Chapter 6: The End of July

Before the End of August

Cocoa would preside over her pool party, and my return to the silo—with someone there to back me up—would have to wait. 

The community pool where Lydia worked was open to after-hours rentals, and employees got half off. Cocoa, whose birthday was in late July, one of the youngest in our grade, was given free reign by her parents to decide how she wanted to celebrate her summer birthday, missing out on the excitement of having a birthday during the school year with everyone else around. Every summer since we were in middle school, we had heard about Cocoa’s legendary parties: A bounce house rented and taking over a church parking lot, a rollerskating bash where our classmates slipped, slid, and held hands under a disco light for hours, horseback rides, caricature artists, ice cream sundae bars as long as the school gym. We had never been invited, always just outside of Cocoa’s group of friends. 

Now, in a diplomatic show of commitment to her relationship with Peter, we were all invited. Saturday night, after the pool closed to the public, the whole place was rented out for up to fifty chosen guests. Cocoa’s friends would be there and her coworkers from the pool. Peter’s friends had received invites as well—home-printed cards, a sheet of printer paper folded in quarters, with a picture of Cocoa, as a toddler, sitting in a kiddie pool wearing sunglasses. The card told us to “come splash around with the party girl,” Saturday night, 7 to 10 p.m. Bring your own bathing suit and towel. Bring gifts. 

Jenna, Devi, and I walked through the community center doors at 7:15, praying we were late enough to be cool. Lydia ran up to us as we came into the pool area, our flip flops squeaking from the damp tiles in the hall. 

“You’re here!” She wrapped all three of us in a lopsided hug and dropped her voice into a whisper. “Everyone is late, and Cocoa was trying to play it cool but she started to freak out as if people weren’t coming and Peter is comforting her over by the waterslide.” 

Lydia nodded over her shoulder and we all looked over at once. Cocoa sat with her legs folded in the evening light. As we looked, Peter pushed back a piece of her hair and kissed her forehead. 

Jenna’s eyes widened. “She looks like she’s doing just fine.” 

We put our gifts on a white plastic table and claimed chairs with our beach towels as more people trickled through the doors. Soon Cocoa’s friends arrived and she came running over to them, screaming as they shouted out happy birthday. Box and Ralphie slipped in behind them, and Peter found them by the gift table, looking for food.

Dinner was pizza, delivered at 7:30 p.m., two high stacks carried in by a student from our school a year younger than us, who looked longingly at the pool and the gifts before he shuffled back to his car. We ate around tables in the picnic area of the pool, subdividing into our typical friend groups, just as we had done in the school cafeteria for almost all of our lives. Jenna, Lydia, and I sat with Box, Ralphie, and Devi, as Eduardo floated between our table and the pool people table, trying to figure out a way to sit by Cocoa. 

Cocoa’s mom fluttered around the gifts and food, calling out the remaining slices of pizza as Cocoa’s dad ran in and out, taking bags of trash to the dumpster, digging up more ice, wiping sweat from his forehead in the sticky summer night. 

We ate furiously, dipping our slices in garlic sauce, and returning to the stacks of pizza for another last slice. We talked about the summer, threw napkins at each other, and watched Eduardo try to find excuses to circle past Cocoa, as the Peacock boys shouted and chased each other around us, causing even Cocoa’s accommodating parents to look over with exhaustion. 

“Lydia, I can’t believe you had to put up with them all summer,” Jenna leaned over as Levi ran past her again, bumping into her back as he tried to make a shot into the trash can from the other side of the table. 

Lydia pulled at the ends of her hair in mock anguish. “Only three more weeks, that’s what I keep telling myself.” 

Eduardo returned to our table again. “Can I get anyone anything? Anyone need more to drink?” He scooped up our empty plates and threw them out in the bag that Cocoa’s dad was about to tie off. 

“Is it just me or has pining away for Cocoa made Eduardo a lot nicer?” Devi asked.

Lydia nodded. “This is my favorite phase so far. I think he realized a week ago that Peter is a better person than him, so he’s working hard to catch up as fast as he can before the summer is over.” 

Ralphie and Box sat down at the table with their actual last slices of pizza, after promising Cocoa’s mom that they could help finish it off. Next to us, the Peacock boys were daring each other to eat one of the hot peppers from the corner of the box. Devi stood up, grabbed one, and popped the whole thing into her mouth. 

“Dang, Devi!” Box high-fived her as she turned back to our table triumphant, Levi staring at her in dismay. 

“That’s nothing,” she replied. She slid back into her seat next to Lydia. Lydia leaned over and whispered. “I can’t believe you got them to shut up. I should have had you here all summer.”

The sun was sinking now, and the lights in the pool had turned on, beckoning us to get in. 

“Go swim,” Cocoa’s mom waved us off the patio. “In a little, we’ll open presents and eat cake.” 

Lydia and I sat down at the edge of the pool, dangling our feet into the water. Devi and Jenna climbed up the twin diving boards, leaning over their edges, not quite ready to jump. Box and Ralphie, seeing them there, climbed up stealthily behind them while Lydia and I watched. 

“Should we warn them?” I asked as we waved to them from the other end of the pool. 

“If working here this summer has taught me anything, it’s that it is good to get pushed in the pool every once in a while. It builds constitution.” Just as Lydia finished saying it, Ralphie had stepped onto Jenna’s diving board, and the shake of his weight made her spin around. She jumped back to the railing, holding on as Ralphie tried to push her in. 

When Jenna realized she wasn’t getting past Ralphie, she changed directions, running to the end of the board and cannonballing into the water. Just as Jenna bobbed up, Ralphie jumped in as well, splashing a wave of water across Jenna’s face.

Next to her, Devi laughed at Jenna. She didn’t see Box sneaking up behind her. Box stepped onto Devi’s board gingerly. He lunged to push her off, but she saw him coming a moment before, grabbing his hand as it came near her shoulder. They fell off the end of the board together, landing sideways in the water in one unified splash. 

Devi and Box came up laughing, and Devi jumped on his shoulders as Jenna and Ralphie swam to the shallow end where we were sitting. 

“Are you getting in?” Ralphie floated in front of my legs, my calves looking distorted in the light of the pool shooting out behind them. 

“Eventually.” I kicked some water at them. 

“Maybe she needs to be persuaded.” Jenna motioned Ralphie toward my legs, and suddenly I was pulled in, my waist, chest, shoulders, and neck, hitting the surface progressively, shivers passing over me as my body adjusted to the water’s temperature. 

I splashed at Jenna and Ralphie as they started toward Lydia. Lydia yanked her legs out of the pool just in time. “You’re not getting me like that!”

She jumped up and dashed around the pool. She climbed up a diving board at the other end. “If I go in, I go in big,” she shouted, running off the edge of the board and jumping with all her might. 

Devi and Box cheered her on. Cocoa and Peter had taken our spots at the water’s edge, along with a bunch of Cocoa’s friends from school, and we all clapped for Lydia as she bobbed up from her grand leap off the diving board. 

“The judges give you ten out of ten,” Ralphie shouted, and we swam together toward the center of the pool. 

With the first jumps and shoves, the tone was set for the rest of the night. People treaded water, talking to their friends as they sat on the side. One person after another left to get something to drink, something to snack on, to change the music that bounced out of the concession booth on the side of the pool.

Devi and Box made it a mission to get everyone to jump off the diving board at least once that night, circling through every group to recruit new jumpers. 

“I want to see one hundred percent compliance,” Box declared as he paddled over to Cocoa’s friends again. “I’m an overachiever, and I want an A+.” Through Box’s persuasion, each of Cocoa’s friends found themselves at the edge of the board, motivated to jump by endless clapping and hollers from the rest of us. Devi even chided the Peacock boys into participating, and their chaotic energy, finally directed at something productive, led to some of the greatest moments of the night, topped only by Eduardo doing a backflip off the board, aspiring to take home a non-existent best jump trophy.

Lydia and I, sitting again on our edge of the pool as we waited to eat cake, marveled that somehow this magic mix of people had made the Peacock boys a bit more bearable and a bit more humble, and had taken Eduardo’s focus off of Cocoa for the first time that summer, for the first time in months. 

The focus was all back on Cocoa for cake and presents later in the night. Her mother carried out a white sheet cake with eighteen candles placed in a careful circle, and we all sang and watched as Cocoa blew them out, giving Peter a meaningful look afterward. While we ate, Cocoa held court opening her presents, tossing wrapping paper to her dad who was filling yet another garbage bag, tossing another meaningful look if the giver of the opened present had earned it.  

After opening a necklace, a manicure set, and an iTunes gift card, she started to open a nondescript red gift bag, no bow, no card. Cocoa pulled out a pair of carved bookends, hands in parallel prayer posture, ready to hold up a line of books. “Wow, thank you,” Cocoa cast a confused look in Eduardo’s direction. 

“I carved them for you last spring,” he replied nonchalantly, and next to Cocoa, Peter looked perturbed. 

“They’re great. Thanks.” Cocoa put the hands back in the bag and began opening her next present, a new straightening iron from a friend from school with a card signed, Your BFF Mags.

The stack of presents on the table grew smaller as the stack of assorted gifts next to Cocoa’s chair grew larger: a laptop sleeve to take to college, a notebook and pen set, body lotion, body wash, body glitter, and an assortment of portable hand sanitizers with a reusable clip-on case. 

“Last call for cake,” Cocoa’s mother called out from the food table. “We’ve got to be out of here by ten, so you’ve only got a little bit of time left to swim.” 

Devi and Box heard their cue and ran ahead to the diving boards for one last jump. The rest of us walked over and dropped our feet into the pool. Ralphie sat next to me, his feet swinging in the glow of one of the underwater lights. “Are you going to get back in?” 

I hugged my towel around my shoulders. “I don’t think so.” My hair had now started to dry, and my legs were getting cold in the darkness.

The other groups were hugging the edge of the pool like we were, talking along the side, splashing feet in the water, huddling in beach towels, leaning back into the darkness to shout at a friend down the way. Ralphie dropped fully into the water and pushed toward the other edge, his bare chest bouncing light in the pool. I watched his feet and legs kick under the water as he ducked below and came up on the other side. 

Jenna and Lydia sat down near me. The dark, or perhaps the cold, made us quiet, as if we were suddenly aware of our bare skin in the night chill. Despite that, we could hear the laughter of Cocoa’s friends around us, simmering with flirtation. Our bathing suits were unforgiving, but the dark was flattering, and youth is always kind. Together, we watched Ralphie push placidly back and forth between the walls of the pool, his torso making shapes along the top of the water.

Behind the sounds of the others, the music slipped into a playlist that Jenna didn’t approve of, moody melodies, more pensive than any of us wanted to be at that moment. Lydia and Jenna stood up to change the music.

Ralphie pushed back toward me across the pool as I now sat alone on my edge. He reached my legs and placed his hands next to where I sat. I had the same sensation that I had had on the rollercoaster at the carnival, wanting to move away from his fingertips and wanting to touch them at the same time. Just as Ralphie started to say something, Jenna walked up behind me and leaned down next to my ear. 

“Hey, would it be okay if you got a ride home with someone else? Lydia and I are leaving now.” 

I turned to see what was going on, confused by the sudden change in plans. Jenna’s eyebrows were wrinkled with concern, and Lydia was nowhere to be found. “Sure,” I nodded, and Ralphie, who had heard Jenna’s request, responded.

“I drove here; she can ride with me.” 

“Thanks,” Jenna said. She stood up, and I watched her walk away, catching a glimpse of Lydia as the locker room door shut, with no extra clues given. 

“Do you know what that was about?” Ralphie looked at me, concerned. 

“No idea.”

A few minutes later, we learned what it was about. As Ralphie and I talked, him drifting in the water, me at the water’s edge, letting my feet float and sink and float again, Devi and Box sat down on the edge next to me, giggling with purpose. 

Box leaned around Devi to talk to me. “You should know that Devi is not who you think she is.” He nudged Devi’s shoulder playfully as he said it.

“Oh, really? Who is she?” I asked. 

“She just informed me that she was born in Florida. So she’s not actually from here. She’s an imposter.” 

Devi laughed as he said this and shrugged her shoulders in surrender. “I guess so. But not as much of an imposter as you.” 

“Uh oh, where was he born?” I looked over at Box. 

“It’s not where he was born,” Devi declared. “It’s where he went to school. Did you know that before he went to our school he started at…Warhouse? The traitor!” 

Box raised his hands in surrender, “I switched sides! I switched sides!” 

Devi grabbed his surrendered hands and pulled them down out of the air, “You don’t get to switch if you started at the rival school. ‘Once a Warhouse, always a Warhouse,’ remember?” 

“Hey, that was our motto,” I jumped in. 

“That was everyone’s motto,” Devi responded. “Even traitorous rival schools like Warhouse.” 

I looked over to share the laughter with Ralphie and saw his eyes wide, watching Devi and Box. He saw my glance and nodded meaningfully back at Box’s hands. They were still in Devi’s, as Devi held them down from further surrender. Box attempted to surrender again, but the tussle turned into a brawl and soon Devi and Box were both in the pool again, kicking around in the water as Cocoa’s mom made the last call for us to get ready to go. 

It turned out that Devi and Box were also driving with Ralphie, so the four of us piled into his silver car, our towels on the seats under us gathering the dripping water as we drove, Devi and Box’s hands still entwined on the back seat of Ralphie’s car. 

✷

Devi and Box were dropped off first. They lived in the same neighborhood, and Box assured us that he could walk Devi the rest of the way home. As Ralphie and I pulled out of Box’s driveway, the headlights panned over their towel-wrapped forms, melding together as Box punched in his garage door code, and the door began lifting up. 

Ralphie and I drove out of the neighborhood together and back onto the main street. I broke the silence. “Well, I guess that is happening now, isn’t it?” 

Ralphie started laughing. “Eduardo will be so bummed to know that all of his flirtatious energy in the air only led to Box and Devi finally making a move.” 

We both laughed, and I suddenly felt the presence of just the two of us, here in Ralphie’s car, my sandals slipped off on his car floor, one leg pulled up onto the seat beside me as my other stretched out in the darkness. With Devi and Box in the car, I had been thoughtlessly comfortable. Now, I felt every inch of car seat touching skin, the back of my bathing suit pressing into the seat’s fabric, the back of my thighs sticking to the towel beneath me. 

I waited this time, not wanting to break the silence twice, not wanting Eduardo’s flirtatious energy to miss the mark again and hit me and Ralphie instead. 

“Where do you live again?” Ralphie drove toward the general direction of my home. 

“Over by the library. You’ll turn after the school.”

“By the ice cream place?” 

“Yep, it’s like two streets after that.” 

“I love that place.”

“Me too.”

“Have you ever had their caramel brick chocolate cone?”

“No, my go-to is cookies ’n cream every time.” I paused, resisting the magic of night swimming, of college coming, of everything changing at once anyway so why not one more thing? I gave in. “But that sounds amazing.” 

Ralphie turned, two streets early, into the parking lot of the ice cream stand. We waited in a dwindling line of couples and families and ordered one of each, and a blonde girl who was younger than us handed them to us out the window of the stand, the ice cream already beginning to melt down the sides of the cones. 

We sat on the hood of his car, and I felt the warmth from the engine drying off the towel wrapped around my waist. “Want to try a bite?” He held out the cone. It was chocolate-dipped with caramel swirls and “bricks”—frozen slabs of shortbread—scattered throughout. He tried my cookies ’n cream and nodded approvingly. “I love it when there are full cookies in the ice cream. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

“When I was a kid, I always wanted to get one with a cookie in it. It was the best feeling to see my mom scooping ice cream and to spot the folded cookie hiding in one of the corners. I’d always make her scoop it for me.”

“My dad would do that with the cereal boxes. He would pour it, and he would keep pouring if I could see the toy inside. Once I lied and said I saw the toy even though I couldn’t, and he kept pouring and pouring, even after the cereal overflowed the bowl and was going all over the table. It turned out that my brother had already gotten the prize from that box, so my dad poured out a whole box, and there wasn’t even anything in there.”

I could picture the bowl overflowing and filling up the table, and another drip of ice cream escaped over my fingers. Ralphie grabbed a napkin and wiped off my hand as I leaned to lick off another drip off the cone before it fell. 

“Thanks.” I took the napkin from him and wiped the rest up. “Gotta keep this car hood clean.” I patted the hood of the car with my hand, now free of the napkin. 

“Oh yeah, wouldn’t want to mess up this sweet paint job.” Ralphie rubbed his hand over a patch of faded gray paint.

I leaned on one hand, finishing my ice cream as Ralphie scrunched the rest of the napkins together in his palm. I could see the back of his hair, a sight I had been familiar with since tenth grade geometry, had grown longer over the summer. It curled at the base of his neck as he leaned forward wiping off his hands. He turned back to look at me, catching me looking at him. 

“What?” he asked as I started smiling. 

“Nothing.” I shrugged, finishing up the last bite of my ice cream cone and smacking my lips. “I was just thinking about how long your hair is getting.” 

He tugged at the back of his neck. “It is pretty long, isn’t it?” 

“Yeah, but not bad long.” I had gotten myself somewhere new, somewhere I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I plowed forward with honesty. “It’s just longer than it was when we were in math together.”

He looked at me with mock accusation. “You remember what my hair looked like when we were in math together?”

“I sat behind you!” I protested. “And Mrs. Ketchan was really really boring!”

“Do you also remember everyone else’s hair who sat in front of you?” he asked. 

I was caught, so close to being the next casualty of Eduardo’s dangerous energy. “I remember Fred’s hair. Don’t you remember he had that rat tail braid like he was a Jedi?”

Ralphie let me dodge. “Oh yeah, and Eduardo teased him about it, but then he cut it off and everyone else missed it, right?” 

“Yep, and then he left to go to military school, and his cousin started at our school and looked just like him and also had a rat tail, and it was confusing for all of us.”

Ralphie leaned back on his forearms on the car hood, now his legs and swim suit and t-shirt stretched out in front of me. I looked at the side of his face and noticed how the hair had grown longer there too. 

“That was a fun class,” Ralphie remarked. Was he thinking the same things as me? Were we both good at avoiding all the same questions, playing it safe with school and Eduardo and friends? 

“Where did your dad go?” I asked it impulsively, worried that I was crossing a line, but wanting to know more about the boy with the brown hair next to me.

“It’s kind of a long story,” Ralphie said. He didn’t move, didn’t even shift his feet. I waited. “He was working in California for a while, and we were supposed to move out there. But my mom didn’t want us to leave school, and my brother begged my mom to let us stay. Now he lives out there and we live here, I guess.”

“Are your parents still together?” It seemed like such an easy question to answer, but even as I asked it, it felt heavy slipping out of my mouth. 

“They are figuring stuff out,” Ralphie answered. “So, I guess the answer is I don’t know. Maybe. Some days it seems like maybe. Some days it seems like no. My dad said I should come out to California for college. I could get in-state tuition since he lives there. But I wanted to stay around here, go somewhere close, and be near my mom.” 

I hadn’t meant to pry. I had followed a sudden urgency to know more, to find out who this person was who had made me laugh all summer, who had always seemed to be looking at things the same way I was. I realized then that this wasn’t Eduardo’s energy bewitching me into a place I didn’t want to be. This was energy, all my own, crashing through barriers I had put up myself.

“I’m glad you’ll still be close by.” 

My words hung between us. I hoped they would be enough, that he would know how many more things I meant with them than I could say in that moment. Ralphie looked over at me, and our eyes met, not out of sweet curiosity, not as a shared punchline or a mutual laugh at our friends. He looked at me with purpose, and I returned it. 

“Me too,” he said.

✷