He didn’t want to play, but you pressured him. You remembered him from school. You were friends — not the kind that would stay up till midnight during Friday night sleepovers, but the assigned science fair type. The project had been on catapults. It didn’t win. You swam over to him and balanced yourself, half sitting, half sinking, on the dock ladder and made small talk about his SpongeBob SquarePants swim trunks. About the impending elementary school graduation. About Bobby Tyler and how you were snubbed. Catapults were cooler than those stupid betta fish.
You invited him to join you and your friends. Maybe you were a person short. Maybe you felt bad that he was alone and you weren’t. Maybe that bad feeling made the game less fun. The point is, you were being selfish. The point is he was either a body to you or a boy worthy only of pity. The point is he was sitting alone on the dock and you took advantage of him.
We’re playing chicken fight, you told him. He knew your friends from Boy Scouts or gym class or some other pack animal setting. He’d played them in H-O-R-S-E or helped them memorize their multiplication tables. He knew that they were at an age where they were probably the nicest to him they’d ever be.
Still, he was hesitant. Don’t tell the others, he said, but I’m not a good swimmer. You didn’t. No need to worry, you promised. It’s only a piggyback ride.
He climbed onto your shoulders and faced your opponents. You were allies in battle. You wrestled against the other team like brothers, meaning there was a carelessness to the violence. Meaning it was youthful. Unrefined. It was war play, which is the practice of boyhood. He hit the water with a splash.
It takes only minutes to drown. Your first thought was that you lost. That, despite the lack of his weight on your shoulders, they still ached. That you wanted a rematch and quick because the sun was setting. The lake was inky black, but the longer you looked the more you saw only red.
