Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen - 10

June 2015

The year I was sixteen, I failed my driver’s test but passed my lifeguard certification. By the time Memorial Day arrived and opened the door to summer, I had secured a job at Lake Locust, which was ten times the size of our pond and bustled with tourists from June through Labor Day. It was only four miles away and an easy enough bike ride to the lake from our house, but I stewed each time I set out, knowing that I could have been driving a car, if only it weren’t for that botched K-turn. And the forgotten turn signal. And the rolling stop. All minor infractions, in my opinion, but enough to leave me bike-bound for the foreseeable future.

On the first real day of summer, I hopped on my rusty Trek, wearing a red one-piece swimsuit, some tattered running shorts, and my green JanSport backpack. As usual, my mother barked at me not to wear Birkenstocks while riding my bike, but I ignored her as I pedaled up our driveway, my toes and heels bare in the breeze.

My route to the big lake took me past the town tennis courts, and as I approached them, I could hear the rhythmic pop of a ball being smacked back and forth. I slowed to see who was playing and sighed with dread as I realized it was Greg Seavey. When he saw me, he caught the ball in his right hand, abruptly halting the rally.

“Cricket Campbell. Nice wheels.”

I rolled my eyes and came to a stop. Obviously, Greg had heard about my failed test, just as I had heard about his new BMW, which bore a vanity plate that read: BOOYAH . He walked over and looked me up and down through the chain-link fence, channeling his disappointment.

“You don’t have to look so devastated,” I said. “It’s fine. I’ll retake the test when I feel like it.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just…” Greg shook his head regretfully. “You had all year to grow boobs.”

Greg loved nothing more than to shine a spotlight on people’s insecurities, and my chest size had been a preoccupation of his since we were twelve years old.

“And you had all year to fix your personality,” I fired back.

Greg’s tennis partner laughed at my quick retort. Only then did I really notice him: cute, a bit taller than Greg, with messy blond hair.

“Hi, I’m Cricket,” I said, with a cautious smile.

“Seth.” He had a relaxed air about him that was very different from Greg’s agitated cockiness. It was what I could only assume was genuine confidence—a rarity in anyone our age.

“He’s my cousin,” Greg interjected, as if this fact somehow ranked Seth below him in the social hierarchy. But Greg was now superfluous to this conversation, and neither Seth nor I turned to look at him.

“Are you here for the summer?” I asked.

Seth nodded. “That’s the plan. Teaching at the tennis camp. You?”

“Yeah. Lifeguarding at the lake.” I checked my watch and realized I was already two minutes late. “Shoot. Gotta go. I’ll see you around?”

“For sure…” Seth began.

“Beers tonight at Sully’s dock,” interrupted Greg. It was more of a command than an invitation. Technically, Greg and I were friends. Or at least, we were tethered by a shared circle of friends who spent every summer here. I didn’t like him much these days, but now that we were in high school, the social dynamics were churning so swiftly that it was better not to write anyone off, even if he was an inveterate ass named Greg Seavey.

“We’ll see,” I said as I pedaled away, suddenly feeling a little off-balance as my sandals slapped against my heels. I knew how to handle Greg. It was the unexpected arrival of Seth that had thrown me for a loop.

A few weeks later, on the night of the solstice, my friends gathered at Greg’s. We knew it was the longest day of the year, but time didn’t mean much to us that summer, when our future spilled out before us like an eager tide that we believed would never ebb. While my family’s camp was an example of Adirondack understatement, the Seaveys’ property was the opposite. It had been one of the great historic camps, once owned by a former president. But when the Seaveys acquired it, they modernized it and depleted it of its original charms. They expanded the two-story boathouse, adding large docks on either side. Their three motorboats and two Jet Skis were always on display, and it was rumored that Mr. Seavey was looking to add a seaplane to his fleet. A stone firepit was built into the hillside and was “architecturally significant,” or so Greg told us. Up the hill, the main house asserted itself as one of the biggest in the area, and the rest of the estate comprised four guest cabins, each one decorated in an over-the-top way that imitated Adirondack charm rather than embodied it: mounted moose heads, cashmere blankets that were over-luxurious, and decorative signs that said things like LIVING THAT BACKWOODS LIFE .

Pretension aside, the Seaveys’ was a convenient place to party. Greg’s parents were notably permissive, and they encouraged him to host in the hope that it would make him popular, which it did.

I could easily boat to Greg’s from my dock, but that night, I arrived by car with my best friend, Chloe—who had passed her driver’s test and had access to her mom’s SUV—so that we could stop by Deb’s Depot on our way. Deb had no qualms about selling alcohol to minors, as long as those minors had passable fake IDs, and we used ours to buy bright-pink wine and a case of the cheapest beer available.

As we ambled down Greg’s well-kept lawn, I could see there were already at least fifteen kids gathered on the dock. The firepit threw sparks into the air, and a few people stood around an ice-filled cooler by the boathouse. Chloe and I approached to unload our haul, and as I transferred the beers from their box to the cooler, Greg plucked one from my hand to inspect it. He had recently taken up drinking obscure craft beers, so he now scoffed at the humble varieties he had been perfectly happy to guzzle last summer.

“You know why drinking light beer is like having sex in a canoe?” he asked. None of us responded, so he continued with a grin: “Because it’s fucking close to water!”

A few of the boys chortled. I rolled my eyes and tried to smile knowingly. I knew it was just an expression, but the truth was: I had no idea what sex was like, in a canoe or anywhere else.

Suddenly I felt a pleasant electricity, and I turned to see that Seth had sidled up in time to hear Greg’s punchline. He smiled at me and shrugged, taking a can from the cooler. “Well, I like light beer.”

“Me, too,” I said, feeling a sense of relief. I still didn’t know Seth well, but I wanted to. In the few weeks since I had first met him at the tennis court, he had become an object of fascination to me. Privately, I was cultivating what I hoped was a shared connection, but what could easily have been a humiliatingly one-sided crush.

What I knew about Seth: he was a year older than Greg and me, which meant he would be a senior in the fall. His mother and Greg’s mother were sisters, though I heard there had been some kind of feud between them. Something about money—one of them having too much of it, the other not enough. Seth was not a “summer person” like most of us were. He lived in the Adirondacks year-round, though a bit farther north in the direction of Lake Placid. His parents were divorced. We had only spoken a handful of times at gatherings like this, but he always seemed relaxed, unconcerned with how he was perceived and uninterested in the teenage drama that embroiled the rest of us. I noticed that he only laughed when he was actually amused; and he seemed to treat everyone with easy equanimity.

I didn’t realize I was staring at Seth until his eyes turned to me. I looked down, but before I could come up with anything to say, the moment was punctured by a scream. Greg had thrown Chloe over his shoulder and was lumbering toward the end of the dock.

“Greg! Don’t you dare!” she yelped, half annoyed and half thrilled to be the target of his antics and the center of attention. I happened to know she had spent an hour choosing her outfit and putting on makeup, something I never did. Tonight, she had painstakingly applied tiny gemstones to the outer corners of her eyes. That’s not the kind of thing Greg would have taken into consideration as he barreled toward the water. We all thought he was going to dump her in, but he stopped just short of the edge of the dock and put her down, his point made. She slapped his shoulder and walked back toward the firepit, shaking her head. We all understood that this kind of interaction constituted flirtation.

As it was the longest day of the year, the sun disappeared around 8:45 P.M. that night, but the sky did not fully darken until closer to 10:00 P.M . By then, everyone was tipsy and looking for boundaries to test and trouble to stir up. Our friend Sully had grown tired of toasting marshmallows over the firepit and was experimenting with roasting a full Snickers bar. Another kid had hopped on a Jet Ski and was tearing back and forth between the boathouse and the far bay. Greg made another attempt to drag Chloe into the water, and this time, he meant it. They both tumbled in, and others jumped in after them. Soon the shallows were frothing with teenagers, their shrieks and cackles echoing through the warm summer air. Those who were still dry began sprinting toward the end of the dock. I was near the back of the pack, and before I got very far, I felt a hand slip into my palm and pull me out of the fray.

“Shhhh.” Seth held his finger in front of his lips, and we scurried around the boathouse and into the woods along the shoreline. As I navigated the uneven forest floor in my sandals, I felt a fiery pressure within—excitement and fear comingling. Was this really happening? And if so, what was it, exactly, that was happening? Seth seemed to have a destination in mind, and he led me with confidence past the darkening trees. We could still hear the whoops and splashes from the dock, and I was elated to have broken from the group, to be on a stealth adventure with Seth.

We passed first one, then another of the guest cabins, and finally wended our way through the woods to an enormous boulder that sat on the shoreline, partially submerged in the pond. It was twice my height and big as a whale.

“Are you okay to climb this?” Seth asked.

“Of course,” I said, as I looked for a foothold.

“I’ll give you a boost.” Seth knit his fingers together, and I stepped into them. He lifted me high enough to start my ascent. It only took a few seconds for me to summit the boulder, but when I reached the top, my heart was pounding.

“Have you ever been up here?” Seth asked.

I shook my head, and we made our way to the edge, where the rock sloped sharply down to the water below. Seth sat and let his calves hang down, and I followed suit. He pulled a beer out of his pocket, cracked the tab, and offered me the first sip. From our perch, we could see our friends cavorting on the far dock, their restless shapes backlit by the fire.

“Do you have FOMO?” Seth asked.

“Not at all.” I had been to a version of this party dozens of times, and I knew that the most exciting things happened around the edges of the action.

We passed the beer back and forth in what felt like an unrushed rhythm, and I was relieved to have something between us to absorb the pleasant tension that was growing.

“Why haven’t you spent the summer here before?” I asked.

Seth shrugged. “I usually work at one of the tennis clubs near Saranac. But my mom thought I should take a job here this year.”

“And she didn’t want to come with you?”

“She has to work. She can’t really take much vacation. But she thought I should spend some time with this part of the family. Maybe so she doesn’t have to.”

“You’re her proxy?”

“Something like that.”

It made me wonder if my parents did the same—used my sister and me as a shield, a means of avoiding their own marital stagnation. To me, that strategy seemed more complicated than it was worth, but I knew adults had the capacity to twist themselves into knots rather than face the hard truths of their lives. I hoped that would never happen to me, that my loyalty would always be to reality, no matter how painful it might be.

“My mom is cool, though. You would like each other,” said Seth. I appreciated this vote of confidence, which had a forward-looking quality to it.

“What about Greg?” I asked, feeling bold. We both knew it was a leading question. “I know he’s your cousin, but do you actually like him?”

Seth smiled. “He’s my cousin.”

“Such diplomacy.” I grinned in the darkness.

“If you’re asking whether I would be his friend if he weren’t my cousin, well, probably not. But we get along. I understand him, even when I don’t agree with him.”

“That’s fair.”

A familiar song carried over the water from the dock. I looked down into the black expanse and heard the lazy lap of water against the boulder beneath us. This time, when Seth took the beer from me, he set it down and looked into my eyes. On fire but paralyzed, I had to summon all my courage to hold his gaze.

He leaned in and kissed me, confidently but quickly, then pulled away to gauge my reaction. I must have smiled or blushed or seemed otherwise receptive, because when he leaned in again, it was more purposeful. More artful. I felt my body melt into the rock beneath us, everything blurring as my world shifted on its axis.

This was hardly my first kiss; that had happened a few years prior, when I was thirteen, with none other than Greg Seavey. But all I remember from that experience was too much saliva—his or mine, I still don’t know—and Greg telling me a few days later that I wasn’t his type. No, this was something altogether different. This was my first kiss that felt like something more than an experiment; my first kiss that made me think I was finally doing it right; my first kiss that I could actually envision leading to sex in a canoe (or perhaps somewhere more hospitable).

Until this moment, I had never even considered sleeping with a real-life teenage boy. With a movie star? Yes. A rock star? Of course. But those people were conveniently out of reach, so I could cultivate the fantasy from a safe distance. The thought of sex with an actual peer horrified me—until now. Now it started to seem possible, and maybe even desirable. Still, it was terrifying: to be aware that you’re living the most exciting moment of your life as it happens. To be fully present but also out-of-body, overcome by a pleasant quaking. I feel alive , I thought. And even more astonishing: I felt deserving.

Eventually, having exhausted the ways we could make out on a boulder without injuring ourselves, we climbed down and headed back to the party. But we took our time, stopping along the way to kiss against the odd tree. By the time we got back to the dock around midnight, most everyone had dispersed. Chloe and Greg were nowhere to be found, and none of my remaining friends were in any condition to drive me home, even by boat. I was already late for my 11:30 P.M. curfew, which left me with only one option. Nina was twenty-two and had just graduated from college with the highest of honors. She would head to her Peace Corps post that fall, but for the summer, she was here. And she had a car.

When my sister arrived twenty minutes later, I left Seth by the dock and scampered up the lawn, propelled by giddiness and beer. As I dove into the passenger seat, she raised her eyebrows, intrigued.

“What?” I asked defensively, though I knew I was radiating excitement.

Nina reached over and lifted a lock of my hair that was matted with balsam sap. “Fun night?”

I touched the snarl proudly. She grinned but didn’t pry as she backed the car up and performed a perfect K-turn. The whole way home, I let my right hand fly out the window, watching it rise and fall in the clean night air. In that moment, I felt absolutely certain that everything in my life was going to work out just fine.