Love is Done At the Seat of Your Pants

A boy on swim team died in a motorcycle accident when I was 16. His name was Cameron, and I didn’t know him well except that he was a reasonable backstroker. The swim team wasn’t unkind to him; We didn’t realize he was there until he was gone. My friend Libby said we treated him poorly. She cried when Coach announced it the day after it happened. She put her hands between her legs during our breathing exercises before practice and howled.

“We treated him like he was a freaking lamp shade,” she said. “We hung around, but we never said anything to him.”

Ed turned to me while adjusting his goggles.

“Why a lamp shade?”

Libby screeched like a parrot until Coach suggested she sit in the girl’s bathroom. She nodded, trying to use her rubber swim cap as a Kleenex. We watched her slip on the deck on her way to the locker room. She leaned on the wall to steady herself. I didn’t understand what was wrong–why was there such immediate guilt? Libby was no better to Cameron than Coach or Ed. She always to seemed to cry whenever there was an opportunity. I remembered our sleepovers in middle school. I walked in on Libby crying in front of my mirror once. I forget why. She touched the tears on her cheeks as if her face was bleeding. She had winced, as if crying somehow burned her cheeks. Delicate Libby.

“We did kind of treat him like crap,” Ed said, tugging on the strap of his goggles.

“We didn’t treat him like crap,” I said. “We treated him like anything else.”

Coach clapped his hands together twice, and we stood up.

“Good talk, team,” he said. Coach wrung his hands and cleared his throat one too many times, as if he had just told us about the birds and the bees. Maybe he thought being a swim coach was confined solely to the water and the pool deck. This moment had breeched that barrier. Even swimmers think that way. The pool is a safe place. An other place.

I followed Ed to Lane 4 and hopped in. Ed avoided my splash and dipped his foot in the water to check the temperature. The water was cold and the chlorine heavy. I shook it off, spit into the gutter, and kicked away from the wall, streamlining into the warm-up. We didn’t talk about Cameron for the rest of practice. Actually, I don’t remember talking to anyone at all.

Cameron’s brother, Nate was driving the motorcycle when it happened. I overheard one of the moms whisper after practice that he was trying to be “some sort of hotshot. Raced a car down Gilmer Road and went right into the trees at 95.” Nate survived, but his leg was mangled. Bye, bye college track career. Nate was a star sprinter at U of I. I remember reading about it in the local paper. He had been in the process of making our town proud.

Nate came to practice one day to speak to Coach. I watched him try to navigate the slippery pool deck on crutches. The way his leg looked–even in a cast–it looked wrong. Like a tilted picture on a wall. The cast was uncolored and plaster. He wore a converse sneaker on his good foot, the better foot. Nate already looked like someone lost. He wore an Illini track sweatshirt and Illini sweatpants. The pant leg was rolled up over his cast. He reminded me of those emergency telecasts: I interrupt this message to broadcast my loss. I missed a few 50-meter sprints to stand at the wall and watch Coach talk to him. I kept my goggles on because I didn’t want them to see me watching. Metallic goggles always gave me this exhilarating feeling of invisibility. I watched Coach put his hand on Nate’s shoulder and squeeze. It looked like it would hurt, but Nate stared past him. He nodded. His lips didn’t move. His chin jerked up and down, up and down.

Outside the confines of the pool deck, Jake was nudging me to have sex with him for the first time. He had started stockpiling condoms in my room, hiding them under the mattress and in my jewelry box. He’d bring them over in a large Ziploc freezer bag and empty them out on the bed like some sort of loot.

“You don’t think anyone’s going to look here, do you?” He asked, slipping a condom between two books on a shelf. The condoms were all sorts of different colors. I asked him if the colors meant flavors, and he laughed and kissed my forehead.

“You’re so cute, you know that?”

I nodded.

We had been dating a year, which was a big deal on swim team and an even bigger deal at school. My parents liked him enough to let me close the door to my room when he visited. My Dad called him “bubba,” when he came over.

“What’s going on, bubba?” and “Hey bubba, give me a hand.”

Teachers smiled at us in the hallways when we held hands, and girls came up to me asking for relationship advice.

“You seem to have it all nailed down,” Trisha said. She wasn’t on swim team, but we were friends at school. She played soccer, had enviable muscular legs, and she liked to wear skinny jeans to prove it. She always asked me how I would go about a situation she was having with a significant other. Sex came up once or twice, but I was usually able to change the subject, commenting on her outfit, mentioning Honors Bio homework, or the way our gym uniform itched.

Honestly, I had no secrets to give. I felt the farthest from my secrets than everybody else. My analysis of relationships, at the time, was really no different than keeping track of swim times and dual meets. The relationship progressed like waves. When the waves hit a wall, they’d slosh the other way. If Jake and I fought, we found something else to talk about. Now that I remember it, there were never any apologies, which I admire and regret. Jake was a good guy, a great guy even, but I wasn’t sure if I loved him. I liked being around him. His kisses tasted good. His hugs were warm. I liked the way he smelled. What else was there? I watched my parents kiss in the mornings, and that was the only time I ever thought they were in love. Was that what I wanted in the future? Something so lackluster and infinite?

“Did you know Cameron?” I asked as Jake stacked more blue-colored condoms next to my earrings in my jewelry box. I was lying on the bed with Ayn Rand’s We the Living on my belly. I was gulping down Rand after our English teacher assigned it as one of the summer reading choices. She was a crazy, but I respected her, even idolized her. She made humans god- like. The importance of the Self. The I. It made me feel significant. I can see why she’s a high school thing.

“Nah,” Jake said. “Shame, though. He was in my sister’s Spanish class. The class thought he was a stand-up guy. He wasn’t one to make fun of anybody.”

“How would she know who he didn’t laugh at?” I said. “Suddenly everyone knows exactly who this kid was down to his chuckles.”

Jake closed my jewelry box and crawled on the bed next to me.

“What’s eating you?” he asked. “I know he was on swim team. I should’ve asked if you were okay.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just a little frustrating when people claim to know someone they didn’t.”

Jake turned his head and shrugged in a meh way.

“Some people feel bad about it,” Jake said. “No one bullied him, but I guess no one acknowledged him either. Poor guy.”

I wanted to yell Not you, too! This was almost worse than knowing Cameron. Missing him, hating the world because he wasn’t in it. Who gets the right to grieve is what I wanted to know.

“Everyone feels sad differently,” Jake said, as if I had said it aloud. I wondered if I had.

As if that was a cue, Jake turned to kiss me. And I let him. He tasted like peanuts and twizzlers. He rolled on top of me and put his knee between my legs. We were pretty good at tongue, but sometimes our teeth knocked together, which after months and months had become almost musical in a drumbeat sort of way.

He started reaching to unbutton my pants when I rolled him over and straddled him.

“I’m hungry,” I said. I kissed his nose and got off the bed.

“Let’s order pizza.”

Jake stared at me, wiggling his nose. Maybe he was thinking I was a tease. Or maybe he was thinking whether I’d put out for him on prom night. Was anyone ever really prepared for it then? At that age? Did anyone ever not romanticize it? Fantasize it? I knew friends that got married after high school, but even then I wondered if they ever really recognized it. It–mean the feeling, the surety, the knowing. People define forever so loosely. I always felt like forever became more assured as I grew older. When you’re two years old, forever is as soft as dough, but it gets harder, bit by bit. Everything gets harder. Until people break themselves trying to smash it.

“Okay,” Jake said. “What are you in the mood for?”

I said pepperoni, because I knew he liked it.

We were doing a ladder during a Thursday practice. It was a week after Cameron’s death. The buzz about him had calmed down, but there were still whispers and remembrance. There was a rainbow of condoms in various places in my room, preparing for some sort romp of the century. I was counting in my head where all the condoms were as I swam. In a ladder practice, the distances get higher and higher. One hundred meters, 200 meters, 300 meters, 500 meters, 800 meters, and then we’d climb back down the ladder to 500 meters, 300 meters, 200 meters, and 100 again. I hated them. It gave me too much time in my own head. A lot of swimmers say they like swimming because they get to think and ponder. You’d think Olympic swimmers could figure out all the mysteries of the universe with all the time they spend in the water. It’s maddening.

By the time I was in the middle of the second 500, I remembered a moment I had with Cameron. The team was on a bus to Rockford for a Saturday swim meet maybe six months before his death. It was a duel meet, and it seemed useless to go against this team that was so far away. Only big meets were worth the distance. We wanted medals or tiny trophies with foil #1s 2s and 3s on top of plastic. To make the Rockford trip worth it, some of my teammates started a small war, throwing crackers and ice cubes from our drinks across the seats. I heard the bus driver yell to Coach, who yelled at us. It calmed things down, but just barely. Then they went into stealth mode.

I was a casualty of this cracker-ice cube battle. I was listening to music, probably thinking about Jake or Ayn Rand, when an ice cube hits me square in the eye. It was such a surprise–like when a bee flies near your face and you freak. I remember grabbing my face and yelling. Libby might’ve thrown it because she squawked and ducked into the back seat. Ed and my other friend Meg jumped into my seat. It really hurt like a bitch. My eyes watered, and I tried desperately not to cry, so I started laughing maniacally.

“Stop sounding like a freak,” Meg said. “Let me have a look.”

Ed tried to pry my hands away.

“Don’t be a hero,” he said. “If your eye is shot, you’ll screw your relay.”

“Shut up, Ed.”

I had turned away toward the window, trying not to hide that I was crying. I waved Ed and Meg off.

“Seriously, go away,” I said.

Ed shrugged and went back to his seat, and Meg said something about being right behind me if I needed her.

Then I felt a heaviness in the seat next to me. It was Cameron. He was a year younger than I, but he looked like he was twenty. Maybe that’s why no one talked to him, because he looked so old. There was stubble on his chin and cheeks, and there was a place near his unusually large Adam’s apple where a razor nicked his skin.

“Let me see,” he said. “My mom’s a doctor.”

“Since when?” I asked.

“Dr. Platt? She’s the pediatrician for like half the 12-year-olds on this team.”

He was right–most kids knew Dr. Platt–but it was weird having him so close all the sudden. He was mist. He just kind of lingered, but then he was undeniably front of me. His hair was thick and dark, and he had a large nose, but it wasn’t giant or ugly. His eyes were brown, but I didn’t remember how brown. They were a forgetful brown.

His hand cupped my face and he angled me so he could see into the eye.

“Look up,” he said.

I looked up.

“Look down,” he said.

I looked down.

He was wearing orange converse shoes, and he had written “Science is done at the seat of your pants” on the side of his left foot. He had nice handwriting, if he was the one that wrote it. It was perfectly-looped cursive. Nobody appreciated good cursive anymore.

“I don’t see any bleeding,” he said. “It looks irritated but leave it alone and rinse it in the pool during warm-ups. My mom will be there if you want her to take a look at it.”

“Okay,” I said.

He had let go of my face.

“Promise not to rub it?”

I nodded.

“Pinky promise, Jess?” He held up his pinky. A hotness rose up in my throat, and I wiped away the tears on my face. His hand must have had tears on it too.

It must’ve been obvious that I was embarrassed, not because no one made pinky promises anymore, and not because my eye felt like it was waving a flag at everyone on the bus. I was embarrassed because Cameron was treating the situation as if we were friends. How long had he been on the swim team? Years? Since I was eight?

I held up my pinky. Cameron’s wrapped around mine a bit too tightly. There was a millisecond when I wondered if he might never let go, and that I might have to tell him or pull away. Then the millisecond passed and he let go and moved back to his seat. There was a dip in the space beside me. The ghost of him was still sitting next to me.

I remember that Rockford meet vaguely. I remember Libby getting pissed at me during warm-ups because I had clawed at her feet. I hadn’t meant to; I was probably lost in thought, even though she deserved it if she had thrown the ice cube. I never found who threw it. No one mentioned it after, I realized. There wasn’t anything definitive about that meet. I only recalled Cameron’s ghost, and he hadn’t even left us yet.

After I remembered Cameron’s shoes, I bought a pair of my own. Converse shoes were fashionable at school, but I hadn’t seen what the fuss was all about. They looked like clown feet to me, but I ordered a pair of baby blue shoes, and after wearing them for a few days to break them in, I couldn’t bring myself to wear anything else. Even on the pool decks during meets, I’d fold down the heels and loosen the shoelaces so I could use them as a flip-flop hybrid. The baby blue shoes got all wet and looked like sagging tears.

“Jess, what’s up with the shoes?” Libby asked during a duel meet in Vernon Hills.

“I like them,” I said.

“I can see that,” Libby said. “They seem a little sad.”

“Really?”

Libby nodded. I looked down at my baby blues. I was only wearing my one-piece swimsuit. My goggles were tucked into one of the straps on my shoulders, and my cap was tucked under my suit at my thigh. And then there were the shoes. After just a few weeks, they looked worn, like I beat them wet against the ground. Jake had called them “interesting” and my parents had deferred to Jake’s comment. My father had gone “Well, everything’s a fad these days.”

“They’re comfortable.” I looked up at Libby. “They mold to my feet. It’s like I can’t take them off.”

“You don’t sleep in them, do you?” Libby giggled and it sounded like a slap-happy pigeon. Before I could answer, she had taken off her towel to go behind the blocks. Libby was a pretty good freestyle sprinter. You wouldn’t predict that out of someone so bird-like. People always guessed Libby was a butterflier. But she was a fiendish kicker.

A few more weeks went by, and Cameron’s brother Nate stopped by practice again just before our big conference meet. He didn’t have crutches anymore, but he walked with a gangly walk in his cast. Rumor had it that he got a giant tattoo of Cameron on his back. I heard kids at lunch saying how Cameron’s nose would’ve taken up the width of Nate’s spine. I didn’t believe the chatter; Nate didn’t look like a clingy person. He looked like the person to hold on in that quiet, strangled way, and carry the burdens on his own.

My baby blue shoes were on a metal chair in the front of Lane 4 during practice. A lot of girls kept their shoes and clothes in the locker room, but I liked to have the shoes near me when I wasn’t wearing them. I had started writing on them, sometimes at home or in class. The smell of the Sharpie markers I used was calming. Orange Sharpies came off brown on the baby blue shoes. Navy Sharpies looked black. I liked experimenting. I wrote equations from pre-calculus that I couldn’t figure out. I wrote down words that sounded beautiful to me. I thought about the phrase Cameron wrote on his converse shoes, and I wrote a similar version. Instead of “Science is done at the seat of pants,” I wrote “Love is done at the seat of your pants.” They were different variations of the same thing, really. It connected me to Cameron in a non-committal way. I didn’t want it to be a direct tribute, but it was something that made the hot throbbing in my chest ease up a little bit.

I watched Nate talk to Coach a little bit. Coach gave him an envelope, and I assumed it was some money from the bake sale the swim team hosted the weekend before. Moms and kids from swim team baked goods and sold them at the high school concession stand and other sports events. It was supposed to help pay for new swim caps and warm-up suits, but this year they wanted to raise money to help Cameron’s family pay for the funeral and Nate’s injuries. My mom had made a gooey butter cake that was her mother’s recipe. She had never made it before, and I never got a taste of it. She wouldn’t let me take a slice.

“You’ll dry out the inside,” she had said. Mom cooked a lot of her mom’s recipes. I had told Jake how it had irked me, but he promised to have his mom share some of her cranberry cookies with us. I had told Jake it wasn’t the point. Cranberry cookies didn’t count if I wanted gooey butter cake.

As Nate was leaving he glanced around the pool. I was waiting at the wall again in my metallic Goggles of Invisibility. But this time, Nate saw me, and he then he looked and found the chair with my shoes on it. He walked over.

“Jess, right?”

“Huh?” I said, wanting to seem like I hadn’t noticed him. I thought my goggles would have protected me. I lowered myself in the pool so I was kneeling on the shallow bottom. The water came just up to my chin.

“Sorry,” Nate said. “Don’t go just yet. I want to ask about the shoes.”

He wobbled over to the chair and picked up my baby blues. He turned them over in his hands, and I wanted to tell him to stop. “Put them down and leave me alone,” I wanted to yell. I should’ve dove under the water and sprinted down the lane and back, burning my lungs and legs and arms until they were numb. But I watched Nate instead. He looked at me and then at the shoes.

“Cam had a pair like these.”

“I know.”

“You do,” he said. “Then you know he wrote something like this, too.”

I started at him. With my goggles on, he looked shaded over, as if he was about to fade away.

“He liked ‘Science is done at the seat of your pants’ because that was how someone described Einstein to him,” Nate said. “He was fascinated with Einstein. Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

“Were you friends with him?”

“Cameron or Einstein?”

Nate reacted to my question as if he were pushed. He staggered back a step held onto the back of the metal chair. Then he looked down at his leg, the awkward angle. Then he looked at my shoes.

“Why did you write love instead of science?” He asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it just felt more like my situation.”

“Were you friends with my brother?” He asked again. He seemed so much older in that moment, and it made me wonder if Cameron had told him about what happened on the bus that time. Did Cameron share our pinky promise? Did Nate approve? Should I care? Nate looked as if he needed to know. Maybe my answer were prove something to him or make his grief better or worse. Maybe, I thought, I should try to comfort him. Maybe I should tell Nate that yes, we were friends, good friends, and that I had respected him, miss him, and give my deepest condolences.

“No,” I said. “We were not friends.”

The words came out, blundering and overly loud. I glanced down the pool to Lane 2 and 3, and Meg was looking my way.

Nate set down the shoes and nodded two or three times. Coach yelled for me to finish the set of sprints. I hadn’t realized Libby and Ed had also stopped at the wall, and they both stared at me. Libby wore her neon green goggles and Ed wore his Swiss, orange plastic goggles that dug into the sides of his nose. His eyes looked like large fish in two orange bowls.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

Nate was already making his way along the pool deck. I watched him limp to the exit without looking back.

“What did you say?” Ed asked.

“He liked me shoes,” I said.

“Did you really–” I heard Libby ask, but the sprint clocked beeped and I dove under, cutting in front of her. I swam the set as hard I could, pumping my arms and kicking away from them. I swam the rest of practice as if it was an escape. By the end of practice, my legs felt jelly-like, and to avoid seeing Libby in the locker room, I threw on my clothes over my wet suit on the pool deck and left.

The night when my parents went to the country club to play their weekly Bridge game, Jake started kissing me in a way that I knew he wasn’t going to stop. We had turned on a 90s movie we both loved as kids. Superheroes and melodramatic love. It was a movie I used to watch with my parents with such glee, and I knew all the lines. Jake gently unlaced my baby blue shoes and put them next to the bed. He took out my hair tie and undid my braid. It was as if the steps were blurred, because suddenly I was bare, like the inside of an egg. I remembered a type of pain, an indescribable sting. A wonderful–terrible–bursting feeling. I listened to the dialogue of the movie as Jake moved over me (he had used a yellow condom wrapper). I think it was near the end of the movie, although it was unfathomable to me that undressing and this would last as long.

The villain revealed a terrible secret, something that tore apart the world of the heroes. Nothing ever stays innocent.

One of the heroes cried out, “You lie!”

The villain laughed. The voice was phlegmy, and his laugh sounded like gargling mouthwash. I remembered the scene in my head. It was night. On top of a building, overlooking a vast city. A crisp memory. The villain pointed to the heroes, his fingers gnarled and scarred.

“Do I?” He asked.

In their agony, the heroes charged.