Private Lessons

By the time you walked into the snack bar that day at the end of May, I had become an expert in grilled cheese. I knew melt times by intuition, could achieve perfect browning on sound alone. I was a cook only in the most technical sense, when for the last seven or eight years I had been outside, on court, training—a “prospect.” I had ligament damage in my ankle and had been ordered to take ten weeks off. I now wore jeans and Chucks to the club, not sweat-wicking shorts and court shoes. Instead of racquets I now carried a pen and notepad, a bar mop tucked in my back pocket. I kept a Bosu ball behind the counter on which I was supposed to balance one-footed intermittently, generating connective tissue in my sore joint. My hands had developed a new kind of skin, one that let me touch scalding surfaces without recoiling.

I was spearing pickles with toothpicks when you walked up to the counter, pushed your sunglasses into your hair, and ordered three grilled cheeses. That you did this without looking at the menu taped to the counter felt auspicious. You told me to charge it to Broussard.

“You’re not Lisa,” I said.

You rested your elbows on the counter.

“I’m Ryan,” you said. “The new sitter.”

It was mid-afternoon, a blazing, lazy hour. Tables were strewn with plastic cups and crumbs, the floor slick with swimmers’ wet footprints. I had three fans going, triangulating my position in front of the flat top. Taped to the windows behind the counter were draws from the French Open, one with my predicted results, the other with the actual. Their corners lifted and settled in the draft. I pulled off my plastic gloves and reached for my pen and pad.

“Are the girls driving you nuts?” I asked.

I could make out the yellow straps of your bathing suit beneath your shirt; the neckline riven with tiny holes. The stud in your nose gleamed.

“No, not at all,” you said, squinting a little. “I mean, not yet. Should I be worried?”

Naomi and Olivia were fixtures at the club, had been virtually since they were born—you hadn’t yet heard the whispers, caught the glances. They’d grown from tiny vessels of cuteness into forces of sustained, low-grade terror. The coaches all lobbied Chip to bar them from group lessons, citing safety concerns—for the coaches. Naomi liked to steal bottles of sunscreen and empty them on the clubhouse floor and finger-paint murals. Olivia had developed a habit of slinking behind the deck chairs with a pair of scissors and snipping locks of hair from dozing swimmers. They had their own language, which at first seemed precocious and charming, until no one could figure out the pattern—the sound system—which seemed to consist entirely of vowels. We began sifting through garbage bins for discarded ball can covers, which Olivia and Naomi salvaged in bulk and learned to throw like ninja stars; they could sink them into the bulletin board from fifteen feet away. And they were climbers: they’d vanish from the pool deck and twenty minutes later be discovered on the roof, pelting pigeons with rocks, or shimmying up the juniper trees behind the south courts, disappearing into the needled branches and making them rustle and rock, as though roosting for the season. Over the last three summers I’d counted five babysitters.

“If you enlist them as allies I think things go better,” I said, and went about making the sandwiches. The TV in the corner was playing Roland Garros highlights from earlier in the day. Paris looked blowy and cold, the crowds wrapped in scarves, players wearing long sleeves under their kits.

“I’ve never been here,” you said, looking out at the courtyard, the pool, the north courts. “Driven by hundreds of times. I’ve never actually known anyone who plays tennis.”

“That makes you a swimmer.”

“I swam club at UNM, that’s how I met Lisa. One of my friends on the team had worked for her before, and she introduced us.”

“Do you not swim anymore?”

“I graduated.”

“Just now?”

You nodded.

I pinched the brim of my hat.

“And yet, still here.”

You kept looking out the window and ran your tongue along your bottom teeth. Naomi and Olivia were sitting on the bench under the elm tree and peeling strips of bark like old paint. That you didn’t dash out to admonish them seemed a good sign. I put your sandwiches onto paper plates and slid them across the counter.
“If you ever need anything and I’m not here, just come back and sign the slip and take what you like. No one keeps track anyway.”
You leaned forward and pushed up onto your toes to peer over the counter. “Are there any pickles back there?” I turned to the steel fridge and took out a jar of kosher dills, herbs and garlic swirling in the brine. I wrapped four or five in tinfoil and handed them to you. “From my private jar,” I said, and you smiled.
Olivia and Naomi appeared suddenly at the door. They were holding hands, or clutching their hands together in what looked like some sort of truce. Naomi had a piece of bark tucked behind her ear like a pencil. I avoided their eyes.
“What’s up, ladies?” you said, turning.
“We found lizards,” said Olivia. She had a red ring of Gatorade around her lips. Naomi was missing a shoe. “They’re both dead,” said Naomi, and they dropped the dead lizards on the floor and stooped to inspect them. “This one’s missing a tail, which may or may not grow back. It depends on the species.”
“Nope,” you said, taking three large steps across the room. “Nuh-uh. Restroom, now. We’re washing our hands, okay?”
You nudged them firmly by the shoulders and they scooted out the door into the courtyard. Then you slipped off a sandal, scooped the dead lizards onto it and dropped them in the garbage can. After waving at me, you slid your sandal back on and moved briskly out of the snack bar.
I watched you three eat on the bench under the elm tree, and when the girls were done and had jetted off somewhere else, you ate the remaining crusts of their sandwiches in the shade. I had to pull myself away and get back to work, but I found myself aware of you, the impression at the edge of my vision. I hoped you’d last the summer.

I’d get to the club early to go through my tasks: wheeling the Igloo coolers out to the courts, all the prep work for the snack bar, snaking the drains in the showers. I could never get there early enough, as the swim teams and group lessons seemed to start barely after sunrise, and the soft light and fleeting cool was always torn through by screams and splashes and peals of whistles.
You’d get there early, too, for the girls’ group lesson. While they were out on court, you’d go down to the gym, and I’d see you when I went to stock towels and organize the free weights. You’d be on the treadmill or rowing machine, with headphones on, and a sprinter’s vacant stare. When you were finished you’d walk from the gym through the courtyard toward the women’s locker room with your hands on your head, chest heaving. Then you’d shower and put a towel down on the pool deck to stretch while the swimmers finished their workout.
Was I staring? I hope I wasn’t. I was supposed to take the club’s pulse, attune myself to its rhythms, anticipate its needs. I knew people’s lunch orders, their favorite courts, who needed reminding to put their windows up when it started to rain. I knew who was getting divorced, whose kid had just gotten a DUI, who wanted tequila in their lemonade, who would make a pass at you by the sinks in the men’s locker room. By grunt alone I could identify all the league players, the mixed doubles ladder. I felt like a keeper of gossip, our appointed memory, instead of just the injured pool boy I was.
I didn’t like to sit still: there were always coolers to restock, folded napkins to slide under rickety table legs. In my jeans I felt naked. I hung a bottle of Windex from my belt and kept a towel over my shoulder, looking for smudged fingerprints on windows. I prowled the club grounds, the hallways, righting photos and trophy plaques, measuring net heights, kicking sycamore seeds from the entryway. Never had the snack bar fridges been more organized. I was taut and spring-loaded.
You didn’t look like this at all. Restlessness seemed foreign to you, a feeling not worth indulging in. It was in the way you didn’t rush when one of the girls screamed for you, how you’d put a hand over your eyes to block out the sun and follow their voices. In how you always had a book—something slim, with a cracked spine. I’d see you reclining on a deck chair reading Play It As It Lays while pulling a forefinger between each of your toes, letting the breeze move through them. I felt I could see something in your features, an expression that’d come over you as you sat at the picnic tables or folded beach towels: a slackness, a calm, as though your days of having something to prove had long since passed.
One day I’d see you doing a crossword, the next flipping through a prep guide for the LSAT, wetting your thumb on your tongue before turning each page. Your headphones always dangled from your collar, but I never once saw you on your phone. Every hour or so you’d take a bottle of Coppertone, hold it in front of your face, close your eyes, and spray your skin. I could sense when you’d come for a snack, would mix sauerkraut into your grilled cheese, heap your plates with extra pickles. I worried about the stud in your nose, which seemed to keep getting infected. We kept a first aid kit at the front desk, and I wanted to wet a cotton ball with peroxide and dab the piercing while you sat and ate your sandwich. But I minded my own business. Nadal won the French, and I was possibly the only person in the world not to have predicted it.

When Wimbledon started I saw you talking to Kenny on the pool deck. You were in your navy one piece, and you had your legs dipped in the water, hands behind you. Kenny was standing next to you in his red trunks holding his arrow-shaped flotation device, whistle hanging from his neck, ready to save. His tan was deep and he had a kind of puffed look about him, as though each morning he opened a valve in his ribcage and inflated himself. You moved your legs gently through the water, as though pedaling. You looked up at him with your big sunglasses while he explained things to you. You looked bored, and a little amused, as though you were accustomed to this. I was watching from my stool, tapping my pencil to my chin, trying to determine whether Kenny shaved his chest hair and if that was something I should be doing. I shredded a paper napkin to confetti and balanced on my Bosu ball and watched it start to rain in London, suspending play, the grounds staff scurrying out to cover the courts with those immaculate green tarps.

Late one afternoon I wheeled a ball machine onto Court 4. I missed the sweat of exertion, the stinging sun on my neck. I taped my ankle and resolved not to sprint or split step. I camped in the backhand corner and hit inside-out forehands until my shirt was soaked through. Heat rippled the air and the court’s white lines seemed to wiggle as in a mirage. I set up cones and ball cans for targets. I sequenced the sounds of the ball machine’s mechanized wheel, the bounce, and my exhale on contact. I felt the rhythm take root. A breeze came through and filled the windscreens like sails. The sky was a sheer blue on white’s edge. The shouts from the pool were distant and sporadic, and the court’s surrounding wall ricocheted the sound of the ball coming off the strings, forming a kind of echo, as though the shot itself had a memory.
When my vision started to shimmer I came off the court and into the snack bar. I pulled a bottle of Powerade from the cooler, taking its cold air on my face. I drank half of the bottle in one sip, spilling some down my chin and staining my shirt. The fans hit me like ice. When you spoke, I jumped. You were sitting at the table behind the door, your LSAT guide open in front of you, a highlighter in your hand. You had grass clippings in your hair, the neck of your shirt looked stretched.
“I didn’t realize that was possible,” you said, pointing your highlighter at the court behind me. “I thought tennis was a two-person thing.”
We both looked out at the court, as though it contained some kind of answer.
“It’s all I’m permitted to do right now,” I said. “I have to stay off this ankle.”
I sat down across from you and bent to untie my shoes.
“I did my shoulder a few years ago,” you said, and touched it with your chin. “Repetitive use thing. I had to sleep in a sling.”
I toed off one of my shoes and pulled off the sock, started unwinding the tape around my ankle. The skin held its impressions, my leg hair flattened. I spread my toes on the cool tile.
“And you’re okay now?”
You shrugged. “More or less.”
“Where are the tyrants?”
I started peeling back the label of the Powerade bottle.
“Lisa put them in one of the camp sessions. They’re doing crafts until three.”
I nodded at your book. “That seems like a depressing thing to be doing during the summer.”
“I’m exploring my options. That’s what I’m telling myself.”
“Do you want to be a lawyer?”
You twisted your lips, considering. I had sweated through my shorts, could see the plaid print of my boxers underneath. I untied the knot of my other shoe.
“I don’t not want to be a lawyer.”
“Is it interesting?”
“It’s mostly just puzzles and word problems and riddles.”
“Pattern recognition.”
“Exactly. It’s fun if that’s how your brain works.”
“How does your brain work?”
You sat back and curled your hair behind your ears. I was trying to be clever, riff a little, but you took the question seriously.
“Like fog, like I’m moving through fog. I feel everything, my feet on the ground, the moisture in the air or whatever, but my field of vision is fogged up and I can only see so far ahead. As I read these problems”—you tapped the open page—“I feel each word is coming up at me. It gives this strange sense of suspense. Everything sort of reveals itself only as I get right in front of it. I feel I’m always right about to walk into something.”
You stopped, bit your thumbnail, then laughed, as if the whole thing sounded ridiculous. I leaned forward. Did everyone in college talk this way? My sweat was drying, turning stale. I took off my other shoe.
“That’s why I like swimming,” you continued. “You have the pool, a closed space. Lane dividers. When you flip-turn you know the wall’s there to push off against. You don’t actually have to look where you’re going, you just follow the sight lines. Your course is basically predetermined.”
“Seems boring,” I said. “Maybe boring isn’t the right word.”
“No,” you said. “It’s the opposite. It frees you.”
“I hadn’t considered that.”
“Your mind doesn’t work that way.” You smiled and scratched at peeling nail polish.
“In tennis,” I said, eager to match, “you need an opponent, or at least a hitting partner. Like you said a second ago. No point, nothing really, is repeatable—everything only ever happens once, never to be copied. You essentially create the game itself, from nothing.”
I had been thinking about this, watching matches idly from my stool in the snack bar, developing theories. It’s all that was available. I wasn’t training: I felt I needed to be acquiring private knowledge, molding my absence into meaning.
“Is that what you’re describing?” You pointed behind me out at Court 3. Some of the veterans were out playing doubles, paunches hanging over their shorts, hitting forehands with continental grips and dumping every third shot in the net. I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “That’s beer league.”
“You’re too good for beer league.”
I smiled.
“It’s a different set of priorities.”
“How old are you, anyway?”
“Me?” I said. “I’m seventeen.”
You looked down into your cup of ice and picked out a wedge of lemon. Your teeth had left indentations on the cup’s rim. You picked up the highlighter and began making flares across the bottom of the page. You suddenly seemed tired, drained.
I got up and walked to the ice cream cooler. I pulled out a carton of Dibs. I peeled back the tab and set them in between us.
“I’ll show you,” I said. “It only makes sense if you do it yourself.”
You looked at me and squinted, as though this were some ploy. “Hand-eye isn’t my strong suit. I’m more of the distance-and-balance type.”
“How long are the girls in this camp for?”
“Another week.”
“You’re free after lunch?”
“That’s when I explore my options.”
“Then that’s what we’ll call it,” I said. “Exploring your options.”
You flipped a Dib into your mouth, then moved a hair tie up and down your wrist, where it’d pressed a ring into your skin. I drank the second half of my Powerade, wiped my lips on the back of my hand, and got up before you could invent excuses.

To our lesson you wore ankle socks. I think it was evident how much I enjoyed outlining why this would not do. Ankle socks are for scrubs—the uninitiated. Scanning the grounds on day one of a tourney you can immediately recognize the talents from the height of their socks. Crew socks are the only socks. You want a tan line at mid-calf so deep it looks tattooed. I might have been projecting; mine had begun to fade. You were a good sport. It was the one speech I allowed myself. I got you a racquet from the pro shop, and opened three new cans of balls, bringing them to my nose and inhaling their industrial scent.
We were on one of the back courts, out of view of the snack bar so we wouldn’t be interrupted by my being summoned to make a quesadilla. We started short court, from the service line. Immediately I could tell you had something. Your grip was off, you shanked every other shot, and you misjudged the distance between the ball and your hip, but you had a way of gathering and releasing your body’s energy that no coach can ever fully impart. When you connected cleanly, wherever the ball went, the sound took on a shape, a shape that parted the air around us. It hung in the wind screens, in the court’s high corners. You’d kind of laugh-squeal after each shot, as though in surprise at your own ability, and I’d sprint after the ball, trying to maintain the rally, making sure not to plant on my ankle. I tried not to sweat.

You had gotten a taste, felt the razz move up your arm on a clean forehand, and wanted more. For our next lesson, we played on Court 12, the one where the cottonwood tree had grown into the back fence, its trunk beginning to swallow the chain-link, offering us an arch of shade. You wanted to play a set, but that required learning how to serve. We lined up on the baseline and I said to take your face to the ball, pop your hip, uncoil your body like a bow. We practiced tossing, keeping our left arms extended. I tried modeling what to do with your wrist, how to whip it across its axis.
“Pronation,” you said.
“Exactly,” I said, and committed the word to memory.
The sun’s glare felt personal, a dry, parched heat that seemed to deaden the air. The July badlands. We stopped for water more than we needed to. We sat on the covered benches, trying to coax a breeze onto our faces. I could almost hear the court surface crackling in the heat. I sat with my legs apart, my right knee almost grazing your left knee. I saw my reflection in your sunglasses. You were opening and closing your hand, making a fist and releasing it slowly.
“Does yours hurt, too?” you asked.
I showed you my palm. I had a small blood blister just off my center knuckle, the hard skin growing soft in recent weeks. You traced the ridged yellow skin with a finger, drawing figure eights between them. It was the first time we’d touched. I said something about sawdust, how players used to put sawdust in their pockets, dipping their hands into it between points to keep their palms dry. No one does this anymore, but I wished I’d had some then. You took your fingers back and adjusted your ponytail. The hairs on my arm were alert, prickled. I wondered what you’d seen in my palm, where the lines split, if they betrayed some future. I was prepared to believe that such things could be gleaned from skin alone. If you did, you didn’t say anything. You stood up, took a drink of water, and crumpled the plastic cup in your hand. You walked to the baseline, stooped to pick up a ball, and scrunched it up under your shorts. On the deuce side of the hash you set your feet like I’d shown you, lining your toe with the net post, squaring your shoulders with the side fence. Then, as you waited for me to take my place across from you, you took your right hand from the grip and trilled the fingers in front of your mouth, blowing on them, cooling them, with a kind of ritual ease that looked as if you’d been doing this all your life. On the court I sunk into my return stance as you entered your motion, but it felt wrong to be holding a racquet, replacing the feeling of your fingers there, as though I were erasing them.

The monsoons came, signaling summer’s turn. The air became thick and humid, almost chewable. When the rain started everyone would gather under the clubhouse awning, jogging in from the courts, picking up towels and racquet bags. I’d see Naomi and Olivia holding their hands under the gutters, pulling their fingers through the streaming bands of water. The juniors would start up a ping-pong ladder, and soon their voices would be competing with the rain, a combined force that vibrated the windows. Bags strewn on the floor, people chatting, flipping through magazines—the clubhouse took on the feeling of a crowded airport terminal. I watched the rain—fat drops that made the pool’s surface dance—and counted the seconds between flashes of lightning and their tailing thunder. It felt like stopped time, the forward advance of days halted. It was its own season, outside of summer. The rain washed the courts of their accumulated dust, slaked the leaves of the elm trees. The smell filled the snack bar. During the storms I always kept the doors open.
You and I were on court one of these afternoons, having our third lesson. I brought a hopper out and fed you groundies from the service line. You wore a skirt, and crew socks.
As is inevitable with this game, your expectations had shifted. You envisioned the ball beaming off your strings, frozen rope up the line. You expected consistency and satisfaction, for your ability to have doubled or tripled since your last outing. I could see you darkening as we rallied. You weren’t breathing through the stroke. Gripping the racquet as though someone were trying to wrench it from you. No laughs or sounds of surprise escaped you. After you framed a forehand into the pool, which was some thirty feet behind us, you stood in the doubles alley and pinched your racquet between your legs while you redrew your ponytail, looking down at the court. You pulled the stray wisps behind your ears. You came back to center, lightly clapping your hand to your thigh.
“Don’t worry about where these go,” I called to you. We were on Court 2, one of the three show courts that you can see straight from the snack bar. The club was virtually empty. Lightning was in the forecast so Kenny had locked up the pool and gone home. We’d reached the lull in late summer, the time for deferred vacations. Naomi and Olivia were out of town with Lisa, whale watching in the San Juan Islands, and the club was suddenly serene in their absence. The young energy of camps and swim meets and yawning days had turned, started to yellow. I told you to keep your head still and just swing through, one unraveling motion. I said, “See the ball, hit the ball.”
You mouthed the phrase back at me, mocking its neatness. I took some volleys at net, sticking them in the middle of the court. We needed to introduce the split step, but I worried about an excess of variables, and I doubted my ability to explain something that had become unconscious, automatic. Your expression as the ball came to you was contorted, alarmed, as if you were flexing your torso in preparation for getting punched in the gut.
I stopped feeding and stepped over the net, coming to your side of the court. You wiped your palm on your shirt, resin from the grip staining your skin. Sweat had blanched your shirt another shade of blue.
“Let’s call it,” I said. “Bad day. We’ll come back next week.”
“No,” you said. “Not yet.”
“Trust me,” I said. “You’ll end up hating it.”
“Just give me one cue. One thing to remember.”
Your look was piercing. I’d grown used to your eyes hidden behind sunglasses during our lessons.
“The trick is to free your body,” I said. “Relax your arm and then flex it at just the right moment.”
“No,” you said, your voice sharp. You shook your head impatiently. “Too abstract.”
I took three steps back and drew a ball from my pocket.
“Breathe,” I said. “Breathe just at the moment of contact, like you’re blowing out candles on a birthday cake. Blow the ball off the strings.”
I drop-hit a forehand, demonstrating. I puffed my cheeks. I hit another, let my breath unspool. “Here,” I said, and tossed a ball into your swing path. “Louder,” I said, after your first attempt. “You have to hear it.” I hand-fed another and you swung through it cleanly. I didn’t track where it went, if it was in or out. The sound was clean—that’s what mattered. I emptied my pockets, then jogged to get the hopper. I focused on your features, the grimace on contact, and then loosening after, cycling air through your lungs. Once you even unlaced your fingers from the grip between shots, the small gesture of a pro. We fell into a sequence, a series of sounds: the ball’s round bounce, the crack of contact, your breath, the rattle of chain-link across the court, squeak of your shoes on the baseline. They ceased to be distinct sounds and began to blur together. This was tennis.
When the rain started we played through it. The air was cooling, and the court wasn’t yet held in shadow. A sun shower, maybe. I scuffed the lines of the court with my shoe to see if they were getting slick. The balls began to fuzz in the humidity. Then it was there, as though a switch had been flipped, drumming the tin awnings over the benches. I raced to pick up the balls with the hopper. You knelt and made a bowl of your shirt, as though gathering Easter eggs. By the time we were off the court and back in the snack bar we were drenched, our clothes clinging to our shapes. The room was dark, the clouds settled over us. Water dripped from the bill of my hat. We stacked our racquets on the counter. We stood at the window and watched the rain come down in pinstripes. I leaned my hip into yours, the coolers humming at our feet. Pearls of water clung to your eyelashes.
When you kissed me I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I had one on the door of the cooler, and touched the other to your hip. Then you pulled away, and we looked back out the window. My lips burned. I felt a current move between us, a tugging in my stomach. I wanted you to kiss me again, but the moment felt stolen, impulsive, a risk too great. I wanted to hold it in my palm, feel its weight. I looked at the snack bar’s open doors, heard the phone ring at the front desk down the hall, no one there to pick it up. I touched your hip again, the space between your shirt and waistline. “We should dry off,” I said, and moved across the room.
We crossed the courtyard. You tipped your head back to the rain. The air held a mineral tang. I followed you into the women’s locker room, sure it was empty, that we’d be alone. We came together at the towel shelf, next to the shower stalls. The room was empty but bright as rain pummeled the skylight. You put a hand on my cheek and bit my lip. I lifted you up onto the shelf, pushing towels onto the floor. Our breathing was loud. I put my hand on the skin of your back, and felt the muscles tighten. You reached for the drawstring of my shorts. I lifted your skirt and worked the spandex down your legs, laughing slightly as they bunched at your ankles, my halting ineptitude. You took me in your hand and guided me into you, and we looked at each other as we breathed in, the sharpness of your gaze almost painful, as though soldering a weld with your eyes alone. You pinched the nape of my neck and I put my nose into your wet hair. As we moved together, finding a rhythm, we pushed the rest of the towels off the shelf and onto the floor. You dug your heels into the backs of my legs and pinned me to you. Never had I been touched quite this way, deliberate and eager. It was as if you feared I would disappear, burn off like vapor, if you relinquished your grip even for an instant.
I gasped when I came, shuddering, loosening my muscles. I fell into you, pressed my forehead into your shoulder, my chest heaving. You put a hand to the back of my head and held me there, my lips on your collarbone. The rain became loud again. You had goosebumps all up and down your arms. I kissed your nose, taking the stud between my lips. We let our breath slow, and then moved and sat down against the lockers, their vents pressing into our backs. I pulled up my shorts, and you pinched up your spandex. I wanted to say something but I didn’t know what. I felt I was living an episode from somebody else’s life. I touched your leg; you were freezing. I reached for the towels we’d dislodged from the shelf. You smiled at me. I felt the stubble on your shins, traced the trio of scars on your knee. I stood up and walked to flick on the lights over the showers. A faucet dripped. Locker doors hung open. The space felt abandoned.
When I came back you were looking at me in a way I hadn’t been looked at before. It wasn’t your eyes, or even your features; it was how you arranged yourself toward me, how our centers of gravity suddenly seemed misaligned. It was as if you saw how I was going to live, and could see all of my own mistakes ahead of me.
I was starting to shiver. I took off my shirt and draped a towel around my shoulders. I wanted you to say something. I didn’t want to pierce the silence, a silence that grew with each passing moment, that became somehow more private. I sat on the floor next to you and put my hand in yours, but your fingers didn’t close around mine.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You didn’t—”
“Don’t apologize,” you said. “That’s how boys can be.” There was an edge to your voice, as though I’d been naïve to think we were equals. I pulled my hand back from yours.
You asked if that was my first time.
I shook my head. “Was it yours?”
You laughed, then picked up a towel and ran it over your hair. The rain had softened to an ambient sizzle. I felt spent, and a little faint. You seemed alert, tense, a fire in your eyes. I had the impulse to confess, offer explanations, disclose, as if some window of permeability had opened and would soon shut. I wanted to curl around you, stay fixed to your side. I asked if you were cold, and you shook your head. I wanted to tend to you, to have tasks, to feel useful. I asked if you were hungry.
“It’s okay,” you said. “You don’t have to do this.”
I sat back, leaning against the cool metal of a locker door.
“Can we go somewhere?” I said. I felt a rising panic, a sense that I had to tether us in the present. I wanted an enclosed space, walls, dry clothes on our bare shoulders. “My house is nearby. My parents won’t be home. We can get something to eat. You can shower if you want.”
You looked at me with reddened eyes, eyes that felt suddenly sunken and distant. You shook your head.
“I don’t want to know where you live. I don’t want to see it.”
I pulled away slightly from your shoulder. I felt abruptly aware of my skin, the spots on my chest. I wanted to cover the creases in my stomach.
“I don’t have any agenda here,” I said. I moved to touch your hand but you pulled away.
“Don’t,” you said, and began to stand up. You fanned out your hair, and reached your hand to me. You pulled me up, and I tried to meet your gaze, return to the look that bound us just a moment before, but it was as if a film had descended over you, distorting the face that had grown so familiar to me. You began to erase the mess we’d made, stacking towels while I put my shirt back on. The rain pattered the skylight, casting the room in a gray flat light, and a silence grew between us that hung in the air like mist, breaking only with the whine of the locker room door as you walked back out into the storm

You weren’t at the club the next week, or the one after that. Nor were the girls back, still out boating in the Northwest, establishing diplomatic ties with Orcas. I was growing to miss their insurgency, as though some essential pulley was absent in the club’s inner machine.
It was the week of the junior open, that bitter late-summer signpost, the first I hadn’t played in six years. Kids in their match gear swarmed the clubhouse, crowded the ping-pong table, took naps on the floor with their heads on their bags, towels covering their faces. Chip’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker, calling out court assignments.
At lunch on Friday, Lisa came into the snack bar in her big sun hat. She ordered me to step out from behind the counter for one of her customarily crushing hugs. She asked about my parents. I asked her about the San Juans. She pulled up pictures on her Blackberry.
“I’m jealous,” I said. Then, after drumming the counter lightly with my knuckles: “Is Ryan not watching the girls anymore?”
Lisa frowned, tucked her phone into the waistband of her shorts, and pulled a bottle of Perrier from the refrigerator.
“It’s the oddest thing,” she said. “I haven’t heard from her since we got back. She’s disappeared. The girls are heartbroken. I hope she’s okay. I quite liked her. Nothing they did seemed to surprise her.”
I went back behind the counter and flipped through my card box, looking for her tab. I said I hadn’t seen you for two weeks.
“You were friends?” Lisa said.
I tapped the pencil’s eraser to my chin.
“She liked my sandwiches,” I said.

I saw Lisa again several days later, while the girls had a swimming lesson with Kenny. I caught glimpses of the lesson from my stool. It seemed to be going well, as though both parties recognized the situation’s futility and had struck a kind of detente. Lisa was on the picnic table with her laptop open in front of her and stray sheets of yellow legal paper weighted down with a stone. She took phone calls all afternoon. I brought her slices of honeydew and wedges of lime for her sparkling water. When she had a break from the calls I asked her for your phone number, offered to get in touch with you. I proposed this casually, an off-the-cuff favor. She clicked through her Blackberry. I wrote the number on a napkin, and she wished me luck.
I called from different phones, varying caller IDs. I called from the clubhouse, phone tucked beneath my shoulder while I Windexed the trophy cases. I called from my cell behind the snack bar while I eyed the TV, Federer playing a night session in Cincinnati. I only ever got your inbox, and with each call I hoped, in some part of me, that the phone company’s automated message would be a mistake, a glitch, and I’d be met with at least a recording of your voice on the other end, telling me who I’d reached, asking me to leave my name and number. Soon enough it seemed indecent to keep calling.
I looked for you. I restocked the towels in the gym five times a day instead of the usual two. I wiped down the rowing machine. I looked up at the screams of children, sought your patient gaze. I walked out to the pool to give Kenny a smoothie and scanned the chairs along the east wall, looking for any face in a book, a nose piercing catching the sun. One day I asked Kenny if he’d seen you. “Who’s Ryan?” he said.

I was cleared to start training again. My PT was pleased with my progress, said the exercises helped. I was to take it slow, wear a lace-up brace, be sensible. Cells regenerate when you’re young. There’s never a better time to be injured; you heal faster.
I trained with the other promising juniors and shed some summer weight. Chip found someone new to work the snack bar once school started, but I still worked weekends. My calluses grew back. I hit the ball cleaner, more steadily. The court became shorter, more compact. It no longer seemed a distance to overcome, but instead a kind of personal geometry configured around me. My expectations had shifted.
Fall came and with it a new energy. I’d get to the club early for evening squad sessions. The pool was somber, only the lanes filled with an old guy or two undeterred by the cooling season. The juniors would spread out over the south courts, radiating that intensity of young people taking a singular task very seriously.
During these sessions I avoided Court 2, where we had our last lesson. It held our sweat in its paint; I could hear your shoes scuffing across the backcourt, your shouts and groans and long breaths, and I’d find myself turning, looking up abruptly, thinking I’d glimpsed a sliver of a yellow two-piece, your ponytail whipping around your shoulder as you shuffled back to the center hash. Maybe it was the heat, the altitude, or just a false impression. I blamed the court. Its surface was slow and a network of cracks was spreading across the service line. It was too open, too exposed, and anyway I didn’t trust its bounce.

 
 
Miles Parnegg is a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine, and my work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Subtropics, Fractured Literary, and elsewhere. He is based in Los Angeles.