chapter twenty-three

before After the night he'd ambushed me in my bedroom, it was like Griffin disappeared. The text messages every five to ten minutes either professing love or disgust stopped, and so did the unmarked letters and packages. I saw him in the hallways sometimes at school after summer break ended, slamming locker doors or slapping the shoulders of guys I barely recognized, pretending as if I wasn't there, but something felt strange about it. I wondered if now he was the one who was afraid. Maybe he thought he'd gone too far and was a phone call away from being arrested and charged with assault. He passed me in the halls with his eyes directed at whatever was straight ahead of him, completely ignoring me. If he was outside when I stepped out through my front door, mowing his lawn, the material of his shirt darkened with sweat, he kept his eyes down on the clipped blades of grass. Guilt or fear motivated him, or maybe he was actually through with me. He had felt my life in his hands, my body beneath his, and maybe that was enough, for now, but I was still afraid for later. I'd thought later might come at the block Labor Day barbecue, when I noticed him swimming in one of our neighbors' pools with Kolby and a couple of the neighbors' kids. He'd looked over to me and my family as we arrived, taking us in for a moment before calling out a weak, "Polo." Sometimes I wondered how no one else saw it—the boy he really was underneath—but then I watched him play pool games with the neighborhood kids. No one expects boys like him to play Marco Polo at block parties, swimming slowly in the pool to let the kids still in floaties catch him. That would be too sweet, too kind. Boys like him had to always be fraught with malice. About an hour later, he was gulping down his soda, condensation clinging to the cup, and he cast one quick look over the rim from across one of our neighbor's backyards. He was shirtless, the curls of his hair still wet, his swimsuit clinging to his thighs as he stood there, barefoot. But then he looked away from me, finding something else to my right and something changed in his eyes. It was something I couldn't quite understand or identify, but then he looked away from that too. "I'm heading back to the pool," he announced, slapping a mosquito from his forearm. I looked over after he walked away, a tense arch in his shoulders, and saw it was only Emily, slouched in a lawn chair, her flip-flop dangling from her toe as she observed him, lips pursed. I thought it must have been disgust that made her lips press into a thin line like that, her eyes never abandoning him as he left. So he walked off, and that was the last time I saw Griffin Tomlin. The next morning, he was dead, found floating in his pool.