The Pond by Our House

We headed for the pond right after breakfast, you in the driver’s seat, me fumbling through our CD collection for something worthy of summer vacation. Mom yelled from the kitchen window as we pulled out of the driveway, “if you boys go a lick over fifty, don’t bother coming home.” We sped away and went well over fifty once we hit the two-lane highway. 

We spent every summer at the house up in Maine, but that was the first summer where you had a driver’s license — I’d never felt a freedom like that, even as a passenger, in Dad’s brand new 2003 Ford Everest. We got to Range Pond just before eleven and dropped our things on the thin strip of sand before rushing into the water. It was smooth like glass, framed with trees that glowed an iridescent green under the June sun. 

You dove into the water, maneuvered around the children splashing in the shallows and swam further out to where your feet didn’t touch the bottom. You were sixteen that summer — puberty was mostly through with you and you’d grown into your curly brown hair that used to look like a mop on top of your head. You’d made first string for our high school’s soccer team and had a 4.1 GPA. 

I was fourteen — smack dab in the middle of puberty, my voice changing octaves three times within one sentence, curly hair still a mop on my head. You seemed leagues ahead of me. Grown up in every way I wished I was. As you floated on your back and stared up at the sunburned sky, you looked like you had the entire world at your fingertips. 

…

That afternoon, we played soccer on the sand with a few other vacation kids, using water bottles and flip flops to designate the goals. During our first game, a newcomer joined us — he stood out from the other kids with whom we associated. His skin was dark like a flash of ink on the sand. He was tall; taller than you, with long limbs. It was clear the moment he touched the ball that he played soccer too. Later, after his team won, he introduced himself. 

“Yo, I’m Assad.” His voice was higher than I expected.

You asked him if he played. He nodded; he was on the soccer team at his high school in Lewiston. He was a local. 

“I’m Adam,” you said and then pointed to me, “this is is my little brother, Eliot.” 

Assad dried off on the sand with us late into the afternoon. The sun dipped low over the trees. The pond was murky with sediment dredged up by the splashing children. You and Assad talked. I listened, mostly. 

Assad lived in Lewiston with his family. A junior at the local high school. He played center-mid for the soccer team. He liked math and hated social studies. I interrupted to ask why, why did he hate social studies. 

“Because all we do is learn about you guys, your country.”

His family was from Somalia. They came to Maine shortly after he was born. 

“I didn’t know there were Somalians here.” I looked up at the sky.

“Somali Bantu,” he corrected me coldly. “And yeah, there’s a lot of us.”

“We’re really only here in the summers,” you cut back in. 

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Please, Adam.” He laced his hands behind his head to lean further back. “I could smell the second home on you from a mile away.”

…

After that, Assad spent nearly every day with us at the pond, playing soccer on the sand, splashing in the shallows with you, ignoring me. You two were always running just a little too fast for me to keep up; talking just a little too quietly for me to hear as we splayed out on our beach towels. I’d never felt more like the annoying little brother. 

One afternoon the three of us played keep away with our water-logged soccer ball and Assad elbowed me hard in the rips. I fell to my knees, every ounce of air leaving my body. I gaped my mouth open like a fish. 

Assad laughed, “you good?”

He was already rushing away with the ball as he asked this. I waited for you to help me, to ask me, really, if I was alright. Instead, you didn’t notice — you were focused on getting the ball from Assad now, grinning and breathless. I spent the remainder of my afternoon pouting on my beach towel. 

Pretty soon, you invited Assad over for dinner. Mom asked him where he was from and when he said Maine, she responded with the classic, “no, but where are you from from?” I was too young to understand this coded language; to figure out why Assad was squirming and a little quieter at the dinner table after that. I thought he was being rude. Even still, he joined us for dinner most nights until Mom started setting a place for him without even asking. 

…

One night, Mom and Dad were out late with friends — they left us $30 for pizza and Dad said, “if you boys throw a party, we’ll know.” That was how most of our parents’ sentences started when you and I were teenagers: if you boys. You smiled at Dad — that first born, untouchable smile — and the moment they pulled out of the driveway, you invited Assad over. 

“Dad said we couldn’t have a party.” I wished I didn’t sound so nagging.

“It’s just Assad.”

Assad arrived twenty minutes later with a case of PBR. The three of us drank and watched baseball in the living room. I hated the taste, but I hated the idea of not drinking more; of going up to my room and being left out. Instead, I watched the two of you get along and have things in common — you both liked horror movies, you both thought your soccer coaches should play you more, you had both wanted to be astronauts when you were in kindergarten. 

“I don’t think little bro likes the beer,” Assad chuckled, pointing at me.

He was right. My head felt fuzzy, my eyes glassy. I wasn’t sure when these burps would turn into something more. You looked at me, asked me if I was good — the perfect level of brotherly obligation — and I nodded.

“Dude he looks like he’s going to hurl.” Assad was laughing.

“Maybe sleep it off,” you said. It felt like you were trying to get rid of me. 

I refused, but soon after, I felt my stomach turn and headed upstairs as discretely as possible. 

“You okay?” you called up the stairs. I said, once again, that I was fine. Embarrassed, nauseous, furious with Assad for teasing me like that and for being right. 

My bedroom window overlooked the backyard. I laid in bed and gazed out the warped glass. The untamed yard was framed with trees, hazy and shadowed at this hour. The light of the half moon painted the highest reaching leaves silver. I thought about the two of us catching fireflies in the backyard when we were younger; before there was Assad; before there was puberty. Now I viciously, desperately wished for these earlier summers when it felt like I was your only friend up here in Maine.

I fell asleep only to wake up less drunk and more hungover an hour later. I looked out the window again to find you and Assad in the backyard, running through the grass like you and I used to. Under the moon’s light, I could only catch flashes of the both of you, vaguely glowing like spirits from another world. 

You and Assad started up a game of keep away. Now I saw that you’d both been going easy on me during our scrimmages at Range. Without me, you and Assad were more physical with each other, pushing, side checking, falling to the ground. Assad even put you in a headlock and I worried you were hurt until your laughter traveled up to my window. 

Assad released you from the headlock, but kept his arm draped over you. He stepped in close, his face nearly touching yours; you pulled away and shoved him in the chest. He stood there, hands raised in a rare moment of surrender. You pushed him again, but this time he pushed back and you caught his hands and left them on your chest. You both leaned towards each other. 

The glass of my bedroom window was old and warped and I was still a little drunk, but as clear as day, I could see the two of you kiss. 

I’ve since wondered if that was your first kiss and I think it had to be. There was something so beautifully fragile and hesitant about how the two of you touched. But I didn’t see it that way in the moment. I couldn’t see that you were falling in love that summer. I was too busy worrying about you. About what Mom and Dad would think. What your friends back home would think. What did I think? I honestly don’t remember. I remember jealousy and worry, but so much of that was wrapped up in our surroundings, my naivety, the 2003 masculinity I had yet to unshackle myself from. That summer, probably your formative summer, all I did was worry about you. 

…

I hardly saw you for the rest of the summer. We still went to Range every day, but you broke off with Assad instantly and now I was afraid to follow along — what if I caught the two of you kissing again? What if you were doing more? Every part of me cringes now when I think back to the petty little thoughts that plagued me that summer. 

I spent my days reading on the sand, hanging out with the other vacationers, or staying home all together, telling you I had a sunburn or needed to catch up on my summer reading assignment for the honors English class I was starting in the fall. 

At dinner with our parents, I worried you and Assad were getting careless with your long looks and inside jokes. I even found the two of you holding hands under the table one time when I stooped to pick up my fallen napkin. But Mom and Dad didn’t suspect a thing. I thought about telling them, but some untapped part of me knew better. The brotherly part of me. 

I even saw you two nearly kiss at Range one day. An approaching storm had shooed most people home, but we stayed for a little longer, me reading on the sand, the two of you swimming further out. I peaked up just as Assad looked over his shoulder to be sure nobody was looking — I didn’t know if he didn’t see me or if he did and I didn’t count. And then he put his hand on your cheek and you looked at him like he was the whole world. 

I wished I didn’t care so much. I wished my jealousy was better placed. Sometimes I thought about confronting you — what would you do if I told you I knew? Other times I fantasized about you getting in a car crash. Nothing terrible, but bad enough to keep you home for a few days — you and I could watch cartoons together and Assad would be far away. 

Now I wonder why I didn’t like Assad. Was it really because he had elbowed me at Range, teased me for not holding my liquor? Or was it because he was a boy? Or, just two years after 9/11, did it have something to do with the color of his skin or the god he believed in? Even then, I hated those ugly parts of me, but they did exist — I had yet to flush them out, expand my life beyond the Boston suburb and Maine summer house lifestyle our parents built for us. 

…

You missed curfew one night, late in July. Mom and Dad waited up until midnight and then went to bed fuming. I listened from my bedroom, too intrigued to fall asleep. You never got in trouble. The cruel part of me wanted to be there when you finally got home and watch Mom chew you out. I heard the front door open at 6am and crept downstairs. 

Mom and Dad are pissed, I would warn you, show you I was on your side. Or maybe I’d asked where you’d been, help you put together a cover story. I reached the bottom of the stairs and tiptoed into the kitchen where I heard you rummaging around. 

I found you standing in front of the open refrigerator. Blue light, from the dawn or the fridge (I couldn’t tell), made you glow kind of like that night I saw you with Assad in the backyard under the moon. 

You turned around at the sound of my footsteps and I was ready with my one liner, but stopped short when I saw your face. You were covered in blood. It painted the front of your shirt. One of your eyes was already closing up and more blood was pouring from your nose. You had a bag of frozen peas pressed up against your jaw.

I asked what happened, but you just sighed at me. 

“I’ll go get Mom—“

“—no, don’t.” I’d never heard fear in your voice like that.

I asked what happened again and you shrugged and said, “just a fight at the party, it was nothing.”

I asked if Assad did this. The ugly part of me hoped he did. 

“No,” you frowned like the suggestion was impossible. “No, he’s even worse off than me.” 

I wetted a kitchen towel and guided you to the back deck for some air. We sat on the steps and you iced your knuckles which were raw and bloody too, while I dabbed at your face with the towel. You let me do this, passively, your eyes hollow. The heat was bearable this early in the morning, the sun not yet entirely risen. 

I asked if you wanted to go to the hospital. You shook your head. I asked once more what happened.

“Just some guys at a party, it’s not a big deal.” You brought the frozen peas to your swollen lip and scanned the trees. You said after a long moment, “they caught me and Assad.” 

There was an admission in this though I wasn’t certain whether it was intentional. I didn’t know how to respond. I asked where Assad was now. 

You shrugged. “I don’t know.”

And then, just as the sun rose over the trees, you started to cry. Quietly. Delicately. I didn’t notice at first because the tears mixed in with the blood on your face so discretely. And then your shoulders were shaking and I did what I’d seen our mother do with us when we were upset. 

I put my arms around you and rested my head against your shoulder, the shoulder I’d been jealous of, the one I had wished to be injured in a car accident. In this moment, every ugly thought I’d collected that summer dissipated like a dying star.

I waited for you to push me off, call me a pussy. But you let me stay there and eventually hugged me back. I felt you shake against me. 

“You knew, didn’t you?” You asked after a while, once your voice steadied. 

I unlaced my arms and rested my hands in my lap. “I saw the two of you in the backyard that night he came over.” 

We both gazed at the lawn, at this unwittingly shared memory. I heard you sigh. 

“That was a good night.”

I looked at you — scanning the backyard, eyes alight with fresh tears, but mostly with this memory. I didn’t know what to say. Looking back, I wonder if this was all you wanted though. For me to sit with you and say nothing.