She was right, it would be lame not to go. I didn’t argue much after that. We got into Irvine’s car, which was full of junk. She rolled all the windows down and blasted Xiu Xiu as she chain-smoked her way down Washtenaw, rarely dipping below the speed limit.

“They’re telling me they’re in the river,” Irvine said, looking at her phone at a stoplight. “Hmm. I might swing by the house and grab my swim stuff, if you want?”

She pulled up to a small, squat house with a gravel driveway. She opened the door.

“Here, I have a spare pair of trunks, come in and you can change.”

Their apartment, in the first floor of the house, was a small, tidy space. Big couches in the front room, a full bookshelf, a record player. Irvine ducked into her bedroom. I caught a glimpse around her. There was a big double mattress on the gray-carpeted floor. The rest of her stuff appeared to be on the floor too. She closed the door and came out in a pair of black swim trunks and a blue, loose-fitting swim shirt. She tossed me a pair of red trunks, which I changed into in the bathroom.

When I was a kid, my mom talked about Ypsilanti like it was a dangerous other world, somewhere it was a misfortune to go. I learned later that it’s not like that at all, of course. It’s a lot more human than the genteel place Ann Arbor is becoming. In the summer it has an overgrown quality. People let all sorts of bushes grow wild right up to their big, utilitarian porches and leave the lower limbs of trees to grab at pedestrians’ heads. Frog Island Park — a shallow, sandy bend of the Huron River wrapped around a finger of swampy land — was never touched by a lawnmower, let alone a landscape architect. In the summer it turned into a shady meadow with a couple picnic benches here and there as an afterthought, burdock and wild carrot and mulleins and black-eyed Susans bursting out of holes in the mud.

When we got there, Steph and Hanin were all sitting on rocks half-submerged in the river up to their chests, drinking beer. Hanin had shaved their head and Steph had grown her inky black hair really long, but otherwise they looked the same. I tried to identify evidence of weathering on their faces and saw a little but not too much. We were all still young, after all.

“Look who I have,” Irvine said as she walked up.

“Is that Kieran Reynolds??” Hanin shouted, standing up as I walked toward the riverbank. They splashed out of the river and embraced me, leaving spots of water on my t-shirt.

“God, it’s been a fucking minute. How are you?”

“I’m ok,” I managed.