The Eno had flooded the old quarry with an unknown depth of rich, jelly-green water. We jumped into the water for the express purpose of evaporating on the shore. Plunging through the cold, flimsy water, for a second I forgot how to swim.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving, Berie!” Isaac said too loudly as we paddled to the edge. The water at my feet was cold, and at my chest it was hot and green. I couldn’t tell if he was angry. I had done just want he had wanted—what my mother wanted, what everyone wanted.

I said, “I’m sure it’ll be just the same as being here.”

Later we lay in the buzzing leaves, watching four small boys swing themselves from a rope into the water. The air smelled like cinnamon from the black and yellow millipedes. I heard Isaac’s shutter click. He aimed at me through a gap in the weeds. When I reached for him, he said, “You’re going to get to college and you’re going to like it.”

“Maybe,” I said. A drip dangled from his earlobe and I restrained myself from kissing it away. I knew his skin would be sulfurous from the water. I knew his face better than I knew my own, his hammerhead eyes, his peculiar softness.

“Don’t let the strawberries die while I’m gone,” I said. I’d cultivated them for years in the vacant lot next to his squat.

“Well,” he said, “if we ever get married, this is where we’ll have the ceremony.”

I laughed.

With Isaac I first learned to commit to something. I remembered the first time he’d coaxed me to jump off the quarry’s cliff. I remembered holding the coarse rope in my hands, swinging myself over the flooded depths, and dropping down into the deep green water. If you don’t drop down at the right spot, you’ll smack yourself against the cliff, Isaac said. But the water looks so far below, and the plunge takes all of the air out of your lungs. This was training for my future life. Before Isaac I’d never been such a good high jumper; I’d always been afraid I’d fall wrong. He taught me it only takes one split second to commit to fearlessness. I’d learned that lesson—I’d learned it too well. I could no longer stay with Isaac listening to the trains make their way through the woods, hosting the punks who came off of them but never quite leaving myself.

* * *