The first good ledge is sixty feet up, and people do jump from it. A few might make it to the next good ledge. Call it eighty feet. Somehow that looks twice as high as the one right below it. Those who make it all the way up tend to lean out from the waist and look downward as if somehow the laws of physics might have changed on the way up.

Seventy miles an hour when you hit the water.

Four full seconds to get there.

From thirteen stories up, the water looks like plate steel, and people remember the stories they’ve heard: the kid who died back in ’57, the ballplayer who hit wrong and drove a knee through his jaw, breaking it in four places and shattering every tooth on the right side. I’ve seen it a hundred times. The boys go pale, and their girlfriends say, I take it back, don’t do it. I’m not the only one who’s jumped—a few others have, too—but only one person had the balls to dive, and that was my brother.

The dead one.

“Come on, man. If you’re going to do it, do it already.” The voice was behind me, my oldest friend. “You know Becky’s watching.”

I looked into the quarry and saw Becky Collins on an inner tube a hundred feet out from the cliff. She was as small as the rest, but no one else wore a white bikini. Her head rocked back, and I thought she might be laughing. The girl beside her might be laughing, too. Around them, a collection of rafts and tubes held half the senior class. The rest were on the far side of the quarry or in the woods or passed out in any of the cars that glinted in the distance like bits of colored glass.

“Are you making this dive or not?”

I looked away long enough to catch the gleam in Chance’s eyes. He was a small kid, but would fight anybody; try for any girl. “Maybe she’s looking at you,” I said.

“I’m not dumb enough to jump off this rock.”

I wondered what that said about me. I’d jumped seven times, but never made the dive, and everyone down there knew it. I’d sworn to do it before graduation, but that was two years ago, and I’d been angry when I’d said it. “Do you think I’m stupid?” I asked.

“I think you’re a rock star.”

“McCartney or Jagger?”

Chance offered up a devil’s grin. “That depends on if you jump or dive.”

I looked away from my friend, and thought about hitting wrong at seventy miles an hour. Beneath me, people began to chant.

“Dive, dive, dive…”