The water was cool but not cold. I hovered there in that other world, paddling to keep myself under, my hair drifting like seaweed. If I could have survived underwater, I might have stayed there forever—everything was silence and peace and darkness. When I came up, I swam away from the dock, out into the night.

“C’mon,” Tom called after me. “Don’t go out alone, Paul.”

But I kept swimming. Pure, youthful energy had gathered in me, collected from Mary and the melancholy night and the moon, and I swam harder. Soon the porch light was a dot, like some star far behind me. A stiff breeze came and went, and the surface of the lake was brittle, choppy. When I tried floating on my back, the small waves came up over my mouth, and I coughed the water out, treading darkness.

Something came up out of the water, something large and frantic and direct. I stifled a shout, but it was only Tom.

“There you are,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “Idiot. You didn’t grow up around water, did you? Don’t go out by yourself at night. Not like this. C’mon.”

He swam back to the dock, and for a moment I considered going out even farther, leaving all of them behind, even Mary. Why did I want to keep running? What was I running from? Could I see us getting older, the years gathering around us? Maybe I could sense that summer was the end of our youth, the last time things would be that way, carefree and light. I wanted to swim away from whatever it was that was coming for us, whatever it was that would take it all away.

But I didn’t keep swimming away. I followed Tom back, the small, single porch light leading us home. By the time I got to the dock, Tom was already sitting beside Shirley, and when my head peeked up over the edge of the wooden boards and I pulled myself up, he shook his head.

“You are such a—”

But he never finished, because that’s when Mary, still inside the house, screamed.

Shirley

You and I follow Tom out of the diner parking lot, sufficiently stuffed. Jenny, aka the witch queen, at the continued requests of Tom, had brought out various plates of diner food for us, and what we didn’t eat, Tom packed in Styrofoam clamshell containers and carried out with him.

“For tonight,” he said. “I love leftovers.”

Now he turns onto Main Street, away from the diner, the golden light flickering from his BMW’s turn signal. It’s a beautiful car, and with the clothes he wears, I’m beginning to think that Tom has done very well for himself.

“I like Tom,” you say, and I can tell the food has made you sleepy. I could use an afternoon nap myself.

I don’t reply. I always liked Tom. I liked him a lot. But there is something about him now that seems far away. The man we sat beside in the diner, the one who told you funny stories about me from when I was a teenager, the one who insisted on buying the food, the one who wrote his address on the back of a napkin in case we get separated—that Tom is somehow an outer layer. I can tell the old Tom is in there somewhere, but he’s buried deep.