Chapter 15
15
NOW
FOR THE FIRST EVENT—THE tug-of-war—we divided into two teams, two pairs of partners per team: Clarence and Caleb plus Karma and Shelly on one team, Helene and Taz plus Manuel and me on the other. My parents, along with Pam and Tim, stayed ashore as judges.
The Cradle Island Tug-of-War is no rinky-dink middle school Field Day contest between a bunch of screaming eight-year-olds. It’s vicious. Just offshore, two water trampolines are anchored fifteen feet apart. They’re held in place by long chains wrapped around heavy cinder blocks at the bottom of the lake. The trampolines don’t particularly like staying in place; they wiggle and wobble beneath your feet, tipping at the mercy of tides. For the Tug-of-War, each team stands on one of the trampolines with a rope pulled taut over the open water. You tug until one of the teams falls into the drink.
As I swam out to my team’s trampoline, I thought about the Olympics we held back when I was still just a kid. For my siblings, they were the highlight of every summer. For me, the only thing they highlighted was how painfully young and small I was. I participated, but only in ways that emphasized my own inadequacy, my certainty that I didn’t belong. I filled water balloons and handed out towels. I designed prizes for the award ceremony, misshapen slices of construction paper smeared with glitter glue. I sat on Speedy’s lap during the Diving Contest and waved scorecards as high as I could. I never joined Greased Pig. At seven years younger than almost everyone else—except Henry—I was more suited to being the watermelon than to being a player.
I had every intention of winning the Tug-of-War this year. In fact, I had every intention of winning the entire Olympics. I was an adult now, just as qualified to win as any of my older siblings. Not to mention I was in the best shape of my life, thanks to all my early morning runs next to the East River.
This was Manuel’s first Olympics, too. By the time he started coming to Canada, we’d retired them; everyone else was too old. They’d found other outlets for pent-up emotion. Healthier, more mature outlets, like sarcasm or alcohol or grudges buried so deeply they never see the light of day.
Up on the water trampoline, I ended up positioned between Manuel and Taz. Manny’s back was so close to me that I could smell the cedar and sunscreen leaking from his pores. It was a traitorously nice smell. Just as I caught myself leaning a little too close, hands loose, nose hovering just a millimeter from his skin, Speedy blew his whistle and the contest started. I jerked forward, grasped for the rope, missed entirely, and tipped headfirst into the lake.
—
THE SECOND EVENT WAS A long-distance relay swim. One partner swims from one end of the harbor to the other, and the second swims back. First team to finish wins.
No sweat , I thought. I’m a runner; cardio is my thing.
Unfortunately, running didn’t seem to translate to swimming. I hardly made it fifty meters before my arms and legs and lungs were screaming at me to stop. I lifted my head out of the water, and when I saw how far the beach still was, I groaned. In doing so, I accidentally inhaled a mouthful of lake water. I coughed it up. My arms flailed wildly. I pounded at the water and wondered if this was what it felt like to drown.
When I finally made it back to shore, I dragged myself through the knee-high water on all fours. I squinted up at the sky only to find a hand waving in front of me, blocking the bright sunlight. I grabbed it without thinking. As soon as it wrapped around my palm, I knew who it belonged to—the warm palm, the rough skin, the long, nimble fingers…My hand had been in that hand before. More times than I could count.
Manuel hoisted me out of the water, helping me up onto the sand. I sprawled out on the beach, breathing heavily. When I turned my neck to look for him, to say thank you, he was already gone. Off swimming the second leg of a race we’d already lost.
I let my head flop back onto the sand. My eyelids were about to flutter shut, but before they closed all the way, a pixie-haired face popped into view: Karma, captain of her high school swim team.
She grinned victoriously down at me. “Glug glug, Guppy!”
—
“DON’T SWEAT IT,” MANUEL SAID as we toweled off back up on the rocks by Sunny Sunday. “It’s only the first two events. We can still win.”
“Right,” I said dryly. “Things are really looking up.”
He nudged my side. “A little positivity wouldn’t kill you.”
That one touch—it did something to me. Something unexpected. Something dangerous. Ever since that night , I’d done everything I could to repress sexual impulses within myself—even the ones I didn’t see as problematic. Warm pelvis, tight belly, flutters in the stomach…I shut it off. All of it. I had to, because letting it in risked letting in everything else, everything that goes along with arousal. Better to tamp it down. Better to feel nothing at all. And it worked.
Until then.
Until that very moment, when one elbow against one side sent a thousand volts of electricity dancing through my body. Switching on lights. Dusting off corners. Pulling levers that should never be pulled. Awakening every part of me that I tried so desperately to put to sleep.
No.
No, no, no.
My breath became very shallow. I cast about for something to do, a distraction, a roadblock to grind whatever was happening within me to a halt. I wished I could reach for my phone. Check Instagram or TikTok, even though there was only one person whose updates I actually cared to stalk, and he was standing right beside me. At least holding my phone in my hand would provide me with a repository for my attention. But there’s no Wi-Fi and hardly any signal on Cradle Island. Most summers, I just leave my phone in my cabin and let it die.
Thankfully, my mother chose that moment to yell down at us from the porch: “Manny! Eliot!” We craned our necks to find her waving a bottle of Neutrogena at us. “Don’t forget to reapply!”
I exhaled sharply. “Mom, it’s been a half hour since we put sunscreen on,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice light. “We’re fine.”
“Nonsense.” She clopped down the stairs, flip-flops slapping the smooth wooden boards, to head for where we were seated. “Didn’t you hear what your brother said about melanoma? I won’t have either of you catching cancer on my watch.”
“I wasn’t aware that cancer was something you caught,” I said flatly.
My mother set the bottle of sunscreen in my hand. “You never know with these things.” She straightened up and turned around to flip-flop away. Before making it all the way back to the porch, she paused and looked over her shoulder. “Oh, and Manuel, dear—do help Eliot with her back and shoulders. She’s too modest to ask for it herself and always ends up with splotchy burns.” Then, with a pleased nod, Wendy Beck turned around and marched up the steps.
The bottoms of my feet broke out in a cold sweat.
Slowly, as slowly as possible without staying frozen in place, I pivoted my head to look at Manuel. To my surprise, when my eyes finally landed on him, he appeared to be holding back laughter.
It was a reflex; seeing his smile, I couldn’t quite hold back my own. “What?” I asked.
His lips twitched. “She could be a little less obvious about it, couldn’t she?”
I smirked back. “You know as well as anyone that Wendy has been plotting to marry me off to you since the first moment you set foot in our house.”
His mouth stretched into a full-on grin. “Do I ever.”
We stayed like that for a small eternity, best friend grinning at best friend. And for those few seconds, I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying myself. I forgot that I wasn’t allowed to fall back into him. That we weren’t allowed to just be Eliot and Manny anymore. I lost that privilege three years ago on the night before he left for Harvard.
We kept staring for far too long.
I don’t know who looked away first.
—
NEXT CAME THE DIVING CONTEST. I knew we’d fail that event spectacularly. Manuel stands a full head taller than most of my brothers. Watching him try to swan dive is like watching a tree trunk fall off a cliff.
By the time Greased Pig rolled around, the heady, electrifying buzz of competition had taken hold of me. We’d lost the first three, but there were four more events to go. Taken together, they were worth more points than all of the previous ones combined.
I might have been the youngest, but I was still determined to win.
We switched up the teams from Tug-of-War, Clarence and Caleb joining Manuel and me, then put heads together to discuss strategy. On our side, Manuel and Clarence dominated the conversation, speaking in hushed, scheming tones. I watched their connection with mild confusion.
Throughout that morning, it felt like every time I looked over at Manuel, he was goofing off with a member of my immediate family—teasing my mother, bumping fists with Taz, making Karma laugh so hard she spit her gum out. He even appeared to be the resident favorite of Pam and Tim, who peppered him with so many questions about Colombia and Harvard that I feared he might run out of responses. But he never did. He took them in stride, all of them—just as he always had.
It takes a certain kind of fearlessness to let yourself be absorbed into a family as massive and chaotic as my own. Luckily, Manuel was nothing if not fearless. He moved to the US at ten years old—that awful age, when most children go from innocent to something short of evil—and even though he talked about missing parts of his life in Colombia, I never saw him cry. Not once. He embraced his bizarre new American family. He embraced all of us, from Taz’s long silences to Clarence and Karma’s aggressive hijinks. At the time, it was perfect. To have your best friend so seamlessly absorbed into every aspect of your life? It’s every child’s dream.
But as I watched him laugh and plot and generally take center stage among the family whose acceptance I had so desperately craved as a child, the same family who clearly hadn’t forgiven me for my yearslong absence, I felt this creeping dread, this pit in my stomach that felt like recognition: Had I been so easily replaced?
Speedy, who was in charge of kicking off Greased Pig, was positioned up on the porch in his Feather Chair. The Pig—a watermelon covered in a thick layer of slippery Vaseline—sat in his lap. On Wendy’s whistle, he tossed the Pig into the lake. It was a fall of over fifteen feet. It hit the water and rocketed halfway to the bottom before it boomeranged back upward. By the time it broke the surface and leapt into the air, sending up two great flourishes of water, the other players had already dived after it. Caleb snatched the watermelon first. The game was off.
My siblings had no problem playing dirty; that much became clear within the first few seconds of the game. Karma attacked Caleb from behind, pushing his shoulders down until his head submerged and grabbing the Pig. Clarence splashed water in Karma’s face. Momentarily blinded, she let the Pig slip through her fingers and into Clarence’s arms. Clarence kicked as hard as he could, drawing near the other team’s inner tube. Taz was waiting, playing goalkeeper. He dove for Clarence, but at the last minute, my half brother passed the ball to Manuel, who slam-dunked it into the tube.
Clarence let out a victorious whoop, rubbing Manuel’s hair affectionately. “That’s our guy.”
One point to our team.
We could do this. We could win. I wasn’t just going to sit back and watch; I was going to swoop right in and bring us to victory.
Once again, Speedy tossed the Pig off the balcony, and the second round began. Karma snagged it right away, kicking water into Clarence’s face as he advanced on her. Thankfully, her attention was all on my half brother; she wasn’t even looking at me. Probably didn’t even consider me a threat—youngest child and all. I capitalized on her negligence and pounced.
What resulted was a kicking and scratching match between Karma and me. It was like we were little girls again, fighting over a favorite toy. We kept our kicks light, not wanting to actually injure each other, but our faces were screwed up into twin expressions of gritted teeth and wild eyes, fingers scrabbling for purchase on the greased watermelon.
“A- ha !” hollered Karma, ripping the Pig from my hands and tossing it into the air. Taz was waiting behind her. He snatched it, then tossed it to Helene, who floated closer to our goal. Helene shot, and the Pig went into the tube.
It went on like this, back and forth between the teams, them scoring once, us scoring twice, them scoring three times. I did my best to participate, but it quickly became clear that I wasn’t built for this sport. I was built for long runs along the Hudson and even longer days sitting at my desk.
Yet again, I was the weakest one of the group. Yet again, I wasn’t enough.
Eventually, I decided I needed a break. I paddled away from the game, over to the rock we used to climb out of the water—an enormous box of a thing with a perfectly smooth top, like a swim raft. When the water is low, the rock sticks a full foot out of the water. I wriggled up, not bothering to push with my arms, just flapping my legs until enough of my torso slid up and over the rock’s flat top. I rolled over onto my back. Then I went limp. My legs dangled into the water. A cloud shaped like a light bulb drifted past. Hungry smallmouth bass could have nibbled at my toes.
Somewhere in the distance, Karma yelled, “Eat grease, asshole!”
As I lay on that rock, I couldn’t help but come back to a question I had pondered a thousand times in my life: How do you form meaningful relationships with a family you didn’t grow up with?
The answer, I had come to see at last, was this: you can’t. You might think that as you grow up, it gets easier. To make friends with your siblings, I mean. You age. You mature. You harden from that adorable, irritating little bag they have to carry around into something resembling a human adult. When that happens, you get to take your seat at that proverbial table. Right?
Wrong.
That gap might shrink, but it will never close altogether.
You’re left with one option: Build your own family. Choose your own identity.
But here’s the problem: the older kids get to the rest of the world first—to the parents, the teachers, the local law enforcement—which means they define what it means to be a Beck. And they’re human, right? They have no idea how to grow up properly. They make mistakes. They fight. They self-destruct. Sometimes, they self-destruct rather publicly . In that way they stumble into adulthood, drunken explorers weaving through the jungle of life and hacking shit down as they go. By the time you, the youngest, come along, you stand at the jungle’s entrance with a machete in your hand and envision carving your own path, but shortly after you start, you realize it’s impossible. The damage is done. The jungle is razed flat. If your oldest brother was a goat fucker, it doesn’t matter if you commit your entire life to saving the planet. It doesn’t matter if you’re hotter than a supermodel or faster than Usain Bolt or ordained by God as the second coming of Jesus Christ himself. You’ll always just be the sister of a goat fucker.
But the craziest part, the most baffling, ridiculous part of all, is that these people—the ones who cut the paths you must follow, who standardize familial traditions, who leak personality traits and isms that you absorb without meaning to, an accidental human sponge—you don’t know them. Not really. You’re so young that by the time you’re old enough to make your own decisions, they’re gone. Off to college, to jobs, to that slow process of disentangling who they are from who they were raised to be. They’re well out of the jungle, but you’re lost in the thick of it, no map, no guide, clutching at your side what you thought was a machete but you see now is nothing more than a pen.
—
THE FIFTH EVENT—THE FINAL round before lunch—was the Sauna-Off.
All morning, the Nurses had been stoking the fire, juicing the sauna up to skin-melting temperatures. The rules for the contest were simple: Whoever stayed in the longest won the most points. Five points for first place, three for second, and one for third.
“This will be a walk in the park for us both,” Manuel said as we followed the group into the small wooden hut. “We grew up spending almost every summer night in here.”
“As did the rest of us,” Karma said over her shoulder. She leapt up onto the lower wooden bench—one of two that lined the walls of the sauna, interrupted only by the vintage metal chimney and hot rocks in the corner—and sat down, crossing her freckled legs. “I wouldn’t get too cocky, Valde.”
I stiffened. A bizarrely possessive feeling rushed through me at the sound of someone else using my nickname for Manuel.
How ridiculous , I thought. It’s just a shortened version of his last name. Of course other people are going to call him that. In fact, I bet his entire club—what did he call it, the Spree?—knows him as Valde.
It happened all at once, like a boat filling with water so fast it was sure to sink: I was furious. Not at Manuel. Not even at the Spree. No, I was furious at myself. For not knowing the name of the place he spends the most time. For not knowing the names of any of his friends that are in that club with him. For not knowing anything —not one significant thing—about the life my former best friend led in Cambridge.
“Eliot?”
The sound of his voice shook me out of my spiral of self-loathing. I came to only to realize that I was standing in the open sauna door while every member of my family was already seated inside staring at me, waiting.
“You coming in?” Karma asked. “Or are you just going to stand there in your own world and keep letting all the hot air out?”
“I—” I shook my head, shutting the door behind me. I hurried forward and took the only open seat left, muttering, “Sorry.”
As soon as I was seated, Clarence stood up from his place on the upper wooden bench. “Right.” He clapped once. “The Sauna-Off. You all know the rules: the longer you make it, the more points you get. No breaks. No splashing water onto your body.” He pointed at the buckets of water on the floor, all of which had wooden ladles sticking up from their insides. “Tossing water on the rocks and steaming the place up is fair game. Understood? Good. May the best man win.” With that, he sat.
And we were off.
—
HELENE LEFT FIRST. TAZ LEFT approximately fifteen seconds later, even though he wasn’t even sweating yet. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Caleb left. Shelly left. Karma yelled after her wife, calling her a “disgrace upon the gay community.” Shelly mooned her through the glass door.
“And then there were four,” said Clarence, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
He, Karma, Manuel, and I glanced around at each other inside the tiny, sweltering wooden box. Sunlight streamed in the window that looked out over the back porch and the lake. On the porch, the family was gathered, chatting with each other or watching us with keen interest. Mom waved when she caught my eye.
“How bad do you think Wendy wants to join right now?” Clarence asked.
“Given that she has worse FOMO than anyone I know,” Karma said, “I would say pretty bad.”
Clarence grinned. “Unless it would mess up her clothing.”
“Oh my God.” Karma leaned her head back, and her short hair, matted with sweat, dangled back, too. “Wendy loves to pretend she’s low-key, but she’s really the highest maintenance of us all. Remember on that one Trek of Chaos, when she ripped her favorite Loro Piana shirt?”
Clarence groaned. “I’ll never forget it. Speedy was trying to calm her down by telling her that we could mend it, and she said, ‘No, it’s over—’?”
“?‘—just like my life,’?” they finished in unison.
Manuel burst out laughing.
I tried to listen, to laugh along, but the task proved difficult. My mind was drifting. Away from the conversation. Away from sound and toward sensation. Specifically—the sensation of Manuel’s sweating body sitting not five inches away from mine.
All morning, I’d done my best not to notice the hard lines of his chest muscles, the tanned, freckled skin of his arms and shoulders. I pretended not to see the water dripping from his matted curls or the tan lines around his thighs or the little V of muscle sloping down into his swimming trunks. But here, inside a sweltering cedar hut, that same tanned skin dripping with salty-sweet beads of sweat…
I was trying not to breathe.
Because when I did—when I let the smell of him seep even a tiny bit into my nostrils—it sent my entire body into a spiral. A heated, sweaty spiral of sparks in the stomach and a tight, aching pelvis. Breath that barely made it in before I had to push it back out again.
When the others had dropped out, he could have moved. Could have scooted away, giving me even one or two extra inches of space to breathe. But he didn’t.
And I think he did it on purpose.
Help.
Thankfully, Karma chose that moment to stand. “Well,” she said, jumping off the bench, “I’m officially out.”
“You’re leaving ?” Clarence looked aghast. “So much for all that big talk.”
“Talk is fine, but it’s hot as the devil’s left tit in here. I’m gonna go hang out with my hot wife instead.”
“Loser,” Clarence called.
“Asshole,” Karma yelled over her shoulder as the door swung shut.
And then there were three.
To be honest, I was starting to feel the heat. I might have grown up sitting in the sauna all summer, but three long years had passed since I had even set foot in one. Perhaps I overestimated my perseverance. Perhaps it was my earlier overconfidence during Greased Pig at work again.
“Fuck.” Clarence bent his head. Sweat dripped from his forehead to the cedar floor. “How are you two not dying?”
“I am.” Manuel flashed his vivid white teeth. “But I want to win more than I want to cool down.”
“Touché, brother.” Clarence pushed himself off the bench. “Well, then, kids. It is with a heavy heart”—he bowed low, leaking more sweat onto the floor, then straightened again—“that I concede to the victors. See you in the lake.”
And with that, it was just Manuel and me.
We did it. Our team won. Still, he didn’t move and neither did I. I wanted to—wanted to scoot an inch to the left, creating just a smidgeon of breathing room between us, but I was smushed up against the wall, Manuel’s body blocking the rest of the bench. Why didn’t he move? There was a whole sauna we could fill. Why did he have to stay so damn close?
And then he looked at me.
And like an age-old reflex that would never leave my body, I looked back.
Which was a mistake, because his head—while a foot taller than mine when we were standing up—was tilted down such that his lips were a bare breath away.
Fuck.
I needed to turn, to look away. But I was trapped in his gaze, his eyes like almonds swirled with caramel, his lips dark and lush beneath them. Breath climbed high and shallow in my chest. In my stomach it felt as if a tower of rocks were teetering back and forth, just seconds from crashing and shattering every inch of my insides. It must have been the heat. The heat was making me lightheaded, making me feel as if I wasn’t actually the one inhabiting my own body.
“So,” Manuel said.
I swallowed. “So.”
“Technically, it doesn’t matter which of us stays in here the longest.”
“I know.”
“We’re on the same team. Either way, we win.”
“I know.”
What is happening to me? Why can’t I move?
“Then why don’t you leave?”
My fingers dug into the bench. I whispered, “Why don’t you?”
Manuel leaned down. His breath whisked hot and sweet along the bridge of my nose. “I think you know why.”
His lips were so close I could lick them if I wanted to.
And, God, did I want to.
No. Panic spiked through me. No. Shut up, Eliot. You can’t think things like that.
“I think you know exactly why I’m still here,” he murmured. “And I think you’re here for the same reason.”
“I—” I swallowed again. “I don’t—”
Manuel leaned away. “Because you’re a competitive psycho, and you want to see which one of us can last the longest.”
Oh.
Right. That. Of course.
“Right,” I said aloud. “For sure. I’m here to kick your ass.”
Manuel grinned. “I know. You like to pretend not to care about competition, but you’re secretly a killer.”
I scoffed. “I don’t pretend anything. I’m open about my murderous side.”
“You should be.” He lifted a hand and brushed the back of his fingers down my cheek. “Your darkness is my favorite part of you.”
Everything in my body went still at once. Manuel didn’t withdraw his hand. He left it there, his eyes burning deep into mine. He said nothing more, and neither did I. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. The heat, the vertigo, the lack of food, his words, his fingers on the side of my face…it was too much. A windstorm of sensation, of emptiness, of desire.
I want him.
The words erupted into my consciousness like storm shutters flying open.
I still want him.
I pushed myself off the bench so abruptly my sweat-slick feet slipped on the floor. I nearly tipped backward.
“Eliot?” Manuel said, alarmed. “Eliot, are you—”
But before he could reach okay , I was out the door and sprinting for the lake.