Page 30 of What Boys Learn

I hurried to the pool deck in my old bathing suit with a beach towel wrapped around my waist, spotting Benjamin just as he finished a lap. His hand went up, waving.

“Mom,” he shouted across all six roped-off lanes. “Over here!”

In the shallow end, two young women who were probably nannies played with two toddlers. In a lane next to Benjamin’s, an ancient, liver-spotted bald man performed the slowest and steadiest crawl stroke I’d ever seen.

“This is awesome,” Benj said when I reached the far side of the pool. Pointing to the big swimmer’s clock hanging over five lounge chairs, only one of them occupied, he said, “Here, time me.”

So that’s why he was glad to see me. No contacts. No way to see the clock.

“How many laps are you doing?”

“Three hundred meters.”

“That means nothing to me.”

“There and back, six times.”

I waited for the second hand of the big swim clock to sweep up to the “60” position, a new minute about to start. “Ready, set, go!”

Swimming had built up his back, bulked out his shoulders, and tapered his waist. He gobbled protein bars between classes, then skipped lunch period in the cafeteria, going instead to the school’s weight room—an alternative Summit allowed. I knew why he and other kids like him did it: to avoid the terror of the cafeteria—the stares, the cliques, that moment of wondering where you should sit or if you should just turn around, dump your tray, and flee. I was a kid, too, of course. The difference was I wanted friends, enough for me to overcome my shyness. When I told Benjamin that story, he corrected me. He wasn’t shy, he said. He just didn’t like most people.

In any case, the weight training had paid off. I couldn’t believe that more girls hadn’t noticed his good looks or the way he was shooting up. Already, there was too much ankle showing below the cuffs of his latest thrift-store jeans. He wouldn’t be the shortest boy in his class forever.

Benjamin was coming in for the first of six completed laps when I noticed a man occupying a lounge chair in the shade. He caught me looking and shifted his gaze downward, to a yellow pad not unlike the ones I’d just packed up from my office. Lawyer, I thought, or architect. The latter guess only because he had anArchitectural Digestat the top of a pile of reading materials next to his chair.

He was older than me by a decade. Slim, tan, and fit. Eyes hidden behind nothing-special sunglasses. Good-looking. Intellectual, if all that reading material was an indication. But not someone I knew from Summit, which was the important thing.

After his last lap, Benjamin hit the wall and yanked off his goggles. “Time?”

“Five minutes, forty seconds.”

He slapped the water with his palm, face unreadable.

“Is that a victory slap?”

He ran a wet hand over his face then stared up at me, eyes bloodshot, brow furrowed. So, not a victory lap.

I asked, “Is it good enough for the lifeguard test?”

He dipped under the water again, then emerged, smoothing back his otter-dark hair. “There’s no maximum time for the three hundred meters. You just have to swim it with a confident stroke and even breathing.”

“Well, no problem there!”

But his expression had flattened.

“You probably need a snack by now,” I said.

“No. What Ineedis to learn how to flip turn. Which will make me ten percent faster.”

“But you don’t need to go any faster.”

“All real swimmers do flip turns.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mom.”

Since he’d started visiting the pool this month, he’d had to swim laps alongside the real swimmers—private swim teamswimmers. I got it. I lowered myself into the water and started doing the breaststroke, allowing him time to swim off his frustration, although I still didn’t fully understand it.