The Days of Bluegrass Love Read online

  “You know, she wanted to. She really did.”

  “What about you?”

  “I didn’t. I mean—I like her. But not like that.”

  “And did you tell her that?”

  “I didn’t get the chance. We went outside for a minute and we were talking and then all of a sudden she wanted me to hug her.”

  “Whoa. And then what?”

  “Then I walked away.”

  Tycho’s face grew hot. Not with shame, he was sure of that. But he didn’t get a chance to figure out the real reason, because of the roaring inside his head, like the roar that football players let out when they’ve scored a goal. And just like the players, who have to run back to their positions when the cheering dies down so the game can start again, Tycho came straight back down to Earth. He was sitting next to Oliver and Oliver had a problem and had come to him, his friend, for advice.

  “But yesterday, when we were by the pool, you kissed her, didn’t you?”

  “Yea. Sort of. She kissed me. And I’d had that wine, remember?”

  “Right. And then I had to help you into bed.”

  They both laughed. “I have, like, no alcohol tolerance.”

  “Want an aspirin?”

  “Where did you get those?”

  “My bag. My mom packed them.”

  “Aww. Did Mommy—”

  “Don’t you bring my mother into this! I’d rather have a mom who cares about me than a splitting headache.”

  They laughed, and Oliver climbed back up onto his bunk. Tycho took off his jeans, crawled into his sleeping bag, and turned off the little light. His cheeks had cooled down a little, as if all this talk about aspirin had helped. He whispered “god natt” and Oliver wished him “welterusten”—they’d taught each other that a long, long time ago, somewhere over England. Then he rolled over, turning his back on everything that had happened that day.

  * * *

  BUT NO—HE DIDN’T fall asleep yet. Thoughts sprang back up like the grass on a football pitch an hour after the game. He realized that he hadn’t helped his friend. He’d just listened—he hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t told him about Donna. Or about himself. Or how glad he was that he didn’t have to share Oliver with anyone. Glad that Oliver was available. He realized that it might affect the whole camp if Sherilynn and Oliver couldn’t work together anymore. Maybe he should discuss it with Donna. But then again, maybe not. At the end of the day, he didn’t really care about the camp.

  Then he ended up drifting off after all. Until he was jolted awake, because an idea occurred to him. Days are like migrating birds: they all fly in the same direction, he thought. But some stubbornly follow their own course, and end up determining the route for the rest.

  This day fell into that category.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING THEY went swimming. Everyone piled into a minivan and they were taken to the local pool. Before long the fastest kids were jumping off the low diving board, while the bravest leapt off the high one. Tycho was among them. He loved water, although the way things worked here took some getting used to.

  They had to put on numbered plastic caps and there was a raised chair at the edge of the pool. Perched up there was a lifeguard who kept an eye on people. At the slightest misbehavior he’d yell a penalty: “OUT—for three minutes, OUT—five minutes!”

  * * *

  THEY’D BEEN SWIMMING FOR an hour when, suddenly, without Tycho wanting them to, all sorts of things started happening.

  * * *

  OLIVER WALKED AWAY. TO get dressed, he said. Why? Had he had enough of swimming? Tycho wanted to ask where he was going, to tell him “wait, stay”—but the girls from Japan were dragging him up the steps to the slide. After he’d whooshed down, he left the pool area. Just to see where Oliver had gone off to. To maybe talk to him for a minute. Or just to use the restroom, at least.

  The exit from the pool branched into the different shower areas, boys and girls. You had to pass through yours to get to the changing rooms.

  And that’s where Tycho saw what he saw.

  * * *

  OLIVER WAS STANDING IN the middle of the men’s shower area, alone. The sun was coming in through the upper windows. A beam of light fell diagonally onto a thousand white tiles. And in the middle of that light, between rows of spraying showerheads—nine to the left, nine to the right—water was streaming down Oliver’s face. His eyes were closed. His hair clung to his head. His chest, his abdomen, his legs were a river. He had taken off his swimming trunks, they were dangling from one finger, and he was standing there—naked, simple, proud, without shame, entirely content—enjoying the hot water.

  As if something or someone had suddenly cupped Tycho’s head between two warm hands—that’s what it felt like. As if a can of silver paint was pouring all over his body.

  Shit, Tycho thought. Shit.

  * * *

  THERE WAS NOTHING HE could say. Nothing he could do. Except back away, one foot, one heel at a time, until after about ten feet he turned around, took a running start, and made the biggest splash the little pool had seen in a long time.

  Immediately boys were jumping up onto his shoulders. He grabbed them by the waist and flung them this way and that. They shrieked. Everyone was swept up in it, excited and laughing. Wild. He threw children around and roared. He got himself barred from the pool for being too rowdy, and so he ran through the now empty shower room to the one place where he could be alone for a moment—a toilet stall.

  There he stood, panting, his hands gripping the top of the stall door. Time passed. A minute? Two, three, four? His breath grew even again. But then suddenly his body was in a hot rush to pull off his swimming trunks—quick, quick, lift up your feet and throw them into a corner—and there he stood, his fingers curled around, and released all of his pent-up excitement.

  * * *

  AFTERWARDS HE HEADED TO one of the changing cubicles, trembling. That’s where he was sitting now, staring down at the floor, a large, soft towel slung around his shoulders. He smelled the fabric softener his mother had used—the comfort of home reaching all the way to Knoxville.

  A storm was surging inside his head. Old thoughts, dreams, fantasies, things he’d read, things he’d felt, all swirling in a vortex. He thought of his father. His mother. His father again. His friends. One friend in the seventh grade. A teacher. Two or three celebrities. A TV host. The singer in a boy band. An uncle. Nina. Donna. But underneath, between, on top of everything else, he thought of Oliver. How he’d stood there, like a waterfall, a rock. He remembered how they’d met, like he was seeing it in the rearview mirror. He’d probably felt it even then. And from deep inside, a broad smile spread across his face.

  Men, he thought. Hunters. Ha.

  FOR A LONG TIME, there’d been something he’d chosen not to see. Just like you might sit on a beach and notice the people around you, all pointing up at the sky. You know they’re seeing an airplane, an airplane with a banner, a banner with a message anyone can read—but no, you don’t look, because you don’t feel like it.

  There’d always been something, and he hadn’t looked. But now Tycho was looking. Now he saw everything. The whole wide sky.

  * * *

  HE KNEW HE HAD to call it being in love. Crazy in love. Head-over-heels in love. But that all sounded too meager, too accidental. He racked his brain for something else to call it. Transformation? Foolishness? He felt transformed, and he felt like a fool.

  No matter what he called it, it had flooded him. It had made him light. And heavy. He felt higher, deeper, more real.

  * * *

  DONNA CAME AND SAT down next to him. She slapped his thigh and said, “You’re not really in love with me, are you?”

  Tycho looked up at her.

  She laughed. “But you are in love with someone else?”

  Tycho looked away. Being in love, he realized, messes with your navigation. You have a hard time steering the ship, butterflies keep clouding your field of vision
, but despite all that, Tycho had decided one thing: he didn’t want Oliver to know. He was keeping this to himself.

  But then she asked again. And again. And the next day—they were standing in the kitchen stirring a pot, no one else around—and so he told Donna after all. As he talked, he heard himself say the things that he’d spent an evening and a night, a morning and an afternoon thinking. And it felt true and new.

  He wasn’t worried about what she thought. He didn’t even look at her as he was talking—well, he looked, but he didn’t see her, he only saw himself. It wasn’t until later, when he’d tripped over his story and told it another three or four times, that he noticed she was beaming. As if his good mood had rubbed off on her.

  But Oliver wasn’t allowed to know.

  “You’re crazy,” Donna said, “why don’t you just tell him?”

  “No!” Tycho said. He imagined how startled Oliver would be, and how he’d say, “Tych, I like you, but not like that.” That’s what he’d told Nina, and he’d crushed her with those words. Nothing could be worse than that.

  “I have a brother,” Donna said, “who’s just like you.”

  “Come on,” Tycho said, “let’s go, we have to go play Human Origami.”

  * * *

  TYCHO PLAYED AT BEING junior assistant in a camp that suspected nothing. Where everything rolled along like it was supposed to. Sometimes, he avoided Oliver. Not too often, but when he was with him Tycho felt like a house split into two floors. His first floor was safe and familiar. From down there he talked and laughed and went through the motions of their established friendship. As if he hadn’t noticed that another floor had been built on top, didn’t know what was going on just a little further upstairs. He firmly locked the elevator to that top floor when he and Oliver walked into their supply closet at night, though he was aware that someone inside him was looking down from up there, someone who’d started looking at Oliver’s back, at his chest, his biceps, the edges of his boxer shorts, and he could hear that person’s heart pounding. Loudly, so loudly that downstairs you no longer knew what time it was, or what was being said, and you missed the doorbell ringing.

  But eventually it would get too late to keep talking, and he’d be staring up at the safe mattress sky above him.

  * * *

  THERE WERE NATIONAL EVENINGS. One delegation after another would spend an evening pretending the camp had relocated to their own country. To Ireland. Denmark. Then Mexico. There were enchiladas and an embroidered napkin for everyone, followed by a dance. The Mexican boys wore sombreros and the girls wore dresses with lace and ruffled sleeves and big swishy skirts.

  It took his mind off things. Tycho watched and Tycho laughed, Tycho danced and played games. He always knew where and how many feet away from him Oliver was, but he wanted people to think of him as the junior assistant who was enjoying every Little World minute. Which he was—just not in the way they thought.

  * * *

  CAROL DRAGGED OVER A cushion. “Hey, how’s it going?”

  Tycho drew back, smiled, and said “Good.”

  “Are you having a nice time in our Little World?”

  “Yeah, of course!”

  “I’m glad,” Carol said, folding up her legs to form a cushion on top of a cushion. “My son is the same age as you. He’s at a Little World camp in Canada right now. I talked to him on the phone. They were having issues. He’s not getting along with the other assistants. I told him that things are going really well with you guys. Right?”

  She looked over at him. He nodded.

  “Between Oliver and Sherilynn too?”

  “I don’t know,” Tycho said, a little too quickly and a little too loudly. He hurriedly asked, “Do you miss him? Your son, I mean.”

  “Not yet. But when it hits me, I’ll just project my motherly feelings onto you. I’ll just think of you guys as my temporary children, if you don’t mind?” She smiled.

  “Not at all,” Tycho said.

  “Thanks,” Carol said. As she got up, her face appeared in his sight line. She pinched his cheek between her thumb and forefinger and said, “You big boy, you!”

  She laughed.

  * * *

  GARY ASKED IF TYCHO could sing “Brother Jacob” in Dutch. He was collecting all the different versions of that song. He grabbed his guitar and sang it in Swedish and Norwegian and Finnish and German and French. How did the Dutch one go?

  Tycho felt dorky singing this old-fashioned song, but he still did it. He didn’t want anyone to notice anything. He glanced over at Oliver, who was sitting on a bench, his arm draped behind Sherilynn. Around her shoulders? On the back of the seat? Tycho shifted over a bit so he could see better—on the back of the seat, thankfully. But what was the deal?

  “Bim, bam, bom,” Gary sang. “Bim, bam, bom.”

  * * *

  FOUR WEEKS, THAT’S KIND of a long time,” Oliver said. “I’m already getting sick of these games.”

  Talking about the camp and about the others—thank God there was that, once they were back in their room at night. “Do you want to go home?” Tycho asked.

  “No, not really. But I kind of wish we could be replaced halfway through. We could go to Amsterdam. Or somewhere else.”

  “We?” Tycho said. He poked his head out from the lower bunk. The sudden groundswell inside of him almost caused him to choke. Oliver was lying above him, talking to the ceiling, his arms folded behind his head.

  “Yeah.” He rolled over onto his side and looked down at Tycho. “Anyway, what do you see in Donna?”

  “I dunno,” Tycho said. He could feel his cheeks burning. “Just someone to talk to sometimes.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yeah, of course!” Tycho fixed his bright eyes on Oliver, his gaze like the exclamation marks after his words.

  “Okay, okay.” Oliver laughed. “I talked to Sherilynn, by the way. That day we took the kids to the pool. She wasn’t swimming because she was on her period, and suddenly I thought: I’m gonna go over and talk to her. And so I told her what the deal was. That was good, right?” He turned over onto his back again.

  “Very good,” Tycho said.

  But then he stopped talking, because he was afraid his pounding heart would come leaping out of his mouth.

  * * *

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT and Tycho said, “It’s getting harder.” Donna was asking him how he managed to fake it every day. “It’s getting harder.” He wanted to say the days were like a funnel. In the mornings and the afternoon things were easy, when he and Oliver were immersed in the bustle of the camp, playing games, organizing group activities. The kids diluted his focus on Oliver, though he always knew where Oliver was and what he was doing, as if a sonar system had been installed in his brain. But at night, once the kids had been put to bed, and the chatter had died down, it became more difficult. That was when he got Oliver, pure and concentrated.

  At night the junior assistants had kitchen duty. They had to set the tables for breakfast and put out place cards to change up the seating, because everyone had to mingle at mealtimes—the point of Little World was contact, contact, contact. Once they were done, they’d pull up stools around the fridge and grab a soda—they didn’t have to pay for it here. Sometimes Carol would stop by, or Josine, or Brahim. They’d play music, and chat, and the funnel would get narrower and narrower.

  And then, later still, in the small hours, the neck of the funnel ended in their supply closet, where Tycho had to pretend that in his eyes, too, they were just buddies. Best friends, closer every day, but not much more, nothing else. That was the hardest part, he’d wanted to tell Donna, but it turned out she had asked her question because there was something she wanted to get off her chest. “Tycho, I told Sherilynn. I’m sorry, but I had no choice.”

  “What? Why?” Tycho said.

  “Don’t you get it? I had to tell her that sooner or later, you and Oliver are going to end up together. Otherwise she’d keep being difficult. She’s after him too
, Tycho, surely you know that?”

  “… that Oliver and I are going to end up together?”

  “Of course. It’s only a matter of time. Get real, you dummy. Just look at him. It’s obvious!”

  It was late. Sherilynn was sitting over with the camp leaders. Oliver had already gone to bed. Tycho had told him he’d be there soon, but now he needed proof. He subjected Donna to a cross-examination that ended only when she could no longer stifle her yawns.

  Tycho went to bed walking on air. He looked at Oliver breathing and breathing and breathing and began to think that—No, he thought, it’s impossible, that kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Not in the big world, and not in Little World.

  * * *

  SO THIS IS ME, Tycho thought the next morning, and one of the side effects of being in love is that once again I’m standing looking at myself in the mirror. It was still early and he was the first one in the communal bathroom. He thought: This is how Oliver sees me every morning. This is what he says good morning to. Good morning, eyes. Mouth and cheeks. Hair all sticking up. He thought about everything that was happening. He’d wanted to set his life in motion. But this wasn’t hunting—this was being pulled along by something.

  “Like what you see?”

  Director John came in and started noisily washing his sleepy face. He spat into the sink. Water splashed in all directions. This was probably how bears would do it too if they were standing in front of a mirror. Tycho grimaced in reply, which was enough for Director John, who remained the boss, here even in the bathroom, and perhaps had only intended his question as a “here I am.” Tycho grabbed his toothpaste and started brushing.