Take away the trilling of children, splashing their chubby arms in the shallow end.
Take away the sunblock and coconut scented tanning oils sweetening the breeze.
Take away the ultraviolet rays beating down on your shoulders like a silent bass chord.
Take away the antiseptic scent of chlorine that cleared out your sinuses when you fell off the diving board.
Take away the flip flops, the sunglasses, the taught draw string around your swimming trunks as they fall to your feet.
Take away the fluorescent lighting and the hollow but familiar gray echoes of the men’s locker room.
Take away the hesitation where confidence should be because he was definitely looking at you too.
Take away the fact that there’s someone out there waiting for him, but you don’t need to know that because he knows you like what you see, and you’ve waited for this moment for too long anyway.
Take away the guilt in the moment because no one’s gotten hurt yet and there’s only a few steps left between you and him.
Take away everything wet and your heart would still be pounding against your chest.
Take away any other option until there’s nothing left but to feel his skin and taste his sweat.
Take away the nerves and the thing you do where you choke up with anxiety like being at the top of a roller coaster.
Take away the pain for now and the way your knees will be bruised because people get bruises all the time for no reason, right?
Take away the sound of your voice or the need to say your name because it’s not polite to talk with your mouth full.
Take away walking back out the chaise lounge where you left your things and you’ll have your family waiting there wondering what could be taking you so long.
Take away the lies you tell and you’re left in the gloaming gratification of a stranger’s DNA freshly fucked inside you.
Take away the age difference and it might just be love, but he doesn’t know that yet.
Take away the tension, the yearning, the need, and what you’ve got is the prismatic demeanor of someone who gets what he wants, and it’s a feeling that makes even the cruelest summer feel endless, 24-hour sunlight with every breath.
Take away what’s next, the barbecue and hotel bar and wandering back up to the room alone and you’ve got yourself naked in front of a mirror with the air conditioning, masturbating onto the floor with the curtains open because it reminds you of what it’s like to take a risk.
Take away this unfamiliar territory in the suburbs in this pretty town with all its trees and the evergreen park with the public swimming pool and you’ve got yourself a memory, or better yet a secret, and it makes life feel more interesting.
Take away his name, the one he told you after, and you’ve got a man who lives in a Victorian house across town, the kind that speaks for itself, with big mortar walls and antique stained-glass windows, and in the kitchen he’s stirring risotto.
Take away his family, the wife and kids, and you’ve got a young husband and father with what he thinks is too much time on his hands, and right now he’s thinking he knows who you are even if you don’t, not really because you’re still at that age.
Take away the flight home, back to the middle of nowhere, where the suburbs are boring because it’s what you’re used to and there’s a party to go to later because all your friends feel the same way.
Take away the months it takes for you to start feeling that twinge of uncertainty when something is wrong inside your body, but you can’t quite pinpoint why it’s unfamiliar somehow, and you’ve got the others you met with at the local swimming pool who like the same things you do and that’s called solidarity so you keep spreading yourself around.
Take away their secrets too, the times you reached climax together in different positions in a car or laying in the grass or sweating in the woods, and then you’ve got a ritual, the kind that changes demeanor into attitude and you’re walking tall on your way to becoming the kind of lover a man will need someday.
Take away the bedroom walls and you’ve got a future in the world, a living, breathing, American teenage dream, and it’s all feeling so good that it’s just too good to be true, and you’ve never experienced a bad day in your life, not really.
Take away the ability to sleep through the night anymore and you’ve got repetitive cold sweats forcing you to dive into the blistering idea that something dangerous is coming to the surface.
Take away your blood and you’d have a perfectly healthy high school junior, the kind who can skateboard down a cul-de-sac without fainting, the kind whose legs can move because they don’t feel heavy like concrete.
Take away the six months it takes for similar symptoms to develop in those other boys who think they’ve got the flu, and by then you’re in a starchy gown surrounded with tubes and saline solutions and antibiotics because the doctors can’t figure out what it is that’s making you look so pale, because it can’t be that, you’re far too young for that.
Take away your mom holding your hand and sneaking in fast food because the hospital cafeteria is atrocious, and now you’ve got tears streaming down your face in violent, explosive rivulets because it occurs to you too late that you might be dying and don’t need a specialist to tell you why.
Take away the diagnosis and you’ve got devastation like the very ground beneath your feet splitting open, glowing red with the flames of hell as you’re breaking the news to all those people and their families and the way they scream and drop to their knees like you did that day in Lexington, and now you’re left with your parents and siblings who refuse to look at you in a way that causes your stomach to turn but maybe that’s just the medications kicking in and eventually you’re supposed to get used to it.
Take away the other kind of medications, “enough to relax China,” you say, and you’ve still got shaky hands of debilitating depression, because the doctors and your mom and everyone else is right: You’re too young for this, but you also recognize that in spite of the pills and pills and pills you have an agenda that, while maybe not sane, is still very real, and the possibility of it is kicking in like a drug.
Take away telling the truth about how this might have happened (“And, Jesus Christ, for how long has this been going on under our roof!” they scream, and they’re all so mad at you), and you’ve still got his name, in spite of all the explaining you had to do and the names you actually couldn’t remember, which was embarrassing, and the social-networking diagrams where thumbtacks secured red string leading from one picture of a smiling boy’s face to another as authorities try to stop the pollution from spreading into an epidemic three districts wide.
Take away another year, and you’ve got the same kind of beautiful day in July as when you met him for the first time, but the difference is you’re a little older now and there’s a stigma surrounding your juvenile record even though you were found not guilty of any crime because it wasn’t really your fault, not really.
Take away the auditorium where you can feel eyes staring daggers at you from every direction and you'd have that woman from the non-profit on stage preaching the dangers of contracting things you already have and no one else wants to think about, which is why people are still afraid to use the same gym equipment after you. But that doesn’t stop you and you’re not as skinny as you were back then, which is part of the big picture.
Take away the months of developing yourself and suddenly there’s a plan in place for relieving all this post-traumatic stress, and it’s the kind of design in which a boy has to get his hands dirty as if that ever stopped him before.
Take away the credit cards and you’ve got cash saved up from the job you still have in a box under your bed, rolls of bills held together tightly with rubber bands, and if you were to be asked you would say it was for college. But mostly it’s for just in case things go wrong, or just to get a little high from time to time.
Take away the technology and you’ve got a notebook where a pen has met paper detailing in purple, your favorite color, the itinerary you’ve set aside for this thing you’ve heard of called revenge, and any trace of research on the computer can and will be used against you as evidence in a court of law so remember to use your brain.
Take away all those times you said you couldn’t remember his name even though maybe a hundred people must have asked, just so you could have the gratification of finding his home address all on your own. And from the outside it’s just so big and old and gorgeous that it may as well be haunted too because that’s what a house like this was built for.
Take away the luck, depending on who you are, and you’d still be looking right into a swimming pool, the kind that’s designed for birthday parties and tanning on an oversized beach towel with sangria. But more importantly it’s the kind of swimming pool he has in his very own back yard, and everything is just falling so perfectly into place.
Take away the lack of conversation these days and you’d still have the annual family vacation, and during the first couple days no one bothers to ask or care much where you’re going just as long as they can enjoy their wine without anyone feeling ashamed or getting red in the face.
Take away watching the house from across the street, where no one bothers to ask who you are because there’s shade from so many trees and it’s a beautiful day and you’re white as far as the other white neighbors can tell. So for the time being you’re just a kid riding his skateboard and toking his pen, which is fine because they're hip and have all been there before, and now they're flickering with nostalgia.
Take away their work schedules and dinner plans and the girls’ bedtime stories and you’ll have found the weak spot in their home where the unlocked window you fell through allowed you a glimpse into a stranger’s life—where the bedrooms are and which drawer the knives are tucked away (they’re actually on a magnetic board on the wall), and also a glass of water because you’re thirsty.
Take away the good doctor closing French doors on the patio and shutting off lights and locking that same window, and it’d be too late because you’re already inside the house, and just for the hell of it even swam naked in their pool while they were out because it won’t be theirs for much longer, if the house sells that is, and now you smell like chlorine.
Take away the bag hanging from your shoulders and you still may not get away with any of this, but the risk is worth taking so you decide to stay the night and feel it out with rubber gloves on the brain.
Take away the wife who’s gone for the day, signing checks like the bitch she wants to be at the restaurant they own and you’ve got the twins, but they’re young enough that it shouldn’t be a problem.
Take away weekdays and you’ve the doctor’s day off, so he’ll be home alone except for when the nanny comes to take the girls wherever the fuck and that’s probably for the best.
Take away needing this to be quick and you’ve got some bizarre new sense of exhilaration and it’s kind of making you horny, but since when has that done you any good except for today because it has to.
Take away the doctor at the kitchen sink washing dishes and you’ve got a man who can’t find the carving knife, but you don’t start with that because you need this to last, so you hit him over the head first, just hard enough with a baseball bat to knock him out and get the blood flowing, quick and easy.
Take away what looks like a seizure and the time it takes to bind him with duct tape and you’ve got the man outside on the chaise lounge and he’s looking confused, then terrified as you walk around him with the knife in your hand, wearing your ski-mask and little black trunks you bought just for him. And if there were cameras the whole scene would look like some dopey fetish porno.
Take away the look in his eyes when you remove the mask to show your face and you’ve got someone who doesn’t know who you are, which is unbelievable, but you still says, “Remember me?”
Take away how much he wants to scream—so he does, in spite of the gag in his mouth—and you decide to start enjoying yourself, so you think to turn up the music on the expensive backyard sound system and instead opt for more of that sangria in the fridge because you don’t want to draw attention.
Take away the condom and you’d be doing to him what he did to you except one of you isn’t leaving this swimming pool alive, so after you finish, you push him in.
Take away what he’d said just before, the part where he asked “Who are you?” and you’d still have the same answer either way, which felt like a silver needle prodding at your heart when you replied, “I don’t know anymore.”
Take away watching with folded arms as he thrashes under water, rallying against the bindings on his arms, wrists and feet, and you’ve got yourself a few moments of silence. In the quietness you think about how after this you’ll never be able to take it back, but you reach in anyway to pull him above the surface by his hair.
Take away the point of no return when you slid the chef’s knife into his belly and how it reminded you of gliding through butter, and you’d still be listening to the speech, the one you tossed around in your head, rehearsing it over and over every day, the words dizzying in their effect like a kaleidoscope, until now when you finally get to say how the body is like a petri dish and as a doctor he should know that viruses, need a warm, wet place to breed and multiply and infest, blossoming with filth into not only cells and particles, but the human spirit as well.
Take away the part where you say “You stole my life, so I’m taking yours,” and you’d likely never get this off your mind, so you feel, of all things, happiness.
Take away vehement hatred and you’ve got logic—a swimming pool is what brought them together in the first place, so neither of you should be surprised when you wade through the water with his missing knife gleaming against the blue sky to remove his head, which is harder than one would think (movies make it look so easy, but then again everything looks soft until you get your hands on it), but there’s no going back and blood is getting everywhere, but you keep hacking away at muscles and tendons and that fucking spinal cord.
Take away his body when it separates, sinking like a rock as the final cut takes, and now your holding his face in your hands. And it’s got the expression of a man who’s suddenly very sorry for being a monster, but you kiss him on the lips all the same.
Take away the nanny coming home with the girls, kicking off her shoes as she heads upstairs to put them down for a nap and you’d have an empty house with a pool outside, dyed red from the top down, where on the concrete sidewalk is a severed head someone’s dropped carelessly to the ground.
Take away the girl meandering to the fridge, enjoying the central air as she pulls out a cruet of fresh orange juice until she looks out the bay window, and you’re left with shattered glass and juice all over the place, but also her crippling screams as she slips across the floor to run outside. And when you take all that away too, you have a boy’s family applying sunblock nearby asking what could be taking you so long.
Take away greeting your parents and relatives at the local swimming pool who ask why you’re already wet and where you’ve been, and you’re smiling because you’ve got a new secret. But the lie you tell is that you’ve been here the whole time (at least your cell phone has, from its place the locker you paid for) and didn’t they get your text message?
Take away feeling sorry for yourself as that cute boy with the dark hair you remember from last summer comes over to talk to you, and when you eventually tell him, “Hey, full disclosure….”, he just smiles and says that it’s no worries and, “not a death sentence anymore, so don’t be ashamed,” and you think to yourself later in the evening after he kisses you that maybe he’s right.
Take away the hours between now and then, and you’ll have the few minutes allotted for yourself when it was all done, diving to the floor of the deep end with your eyes open, watching the infection amalgamize with the water into a blissful red climax, and as you come up for air, you think, aw, what the hell.
Take in a deep breath before going under, keep swimming.