The Boy I Was Never Going to Forgive

There are nineteen people on our dock and one of them is Wade Hargrove.

I count them twice while I haul the second cooler down from the truck, because counting is something to do with my head that isn't thinking about why he's here. Nineteen people. Four coolers. Two folding tables that both wobble on the same warped board. One banner Sadie made that says HAPPY 17TH NELL in letters that get smaller toward the end, because she ran out of poster board and refused on principle to start over.

And one Wade Hargrove, in a clean canvas jacket, standing at the rail like he's pricing the water.

"He just showed up," Sadie says. She takes the other cooler handle without being asked. Nine years of that. "Like a haunting."

"Is he talking to my mom?"

"He was. Now he's doing the thing where he looks at the view until people come to him."

We set the cooler down by the bait fridge. Kettle Creek runs past the end of the dock the way it has run past it since my great-grandfather nailed the first boards down, green and fast and loud enough that you have to lean in to hear anybody. Our sign is screwed to the boathouse wall. PRYOR OUTFITTERS. GUIDES, RENTALS, SHUTTLE. The paint's gone chalky on the north side.

Nobody in this town throws you a party for turning sixteen. Sixteen gets you a cake at your own kitchen table and a lecture about the highway.

Seventeen gets you nineteen people, because seventeen is when it happens, and because about a third of the families here can do it and the other two-thirds have lived next door to it for two hundred years and have opinions about how it ought to be done. There's a basket of old fleeces by the boathouse door. There's a rack of Denny Prosser's canvas slip-ons — five dollars, the ugliest footwear in Montana, sold exclusively to people who cannot carry boots. Somebody's mother always brings a casserole.

You're supposed to be at home when it happens, or somewhere private, with a person who loves you and a blanket. That's the whole custom, and my mother has been quietly preparing for it since March.

Nobody ever says the other half of it out loud, which is that everybody is also waiting to find out where you turn.

My mother is laughing at something two tables away. She has a laugh she uses when she's uncomfortable, and it goes up at the end, and I can pick it out of a crowded room from thirty feet.

"Nell." Sadie's watching me watch her. "It's your birthday."

"I know what day it is."

"You're allowed to eat a hot dog and not run a business for four hours."

I'm not going to win this, so I take the hot dog. It's a good hot dog. The sun's coming down over the ridge the way it does in June, slow and orange, and somebody's put a speaker on the end of the dock.

"Okay," Sadie says. "Don't turn around."

"Why would I turn around."

"Because Cole Hargrove is at the cooler and he has been working up to something for nine minutes."

"He has not."

"I have been *timing* it, Nell."

I turn around. Sadie makes a noise like a kettle.

He's got two cans in his hand. He's taller than he was at Christmas, which is annoying of him, and he's wearing the kind of shirt you wear when somebody has told you where you're going.

"Hey," he says. "Happy birthday."

"Thanks."

"Your mom said to take one of these, so." He holds out a root beer. "I'm following instructions."

There's a version of this where I take the can. It's a can. It costs nothing.

"I'm good," I say.

"Sure." He puts it back in the ice, and he does it without any face at all, which somehow costs me more than if he'd made one. "It's a nice dock."

"It's our dock."

"I know." He looks at the rail, and at the boathouse sign with the chalky paint, and I watch him decide not to say whatever he was going to say. "Anyway."

He goes. Sadie waits until he's eight feet away.

"*It's our dock,*" she says.

"What."

"Nell, the boy brought you a root beer."

"His father is standing on it."

"That's not the same person."

"It is tonight," I say, and I believe it completely, and I will think about those four words on and off for the rest of my life.

Then my mother's laugh goes up at the end again, and I look, and she's got the ledger face on. The one where she's agreeing with somebody and doesn't understand what she's agreeing to.

I put the hot dog down.

"Don't," Sadie says.

"I'm getting a drink."

"You are absolutely not getting a drink."

I cross the dock. The boards give under me in the two places they always give, and I make the same note I've made every week since April, which is that we need to pull those boards and we don't have the money to pull those boards.

"—which is why I wanted to say it in person," Wade is saying, "instead of sending anything. It never reads right on paper."

"Well, that's kind," my mother says.

"Mom."

She turns and her face does something complicated and lands on delighted. "There she is. Seventeen."

"Happy birthday," Wade Hargrove says.

He has a way of saying ordinary things that makes them sound like he's decided to give them to you. Up close he's shorter than I expect, every time. His jacket has never been worn for work.

"Thanks," I say. "What never reads right on paper?"

There's a beat. My mother's smile stays exactly where it is.

"Business," she says, "on a Saturday. Honestly."

"It can keep," Wade says, easy as anything, and that's when it starts.

It starts in my hands.

Nobody warns you properly. People tell you about it your whole life, at the school and at the clinic and at the kitchen table, and Gran told me the same eight sentences every year since I was nine, and none of it is any use, because what they describe is a door opening and what actually happens is the floor going away.

My hands go hot. Then my jaw, then all the way down my spine like somebody's drawn a line on me with a match. I put one hand on the rail and the rail is very far away and also right there.

"Oh," my mother says. Her voice changes completely. "Oh, honey—"

I hear the music cut. I hear nineteen people stop talking in a ragged little wave, from the near end of the dock to the far end, and I understand in a flat, detached way that this is happening in front of every single person I know.

The shift doesn't hurt. I want it on the record that it doesn't hurt. It's more like being turned inside out by somebody very competent and very fast, and then I'm lower down, and the boards are enormous under me, and the creek is suddenly not a sound but a whole layered stack of sounds, and the world has about four hundred more smells in it than it had a second ago.

Pine pitch. Diesel. Hot dogs. The river-rock smell of the water. My mother, who smells like my mother, which is a thing I didn't know until right now and which nearly undoes me.

Gray. I'm a gray wolf. I can see my own foreleg on the boards and it is gray and it is smaller than I expected, and my mother is making a sound behind me with both hands over her mouth, and somewhere under everything else I think: *fast, though. I bet I'm fast.*

Everybody says you know your own form the second you're in it, and everybody is right, and it is the least surprising surprise of my life. Of course I'm a wolf. Half this dock is wolves. Gran is a wolf, my mother is a wolf, my great-grandfather who nailed these boards down was a wolf. I have been turning it over since I was nine and quietly hoping for something ridiculous — an otter, a heron, anything that would have made me a story.

I'm a small gray wolf on my own dock and I have never been so glad about anything.

And then the other thing happens.

Gran always described it as a voice. A kind, sensible voice explaining things. Gran is wrong, or Gran's was different, or Gran has had sixty years to make it into a better story, because there is no voice at all. I simply know which way to turn, the way you know which way is down.

I turn.

Twenty feet away, at the corner of the boathouse where the shade starts, Cole Hargrove is standing with a paper cup in his hand, absolutely still.

It points at him. It points at him the way water points downhill, with no more opinion about it than that, and my whole chest goes to a place I have never been and cannot get back from.

He doesn't move. He doesn't look surprised.

I'll take that apart later, over and over, for weeks. He doesn't look surprised.

Somebody says my name. Somebody else says, "Did you see where it—" and stops.

I come back the way you come back, badly, all at once, on my knees on the boards with my mother's jacket already around me because she has been waiting to do that for four years. My ears are ringing. The dock is silent except for the creek, and the creek is very loud.

"Nell," my mother says into my hair. "Nell, honey, that's wonderful, that's—"

Nineteen people are looking at me. Then, because people are people, nineteen people look at Cole Hargrove.

He puts the paper cup down on the rail. He still hasn't moved his feet.

And Wade Hargrove — and this is the thing I will not get over, this is the thing I'll be angry about when I'm forty — Wade Hargrove smiles. Not a big smile. A small, pleased, private one, the kind you make when a number comes in slightly better than you'd modeled.

"Well," he says.

I get my feet under me. My mother says my name again. Sadie's already moving toward me with her arms out, and I love her, and I cannot be touched right now by anyone.

"I need a minute," I say.

"Of course you do," my mother says. "Of course, you sit, we'll—"

"I need a minute."

I walk. My legs work. I go up the dock past the wobbly tables and the banner with the shrinking letters, past Reuben Tate, who has the decency to look at his shoes, past my grandmother, who does not look at her shoes and whose face is doing something I don't have time for.

Past Cole, close enough that I could have said anything.

I don't say anything.

I get to the gravel and the truck and the smell of the road and I keep going, and behind me the whole dock stays quiet for longer than it should.

Long enough that I know they're all still watching.