There’s a long pause before Tom says anything. Then all he says is, “Okay.”
“Great,” I say. “How about I pick you up at eleven thirty? We can leave my truck at the falls and Hank can pick us up at the bridge and drive us back.”
“Hank?”
“My grandmother,” I explain.
“Okay,” Tom says again. Then he tells me his address, and I hang up.
An hour later, I pull my truck up to a cabin not too far from the Eezy-Freezy. It looks like most of the cabins that encircle the lake, except that someone has put a concrete garden gnome beside the front porch. It holds a sign that says The McCrackens.
Before I can get out of the truck, the front door opens and Tom comes out. I see the same old woman from the other day standing inside, peering out at me. She doesn’t look happy.
Tom opens the passenger side door and gets in.
“Hey, Tom Swift,” I say.
“Hey,” he says. “Do you mind if we just go?”
I pull away from the cabin. As we drive away from the lake, I can feel the worry coming off Tom like heat from a sunbaked road. He still isn’t looking at me. Instead, he’s staring out the window.
I try to decide if we’re going to have to talk about this. On the one hand, it’s none of my business. On the other, I don’t want to spend the afternoon floating down the creek with all kinds of weird tension going on. And I would like to be his friend. I decide that we do have to talk about it.
“When I told the Grands that I’m gay, Clodine wanted to know if it meant I was going to be a hairdresser,” I say. “She was all excited because she thought she could stop paying Pearleen Hepworth to do her permanents.”
“I’m not gay,” Tom mutters.
“Oh,” I say, because I’m not really sure what’s happening here.
“I’m trans,” he tells me.
“Oh,” I say again, but in a totally different way, because now I understand. “Okay, then.”
He turns and looks at me. “Are you being a dick right now?” he asks.
“What?” I say. “No. I mean it. It’s okay.”
“Do you even know what being trans means?” he says.
I nod. “It means your inside doesn’t match your outside,” I say. “Well, that’s how Farrah describes it. I know it’s more than that, but that’s a pretty good definition, right?”
“Who’s Farrah?” Tom asks me.
“One of the queens,” I explain. “At the Shangri-La.”
“The what?”
I realize that this is going to be a much longer conversation, so I say, “I’ll explain while we’re tubing.”
We arrive at the falls, and I park the truck. It’s a little before noon, and there are a couple of other people there waiting for the dam to be opened. I nod at the ones I know, and can’t help but notice some of the girls looking at Tom and smiling. One of them, Anna-Lynn Burling, comes over to us.
“Hey, Sam,” she says, flipping her long blond hair out of her eyes. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Tom Swift,” I tell her. “He’s a summer person. Tom, this is Anna-Lynn. We’re in the same class at school.”
Anna-Lynn beams at Tom. “A summer boy,” she says. “Nice to meet you, Tom.”
“You too,” Tom says, but he doesn’t sound all that happy about it.
A horn blasts, interrupting the introductions. “Five-minute warning!” Anna-Lynn screams. “Everybody in the water.”
People rush toward the edge of the rocks. The dam is about two hundred feet upstream. It’s a small dam, nothing impressive or anything. It just lets out water from the reservoir. But it’s enough to make the creek rise and make rapids over the smaller rocks. Everybody wants to be in the water when it opens, to get that first rush.
I take the two inner tubes that I’ve brought in the back of the Ford and hand one to Tom. We’re both already dressed in swim trunks and sneakers. I take off my T-shirt and toss it in the truck, but Tom keeps his on. Then we walk to the creek and he watches me sit down in my tube. A moment later, he’s beside me.
The horn blasts again. The one-minute warning. “Ready?” I say, grinning at Tom.
He nods. Anna-Lynn, who is a little downstream from us, calls out, “Race you to the bridge, boys! Last one there buys Cokes for everyone!”
“You’re on!” I shout back. I wink at Tom. “I think she likes you.”
He frowns, but doesn’t say anything. I wonder if I’ve made a mistake, joking with him like this, but before I can apologize, the little gate in the dam opens and water comes streaming out.
It hits us about thirty seconds later, lifting our inner tubes up and sending us into the middle of the creek. The water is funneled between two rows of large rocks, and one by one the tubes and their riders shoot down the rapids. The water is freezing cold, but the thrill of being carried downstream makes it so you don’t notice.
My inner tube twirls around as I bounce off a boulder, and I see Tom behind me. At first he looks a little bit scared, so I wave at him and let out a happy whoop. He can’t help but laugh, and when his tube bumps up against mine, he’s got a big smile on his face.
“I told you it would be fun,” I say.
We ride the rapids for a while, until the creek has risen as much as it’s going to and the water calms down, flattening out into a wide ribbon. Now we’re floating more slowly, passing beneath overhanging tree branches as the creek turns in a series of curves that carry us into the woods. Anna-Lynn and her friends are still ahead of us, and although we sometimes see them on the long, straight stretches, when they disappear around a bend, Tom and I are all by ourselves.
“Sorry about what I said earlier,” I tell him as I lie back on my tube, staring up at the bright blue sky. “You know, about Anna-Lynn. I was just joking. Although I do think she thinks you’re hot.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s just that . . .” His voice trails off.
I sit up and look at him. “You don’t have to explain anything,” I tell him. “Really.”
“I guess she is kind of pretty,” he says after a while.
“She has an identical twin sister,” I tell him. “Lynn-Anna.”
“She does not,” Tom says.
“It’s true,” I tell him. “The only way you can tell them apart is that Anna-Lynn is left-handed and Lynn-Anna is right-handed. So if you ask Anna-Lynn out, be sure to toss a baseball at her and see which hand she catches it with. Otherwise, you might be smooching her sister.”
Tom splashes water at me. I splash back. Something has changed. I can feel it. He seems lighter. Happier. Secrets are heavy, and he’s carrying a lot of them.
“So,” I say when we’re done with our water war. “Want to talk about it?”
Tom sighs. “No,” he says. “And yes. Not right now. It’s been a rough couple of months. I’d like to just have fun. But how about this? You can ask me one question. Anything.”
I know immediately what to ask. “How’d you come up with Tom Swift?” I’m curious about his name, particularly because I’m having trouble coming up with my own for the other me.