Jimmy rode like the heat was chasing him.
The levee road unspooled in front of him in a pale ribbon, shimmering at the far edges where the heat haze turned asphalt liquid, and the wind at speed should have been relief but wasn't — just hot air moving, friction dressed up as breeze. His tires buzzed over the gravel shoulder. His thighs burned. His jaw stayed locked at the angle it got when he was containing something too large for his chest.
Behind him, the river kept doing what it always did. Running. Indifferent. Patient. Going wherever it was going without consulting anyone about the schedule.
In front of him, Stockton kept being Stockton. Strip malls. Sprinklers on timers. A man washing his car in a driveway with the particular focus of a person performing a task that requires no thinking, which is exactly what some afternoons demand.
Jimmy didn't look at any of it. He was inside his own head, running the replay, and the replay was not going well.
He sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the calendar on the wall. The calendar was the kind with a different inspirational photograph each month — August was a mountain, snow-capped, the kind of image intended to motivate you toward your goals and that instead just made Jimmy think about elevation and cold and how far away things looked when you were at the bottom looking up.
He stared at the grid of numbered squares. He counted the ones that were crossed off. He counted the ones that weren't. The ones that weren't were running out.
He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a roll of duct tape. It had been their tool all summer. The universal fix-it of the kingdom. If The Bean's speaker housing was coming loose — duct tape. If Dougie's bandage was falling off — duct tape. If a situation existed that required something to be held together that wasn't quite holding on its own — duct tape, and confidence, and the collective agreement that this was sufficient.
He peeled a strip from the roll. The sound of it ripping clean was loud in the quiet room. Decisive. He stuck it to the underside of his bedframe. Peeled it off. Stuck it again. Pointless. Repetitive. The motion of someone who needs something to do with his hands while the thing he can't do anything about continues to be true.
Senior year sat on the calendar like a sentence. Three weeks away. And after that — new rooms, new people, the specific dissolution that happened when a group held together by proximity and shared circumstance was scattered by the simple mechanism of time moving forward.
He pressed his forehead against the window glass. The glass was warm from the afternoon sun. Outside, the street was ordinary in the way Stockton was always ordinary — quietly, completely, without apology.
He was afraid.
He was afraid of the specific future in which this — the van, the river, the boys, the unrepeatable configuration of four people who fit together in a way he had never found anywhere else — was past tense. In which "we used to" was the only verb tense available for describing the best thing he had ever been part of.
He peeled another strip of tape. Let it hang from his finger.
Kings didn't go quietly. Jimmy had never gone quietly in his life. Even when going quietly was the only thing left. Even then.
There was a photograph on his dresser. It was the only one in the room — Jimmy was not a person who decorated, who put things on walls or arranged objects to suggest something about himself. His room was clean the way rooms are clean when the person in them is still deciding who they are and doesn't want to commit too early. Bare walls. One bookshelf with more trophies than books. A desk whose surface was purely functional.
But the photograph.
It was from the previous summer — summer before the last great one, summer before Teppie and the tape and the whole complicated machinery of becoming. Four boys at the river, all of them younger-looking than they would have believed possible. Dougie was mid-air off the bank, arms flung wide, a shape of pure velocity. Rick was watching from the rocks with his arms crossed and the beginning of a real smile, which on Rick was rarer than a comet and more valuable. Kevin had his back half-turned, the orange headphones around his neck, looking toward something outside the frame.
And Jimmy.
Jimmy was grinning in the photograph with his whole face — the wide, unguarded grin of someone who doesn't know yet that he's in the best part. The grin he was less able to summon now, at the end of August, when the calendar had become something he couldn't stop reading.
He stood in front of the dresser and looked at the photograph for a long time. That version of himself didn't know. Didn't know about Teppie or the argument at the river or the specific loneliness of watching your best friend find a door that doesn't open for you. Didn't know that the Last Great Summer would be the one that asked the most of him rather than the one that gave him everything, the way he'd declared it would. Didn't know that the service brochure in his desk drawer had been sitting there since May, unread, because reading it would make it real and not reading it meant he could still pretend it was a plan he hadn't made yet.
He had made it in March. Before any of this summer existed. Before the van warmed up for the first time, before the river, before baloney showed up at the curb with his new tape and his orange headphones and his readiness. He'd made it in March and he hadn't told anyone because telling anyone would have made it the end of something, and he needed the summer first. He needed the summer like he needed air.
He touched the corner of the photograph. The boys in it were already past tense and didn't know it. The river in the background was moving even then, patient and indifferent, already carrying everything downstream.
He put the duct tape back in the drawer. He looked at the brochure. He did not read it. Not yet. Tomorrow.
Outside his window, Stockton was doing what Stockton always did in August: burning quietly under a white sky, going about its business without commentary, leaving everyone inside their own private version of the same problem.
Jimmy sat on the edge of his bed and didn't move for a long time.
He was seventeen years old and he loved his friends with everything he had and he was terrified of the future and he was going toward it anyway because going toward things was the only direction he knew. That was Jimmy. That was always Jimmy.
He told me about the brochure years later. On the same phone call, the one about the duct tape. He said he'd been carrying it for six months before he told anyone. I asked why he didn't tell us. He was quiet for a while. Then: "Because you guys would have made it a thing." I told him it was a thing. He said: "Yeah, but I needed it to just be mine for a while. Before it belongs to everybody." I understood that. I understood it the way you understand things when you've done the same thing yourself in different clothes.
I didn't know what was happening in Jimmy's room that afternoon. I found out years later — he told me on a phone call, late, from wherever the service had sent him. He said: "I sat in my room and stuck duct tape to things for like an hour. How messed up is that?" I told him it wasn't messed up at all. It made complete sense. When you can't hold the real thing together, you hold whatever's in your hands.