A Separate Peace

“The worst thing is there weren’t any witnesses. And I’m no official timekeeper. I don’t think it will count.”

“Well of course it won’t count.”

“You can try it again and break it again. Tomorrow. We’ll get the coach in here, and all the official timekeepers and I’ll call up The Devonian to send a reporter and a photographer—”

He climbed out of the pool. “I’m not going to do it again,” he said quietly.

“Of course you are!”

“No, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Now I know. But I don’t want to do it in public.” Some other swimmers drifted in through the door. Fi

“Not say anything about it! When you broke the school record!”

“Sh-h-h-h-h! ” He shot a blazing, agitated glance at me.

I stopped and looked at him up and down. He didn’t look directly back at me. “You’re too good to be true,” I said after a while.

He glanced at me, and then said, “Thanks a lot” in a somewhat expressionless voice.

Was he trying to impress me or something? Not tell anybody? When he had broken a school record without a day of practice? I knew he was serious about it, so I didn’t tell anybody. Perhaps for that reason his accomplishment took root in my mind and grew rapidly in the darkness where I was forced to hide it. The Devon School record books contained a mistake, a lie, and nobody knew it but Fi

To keep silent about this amazing happening deepened the shock for me. It made Fi

“Swimming in pools is screwy anyway,” he said after a long, unusual silence as we walked toward the dormitory. “The only real swimming is in the ocean.” Then in the everyday, mediocre tone he used when he was proposing something really outrageous, he added, “Let’s go to the beach.”

The beach was hours away by bicycle, forbidden, completely out of all bounds. Going there risked expulsion, destroyed the studying I was going to do for an important test the next morning, blasted the reasonable amount of order I wanted to maintain in my life, and it also involved the kind of long, labored bicycle ride I hated. “All right,” I said.

We got our bikes and slipped away from Devon along a back road. Having invited me Fi

We reached the beach late in the afternoon. The tide was high and the surf was heavy. I dived in and rode a couple of waves, but they had reached that stage of power in which you could feel the whole strength of the ocean in them. The second wave, as it tore toward the beach with me, spewed me a little ahead of it, encroaching rapidly; suddenly it was immeasurably bigger than I was, it rushed me from the control of gravity and took control of me itself; the wave threw me down in a primitive plunge without a bottom, then there was a bottom, grinding sand, and I skidded onto the shore. The wave hesitated, balanced there, and then hissed back toward the deep water, its tentacles not quite interested enough in me to drag me with it.

I made my way up on the beach and lay down. Fi

The ocean, throwing up foaming sun-sprays across some nearby rocks, was winter cold. This kind of sunshine and ocean, with the accumulating roar of the surf and the salty, adventurous, flirting wind from the sea, always intoxicated Phineas. He was everywhere, he enjoyed himself hugely, he laughed out loud at passing sea gulls. And he did everything he could think of for me.

We had di

Fi

“Everybody’s staring at you,” he suddenly said to me. “It’s because of that movie-star tan you picked up this afternoon … showing off again.”

Enough broken rules were enough that night. Neither of us suggested going into any of the honky-tonks or beer gardens. We did have one glass of beer each at a fairly respectable-looking bar, convincing, or seeming to convince the bartender that we were old enough by a show of forged draft cards. Then we found a good spot among some sand dunes at the lonely end of the beach, and there we settled down to sleep for the night. The last words of Fi