1.

I remember stepping into the kayak. It was painted light blue with white stripes running down the side and wobbled heavily in the water. I’d never been in a kayak before. The closest I’d been to anything like it was a tube on the slides of Mountain Creek on my ninth birthday. If Nathan hadn’t been standing on the ledge beside me, I probably would’ve fallen into the water.

“Sit just like it’s a chair,” he’d said. With our hands on one another, he led me down into the boat. Moonlight fell across the water like a landing strip. For an eleven year old, even a swimming pool felt large, but when I looked out onto the small lake nestled in the hilly woods by the abandoned Iron Works, surrounded on each side by tall cliffs, the lake felt more like a few ounces of tea in a giant tea cup.

Nathan followed me into the kayak, taking the seat in the back. We only had one oar between us—Nathan said we only needed one—and it was in his hands. He pushed off against the landing.

“We’re going there,” he said, pointing a finger over my shoulder. The finger pointed to the opposite end of the lake, where there was a small waterfall that, from where we were, couldn’t have been more than a few yards wide. On our short hike through the woods this evening, as we carried the kayak at our side, we’d crossed a small, meandering stream at least three times. I figured this must’ve been the source of the waterfall. I’d thought Nathan knowledgeable. He was seventeen, and my mom always praised him for being the role model me and the rest of the boys in our neighborhood needed. I asked him if there were any turtles that swam through there. He said that he didn’t know.

“What’s over there?” I asked. Earlier, when we were renting the kayak from a sports shop on Route 17, Nathan told me that there was something special out here, only accessible by kayak.

“The waterfall.”

I could hardly tell from where we were, but I said, nonetheless, “It looks pretty.”

2.

Nathan and I had met four months prior to our trip to Tannapin Lake. He’d moved to our neighborhood in Caldwell, a small suburb eight miles west of Newark, with his mother, who’d taken a job managing a gym in Totowa. They lived in the only multifamily house on the block—the one I shared with my parents. The rest of the homes were single family ranches, some colonials, all with tall maples in the front yards and rows of ferns in the back.

Nathan, red-headed and with a certain coyness that any preteen boy can appreciate, had few plans that summer. His mom had gotten him a job working the desk at the gym she managed, but that was only a couple mornings a week. The rest of the time, he was in the street with whichever boys he could find. I think my mom would’ve been more suspicious of him if he hadn’t quickly ingratiated himself with her by regularly babysitting last-second, as he had the night we went to Tannapin Lake.

On the evenings that Nathan babysat me, he would often lead me out to a creek a half a mile behind our house, in the flats between Caldwell and neighboring Fairfield. It must’ve been our third trip down to the creek that Nathan plucked the fish out of the water. This was the day of the blackout. Late in the afternoon, when my parents had already left for an evening on the Hudson, a storm passed through town and knocked down branches and a few telephone poles. Soon, the power gave out. Nathan and boys like myself were out in the street once the rain cleared. As if leading a crowd of lemmings, Nathan brought us to the creek to see if it’d grown.

Shortly after arrival, the crowd had faded, leaving just Nathan and I. Crouched at the edge of the creek, I was staring down at the fish, admiring their dark sheen, when suddenly Nathan’s hand plunged into the water and came out with one. He kept it in between his thumb and forefinger, holding it near the base of its mouth.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” he said.

The fish writhed in his hand. Its eyes, which looked yellow in the water but now appeared a gauzy gray, were popping out of its head.

“Put it back in the water,” I said.

“Why?”

“It’s going to die.”

He looked at the fish closely, as if seeing it for the first time.

“All things die,” he said. “Why not this fish?”

“Let it go.” I hadn’t seen anything die before, and the thought of seeing death prodded a tight knot of worry in my stomach. “Please.”

Without any argument, Nathan dropped the fish back in the water. He didn’t look annoyed, like I expected he might; instead, he looked slightly disappointed, like I had just turned down an offer that he’d hoped—or expected—me to accept.

3.

I remember the feel of the kayak underneath me as we crossed Tannapin Lake. The temperature had dropped from the low nineties to the low seventies in the matter of two days, and with this drop came a steady breeziness, which now gave the otherwise still lake a choppiness that made my stomach lurch.

“I don’t like this,” I said.

“You’ll be fine,” Nathan said, as he paddled us along. “We’re almost there.”

I tried to keep my head up and away from the rise and fall of the boat, and instead looked at our destination. Now halfway across the lake, I recognized that the waterfall was wider than I’d first given it credit for. Not only did it appear to be coming down with some force, but it actually spiderwebbed out into a series of smaller waterfalls, each one spawning from the grand spigot at the top.

The rumbling of the waterfall grew louder upon approach. It was not so loud that I couldn’t easily talk to Nathan behind me, but the sound made it a little tougher to think.

“Looks cool!” I yelled.

“It is.”

“How’d you find it?”

“I’ve been here a few times,” he said nonchalantly.

Looking at the waterfall, I didn’t think that we could hop out and swim—we didn’t have towels, or bathing suits, or a place to dry off nearby. I wasn’t seeing a landing around for us to get out and enjoy the view.

“What do we do now?”

Without hesitation, he said, “We go through it.”

“Through it?”

“What else would we do?”

Nathan started paddling faster. I raised my arms over my head in anticipation of the falling water.

4.

Mom had been wrong in thinking that Nathan was a role model for the other boys in the neighborhood. Perhaps at first, but that changed by July when that squirrel got crushed outside Shravan’s house.

That afternoon, Shravan and I were outside on his front lawn passing a soccer ball back and forth. Shravan, a lanky boy who weighed fifteen pounds less than me despite being five inches taller, had his back to the intersection, and so he didn’t see the truck barreling down our block. But because of where he was facing, he was able to clearly see the truck run over a squirrel that had been trying to cross the road.

Unbeknownst to us, Nathan had been sitting out on the fire escape of our house. I hadn’t seen him there, but I heard him flying down those old, wooden stairs and out onto the front lawn. He didn’t see us watching him and, because of how quickly and focused he was moving, we didn’t say anything to him as he beelined right for the squirrel.

Shravan and I, now given up on soccer, studied Nathan as he fell to his knees right before the squirrel. He looked up behind his shoulder back at our house and, seeing no movement there, reached out and grabbed its tail. Instead of using two fingers, as Shravan or I squeamishly might’ve, he took it by his fist and raised the rest of the body with an upturned palm. He rolled the squirrel around in his hands, as if looking for dents and defects.

Despite the weather, he was wearing an oversized sweatshirt that had Asbury Park printed across it. Surreptitiously, he took the squirrel and tucked it inside the pouch of the sweatshirt. He turned around and started back to the house, his eyes darting from side to side. When he noticed Shravan and I, he looked like he’d been caught by the police.

“What are you looking at?” he yelled, not bothering to slow down.

“Why’d you take the squirrel?” Shravan asked, rather bravely, I thought.

“I didn’t,” Nathan said.

Shravan looked at me with confusion and disgust, as Nathan continued down the block.

Nathan shortly returned to those old wooden stairs, flew up them, and popped back inside his apartment.

Word traveled fast. Shravan told others what we saw. But I didn’t. Telling others, no matter how strange Nathan’s actions were, felt like a betrayal of his trust, and at that time, I trusted Nathan.

5.

I remember feeling the water crash down on my head, shoulders, back. It felt like I was being pelted by a thousand little rocks. I held my hands over my head to protect myself from the water, but that simply displaced the pain from my head to my hands.

A moment later, we were through to the other side. As I wiped flecks of water from my eyes, I noticed a small cove appear before us. Just a few yards past the waterfall, Nathan angled the kayak on its side so that we were parallel to the landing. He stepped out of the kayak and tied it to a nearby stone. Offering a hand, he helped me up.

It was a reprieve to be back on firm ground, but I didn’t like the look of the cove; it was practically pitch black, with the waterfall blocking most of the moonlight that lighted our journey across the water. The sound of the waterfall, too, echoed inside the cove so loudly that it was tough to talk to the person right next to you without raising your voice.

“C’mon,” Nathan said, pointing into the cove. “It goes deeper.”

“I don’t want to go,” I said instinctively.

“There’s nothing scary.”

I didn’t want to admit I was scared, so I made up another excuse. “We don’t have a flashlight. How’re we going to see?”

“There’s light later. Now, c’mon.”

I wasn’t convinced he was telling the truth—I couldn’t see any light ahead of me—but Nathan, soaked as I was, sounded confident. And he’d already started walking deeper into the dark.

6.

A week before our trip to Tannapin Lake, I awoke in the middle of the night to a sharp sound outside my bedroom. I was a light sleeper and quick to imagine the worst scenarios. In this instance, upon hearing a loud creak, I imagined there was someone outside my window, trying to break in. I wanted to get my parents, but I’d spent the first ten years of my life running to their bedroom when I had a nightmare. So after being escorted back to my bedroom by my mom practically every time, I’d finally shaken the habit.

If I was going to have any closure, it was on me to investigate. I peeled off my blanket and dropped my legs to the side of the bed. I crouched down and army-crawled to my tennis racket. Then, with my racket resting on my shoulder, I crawled towards the window. In the dark, I could make out the familiar surroundings—a poster of ‘NSYNC’ and a photo collage of me and my parents on near walls—and used them to guide me across the room.

Once at the window, I pressed my back against the wall. I steadied my erratic breathing and, in one sharp motion, jumped into the window frame, racquet held over my head. At first, I couldn’t make out anything in the dark. Then, there was motion. A body slowly crept to the back of the fire escape wearing a hoodie and a pair of baggy sweatpants.

We stayed there, myself and this mystery person, for what felt like the rest of the night. The person remained still until, perhaps assured that I couldn’t see them, they started edging slowly to the left, their feet gently creaking on the wood.

“Go away!” I finally yelled. The words had been in my throat, but hadn’t been able to find their way out until now. “Go!”

From across the house, I heard my parents start to stir.

“Andrew!” yelled my dad.

I turned to the door of my bedroom, expecting my dad, but then realized I was letting my intruder out of sight. I looked back at the window; the fire escape was now empty. But hustling up the stairs was the mystery person, who quickly, quietly slipped into the apartment above us.

7.

I remember the darkness of the tunnel. My gait had always been short, but in here it was practically heel to toe so that I wouldn’t smack into anything in front of me. I kept both arms extended, but I could only reach the wall on my right side. It was jagged, extending sharply into a low roof.

“Nathan?”

“Almost there,” he said.

The sound of water dripping onto the floor of the cave grew louder the further we moved inside. There was the soft clap of Nathan’s shoes, too, but much louder than either of those sounds was that of the waterfall. Yet, when I turned to look over my shoulder, I could no longer see the entrance to the cave or the waterfall; the tunnel had hooked in one direction, out of view of the rest of the world. It was impossible to tell where we were. I imagined a view from above, as if with infrared goggles, how it would reveal two warm bodies moving slowly through this cramped space.

The cave gently turned in another direction, and now, perhaps because I was really beginning to lose my sense of direction, because we were getting deeper in the tunnel, or because I knew it had to be getting late, I felt panic mount in my chest. I knew that Nathan wouldn’t lead me astray like this without a purpose. There had to be something up here worthwhile that he would show me—a treasure?—but this optimistic view was quickly blurred.

“Nathan,” I said nervously. I kept my right hand glued to the wall, as it was my anchor, and used my left hand to sweep the darkness beside me, hoping that it might find Nathan’s shoulder. I needed to hold him, to know he was there and that he really was guiding me somewhere.

But no matter where I swung my arm, I didn’t find him. “Nathan?” I said again. This time, I stopped and tried to listen closely. There was still the beckoning sound of the waterfall, the drips of water—but no more soft claps of Nathan’s feet.

“Nathan?” I said. “Nathan? Nathan!”

The sound of my voice bounced through the cave, without a response. I released my hand from the wall and stretched towards the opposite wall. I soon reached it, and from here, I again swept my arm out in search of Nathan—and found nothing.

I tried to open my eyes as wide as I could, hoping this might improve my vision, but it didn’t. From what I could tell, I was alone. Here, in this lightless den, Nathan had disappeared. To stave off the panic, I did what seemed my only option: retrace my steps. Now on this new wall, I turned around and slowly headed back out the tunnel. I was certain that I was going in the right direction, and that there was only one way through.

After a short while, the familiar roar of the waterfall grew in intensity. I went around the first turn in the tunnel, and was finally met by a brief glimpse of light. Seeing the mouth of the tunnel, I started running as fast as I could, keeping my head low to avoid knocking it on anything.

The light of the moon struck me like a firm slap. Peering out from the landing, angling my head around the rim of the waterfall, I could see that thin white sliver in the sky. But at my feet, where the kayak had been, was nothing. I tried to look through the waterfall to see if it had drifted away. Just barely, I thought I could see its racing stripes.

I didn’t know where Nathan had gone. I didn’t know where I could go. Not knowing what else to do, I jumped into the water in hopes of finding the kayak. I doggy-paddled as fast as I could through the lapping surf and up to the waterfall. I feared going through it, but saw no other choice if I was going to retrieve the kayak. So, I plunged forward, letting the weight of the water slap against my head like a hundred soft punches. It knocked me under the water, forcing me low, but soon I surfaced on the other side. I took a big gulp of air, flapped my arms frantically at my sides to stay afloat. Once I got the water out of my eyes, I saw Nathan almost a quarter of the way across the lake, hurriedly paddling himself along in the kayak.

8.

I remember the rescue: three men in kayaks drifting across the lake, paddling faster in response to my screaming from behind the waterfall, their strong arms lifting me into one of their kayaks, the warmth of their touch, the roiling of hunger in my stomach, the faintness in my head.

 It had been almost twenty-four hours since I’d been missing. My parents met me at the hospital, and after a few hours, they brought me back to our house. They asked me how I got there, what I’d been doing. They said that Nathan had told them that I’d run off early in the evening. I had no answer for them. I couldn’t put one together. I shook my head in silence until they finally laid off.

That night, as I lay awake in bed, I heard a knock on my window. My body, still recovering from the hours spent alone on that harsh stone landing, felt numb to any sensation. Hearing the knock, I got out of bed and wandered over.

Floating in the dark right near the window was Nathan’s face. Seeing him woke my mind up; I stumbled back, as if hit by a strong breeze, then recovered. I walked back to the window and opened it a crack—just enough so that I could hear his voice.

“How’d you get back?” he asked.

“I was rescued,” I said, my hands trembling.

He looked at me as if I’d just spoken Latin. “You didn’t need to get rescued.”

“You left me.”

“Not really.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why’d you leave me?”

“I didn’t leave you,” he said adamantly. “I was going to get you in a few days.”

“But why?”

He shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. “I just wanted to see what would happen.”

I stared at him, and he stared back. There was no sign of dishonesty in his face. He just wanted to know what would happen if he left me out there in the cave. To see what would happen to me, to my body. To him, it was as simple as that.