Neil is 16, goes to high school, but something is wrong - something he is putting together in his thoughts, troubled.
Connection... somehow.
Writer’s note
This is my story where dry farmland collides with water. I can remember this irrigation canal, especially the large pipe the water rolls out of. Everybody swims there. It's fun but a bit of fear is always there - I mean, the pipe is taller than you are.
A downcast hick boy finds himself powerfully drawn to the kid he rescued in the pond last fall - the problem is, he hasn't seen the boy since. With the coming of the Fourth of July, the bone-dry pond makes it look like he never will. Neil has to somehow find him on this desolate American landscape, and then he needs to take him back to water if he does.
Passage at Amazon Neil Intense
The beginning of the story…
THE RESTAURANT sits on the two-lane highway outside of town, across the road from a restaurant that sells hot dogs. I don't really like working at Larry's because Josephine, the manager, is such a lousy version of a human being, but I do it for the kid who told me his name was Larry.
I did ask some people at school if they knew of a Larry almost my height and with hair that was a light color, which I shouldn't have said because it sounded suspicious. Like his hair color would mean something to me. I don't know, maybe it does.
Anyway, they wanted to know why I wanted to find him. I didn't want to tell them that, so I stopped asking around for a while. But I did say it out loud when I would visit the pond and imagine those conversations.
I would say, "Because I don't see how I can live without him." Yeah, I kind of surprised myself with that. On paper, I'm not supposed to be anything like the lonesome boy I have turned into.
In some of the real conversations about finding the kid who said his name was Larry, I would tell people that we were assigned to work on some school project together and all I knew was what the assistant principal told me about Larry's appearance. Then they wanted to know about the project and I made up something about a school safety committee, which may or may not exist. It was a lame cover story. Finally I let the whole thing drop and I only got one or two follow-up questions on how things were coming along with the safety committee. Great, I told them.
Josephine tells me she has a job for me to do tonight, something she wants me and Geoffrey to take care of, I don't know what. Geoffrey also works at the cafe but he's been here longer than me. The word came down from the owner that this was something he wanted done, and that was all I needed to hear. It puts me in the frame of mind that whatever it is, I am doing it for the kid I got out of the pond. I will do anything in his name even if it's really somebody else's name.