From the author of Spontaneous comes a ’90s mixtape of a young adult novel that delivers a summer romance with an unearthly twist. Perfect for fans of The Gravity of Us.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Aaron Starmer’s Night Swimming, which is out April 29th 2025.
One final swim of the summer. Let’s make it last all night…
Summer, 1994. Trevor can barely wrap his mind around the fact that he and his friends have graduated high school. And yet there’s no rush to get to college. He’s determined to live one night at a time. Riding shotgun from party to party, windows down, music up, his focus is entirely on his crush, the enigmatic girl in the driver’s seat. Will things ever go anywhere with Sarah?
Maybe? Because Sarah has proposed a mission: They’re going to swim all the pools in town. Before long, they’re sneaking into backyards every night, splashing, floating, and loving every minute of it. But it’s still not enough for Trevor. He yearns for Sarah, despite her college boyfriend, despite her “not yet”s, despite the way she keeps pulling away the moment it starts to feel truly magical.
Things finally change when they learn about a natural pool hidden deep in the woods. It seems like just another spot to check off their summer bucket list. But once they get there, they realize that this place has a curious hold on them, and something very strange is happening…
As I watch you sleep, I sing to myself, soft and mournful, a calming melody that laps against the shores of my addled mind. I doubt you can hear it, but it’s our song, the one you sing to me. The lyrics mean so much more than you might realize.
I thought I knew you, but I can’t judge you. I thought you knew me, but underneath I’m, well, not laughing but . . . different?
The lyrics don’t tell the whole story, obviously.
What it deserves—what I deserve—isn’t a quiet night. Not anymore. I thought I did, but I know now that it only makes the noise in my head grow louder.
This is my choice. My journey. Only mine. I’m heading back alone.
NIGHTSWIMMING
They were floating. It didn’t feel the least bit like real life. Twelve years—thirteen, counting kindergarten. An eternity, now in the rearview.
Trevor’s hand was out the car window, a dolphin swimming away from Sutton High through the muggy June air. Sarah was driving, as always. And as always, she was driving the Toyota Tercel, a family car passed down two years ago when her older sister, Janine, departed to Tufts. Janine had called it the Silver Bullet, but Sarah referred to it as the Rat. A demotion on account of rust and dents and stains? Perhaps. It was a loving name, though. The Rat was a survivor. It had seen Sarah through so much. Long detours in the farmlands after her multiple breakups with Mike. Road trips to Rochester and Vermont to see Phish. Predawn journeys to basketball practice and late-night commutes home from the job at Wegmans. And of course, the drives to school.
To school and from school, every weekday for the last two years. For the final six months of senior year, Trevor joined her, proudly sitting shotgun. An assorted list of guest stars rode in the back. Jared, Schultz, and Bev had once been the other regulars. The core. But ever since Bev saved up and got a Civic in March, those three usually rode together. Separately. Like today.
Yes, today it was only Sarah and Trevor. They both preferred it that way, even if they were both hesitant to admit it.
“Wow,” Sarah said as she shook her head in disbelief.
“Wow what?” Trevor asked.
“Just wow. It’s over, huh? That’s it.”
“Yeah. I mean . . . yeah.”
What else was there to say? Class of ’94 had made it. Graduation ceremony was still to come, but school was D‑O‑N‑E done. Regents requirements met. AP tests in the books. Everything . . . complete. Trevor had prepared for it, talked and thought about it constantly, but now that it was here, he didn’t know what to do.
So, he turned on the stereo. A mix was in the deck, one that Sarah made called Sun / Rain. One side had songs with Sun in their titles. The other side, Rain. It was on the Sun side. The Sun side always got more play.
When that fat old sun in the sky is falling . . .
Trevor let the music do the talking for a while, as they passed the fields on Sudbury, all dusty and bulldozed, ready for development. Soon enough construction would start. Houses with pastel paint jobs, flimsy transplanted trees, and in‑ground pools would erupt from the weeds, though probably not before Trevor would leave for college. When he returned home next summer, however, he’d be coming back to a slightly different world.
“What time does Schultz’s party start?” Trevor asked.
“Already started,” Sarah said. “I saw them pouring Zimas into Sprite bottles at lunch, then heading for the parking lot.”
“Should we go straight there?”
Sarah reached over to Trevor’s thigh and gave it a pat—mostly fingertips—and paused for a moment to look at him before saying, “Yeah, straight there.”
The driveway was already clogged with cars, so Sarah parked along the road. From the knee-high grass, she plucked a dandelion that had gone to seed and blew it at Trevor, but the wind stole the fluff before it could hit his face.
“Boooo,” she said. “I wanted to fuzzify you.”
“Did you at least make a wish?”
“Obviously. Now come on.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the backyard. The Schultz house was the last one on a dead-end road, way out past the water treatment plant, where the neighbors were too far away to complain and the cops never bothered to go. There were a few dozen kids there already, mostly in the yard. On the deck, Andrew Schultz reclined on a ratty-cushioned chaise lounge.
For lack of a better word, Andrew was an odd-looking kid, with a nose that was crooked from being broken more than once (basketball, bike accident) and bulging eyes that bordered on amphibian. But what Andrew—or Schultz, as he was known to his peers—lacked in conventional attractiveness, he made up for in charisma. Pictures of him rarely did him favors. Meeting him, however, changed almost everyone’s tune. He was a disarming flirt. The young female teachers at the school knew better than to humor his advances, but they weren’t immune to them. Blushing around Schultz was common. So too was smiling. He was forever welcoming, the consummate host.
As Trevor and Sarah approached the deck, Schultz raised a red plastic Pizza Hut cup in salute. “My fellow graduates. We did it!”
“Barely squeaked by, huh?” Sarah said.
“Don’t joke,” Schultz said. “It was touch and go for me last year. Physics was kicking my ass.”
“And yet you got into Cornell,” Sarah said. “Strange how that happens.”
“Greatest comeback story of the twentieth century,” Schultz said with a shrug.
Trevor and Sarah joined him on the deck, where they too could lord over the revelers. The party wasn’t wild by any stretch of the imagination. But the smell of weed was in the air. A keg nested in a plastic tub of ice near the toolshed was already well on its way to empty.
“Your parents?” Trevor asked Schultz.
“At the lake until Sunday,” Schultz said. “Plenty of time to clean up after these . . . lovely people.”
“Speaking of lovely people, where’s the illustrious Miss Beverly Gleason?” Sarah asked.
Schultz pointed with his thumb to the screen door behind them.
“Well then, it’s been a pleasure, gents,” Sarah said as she slid the door open and slipped inside.
Schultz turned his head to watch her, and when she was safely out of earshot, he said, “So?”
“So?” Trevor responded.
“You and Sarah. Is that, like . . . ?”
“Friends. That’s it.”
“Right. Right.”
“It is right,” Trevor said. “She’s . . . a free spirit.”
This made Schultz laugh. Hard. “That she is.”
Trevor had no response, so he grabbed a seat in a nylon lawn chair, and the two guys quietly took in the crowd. More kids arrived. Trevor knew every face and voice. Sutton High wasn’t tiny, but it wasn’t big. Ninety-six seniors were graduating, which was two fewer than the ninety-eight who had started in September. Katie Crease had dropped out after giving birth in November. She had to find a job because her parents refused to support her and the baby, but she was well on her way to a GED. Clint Hoover had been arrested in April for stealing car stereos, and then stopped showing up at school. There were rumors that he was joining the army, but Trevor had seen him a few weeks before, manning the register at the mini-mart. They didn’t make eye contact.
Katie and Clint weren’t at the party, of course, but a good percentage—maybe thirty—of Trevor’s fellow graduates were there. Plus, a handful of former juniors and sophomores. When Trevor spotted Jared Delson near the keg, he got out of his chair.
“Check ya later,” Trevor said to Schultz, quoting their favorite movie.
“Check ya later,” Schultz echoed.
Then Trevor was off, weaving through the crowd, nodding hellos at acquaintances, raising an invisible glass to friends in the distance, until he was finally standing next to Jared by the keg. Jared had a Solo cup in his hand. Trevor tapped it with a finger.
“You’re drinking now?” he asked.
“Diet Coke,” Jared said, and then he patted himself on the belly. “Don’t want people to think I’m the new Katie Crease.”
“You look fine,” Trevor said, and he meant it. Jared was a skinny guy with long blond bangs that hung over his face. Skater’s bangs. He looked a lot like Tony Hawk, and so he played the part, sometimes well, of idling around parking lots and public buildings, attempting kickflips and rail slides. In a hope to indulge his passion, his mom and dad once offered to build him a half-pipe in the family’s barn, but he declined. “I’ll be the one who’s responsible for breaking my own neck, thank you very much,” he told them.
It was not the response they wanted to hear, and yet it was a response that fit Jared to a tee. It spoke to his independence. Also, to his darkness, a looming presence that Trevor often wished he could chase away from his friend. Out there, in the corner of Schultz’s lush and lively yard, Trevor tried to do just that. Putting his arm around Jared, he told him, “We’re gonna make this the best summer of your life.”
This lifted the kid’s spirits, or maybe he pretended that it did. “We goddamn better,” Jared said with a smile.
