How many times have I tried to tell this story?

Once upon a time, many years back, I dated a girl who insisted I become baptized. It wasn't explicit. I was sixteen, and she was a girl, and my salvation seemed a small price to pay. And so, one July day, we drove to her pastor's swimming pool and he dunked me underwater.

That was everything.

I wore my t-shirt because the pastor wore his. It was my first baptism, so I screwed up the cover-your-nose part and came up cleansed but sputtering, hacking into my towel. Moments later, I made small talk with the rest of the flock before slipping inside the pastor's house to peck at the cheese tray.

"You're freezing," the girl said, tracing my goosebumps.

Or I could tell it differently:

Once upon a time, not so many years back, a girl insisted I become baptized. I was sixteen, and she was a girl, and I was happy to do it. Sometime in late July, we drove to her pastor's house and I dunked in the pool. Afterwards, the girl and I ate watermelon in a hammock. I was happy to do it. And until we broke up three months later, I kept insisting I was happy. That it was no problem—hardly an inconvenience—that the water had been fine.

Or, like this:

Once, on the day I was baptized, I called my best friend and my parents and informed them of this an hour before the ceremony. We caravanned to the pastor's house, waving in the rearview mirrors, and somehow, they applauded my decision. They told me they were proud, though they couldn't have been. That afternoon, post-baptism but pre-watermelon, that best friend and I played tennis on the school courts. I convinced myself that the accuracy of my second serve was a gift from God for my allegiance.

Months later, that best friend and that girlfriend would form a relationship themselves, but whenever I pictured them together, I always just pictured them at the edge of that pastor's pool. How they'd looked from my view beneath the waterline, so wobbly and uncertain.

Or:

There was this one time I got baptized for a girl, but it wasn't the worst thing. I was supposed to be Jewish, but then I dunked in the pool and was not. The cheese tray was mostly cheddar, and I think I drank a Sprite that afternoon. Then, off to tennis on the school courts before eating the watermelon in the hammock, spitting seeds in the grass I would mow the following day.

But then there's also this:

The following December, after the girl and I broke up, the pastor's house burned down. It was a few days before Christmas, and I woke early for swim practice, turned on the television in the pre-dawn hours, watching his house smolder while leaning over a yogurt cup. That morning, I skipped practice and drove to his house, instead. And while I did not see what I expected (there was no robed family huddled alongside the manger scene) I watched the firefighters pick at things with their axes. It was still dark, so I crept through a few pines and stared in at the empty pool in the backyard.

Removing a church bulletin I'd stuffed beneath my car seat months prior, I wrote the pastor a message and placed it in his mailbox. Don't ask me what it said. I don't know if he ever received it, or if I even signed my name.

I only saw him once more after that, years later at the public library. I hid from him behind the stacks of books.