Diary of a Pool
by Justin Holt

My course in why fate was just another four-letter word was Alison. We’d shared classes since the first grade. She lived a housing tract over from me, we rode the same bus, but outside of a silent nod whenever we’d pass each other in the hallways of life nothing was out of the ordinary for two people whose only real connection was proximity. Everything changed one day in gym class during the swim unit of our senior year.

I couldn’t swim. But I wasn’t alone; there were a half-dozen other dog-paddling dunces flopping around with floaties strapped around our biceps. As embarrassing as the situation was it could have been worse. By the sheer luck of whoever was holy one of the other bobos happened to be Matt, the kid who crapped his pants in fifth grade. That sort of fortune trumps just about everything; the possibility of what could amount to the embarrassment of your lifetime is staring you in the eyes, and it’s negated by the undying need of the photographic-memoried masses who continue to pile on the kid who crapped himself seven years before. But I did feel helpless, flailing around in the shallow end like a bird that just got its wings shot off. I was retaining chlorine, my lungs and eyes blazing. I would have almost traded the scrutiny that Matt was getting if I could have only freed myself from that pool forever.

The afternoon sun gave the poolroom an orange haze. Through my burning eyes I saw someone inching towards me. Her smile was flawless. As she grabbed a hold of my arm the water between us quaked. It was Alison.

“Need help?” she asked as she swam me back to the shallow end as if she were my tugboat.

I sat on the pool steps, trying to catch my breath. Alison remained in the water, laughing.

“Thanks a lot,” I said, coughing. “Smartass.”

“Better a smartass than a dumbass,” she said. “At least you’re in the pool with Matt. Nobody cares that you suck at swimming. He’s the one that pooped his pants.”

“You remember that?” I asked, squeegeeing my eyes.

“Duh,” she said as she ducked her head backwards into the water. “I sat next you in that class.”

Did she? She just saved me the embarrassment of my life and I couldn’t remember that we were classroom neighbors for the most infamous event in our scholastic careers.

“Oh yeah,” I said, hoping coy might pass for confident.

“Science and lunch too. You don’t remember?”

“Sorry…chlorine,” I coughed, this time for show, “affecting my memory.”

She smiled. In all of the years we’d shared classrooms and bus rides together, ones she was so quick to point out that I didn’t remember, at that moment of her latest, I hated myself for not realizing how beautiful of a smile she must have had all along.

“Suuuuure.”

As the word left her lips I couldn’t even remember the last moment that we shared where words were involved. But with me on the steps, and her in the pool, as much as it probably should have, the distance and years between us didn’t feel awkward. And we looked on each other neither of us blinked.

“What’s the problem?” a voice yelled. Mr. Max was one scary dude. He was much shorter than I, but he was built like a granite pillar that subjugated wars, Mother Nature, and generations of piss ant kids, standing the test of time with his tattooed Popeye-sized forearms as intimidating as ever. If he wasn’t a drill sergeant he should have been. He put the fear of Run twenty laps into everyone. I sludged to my feet, bringing a wave of water with me. We stared at each other, each waiting for the other to fire first.

“He was having trouble,” Alison said, stepping out of the pool to take the neutral ground between us. “So I helped him out.”

She smiled at Mr. Max.

“You’re always saying, ‘Help each other,’” she said. “That’s what I did.”

From behind us someone screamed, “He shit himself again!” Like a flash of graying light Mr. Max was gone. People ran from the pool, high-tailing it towards the dressing rooms, what they hoped would be safety, screaming as if some apocalyptic horror were on their heels. Alison and I watched without moving.

A while after the last person was gone I thanked Alison.

“Anytime,” she said before she too headed towards the dressing room.

I watched her walk away, my eyes planted on her ass. Her bikini gave me ample viewing opportunity, which I assumed, or at least hoped, was on purpose, and not so much circumstance. Though I’d been noticing girl’s asses for years I couldn’t remember seeing one as nice as Alison’s. Many nights were spent at my friend’s house, sitting with a stack of his father’s finest in between us, arguing over which girl wanted which of us more. His father told us that all of the girls were airbrushed; that no one really looked that good in real life. I never had complaints; those girls always looked that good me. But Alison was beyond that good. Twenty feet from where I stood, behind a concrete wall that I couldn’t see through, Alison was getting naked. I never wanted to be Superman so badly in my life. I imagined peeling off her wet bikini, what she looked like naked. I couldn’t wait for the bus ride home that night. I knew that I was going to say something to her. I didn’t know what, but it would be something.

As I stepped towards the dressing room I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“I know you were sandbagging it out there.”

“But I didn’t,” I said, “I mean, I’m not.”

I wasn’t lying. But his tone made me feel like I was.

“You’re nothing but a pussy,” Mr. Max said. “With pussy on the mind.”

“But…”

“Twenty laps,” he yelled. “Now!”

Those laps were the icebreaker that I needed for the ride home with Alison. I relayed my twenty laps around the shit-stained pool story and she laughed so hard that her body kept rubbing against mine. It was softening and hardening me at the same time. I asked her over to my house, she met my parents, and we both fell asleep watching some movie that neither one of us were really watching. In the days after we passed letters to each other in the six classes we shared. Two weeks later I found out what it felt like to peel her bathing suit off. For the rest of our senior year, and that summer after graduation the things that I’d spent a lifetime fantasizing about became reality. I never knew how to describe any of it. Before Alison my definition of “greatness” was hitting home runs and high scores on Contra. But in those moments when we were lying naked beside each other, and Alison would whisper in my ear how unbelievable it was that after all of those years of being so close to one another where we didn’t say anything, how we could be saying everything that was important to each other now, as much as I couldn’t verbally reciprocate what I was feeling, internally she was writing and rewriting everything I didn’t know.

Two weeks after she went away to college I got a letter in the mail from Alison saying that she was sorry, but she thought she needed some space, and time, and that she sort of, might have found another guy, and maybe, probably, things between us weren’t going to work out.

And sitting there on my floor, letter in my hand, tears welled up in my eyes, the world silent except for Pearl Jam’s “Betterman” playing from my stereo, as apropos as the song of that moment was to reality that I’d just been dealt, that’s when I told myself fuck fate.

All of these years later, I’m looking out of this hotel room window. Behind a broken picket fence sits a pool full of the leaves, condom wrappers, and empty beer cans that the highway on the ridge didn’t want anymore. The fluorescent lights make the water look Kryptonite green. I close my eyes and imagine Matt, the kid who crapped himself. This time there’s no peanut gallery to give him shit; it’s just him swimming like nothing was ever wrong. I close my eyes tighter and Alison and I are in the middle of that pool, splashing up water in the space in between us, her smiling as I try to paddle my way to her, my arms never quite long enough to reach. I open my eyes to see the green din of reality. On both sides of the window life is silent except for Pearl Jam’s “Betterman” playing from the bedside radio. On the windowsill is my 10-year reunion invitation.

Yes sir, fuck fate.