Somewhere She Belongs

 

The girl hates the pool and the way the water pulls her down, flooding her eyes and nostrils with the sting of chlorine. The worst thing: there’s no bottom, just a gaping chasm into the unknown. She shivers, goosebumps spiking up her arms.

A giggle erupts behind her. No doubt they’re laughing at the swimsuit sagging around her butt yet pinching her shoulders as it hasn’t grown well with her. Or they’re mimicking her underbite, a common joke; she closes her lips, self-conscious about her wonky teeth and jutting jaw. Perhaps they’re just anticipating her floundering.

Julia ploughs back to the shallows and the girl focuses on her front crawl technique, wondering if she can absorb it before her turn.

Julia’s one of the better ones. She’s not openly hostile, but yesterday in the canteen they reached for the same juice box and when their fingers collided Julia’s hand jolted away like she’d been shocked. She looked through the girl, then turned and picked up a milkshake. In a way, that was worse than the snide comments.

Droplets of icy spray hit the girl as Julia erupts from the water. Her heart quickens, realising there are only two ahead of her now. It must be beating as hard as last night when the gravy was too runny, so Dad wrapped Mum’s hair around his fist like a boxer getting ready to fight. She watched them tussle on the floor while the culprit congealed on abandoned dinners.

Sam, who’s up next, gingerly eases herself into the pool and begins a slow breaststroke. As she advances over the lip of the chasm, the girl thinks she sees something below the surface move. The dim yellow lighting, which makes everyone look jaundiced, is reflecting on the surface and making it hard to see.

Sam reaches the end and turns round, inching back to them as though she’s swimming through treacle. There’s a definite flash of movement below as she goes over the void again. In a moment of meanness, the girl thinks she wouldn’t mind if something rose from the water and gobbled Sam up. In maths last week, Sam kept idly thwacking a ruler on her arm until it smarted red. The girl pretended not to feel the sting.

The girl looks to Mr Johnstone, wondering if he’d spotted the activity, but he’s eyeing the no smoking sign as if he could pluck the cigarette from it and light it up. She turns to the lifeguard in her tall chair, who is staring at her shoes which are fidgeting on the top rung like they want to escape.

Sam makes it back and climbs the ladder briskly, giving a shake like a wet dog once she’s out. She shoulders past the girl to get to the back of the line.

One more. Then it’s her turn.

The sandwiches she ate for lunch are inching their way up her throat, acidic and burning. She feels as sick as the time Benji clawed Dad’s shiny new gaming chair. Dad took him outside by the scruff of his neck, and she heard the water butt lid thud off and Benji’s yowl before the splash. Dad came back in with his arms covered in thin red lines, without Benji.

Carina goes next. A quiet, bookish girl. In another life they could have been friends. Carina slides into the water and pushes off with a half-hearted front crawl. When she nears the abyss a flurry of shadows moves underwater. The girl stares fixated as Carina reaches the end and turns back, apparently unaware of anything untoward going on below, despite having her face down between arm movements.

Panic riots in the girl’s chest, and she looks round at her classmates, but no one seems to have registered anything unusual. Carina appears at the ladder, hauling herself up.

She feels the eyes of the whole class turn to her.

The girl’s feet are stuck to the cold cracked tile.

“Go ahead, it’s your turn,” Mr Johnstone says, mouth stretched into an encouraging smile.

The girl loves Mr Johnstone. He pretends not to notice when she turns up wearing jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt instead of uniform. And he quietly slips her a pen and paper, knowing she won’t have them. She wants to follow his instruction, but her legs won’t act on command.

“Go on, Jaws,” a classmate behind gives the girl a sharp elbow in the back, causing her to stumble forward, breaking the spell.

She treads slowly to the edge, her legs like candyfloss, unable to support her. She sinks to the floor and lowers herself in, every organ retracting inwards, sitting uncomfortably tight in her core. She leans forward embracing the chill and begins. The arms and legs work together to propel her forward – she knows this. And at first, she does it. For a moment she feels triumphant, maybe she has finally learnt how to swim!

Yet as the girl nears the great blackness at the bottom of the pool, she forgets to command her limbs and the pool gulps her in. She closes her eyes as water floods her nose and ears.

The girl thinks of the lifeguard and Mr Johnstone not paying attention, her classmates are unlikely to raise the alarm.

Her ears pop as she sinks deeper, and she realises she can’t even hear muffled chatter. It’s peacefully silent. Pressure is crushing her ribs like a tight hug.

She’s in the abyss.

The girl opens her eyes and finds herself face to face with an odd-looking creature staring at her. It has stalks of light protruding from its forehead illuminating a grinning underbite bursting with crooked teeth. She glances round and realises she’s encircled by ten or eleven of them.

Are they fish?

Or monsters?

No, they’re shadows, like her.

The lack of air makes her woozy. In her final moments of consciousness, the girl thinks: at last, she has arrived somewhere where everyone is smiling to see her.