The Palmer Pool

6 | Could Be Something

By nine o'clock the next morning I'd been taught how to tie up the boats that came into the harbor, which meant that I learned that what you use is not a rope, but a line, and a knot doesn't keep it secured, but a hitch.

"A cleat hitch," Brandon said, "is a fundamental skill. So, think you can handle it?" He narrowed his eyes at me as he squirted some brown juice out the side of his mouth into the water.

"Yeah, I think I've got it," I replied with a hint of sarcasm. I'd been practicing cleat hitches, which involved a couple of loops around a cleat, what I had previously referred to as the "boat tie-up thingie", for twenty minutes.

He lifted his baseball hat by the brim and ran his hand through his prematurely thinning dirty-blonde hair as he sighed. "Okay, I'll show you the gas dock."

Brandon graduated a couple years before and was a former high school baseball star. He went to college on an athletic scholarship, but dropped out when he couldn't play anymore because of an injury. People in Palmer talked about him like he was a hero returning from battle, even though he didn't suffer from a baseball injury; he got wasted and fell off a second-story balcony. It seemed that all that remained from his baseball career was a revolting chewing tobacco habit and probably some fond memories of what were likely to be the best years of his life. He was training me for the week and was obviously not excited about it.

During my lunch break, I sat at a picnic table alone tearing my peanut butter and jelly sandwich into bite size pieces. Since there were only four dock attendants working at a time, we couldn't take lunch together. It didn't bother me at all because I had exhausted my awkward conversation making skills for the day with Brandon and I still had the afternoon to get through. And it gave me some more time to think over what happened only two days before, though it felt like a lifetime ago or even in a completely different life that wasn't mine at all.

Did I travel through time? I cringed with embarrassment just for thinking it. But what else could it have been? A dream or hallucination wouldn't have made me disappear. According to Sophie, I jumped from the diving board and didn't come back up. Though I did come back up, in the same place that I went underwater.

Except almost everything was different:  the people, their clothes, the cars, the stores downtown, my mom's house, my dad's house. And then I came back, at the same spot where I disappeared, one day later. If the Palmer city pool was some kind of time machine or portal to the past, why hadn't I heard of other people disappearing?

The tickle at the edges of my thoughts for the last two days turned into a full-on aggravating itch I had to scratch. I needed to know what had happened, which meant that I had to make it happen again.

A hand holding a walkie-talkie suddenly appeared in front of my face, interrupting my thoughts.

"Time to learn how to use the radio," Brandon said in a dull, monotone voice.

"Great!" I answered enthusiastically. Mostly because I was ready to get through three more hours of training so I could go for a swim.

                                   ~~~~~~

That afternoon the pool was full of kids splashing and yelling. Their moms and babysitters were sitting around with their eyes glued to their phones or napping. It wouldn't be hard to disappear. I sank into one of the lounge chairs and looked up at the blue sky.  Soft white puffs of cottonwood seeds floated lazily through the air like an aimless summer snow. As I worked up the courage to jump in, I had the prickling feeling on the back of my neck of being watched.

When I turned my face towards the hazy afternoon sun hanging directly behind the lifeguard stand, I figured out who was watching me. Because the sun was behind him I only saw his silhouette, but I knew it was Eric Anderson staring at me from behind his sunglasses. I heard Sophie in my head, saying, "He kind of lost it." To make sure I wasn't imagining his eyes on me I tested him by flicking my hand as if to shoo a mosquito away from my face. His head snapped back toward the kids in the shallow end.