By Julia Gilmour
Sasha swims here every day—rain, wind, extreme heat warning. Today, she’s the first to arrive, wearing a neon-pink cast from elbow to fingers, covered in a plastic bag. She drops two crumpled dollars on the front desk and skips off toward the girls’ locker room, greenish-brown hair like seaweed tumbling down her back.
I sit on the guard stand, squinting through burning eyes in the overcast sunlight.
Fweet fweet! I blow my whistle twice for non-emergency. “Slow down.” Sasha grins, locks eyes with mine and slows to a trot, only to pick back up again behind my chair, her feet slapping the deck. “Sasha,” I say, channeling my mother’s voice. “Walk, or you’ll have to sit out.”
“Why don’t you try and make me?”
I think of what my mother would do: leap off the chair, chase Sasha around the pool, guard tube flying like a cape in the wind. She’d grab her by her cast, shout into her oblong face until she cries.
I am not my mother.
Sasha rushes the pool at full speed and jumps in.
~
Fweet fweet! Sasha doing backflips off the deck. Sasha running down the water slide. Sasha pulling children under by the ankles. Sasha dripping sticky popsicle all over the deck. Sasha filming dances with the other girls. Sasha shoving her stinky cast into people’s faces to sign.
On my break, I eat a turkey sandwich and a bag of chips, chewing each salty bite slowly. I glance at my textbooks: homework I told my mother I’d finish in my downtime.
“To be young and carefree again,” my manager says, wheeling his stool over, peering out the large office window.
I stifle a laugh. “I never got away with that kind of stuff.”
He looks at me, a wad of black hair stuck to his sweaty forehead. “You mean, fun?”
Lettuce falls from my sandwich to the floor.
~
Two blocks from the pool, I hear a pop, feel the right side dip. I’ve blown a tire, so I pull off into a neighborhood—unkept lawns, old pick-up trucks, chain-link fences, plastic children’s toys.
There, I spot Sasha a couple of houses down, still wearing the blue and white flowered one-piece and oversized sandals. She’s sitting on a pink towel outside of an old house. The paint behind her is ashen and chipping. Rain gutters hang loose to one side.
I wave, but Sasha doesn’t even flinch. It’s as if she left her personality inside the aqua-blue gates of the city pool. Something like an ocean tide pulls at my heart.
Under an orange sky, my mother arrives. “You have to be more careful,” she says. “Did you finish your schoolwork?”
“Mostly,” I lie.
She shows me how to change a tire. Then, she wraps her arms around me, kisses my temple.
“Good as new.”
When we drive away, Sasha is still sitting on the porch, digging up weeds and throwing them into the brown grass.
