It was hot but August heat was different and the only thing that helped was laying by the pool. There was a pool in my mother’s apartment complex, one of those slabs with no lifeguard and green water bordered by dirty grills with char marks. The first time we visited, I had to skip track practice to come with her to sign her stupid lease and she was trying to make it up to me by showing me that the dingy apartment she lived in now came with an all-expenses paid trip to the 10×10 ft concrete swimming pool. But the alternative was staying in the house I grew up in with a man who looked like my father and smelled like my father but who never did the dishes and sometimes cried in the shower when he thought I couldn’t hear and went on Hinge dates with women named Heidi.
A few months later, the August before my senior year, I was thin in a way you only are when you’re seventeen and I had to spend every other weekend, half the summer, half the goddamn year, with this woman who looked like my mother and smelled like my mother but who smoked weed and went to parties with guys from across the hall named Mac. I was thin and I had this bikini, it was white with fruit on it, you know strawberries and cherries and oranges. I bought it from Wet Seal which was a store only for special occasions that my parents took me to when they were trying to buy me off, which they were because they didn’t want me to be sad about the divorce. So that summer I lived with my mother and I spent the majority of my time at that pool with that bikini on because what the fuck else was there to do?
And then Eric started coming around. He would wave at me, a lift of his fingers that made me want to bite him and it scared me because I had never felt that way before. Eric never slouched, even when he was in the pool, which I liked about him because my father slouched, he worked an office job and had to wear a back brace sometimes but Eric didn’t seem to have that problem. He was older than me but only a little, and seventeen was basically twenty so what was the difference? Eric didn’t slouch and he waited for me, every day, asking me to get in the water, sometimes with a cigarette in his mouth.
“Come on, gorgeous,” he would say, and his voice was so deep and gravelly and I had never heard a voice like that. The boys at school had high voices and were short and played the tuba, which was fine in general as an instrument but didn’t do it for me in particular. None of the boys at school did it for me, not like Eric. I wanted to impress him, which was weird because I normally didn’t care at all about impressing people, not even the girls I rode the bus with or ran track with, but before I went to the pool I started straightening my hair and putting on a little bit of blush, because even though I was mostly mad at my mother, I remembered her saying that too much blush made you look like a whore. So I had this straight, smooth hair and this pink Barbie towel and this bikini and these sunglasses that were white with stars on the sides and I did all of that for Eric. For me too, I told myself but it was mostly for Eric. Obviously I couldn’t get in the water when my hair was straight.
He would lean forward, his knobby elbows almost knocking against my feet perched on the edge of my Barbie towel, and he would flash this smile at me that showed all of his teeth. That smile would be the reason I took too many Very Berry Smirnoff shots and why I stole money from my father’s wallet and why I thought I was in love, no really, I am Mommy, you just don’t understand him, please.
“You know, that fruit suit is my favorite of yours,” he told me once. “I bet you also taste sweet.” That made my stomach feel weird, and it was like I could see into the future, when his fist was gripping my hair too tight and the vein at the edge of his forehead was pulsing, pulsing, pulsing and I think he might have been calling me a whore even though I wasn’t wearing any blush at all. But then I was back at the pool and there were beads of sweat rolling down my back and there was this little drop of water on his lip that I couldn’t stop staring at and would it really be so bad, to get in just this once? To feel the cold against my skin and close my eyes against the burn and stretch my arms to paddle behind him to the deep end which was only 5 feet. I could stand up any time I wanted, couldn’t I?
So I sat on the side and Eric put his hands on my hips and I let him lift me into the water and it was every bit as good as I imagined it would be until it wasn’t. I never, ever went back to that pool after the August before my senior year. Not even with my mom, who ended up marrying Mac. He hit her and like mother, like daughter I guess. I told her once that Eric and I didn’t talk but that I wished we did because I still loved him. I asked her if she was angry about what happened to me. She asked if I wanted to go to Wet Seal.
Cassie McGhee writes in Richmond, Virginia.
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