Morning all. It is time to wake up the brain and see what the sentence above shakes out. Set the timer to fifteen minutes and lets get this Thursday started.
I want to think about this one some more and then spend some time with it. Maybe at lunch time.
Thursday, April 17th: He swallowed hard.
He swallowed hard. The sound of the crowd enjoying themselves below faded away. White noise instead filled his ears. He heard it a loud shuuush blocking out everything else. He knew the others were watching him even if he couldn’t hear them. They had all taken their turns. He joined, dragging his feet and now he was the last to go. No one was behind him.
‘I could back out,’ he thought. With no one behind him, the ladder was clear. He could back up, climb down and have his feet back on solid ground.
He thought of the others watching him retreat. To climb down without even having tried. They would never let him forget it. Dave was already the one off. Everything about him was at least slightly unlike the others. He knew that if he backed out now it would be more than mocking.
He would never be one of them.
This was his only chance to fit in, to be accepted. To show that despite everything, he was supposed to be there.
‘Best do it at a run,’ he decided.
He took a deep breath, fixed his gaze somewhere past the end of the diving board and ran toward the end. The board was springy, pushing back with each pounding footstep. Somehow it seemed longer than when he was standing by the ladder behind the other boys. His feet thumped, the bending growing greater as he approached then end and then he leaped, the spring of the end of the board bouncing him up slightly.
Dave was airborne. Feet off the ground, body floating through mid air. Weightless. Then gravity grabbed him, pulling him down. Remembering the lessons learned from the smaller diving boards, he shifted, arms extended hands placed one over the other to make a point while his legs jackknifed up into a straight line behind him. He was an arrow heading for the water below.
He zoomed down.
His hands touched the water and he took a breath just before his head submerged. He angled his descent through the water to avoid the bottom of the pool and swum out and up, head breaking the surface. He did it. He jumped and didn’t back down.
Just like the others. Dave made his way to the ladder and hauled himself out of the pool. The eerie white noise was gone, his head now clear. He looked around. People played, splashed, laughed. Dave frowned as his eyes scanned the group. The others weren’t there. They were gone.
He looked back towards the board. He hadn’t been up there that long had he. His head swiveled Eyes seeking the clock on the wall. He checked the time as he stepped onto the board, after George dove off. He had been surprised to be looking down slightly on the clock instead of up.
No, it was as he thought. It may have felt like a life time but he had not really delayed. He checked the time while waiting for George to swim out of the area and taken he breaths as George made it to the side. Not a lot of time passed, certainly not long enough for the others to get bored and leave him. Dave wandered away from the ladder, circling the pool and looking down the exits and corridors he passed as well as into the pool itself.
They weren’t there.
“Looking for your friends, love?” he heard a voice say. Dave looked over. An older woman wearing a flowered swimming cap sat on the edge of the pool. Her white legs were blue veined and reminded him of the cheese his grandfather liked. Roquefort. She was swishing her legs in the water. “They left,” she told him. “As soon as the boy before you climbed out of the water.”
Ten til Midnight 