Below by Meg McKinlay

Author:Meg McKinlay [McKinlay, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780763663803
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2011-06-05T14:00:00+00:00

We didn’t make plans for the next day or the day after that.

We didn’t make any plans at all. We just turned up.

Sometimes I got there first, and sometimes Liam did. When I saw his bike parked alongside the break in the fence, I caught myself smiling.

I wondered if he did the same.

When we went out to the tree, we took turns on the raft — me swimming one way and Liam the other. He didn’t need to stay alongside me anymore, though. I was getting stronger. I was coughing and spluttering less.

And I was getting faster. Even without flags and black lines, I could tell. The platform seemed closer, and not only because the shoreline was continuing to recede.

I still couldn’t come close to Liam. When we swam next to each other, he pulled away from me immediately.

When I asked how he made it seem so easy, he shrugged. “It’s all underwater.”

That’s why good swimmers look so relaxed, he said. You can’t believe they’re going that fast because it’s all invisible. Everything that matters happens out of sight, under the surface. I nodded, thinking of Amber and her clean, butter-slice stroke.

Christmas came and went, and there were days when I couldn’t get up there. There were days when Mom said we should spend time as a family, and we went to the pool, where Mom got mad because I wouldn’t wear the rainbow-striped bikini she had bought me for Christmas. Or around to the Point, where I swam out past the Jet Skis till Mom started yelling and waving her arms, where I stared out across the surface, wondering if Liam was over there on the other side, hauling himself down.

Liam and I cleared off the road, at least as much as we could. As you went farther up the bank, it veered off into the bush, where undergrowth and trees had grown up and over it.

We walked down the road toward the lake, into the water, but we kept bobbing up to the surface. I told Liam about my idea, of putting stones in my pockets, and he laughed.

We tried swimming down the road, following it as far as we could underwater. It was tricky, though. It was hard to stay down without anything to hang on to and difficult to stay with the line of the road when it was dark down there and everything was covered with mud.

Slowly, but noticeably now that we were paying attention, the water level continued to drop. We had to walk farther to get to the water. We made it farther down the road. We wondered how close we were — to the town, to the houses, to the places where our families used to live.

Out at the platform, we pulled ourselves down the pegs. The water got lower and lower. We dived farther and farther, counting ourselves down.

When Liam went under, I timed him so I’d know when to panic. After a while, I stopped worrying. The bubbles always came back up.

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