When I Was Five I Killed Myself by Howard Buten

Author:Howard Buten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BISAC: FIC000000; FIC025000; FIC043000
ISBN: 9781468309959
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2014-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

First you go into the locker room. The lockers are smaller than the ones at school, but they are louder when they get slammed, like guns in my head. All the children run around and scream and hit each other and it makes me very afraid. They give you a towel but it isn’t soft like at home, it scratches me. You have to undress in front of everybody. They give you a bathing suit, but it isn’t yours, and they make you go to the showers which is a big room that is very hot and full of other children that you don’t know and the spray is so hard it stings when it hits you and the room smells like naked people.

Then you have to cross the hall to get to the pool. It is very cold in the hall and the floor is slippery. I fell. Everybody laughed at me until Rudyard came and picked me up and looked at them and they all stopped. And he held my hand and we went into the pool part.

He put a thing on me, it looks like a football with cloth over it. First he put one on himself, only it was too small to go around, so he put two together and put them on. It looked funny. I would have laughed if I wasn’t so afraid. But before he put one on me he took the buckle and breathed on it and rubbed it in his hands. “I hate it when they’re cold,” he said, and he buckled me up. And it wasn’t cold.

There were many other children in the pool. They were jumping in and splashing and yelling very loud. Rudyard looked at me and put his hand out. He held my hand and we walked together into the shallow part. It was very cold. I almost yelled, but Rudyard yelled first. He yelled, “It’s too cold!” and he wouldn’t go in. “Rudyard,” I said, “the other children will think you’re a baby.” And he looked at me and said he didn’t care what anybody thought. Except me. And I said, “We could just go in to where we can stand up.” And we went.

We were standing in the shallow part and there were children splashing all around. Rudyard yelled at them and they stopped splashing. He yelled that he was afraid of the water. He told them to go to another part of the pool to splash, and they went. He didn’t even care if they thought he was a baby. And I was glad he made them go.

“What do you think?” he said to me, and pointed out into the pool. “Should we try?”

I was scared, only he was scared too.

“I’m too short,” I said. “It’s too deep for me.”

“Well,” said Rudyard. “If I carried you, you wouldn’t be too short, and I wouldn’t be so afraid because you’d be with me.”

I looked at him. He put his hands around me very soft and then he lifted me up and held me tight.

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