Swollen by Melissa Lion

Author:Melissa Lion
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307433800
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

chapter nine

And then I missed a meet. I’d forgotten that the meet was at our school. When I didn’t see school buses lined up, I thought that maybe I’d confused the date and I left with Farouk. The ocean had warmed suddenly after an Indian summer and we wore shorts and waded into the clear blue water at the Shores.

Farouk told me to shuffle my feet so I wouldn’t step on a stingray. I didn’t believe that there were stingrays in the water so close to San Diego, but as we walked in farther and the water wet my shorts and made them stick to my legs, I felt a flutter in the sand around my ankles and looked down at my toes. A stingray the size of a dinner plate pulsed and shuddered away from me.

That afternoon we won the meet. The next day my homeroom teacher read the morning announcements, and the names of the girls on my team who placed first, second and third. I blushed and dug deep into my chair. I could have won that race. It would have been my first showing.

But as she went on and read about the upcoming cheer-leading tryouts and the half-day for teacher evaluations I knew that there were moments in life that were worth sacrificing for.

After I saw that stingray, Farouk dove into the water in his shorts and T-shirt and swam to me. The water he was pushing from his body swirled around my legs like the stingray and he put his arms around me and surfaced. The curls in his hair captured droplets of water and he pressed his wet body against mine. His skin was cool and my clothes became heavy from his.

“Dive in,” he said, and kissed my neck beneath my ear.

“I have my clothes on.”

And he pulled me under. My shorts and shirt floated around me as the water stung my eyes and my hair rose from my scalp and shoulders. I was light, weightless. And then Farouk pulled me up. But I could have stayed under, watching the sand hover just above the surface, turning blue as a set came in and the water deepened above me while the sun moved farther away.

And so I wasn’t nervous when I went to the coach’s office to find out what my punishment was. I stood in her doorway, my breathing deep and clear the way she told us to breathe when we lay on the grass picturing our wins.

As I waited for her to look up from the paperwork, I was aware that my body was glowing on the inside through the places Farouk had touched—my hip, the back of my neck and the inside of my thigh that last afternoon after he handed me a towel and I dried myself and my clothes, and despite the surfer boys changing into their wetsuits near us, towels wrapped around their bare bodies, Farouk pressed me against the car door and let himself go too far.

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