The summer Lily turned eleven, her parents took her and her brother to the lake for their annual vacation. She hadn’t even swum in real water, just the chlorinated pool at the high school where she took lessons, so she felt cautious about the pebbly sand and the lapping of water around her feet. She could see a wooden dock floating a little ways out, and kids were jumping off, trying to make big splashes, hooting, laughing and back stroking in the distance.
She was a good swimmer in the pool at home. She could push off one blue concrete side, plunge under the aqua water and pull herself underwater with mermaid’s arms and frog’s legs, all the way to the other. She had done it so often that she didn’t even gasp when she came up, and she could turn around, take ten deep breaths and do it again. This was what she knew how to do, all alone.
She walked with pinched steps into the lake, holding her arms together on her chest. The water was chilly. When the bottom of her bathing suit got wet she stood for a moment, waiting, cooling her body and decided to dive, do it all at once. She took ten breaths and pointed her arms into the cerulean sky and jumped in, in an arc, then pulled her arms and stayed under as long as she could stand it. She opened her eyes, and instead of the black lane lines of the pool, she saw a clear, blue brown background of sparkling sand suspended, and some big black rocks. She wanted to swim underwater forever.