Finn had stepped in the pool because the pavement was burning his bare feet, his forgotten flip flops sitting in the bucket by the door at home, waiting for him, cool to the touch. The molten metal gate slammed behind him as he ran alongside the crystal water to the steps. He stepped in, his scorched feet soothed instantly. His breathing was quick, and his eardrums hammered against his skull, building up the pressure in his head. Finn gently covered his red ears with his small hands, cautious of the splashing kids around him, wincing as a few drops of water landed on his cheek. He felt a hand on his arm, turning him around. The tanned face of an older boy in a red suit was looking down at him, eyes hidden behind dark shades with silver frames. Finn watched his lips as the whistle fell out of his mouth and was caught by the black lanyard before hitting his chest. Finn focused his eyes, trying hard to watch what he was saying. He seemed angry.
“No running by the pool! Didn’t you hear me blow my whistle?” Finn saw. He shook his head, and smiled, embarrassed. The boy in red shook his head, his mouth still moving as he turned around. Finn couldn’t catch the last words, and he was thinking about asking him what he said, but the boy seemed like he didn’t want to be bothered from the few words he saw. His lower lip was tucked under his teeth before throwing it forward to make the ‘f’ sound, followed by the hard set of his jaw. Finn didn’t know the word, but one syllable words never seemed to be nice ones.
He turned back around, looking into the shallow water, staring at a leaf on the bottom of the pool. He carefully took another step down, getting his shorts wet, but before he could go all the way in his mom ripped him out by the arm to put on his sunscreen. She pulled out the blue and pink bottle, his face twisting into a scowl when he saw the word ‘baby’ inside a star under the brand, as if to bring as much attention to itself as it could, to say “Look over here! The little baby is putting on sunscreen!” Finn’s ears continued to burn, his cheeks turning deep pink. He looked back to the steps, where the other kids continued to splash and laugh. He told his mom to put the bottle away as soon as she took it out, complaining that he wasn’t a baby, that he was six now.
“But you sunburn as badly, and in this heat you’ll fry like an egg,” she signed. He watched as her nicotine stained fingers formed the words and threw them in his face. She pinched the pink roll above his hip a little too hard, leaving her white fingerprint behind with a shallow nailmark, like a crescent moon above a sunset.
She smeared the bright white lotion on his already warm skin, spilling out of the bottle onto her hands, more liquid than solid from the half hour of being cloistered in his mom’s straw bag underneath the towels, magazines, cigarettes, and sunglasses. Finn took the bottle from his mom, covering his hands with the sunscreen and painting stars and hearts across his chest before rubbing it in. He carefully put dots along his legs, from his ankles to right above his knees, about an inch apart. He brought the bottle to his other hand and did the same, from left wrist to left shoulder, then down again from right shoulder to right wrist, switching hands halfway through. The outside of the bottle became shiny and hard to hold onto, so he put it on the ground and looked at his hands, a shade too light and slimy, like the frog he had found in the creek by his house. Finn rubbed his hands into his face, closing his eyes to avoid disaster. He traced along the outside of his burning ears, careful to not drip inside. His heart raced anytime he came close to them, the pounding in his chest and his head shaking his hands. He looked across the pool, over to the garbage can, and down at the bottle, the ‘baby’ looking up at him, bright yellow like the glaring sun. He looked over at his mom, who was laying in the white plastic pool chair, reclining all the way back so that she looked like she were dead, her arms tight to her sides, hair spilling through the cracked straps. He thought of the spill of coins across the counter at the dollar store yesterday, and decided to just put it back in the bag.
Finn sat alone in his wet swim shorts on the hot asphalt, uneven in texture with little dark brown pebbles that stuck into his legs and left little red holes with white circles around them. The uncomfortable warmth on his legs felt like he had peed his pants. He was waiting for his sunscreen to dry. It was taking too long, because he had too much sunscreen on, which he told his mom, but she said that he would thank her later when his skin was soft and ‘Can-Sir’ free. He didn’t care, and he wouldn’t thank her, because his skin was already soft and his great aunt had had it and all she got was really skinny. His friend from school told him that the sun gives you freckles, too, and that when you rub sunscreen into your skin, you rub the freckles off. He liked his freckles, but the sharpness with which the words rolled off his mother’s tongue kept him from fighting back.
The hot day hurt his ears as they did in the heat, the swollen drums engorged, straining against his scarred ear canals, trying to escape. He looked into the shimmering pool, imagining the cold of the water soothing him. He closed his eyes, picturing himself under the water, swimming alongside the other kids, making signs back and forth with their hands to communicate because words didn’t work underwater, air bubbles escaping their open mouths as they laughed with each other. His thoughts were interrupted by the memory of searing pain, the freezing water burning a path past the deformed walls of his inner ears, building an unbearable pressure in his head. Finn touched the tops of his ears softly, the oily sunscreen rubbing off on his fingers.
He picked at the rubber that sat between the rectangles of cement, smothering anything green that might work its way through. Cigarette butts lined the breaks in the ground, squished between the blocks of pavement, overflowing with burnt tobacco and threatening to get stuck under his prying nails, spreading into his veins, poison crawling like a slug straight to his heart. He laid down, pressing his face into the hot, rough surface, closing his right eye and staring out of his left into the pool. Waves of heat rose from the cement, altering the air in front of him, like a secret curtain that he could pull open, exposing whatever hid behind the sky. The ground smelled wet, and he felt his head pound hard against it, absorbing every slap of a foot, drop of a bag, or splash of water. He rolled onto his back, closing both of his eyes, and the thump thump thump in his head became more intense as the rays of sun pressed into his skull. The pool was silent to him, as always. The only sound that kept him company was the hammering of his mind. Sometimes, he was afraid that it too would leave him alone.
Finn got up and walked over to his mom, standing over her, the outline of his head dark against her bare stomach, his ears sticking out like broken wings.
“Mom, can I go in now?” He smiled and gave her a thumbs up, hoping to land himself on her good side today.
She raised her glasses to frame her head.
“Put on your goggles first.”
Finn took off his glasses and put them in his mom’s left shoe. He went over to the bag and dug through, untangling them from his shirt, snapping the rubber hard into his fingers. They never fit right. His mom found them at the bottom of the lost and found last summer. The water leaked into his eyes anyway, and the suction pulled at his eyeballs like vacuums, making his eye sockets ache. They ripped at his scalp when he tried to put them on or take them off, and the goggle parts were so close together that they crushed his nose. And they were pink. But it meant he could open his eyes underwater, so he would do it. He would do it with or without goggles, but after a while his eyes would feel funny and get blurry, and his mom would yell at him and say “this is why you need glasses at your age!” and he would cry, but that would just make his eyes burn more. He forced them down onto his face and pressed each goggle into his eye with the palms of his hands, smearing the leftover sunscreen now mixed with sweat. The water would clean them.
He turned around to face his mom. “Now can I go?”
She rolled her eyes and pointed back toward the bag. His stomach dropped. He had hoped she had forgotten them.
He took out the blue plastic case with the smiley face sticker on the side and handed it to her. She opened it, using her fingernail to dig out a clean hunk of wax and forming it into a ball. She motioned for him to come stand in front of her, but he moved slowly. She grabbed his wrist, and jerked him toward her. He looked down and she shoved the wax deep into his swollen ear canals. He recoiled from her with a shudder, saying that she pushed too far. She pinched above his hip again, and told him to stay still. That the doctor had shown her how to do it, not him. He didn’t move as she pressed deeper into his ear, into his pounding eardrum. He could feel the sunscreen melting off of his body with his sweat. She formed another ball of wax and did the other ear, his goggles fogging up with moisture. The chlorine from the pool was invading his nose, making it hard to breathe.
She pushed him away from her and smiled without any love, her eyes telling him to leave her alone.
“Have fun, sweetie.”
Finn began to run to the side of the pool, but he looked up at the boy in red watching him from the top of his tall white tower, and slowed to a brisk walk. He sat at the edge of the pool, his little legs barely reaching the surface of the water. The pads of his feet broke the glassy water, the cold water foreign and stark against his sweltering body. The cement overhang around the pool was broken in a few places. He fit his hand against a crumbled section and imagined that he had fractured it, heard the crack of the ground as it split under his palm. He lifted his goggles off of his head and dipped them into the water, erasing the fog and the tears. He shook them once, then twice, and put them back on his head. They slid into their place much easier when they were slick with water. He would have to remember that. He touched the ends of the wax sticking out of his ears, flattening them into the contour on the inside. He knew if they stuck out like that, water could get in. He didn’t like that his mom had been the last one to touch his ears. Finn thought of the scar tissue that had built up from his surgeries, pushing against the wax from inside, remembering what the doctor told him, that no matter how cold it was, how soothing it seemed, water was not a friend to him. He looked around the pool, seeing the open mouthed kids splashing each other, screaming, no sound coming out. He closed his eyes, slipped off the edge of the pool, and into the water.
The abrupt change in temperate from the air to the water was shocking, but Finn remained unfazed, floating down deep into the water until his back touched the hard, fissured pool floor. The water cupped his face, like cold hands, and for a moment, his ears were the same temperature as his body, no different than the rest of him. He felt the tremendous weight of the water above him, but he felt as though he were floating through the air on a cloud. The pounding in his head calmed, and he reveled in true silence. The water was a complete neutralizer for Finn. Under the surface, everyone heard as he did. Nothing.
Aware of the goggles on his face, he opened his eyes. Turning his head to the side, pressing his ear against the cold pool floor, he saw the feet of other kids in the shallow end, jumping and hovering, but they moved slowly, giving him time to comprehend their movements without the necessity of sound. Far above him, the concentration of white light he knew to be the sun shattered into a million pieces, laying broken across the rippling surface of the pool, hiding in small waves that met each other and traded rays. Finn pushed himself up off the ground with his shoulders, ascending to the surface slowly, the bubbles that trickled from his mouth dancing toward the sun, racing him to the top. He smiled, and more bubbles escaped. He laughed, expelling one immense bubble that twisted through the water, to the surface where he watched it burst, obscuring the sun and scattering the light.
He began to fall to the floor again, in a slow, gentle rocking like he were on a hammock. Eventually, his lungs began to cramp, and then sting, and his ears began to hurt again, eardrums pounding with the increasing speed of his heartbeat. Heat radiated from his head, and he began to fear that the water around him would boil, cooking him in a chemical bath of chlorine. He felt his lungs burn, and thought of the bursting bubble. He crouched on the cement, and pushed himself up with the all the force his small muscles could muster. He shot upwards in a torrent of bubbles, the wax in his left ear threatening to dislodge, and right as he began to inhale the chlorinated water, he broke the surface, fresh air flooding his lungs. His vision was splotchy through the goggles, the black spots swaying in front of him, and he swam to the edge of the pool, folding his arms and lying his head down, the heat and pressure fully restored again.
As his sight returned, he lifted his head, coming face to face with his red faced mother and the tanned boy in red. He pulled Finn out of the water and onto the edge of the pool, laying him against the jagged cement. He goggles were crooked, and he couldn’t see what they were saying, but he felt the pure anger radiating from his mother. He looked back and forth from the boy to his mom, and focused on her.
“You can’t stay under the water for that long!” Her mouth was wide, but her words blended together. “You scared us half to death! I thought you were dying!” She threw the words from her mouth like daggers. He watched her tongue slam up and down in her mouth.
“I’m fine,” Finn signed, and looked at the boy for help, who was watching his hands.
“He seems fine. Ma’am, he’s fine,” the boy said, turning from Finn to his mom. She had stopped yelling now, but her breathing was heavy. She closed her eyes, and Finn saw her shoulders rise and fall. She stood up and walked back to her chair, lying face down, away from them. The boy turned back to Finn.
“Don’t do that again,” he said slowly, moving his mouth much slower and wider. “Understand?”
Finn nodded.
The boy nodded back, and walked back to his tower, climbing until he reached the top, where he sat under a red umbrella.
Finn breathed against the ground, his lungs pushing his back into the concrete. He kept his eye open, staring right into the sun, now a pale, blinding enemy rather than a playful friend, glaring right back at him. He threw his goggles into the water, feeling them sink down and down, until they tap against the light blue floor. He rolled in the pool after them, hitting the water gently, the cold welcome to his scraped body.
He spun in the water as he fell, his eyes open and watching: light, then blue, then light, then blue, then light, then blue. As he finally finished his descent, his head knocked softly against the ground, the wax from his left ear sliding out, falling to the floor next to him. His heart sped up, and immense panic began. He thought of the searing pain, the blinding light of hospital operating room, the school missed and the friends lost, his mom’s sharp nails in his chubby side. His eyes stung with salt, but the cold feeling of immense relief that flooded his hot ear calmed him. He lay in the water confused, suspended just above the blue cement. Finn had never not felt pain, and its absence left a foreign feeling in his ears. The ice cold water touched his ear gently before trickling in, healing every scar in his ear, soothing the red, angry walls until they almost didn’t bother him. Finn slowly removed the wax from his right ear, incredulous. The water surrounding him knew what to do, and he floated in a state of shock and bliss, his head light and blue.
He knew it could only last an instant, that the pain would come any second, but however short that instant was, it would be worth it. Salty tears again poured from his shiny eyes, blending into the surrounding atmosphere and dissipating, but the panic he had felt was gone, cool, unfamiliar peace taking its place. His lungs began to sting, but he felt nothing. He looked up at the water and the sun, a friend once again, and his vision began to darken around the edges. The dark outline of human forms, stark against the bright sky, outside the pool and a million miles away, towered over him, watching him like a fish in a bowl. As the surface broke, his head began to feel heavy, pulling him into the floor. He smiled against the water, and fell asleep in silence.