Surface Tension Read Online Free Page B

would be low; I knew that. It had been a dry year. A dry couple of years.
    But I wasn’t going to go over there – not this time.
    Things were different now. I was older, for one thing, and smarter. I was only here to swim – to do my six without bandaids and stealth attacks. I wasn’t about to fill my pockets full of stones and head off down a drowned road to who knows where.
    I peeled my shirt off over my head and hung it on a low branch. Shoes, socks, shorts. I shook my orange towel out like a bird showing off its bright feathers and laid it down on the bank.
    Then I took a deep breath, a handful of steps, and kicked off, out and away from the shore.
    The water was cold and warm and clear and dark. It was so many things all at once.
    Dragonflies hung in the air nearby, ghosting their shadows on the water around me. Tiny stick insects skimmed their way across the surface, following their own invisible roads.
    There was nothing in my way and no one to bother me.
    There was only the lake, open and empty – the swimming area somewhere on the far opposite shore, the
No Swimming
sign stuck out there somewhere in the middle, obscured by the sunlight that dappled the water’s flat surface. And in the distance on the right, the dam wall curving high above the lake. There was a viewing platform up there we visited on a school excursion. You could push a button and listen to Finkle’s voice explaining about hydro-electricity and irrigation and the future of the region. About the catchment up in the mountains that fed the water through giant pipes all the way down to the power station up the river, where the engineers and the computers decided how much water had to go where, and when it had to go there. You could
ooh
and
aah
about the grandeur of his vision and the invisible weight of history.
    Or you could turn around, towards the lake, and think about the weight of water on top of your town.
    Part of me wanted to swim out towards it, out into the centre, to put my head down and just keep going and going, and see where I ended up.
    Instead, I hugged the shoreline, swimming parallel with the bank.
    I did my six and probably another six as well.
    Maybe more. It was hard to tell.
    There were no ladders or flags up here, no big black numbers reminding me how far I’d come, how far I still had to go. There was no wall to slap and turn around and rinse-repeat, again and again. There were no bombies or tennis balls or sudden waves of water slapping me in the face.
    It made me want to go further. It made me feel like I could.
    I swam until my arms hummed, until my legs began to ache and drag through the water behind me, until I could no longer ignore the ragged rise and fall of my chest in its rattling cage.
    Then I sat in the shallows, willing my breathing to slow, to smooth itself out. I let my legs sink heavily into the warm mud, and looked out across the lake.
    You couldn’t see the other side, not really. You could pretend you did – tell yourself that a quick flash over there in the distance was a jet ski or a speedboat. But the truth was it might just as easily have been a bird swooping low along the water, or a speck swimming haphazardly across the surface of your eyeball.
    All you could see for certain were the tops of trees, the very tips of things. It was weird, but the water was in the way somehow, stopping me from seeing what I knew was there.
    It’s funny how water curves. How when you have a still surface and the right kind of angle it becomes a kind of skin over itself, a bubble reaching and reaching but never quite bursting.
    Surface tension
, our teacher Mr Chadwick called it last year. He showed us how we could pile coin after coin into an already-full glass without it overflowing. How we could thread a needle into the surface so it would float rather than sink.
    There were other things as well. The way water makes light bend, the way it can make something as straight as a rod look twisted and broken. I had