Swim Back to Me Read Online Free Page A

They were known in the neighborhood to smoke pot, and I had a feeling they were smoking it now.
    “What do you mean, ‘great’?” Sasha said. “It is great, we can ask them.”
    “Ask them?”
    “To sponsor us.”
    I stared at her. “We can’t ask them.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because … Because …” They’ll laugh at me, I wanted to say, but didn’t. “They’re kids,” I finally managed.
    “We’re talking about six dollars,” she said. “Anyway, SCRA’s probably locked, what choice do we have?”
    “Let’s at least try,” I said, and I veered away from her toward the entrance, a set of double doors flanked by open railwork that allowed you to peer in or call to someone, but not to reach your hand in to unlock the door.
    Which, it turned out, was locked. From inside, I heard the sound of water lapping against the sides of the pool, rhythmically, as from the motions of a swimmer. “Hello?” I called halfheartedly through the rails, but no one replied, and I figured Harvey and the Volvo driver were both in the water, one in each of the two lanes set aside for lap swimmers, both moving with the monumental slowness of the aged.
    “Richard,” Sasha said, and I turned and found her standing where I’d left her with a high-wattage smile on her face that told me the guys at the fence were watching. “Come on,” she said loudly. “I want to ask these guys something.”
    “What?” I said, but after a moment I joined her and we continued through the parking lot and entered the dead field where the bike rack was. On the other side of the fence was the back playground of my old elementary school. The tether balls had been taken down for the weekend, and the poles stood like leafless trees in an even line.
    I knew who two of the guys were: Eric Rumsen, the younger brother of a neighborhood girl who’d babysat me years earlier; and Kevin Cottrell, whose father was a colleague of my father’s in the History Department. Two of the others looked familiar: Stanford kids, too, but college age now or from the older residential neighborhood, or the offspring of faculty in far-flung departments like Physics or Art. The only one I’d never seen before was a tall, lanky guy leaning against the bike rack, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. In place of a shirt he wore a vest of patched-together velvet, the pieces green and burgundy and navy blue, and his arms were muscled and tan.
    “How’s it going?” Sasha said, and a couple of the guys laughed.
    “We’re cool,” Eric Rumsen said. “How about you? A little warm? Kind of hot?”
    Dismayed, I turned to Sasha, but she was smiling. I thought of Eric’s sister: she’d been nice to me, had brought me a book about fishing once, with glossy color pictures of all the fish you could catch in the western United States. She’d taken me by their house one day, to get something she needed, and I remembered her room, the walls covered with billowy cloths from India. I’d walked by Eric’s room, too, could call up the B.O. smell, the unmade bed.
    “Have you guys heard of the Walk for Mankind?” Sasha said. “It’s this fund-raiser, and we’re doing it tomorrow, and we need one more pledge to get to this higher level of earning.”
    Kevin Cottrell was looking everywhere but at me. I remembered a swimming party when I was about six and he was about ten—it was at the house of the then chair of the department, and while the grown-ups stood around on the patio and talked, the five or six kids all played in the pool, except Kevin. He had a book, and he sat reading by himself on a lounge chair the whole time. Now he nudged one of the other guys and turned to Sasha. “How much do you need?”
    “Not much,” she said eagerly. “Thirty cents a mile—just six dollars altogether.”
    “And what do we get?” said the guy Kevin had nudged. He had a pink face and a snub nose, and pale blond hair that reached halfway down his back.
    Sasha glanced at me.