Hottest Summer on Record

On very hot days, we would pay five dollars to sit in a dark room and hear haunting music played on surround-sound speakers. They called them chill chambers. I wouldn’t get the chills from every song, but maybe some people did. I would put my hands on my damp hair, elbows out so my armpits didn’t fuse to themselves, and wait for the shivers to come.

It was cheaper than the cold pool at the Kirkland Community Center, at least. Only the rich kids went in the cold pool, and sometimes the high school football team when they won a big game. Underwater, the walls of the cold pool were refrigerated, smooth and reptilian, like the inside of a lunchbox. I had been to the cold pool only once, and it wasn’t even a very hot day.

It was the days that we were willing to try anything — that’s when we went to the chill chambers. Dad warned us to watch out for scammers — it was true that some of the chambers were just abandoned public restrooms with some guy playing tunes from his laptop speakers. Dad said these were the same guys who used to set up with buckets of ice in front of the Chihuly museum and hawk ice-cold water bottles at jacked-up prices. I didn’t really believe that Dad had ever seen this, because he said that when you bought a water bottle, it would sweat cold droplets, and that can’t be real — I took physics, but that’s too insane.

In the chill chamber, sometimes I close my eyes and imagine that instead of sticky, stinky film, my pores turn plastic like the walls of the cold pool and spit out bead after bead of sweet ice water.