Fiction
The Plunge Pool
Sometimes you just want to float. Sometimes you can’t.
Vin was on the phone. Warren and Trace were going swimming on Memorial Day at this quarry out near Perryopolis and did I want to come? All I can say now is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.
It was Saturday afternoon, Memorial Day weekend. I had been cleaning the kitchen when he called. The window was propped up with a two-by-four. A warm humid breeze blew in, slightly tinged with sulfur from the coke works over the hill. Kitchen cleaning hadn’t been our specialty that year. Now there was a smell inside that wouldn’t go away, like we were culturing penicillin. The open windows helped with that, sulfur or not. The warm weather also meant the radiators had stopped banging.
Vin and I had gotten the apartment so we could skip the long bus commute to campus every day from home. At least, that’s what we told our folks. My year in the apartment had been a blur. Grain punch in red solo cups. Differential equations. FORTRAN code. Loud parties and Aerosmith and Boston and the Cure and R.E.M. and The Violent Femmes. Taking Marci to the top of fire escape to make out. By February I’d been hundreds of dollars in debt to Vin for rent and food and in danger of failing half my classes. My plan for the summer was to work on campus, banking as…
