The stands are loud and smell of watermelon bubblegum and chlorine. And it wasn’t always this way. It was a dead sport. And everyone is screaming. Like, the girls I mean. They’re screaming encouragement because the kid who lost his sister is climbing the thirty-three-foot platform.
I mean—
If you didn’t know, his sister plunged from seven-hundred-forty-six. It’s our dark secret they don’t show in the post cards. She was two grades higher than me. Her Facebook is still there but was changed to, Christine Smith Memoriam. The last post was from a boy in her grade saying, shouldn’t we take this down, it’s creepy. She would be in first year college now.
And her brother’s name is Thomas, I think.
And, I don’t know—
He’s climbing up, up, and he’s all skin and bones and muscle which is why half the girls in here came to watch. To see the grade twelve boys in small bathing suits from the underside view.
And the other half?
I’m in the other half. Wondering if this is the sequel. Like, in health class when we learned about self-image and eating disorders. Sympathy eating is when you have a friend or sibling who’s overweight so you also become overweight. Not because you’re hungry or depressed even. You do it as a sick form of guilt.
Thomas is at the top, deep breathing damp air. He’s visualizing his spins. And maybe he’s planning on getting stuck in mid rotation. I wouldn’t believe it was anything other than accidentally on purpose. He looks, I don’t know, like, guilty up there or whatever.
Brothers aren’t always nice to their sisters.
Like—
And his dad is the loudest one in here. He’s already forgotten only a summer ago. He’s in a bloodlust of living, like, vicariously or whatever. Remembering the days when he was skinny and could do three spins before hitting the water.
It was seven-hundred-forty-six feet before his daughter hit the water.
Oh my God—
Thomas jumps and he’s spinning, spinning, and he’s a human corkscrew in midair and he’s dropping quick and, like, is this what it was like for his sister? And he’s outstretched like a needle and I could count every rib the way the cold has tightened his skin and he hits the water like a pebble and not a man and he climbs out of the water shivering and maybe crying and he doesn’t look at his dad at all.
Even with, you know, all that “Way to go, Tommy Gun!”
He just stands there for a long while looking for someone in the stands. He snaps his bathing suit. He pushes the water from his hair with his hands. He blows the droplets from his lips in a raspberry.
The judges, there’s three of them, and they hold up their cards.
R.J. Patteson is an author/screenwriter from Toronto. His other stories can be found in X-R-A-Y, Ghost Parachute, and MoonPark Review among others. He tweets @rjpatteson