I saw her for the first time while sitting
on the bank of the pond, my afternoon sanctuary in the woods behind my house.
Her head emerged from the calm water, with long blonde hair slicked back and
the tips spreading out on the sunlit surface like tiny snakes dispersing in all
directions. She caught sight of me immediately and produced the most beautiful
smile I’d ever had directed at me. As her shoulders bobbed rhythmically with
the water, I noticed she wore a collared long sleeved shirt.
I was taken aback by my unexpected
visitor and had a fleeting urge to jump to my feet, but her beautiful gaze
hypnotized me and kept me seated. She looked about my age, but not like any
girl at my high school. She had a wild and carefree spirit that only a girl
swimming in a pond fully clothed could have on a humid autumn day. Her face was
completely washed clean of make-up, but her skin was so fair and flawless that it
would have only distracted from her beauty.
“Hey there,” she said, almost shouting at
me over nature’s conversations of birds and trees. “I’ve seen you here before.”
“You have?” I asked. My body released a
shutter from her stalkerish statement. “Do you go to Rose Madden High, too?”
“Once upon a time,” she answered,
gliding through the water with a graceful breast stroke.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Once upon a time there was a girl named
Eileen who went to Rose Madden High.”
She found her footing as the water
became shallow and stood up, now with only her legs submerged. She wore washed
blue jeans below her plaid, button-down shirt, which clung tightly to her
dripping body.
“Do you always go for afternoon swims in
your jeans, Eileen?”
“Why, is that weird?”
“A little.”
“Then I guess I’m a little weird,” she
snapped back with a smirk.
Our conversation continued uninterrupted
for a few minutes, but she never got out of the water. She splashed around, back
floated away, and swam back to the shallow edge—never allowing the pond to
fully calm.
“Hey, Davy Boy!” a voice called to me
from the thick of the trees. It was followed by the crunching of dried leaves
as footsteps approached. “What, you too good to wait for us?”
I looked over my shoulder and saw Toby,
Stretch, and Tiny wading through the brush.
“I got board so I went on ahead.” I turned back to Eileen and was about
to introduce her to my friends (who were never going to believe I was talking
to such a smoking hot girl), when I discovered she was gone. The pond was still
except for an expanding ripple like someone had thrown a rock into the water. But
if she was under there, she never
came up for air.
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