Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,5

shed it, but now, it wrapped around me, heavy, like a winter coat.

You will bury your feet in the sand and hurry down the beach.

I groaned and stepped off the boardwalk, sinking ankle-deep into the hot sand.

You will hear the radio crackle with “Ambulance … Seventh Avenue.” You will see the crowd gathered at the waterline. Chaos. Shouts. Pedro will narrow his eyes at you when you break through, and scream, “Where the hell were you?”

They will tell you there’s no hope of saving the girl in the pink bikini. And you will know it is because of you.

I was usually too busy getting tripped up by my future to think about the past. But that afternoon, I couldn’t stop thinking about the past. I couldn’t get that little girl’s dead blue lips out of my mind. Those long eyelashes, coated in salt water and sand. She wasn’t one of my dreamland kids; she’d been living and breathing and growing on this earth. And now she was dead.

The girl had been playing in ankle-high water. We’d had a storm the night before, and she’d been dragged out by the strong undertow. In my memory, I’d shaken Pedro awake in time for him to point out the little girl. At the time I’d thought he was pointing out a piece of ass, but eventually I would have realized it was a drowning and I would have saved her. I did save her, dammit. I had the sore neck muscles to prove it, where her mother had hugged me so tightly, shrieking an endless supply of thank-yous into my ear.

In reality, though, Pedro slept through the noon siren, only to be awakened by the little girl’s mother screaming. Yeah, outwardly, it was Pedro’s fault. But my lunch break was up at noon, and I’d been late. I’d also known Pedro wasn’t in any condition to man the stand himself. I could easily have prevented it. But I didn’t.

It would take days or weeks or months to sort out what lay ahead in this new future, but I already knew some things. I knew that Bill Runyon, our captain, had summoned me to headquarters to can me. I knew he would give me that pity look, the one teachers reserve for students who “had so much potential” but still manage to become total screwups anyway. I knew he would use phrases like “good kid” and “take a breather” and that he would shift uncomfortably behind his desk while fingering the cords on the hood of his SPBP sweatshirt. He could single-handedly carry a four-man rowboat down the beach, but he was piss-poor at confrontation. I guess I could have left my whistle and ID on the bench outside headquarters, then biked away and considered my three-month tenure as Seaside Park lifeguard finito. That was what Pedro did; he’d wandered off quietly somewhere in the middle of the chaos, and I found his things lying on the bench. But I went in for the torture anyway. I had nothing better to do.

Besides, if I listened to Bill, chances were I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else. It was the thinking that killed me.

You will sit on the chair at Bill’s desk and start to fidget. He will pretend to be going through papers, but you will know he is just avoiding this.

I sat down and laced my fingers in front of me. I fidgeted even when I wasn’t nervous, though I couldn’t actually remember a time I wasn’t nervous about something. Bill riffled through papers, and I wondered if he was thinking about my mom. Supposedly, they’d gone to high school together, which was why he always asked me how she was doing. Usually with the same kind of face you’d have if you were inquiring about a puppy that got run over by an eighteen-wheeler.

No, I wasn’t the first Crazy Cross he’d had to deal with. But I knew that if he—if anyone—had the chance to see things the way my mom and I did, he’d be just like us. I’d been the only one who’d seen the happy ending—the one where I’d carried the kid to the sand and performed CPR until she regained consciousness, coughing up seawater, in my arms. Now that outcome existed only in broken fragments, bits of sensation—the relief when she finally began to stir, the feeling of her sandy cheek against mine as she hugged me—somewhere in a corner of my mind. The rest of