Everybody shouted yes! Well, except for me. I’m a strawberry or vanilla girl. Mom keeps telling me she’s gonna make me a chocolate lover one of these days—no thanks!
They had sherbets and nondairy ices for the kids who couldn’t do milk-based food. So that’s what I had instead of the sundae. Okay, more points for Camp Green Glades.
After lunch the counselors took us to the latrine. Get this—we each had our own separate stall! And big! With super-supportive toilet seats. Okay, they’ve got me admiring the toilets. Sad, I know, but hey, necessities matter.
When we got back to our cabin, Sage told us to get out our swimsuits. “Now remember, while we’d love for you to try all the activities, you’re not required to, except maybe dinner. I’d hate for you to starve while you’re here—it tends to upset parents,” she joked. “So swimming will be our first official activity of the week, followed by arts and crafts.”
At the mention of parents, Karyn mumbled that she would be leaving for home in a few hours.
But I was thinking, Hmm. Art projects? That might be fun to try. But swimming? Good luck with that! A whole summer wouldn’t be enough to teach me.
Trinity must have seen the look on my face, because she asked, “You’re not a swimmer, Melody?”
I tapped, “No. I’m a sinker.”
Even Karyn giggled.
Actually, I didn’t know what I was. Last year Mom had signed Penny up for swimming lessons, and she took me a couple of times to watch. I liked sitting by the pool, listening to the echoes of the happy yelps and shrieks of the littles. I wondered how the pool people got the water to be so perfectly blue. When I got home, I looked up enough about chlorine to become a chemist.
It was fun watching Penny learn to kick and roll and paddle with her little safety baby floats on her arms and around her waist. But me? Swim? Not gonna happen.
“I tell you what,” Trinity said, her voice all honey. “Let’s just get your suit on and you can sit by the side—watch the others splash a bit, and maybe just let your feet get wet. Okay?”
I could tell she wasn’t going to give up, so I tapped okay. But she wasn’t gonna win this one.
So I added, “The lake is dangerous! It could have rip currents! Or a fast-moving tide!”
“Well, lakes don’t have tides, oceans do…,” Trinity explained. “But regardless, we’re not swimming in the lake. We’re swimming in the pool right by it. It’s eighty-five degrees, warm and shallow, and about as scary as a bathtub!”
Ooh, a pool, huh? I’d forgotten about the pool! Eighty-five degrees? Okay. Okay, fine. Let’s get this over with. We got my suit on quickly—actually, it had never been worn in the water, ha! It was a bright yellow—I probably looked like a stick of butter. Then we headed down to the pool before I had a chance to change my mind.
Along the outside of a long, low building by the pool—another awesome blue—hung a variety of swimming aids and hookups, as well as several different kinds of life vests. All of them were Crayola-bright, as if to say, Nobody drowns in our pool! A ramp was perched by the pool edge, apparently to help counselors lower a plastic-wheeled woven water wheelchair into the pool.
And was there music? Yes, soft classical music, the kind Mrs. V likes, was playing from loudspeakers. Classssssy!
Karyn was clearly a quick changer, ’cause she and Kim had reached the pool first, so they were just going in. I watched, fascinated, as Kim transferred Karyn into that pool wheelchair. It was the same color as those highway cones that Dad always complained about. Karyn was then slowly, slowly rolled backward down the ramp into the water, Kim beside her, close as could be, every centimeter of the way. As the water touched Karyn’s tush, I heard her growl, “I told you—I wanna go home!” But Kim gently persisted. A few more inches, a few more feet, and… wow, I actually saw Karyn smile!
“It’s… like a giant bathtub!” she cried out. And when water splashed up onto her face, she only laughed. She let Kim take her out of the chair, and as they bobbed in the water, I could tell she’d at least temporarily forgotten about her plans to pack up and leave.
Trinity, her suit a pattern of dark blue birds, tapped my shoulder. “Looks pretty fun, eh? Wanna try next?”
Nope. I refused to be swayed. I crossed my wrists and stared at her defiantly. No way I was doing this. No way. If someone let go of me for one second, down I’d go. So, no thank you.
Okay, to be fair, when I first saw the lake, I hadn’t even noticed the small swimming pool set off to the side. Now that I thought about it, the idea of putting kids at this camp into a large, potentially deep lake—full of who knows what kind of fish—would have been a pretty terrible idea. So I gotta admit, these Green Glades folks thought of everything. But I still wasn’t going in. Sinker. That’s me.
Trinity raised an eyebrow. “Look, girlfriend,” she said. “I am the one who will be taking you into the water.” I raised a so what eyebrow. Well, I think I did.
She paused and seemed to be thinking of what she could say to convince me. “Do you like my hair?” she asked all out of the blue, flipping her long, long braids.
I nodded.
“Do you know how much I paid to get these lovely braids?”
I had no idea—my hair never gets much past my shoulders—but I figured it was probably a lot.
She pursed her lips, then spun around, her braids extending in a glorious circle. “Check this out, Melody my friend!” She gave me a saucy look. “There is NO WAY I’m getting my hair wet today, or any day!”
I couldn’t help it; I cracked up.
She pulled her braids up into a giant pile on top of her head and secured it with the biggest rubber band I’d ever seen. “So you are plenty safe, okay? If you go down, I go down, and there goes my hair. No way, no how, no, ma’am!”
I honestly could not think of one counterargument. So I started to laugh again. “YOU WIN,” I finally tapped out.