A shrill whistle sounded behind me. I cringed and turned around.
Deborah was holding up a whistle she’d looped around her neck and grinning. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just, we have a lot of swim tests to get through. Maybe we should hur—”
She was right, I realized before she even finished. So I jumped.
Splash!
The water wasn’t too cold. It just felt like I was being pelted with ice cubes by a bunch of angry polar bears. It made every part of my body want to shrivel, and I gasped so hard I had to remind myself to paddle and stay afloat.
Immediately my teeth started chattering. Br-r-r-r-r-r-r. Br-r-r-r-r-r.
All right, I thought, let’s get this over with!
Deborah looked down at me from the pier and raised a stopwatch from her pocket. “Okay, start swimming for the raft!” she called.
I turned around, located the raft, and made a beeline there. Moving was good. Moving was better than being still, because the tiny bit of exercise warmed me a little.
By the time I reached the raft, I was feeling a little more confident. I slapped the side and turned around.
“Almost done!” Deborah shouted. “Now push off just a little ways—there! Good! Okay, I’m starting the timer. You tread water there until I tell you to stop!”
I moved my arms and legs, trying to do the minimum I needed to keep myself afloat. This was the part of the test I’d been dreading. Treading water always made me nervous. I was so aware of how tired I was getting, how my breath was becoming more labored. How long can I really keep this up? I’d never timed myself. I just hoped I had two minutes in me.
“One minute down!” Deborah shouted after what felt like forever. “One to go!”
I kept moving. Treading, treading, treading . . . I glanced at the shore and, at that moment, remembered that neither Sam nor Bella had returned to the lake from the bathroom or the cabin. Hasn’t it been long enough? How long had Deborah’s test taken, anyway? Surely it didn’t take that long to—
“AAAAUUGH!”
Suddenly my head plunged under the surface and my eyes, nostrils, mouth, and ears filled with lake water. My throat burned and, in my shock, I gasped, letting the air out of my lungs. Something had grabbed my foot and yanked it down! I began choking and gagging, reflexively trying to pull my foot away from whatever held it, but it was no use. I tried to shimmy around, working up enough force to pry my foot away from whatever—whoever?—held it. After a few seconds, my eyes adjusted and I could see a few inches in front of me in the green, murky water. Deborah had been right—the floor of the lake was covered with long green plants. But that didn’t feel like what had my foot.
I looked down at my leg and pulled again. What I saw made me gasp, which only made me swallow more lake water, gagging more. . . .
It looks like a human figure.
The water was too murky to make out much more than a shadow. But I could clearly see arms, legs, a head. This was no reed!
Terrified, I yanked one more time on my foot.
This time, it came free.
I didn’t hesitate. I paddled my arms toward the surface, kicking behind me as hard as I could.
It was probably only a second or two before my head broke the surface of the water, but it felt like days. I gasped in a huge mouthful of air, which just pushed more water down my throat, making me gag again. But the air felt heavenly. I pushed my hair back from my forehead and blinked rapidly, trying to see.
When my vision returned, I saw Deborah watching me curiously from the pier. “Nancy, are you all right? That’s exactly where I went down. There must be a reed. . . .”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t a reed!” I called.
Deborah looked surprised. “No?” she asked. “Well, you probably can’t be sure. Did you see—”
“It was a person!” I yelled. “I saw a figure underwater! It looked like a person!”
Deborah looked at me for a moment, confused, and then her expression hardened to a frown. Meanwhile, the other counselors behind her tittered and began whispering to one another. Bess and George exchanged a concerned glance and then both looked back at me, as if to say, Really?
That’s when I realized how insane it sounded.
How would a person be able to breathe underwater? Where had he or she come from? What possible motive could he or she have to attack me—or maybe Deborah and me—under the water?
But as I remembered those terrible few seconds underwater, I was sure of it. I could see the curve of the figure’s shoulder, feel its fingers on my ankle. They were fingers on my ankle. Not leaves or reeds. I was positive.
Wasn’t I?
“We’re having someone come out to trim the reeds at the bottom of the lake,” Deborah announced at dinner that night. “We think this should address any problems we had during swim tests today.” She glanced at me, and I looked down at my chicken nuggets.