Pool Hoppers by Phoebe Gibb

*THE BLUE FROG 3^rd PLACE WINNER*

August flies by like four drunk chicks in a Nissan Altima, and the need for one last hurrah is urgent, as if we all might disappear. I’m coming down with something, but a viral infection proves easier to ignore than the thought of where-were-yous, of pictures I’m not in. And so I take the medicine. 

We spent the summer sprawled across Bea’s dusty bedroom floor, lit up by hand-rolled cigarettes and some suggestion of a black and white movie, or sardined together on a blanket in the park until way past sundown, drinking the newest seltzer flavour, sharing bad homemade focaccia, and complimenting each other’s peasant blouses.

Tonight, the sport is pool hopping. The place is the park at midnight, where the old rec centre juts out from a hillside. If you scale a famous tree growing up the hill, you’re able to drop over the 10-foot fence encaging the in-ground pool. Five of us ignore the no trespassing signs, maneuver one-handed with our cans of hibiscus sour. 

It’s not that I’m a heavy drinker, or prone to the kind of friendships that feel like a negotiation, though it’s possible my Pisces moon has afforded me certain proclivities. I’ve always argued you can’t know what’s enough until you know what’s too much. I rethink the story I tell myself when Bea says, with surprising authority, Lins, you pour a good beer. Bea, who can fill her hollow leg with a bottle and a half of Cab Sauv and recite the alphabet backwards. It feels better than it should. 

We shed our clothes in the ambient fog and hurl ourselves into the cool expanse, and it occurs to me just how excited I am to see my friends naked. Emmy recites text messages from the boy she’s talking to while Chey blasts a tinny version of Vivaldi’s “Spring” from her phone. Bea shotguns another beer, and I think, how cool. How cool it is that we do this. My friends effervesce like our alcohol, and, soaking in the casual intimacy of our collective bathing, I finally see their fishtails. 

Not the fairytale kind, but the kind in the oldest renditions—open and beautiful and split down the middle for fucking—before history sewed them up. They’re barely there, nearly translucent underwater. I am transfixed. Maybe it’s the cough syrup. I watch them dart freely under the protection of our baptismal breaking and entering, and in that moment, I am so glad I came. 

Then a light that is not the moon shines in my face, and I swallow a gulp of chlorine. An unfriendly voice tells us party’s over. We scramble the arduous climb over the fence and down the hill; Nell overshoots her footing and feels the full decline, shredding her knee, Chey pukes up seafood alfredo. It’s horrible but we are together, so we will of course laugh about it later. The guard lectures us at the bottom of the hill, and that’s when we realize Bea didn’t make it. We exchange silent theories. Did she find a hiding place? Did she get away?

We’re left with a warning because we are flirtatious and pathetic. Unmagical, readable, digestible, soaking through our cutoff shorts. The night is darker now and everyone’s ready to go home to their boyfriends. Not without Bea, I say. We’ll call her tomorrow, says Nell, palming the gore on her leg. Quit worrying. But I can’t recall how we left her in that soggy panic. I imagine my friend with too much to drink now floating like Ophelia, tail limp beneath the water’s surface, and I need to know if she’s okay—otherwise it’ll somehow be my fault. We’re supposed to be together, after all. I took the medicine. 

But this wasn’t part of the deal for the others, and I’m left with their empties. Embarrassingly, I can almost hear Bea mocking my lonesome ascent back up the hill, back up the tree: Mom Friend. 

Yes, I’ll tell her. One of us has to be the sponge.

I’m about to swing my tired limbs from tree bark to iron fence when a coughing fit threatens to collapse what’s left of my lungs. And then that once sturdy branch, that terminal boundary, gives way to my own bulking fishtail. I hadn’t ever seen it before, hadn’t even known it was there. The funny part is, on my way down, I’m still trying to find her. The thought of winter and the kind of cold that hurts to breathe meets wet concrete, and I sink deeper than the deep end, in a fantastic cloud of colour and scales.

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PHOEBE GIBB — Phoebe is a Toronto-based writer. A 2023 Slamdance Mentorship Award finalist for her horror screenplay Drip, which is currently in development with a Canadian producer. Her work has been recognized by Screencraft, Vancouver’s GEMS Genre Film Lab, and has appeared on the Coverfly Red List and in online lit mag Maudlin House. Phoebe graduated from York University with an Honours BFA in Screenwriting. 

Art by RURI KATO — Ruri is an artist based in Tokyo, Japan. Her current artwork primarily focuses on the experience of isolation. She explores the process of finding sanctuary within oneself and the world often in the most mundane of places, like the sunlight or a moment with an energetic colleague that carries on the conversation while you are in the toilet cubicle. Ruri currently works in a range of mediums, including gouache, pencils, and digital. She also enjoys a private project of writing fantastical stories, with accompanying illustrations.