I waited for the rest of the sentence but instead he leant down and pressed his lips onto mine. The kiss was wet and warm and soft, but only lasted a second. Then he was gone. I heard the splash of his body meeting the water once more.
It wasn’t a dream. This time I was sure. Now I was fully awake, my body tingling and alive, my breath burning in my lungs. I sat up and watched Matt freestyle across the water, the elegant, neat strokes of someone who’d been properly taught. I wasn’t expecting that kiss. I hadn’t even dared to think about the possibility of it and yet there it was, still singing on my lips. I admit it. I wanted him to do it again. I slid off the rock and walked to the water to join him.
My skin almost sizzled as the cold water slowly climbed my body. As it closed over my head, a cold, clear coffin, I could see to the ends of my outstretched arms and fingers, which appeared a ghoulish white in the blurry underworld of the pool.
I pushed off and swam toward the deep. The sluggish current swirled in the basin of the pool, contained by the high lip of rock before the falls. If the current wasn’t so weak I could have been swept over the edge, but the rock was like a weir. As I glided, holding my breath, I saw a boulder in the distance and swept my arms wide in an effort to reach it.
I hung in the water before the huge rock. Suspended, weightless. I closed my eyes and imagined an embryo, encased in a whirring silence, untouched and protected. Feeling my lungs begin to convulse for air I opened my eyes.
A face. Swirling hair. Pale, blue-white skin. Dark eyes, floating. I jerked back in fright. My first thought was that Matt had swum over to me, but this face did not belong to him or to this world. It was the face from my dream, from the netherworld.
The blood-drained, dead face of Dylan Koslovski.
My own muffled, watery scream travelled uselessly to my ears. I closed my eyes. My arms flailed to take me backward, up to the surface, away. I opened them again to get my bearings, dreading what might be before me, but the face was gone. The boulder loomed below me, pale and passive. There was nothing there.
My lungs ached for air and I surfaced, gasping. I freestyled back to the shore, crawling in the shallows in my haste to get out of the water. On the rocks, I collapsed onto my knees, with my head in my hands, panting and trying to quell the nausea that rose in me.
Matt came up and knelt beside me. ‘What happened? Are you okay?’
Get it together, Sunny.
‘Yep.’ Dylan’s face was waiting behind every blink.
‘You sure?’
I nodded and forced a smile. ‘Yeah. I just get a bit freaked out by deep water.’ I sat back on my haunches looking across at his troubled face. ‘I’ll be alright.’ I ran my fingers through my wet hair.
He placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re trembling … Listen, it’s not because I … you know …’
‘No. No. I’m okay. I just thought I saw something.’
‘What?’
I looked down at the rock, forcing myself to examine the pattern in the granite, trying to commit the lines and specks to memory. I wanted to remember something, anything but that haunted face.
‘What was it, Sunny?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It doesn’t seem like nothing.’ He sounded annoyed.
‘Really, it was …’ I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t want him to think of me that way. Crazy, I mean. ‘It was just a rock under the water. My imagination playing tricks, I guess.’
‘Okay.’ He threw me a doubtful glance.
I was relieved when he took his hand away; I didn’t want him to feel the tremors of my heart, hammering against my chest like it wanted to burst through my ribs.
I started to get up. ‘I think I might go home.’
‘But we just got here.’
‘You can stay if you want. I’m going to go.’ I picked up my towel and clothes and stepped into my thongs.
Matt stayed sitting. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s going on, Sunny?’
‘I’ll see you later,’ I said, wishing I knew. ‘Sorry.’
When I walked in, Kevin was at the stove in the kitchen. Steam rose from two bubbling pots in front of him. ‘Where have you been?’ he said without turning around.
‘Swimming.’ It was interrogation time.
‘With who?’
‘Zara,’ I lied.
‘Zara Walker?’
‘Yes.’
‘I guess you’ll be going to her party on Thursday then.’
‘Oh, um, yes, I guess. Maybe.’
‘Listen,’ he said, turning from the stove. ‘I need to talk to you about something. Have a seat.’
‘I’m okay,’ I said, adjusting the towel on my shoulder. ‘What is it?’ I anticipated the stern talking to and was already planning my defence but, unexpectedly, he went over to the wooden bowl on the bench where he had piled up the old mail and bills. He picked up a long envelope, the top of which was ripped open.
‘This came the other day.’
‘What is that?’ I placed both hands on the back of the chair, thinking it might have been my report card after all and he’d been keeping it for a special moment like this. An uncomfortable feeling fluttered through me as I thought about all the Ds and ‘unsatisfactory efforts’. Surely he couldn’t criticise me about that. I had the best excuse in the world.
‘It’s a report from the counsellor at your school, Mr Greenwood. We had a discussion about you on the phone and he says you should be seeing someone over the break. Get some counselling.’
My heart sank. This was worse than a bad report card. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’m fine.’ I shook my head.
Kevin gazed at me, his eyebrows meeting in the centre of his head. ‘He’s gone away for the holidays but he sent me the name of someone in Craigsville. He’s made an
