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I don’t remember making the decision to jump in after her.
I don’t remember why I didn’t just yell for help.
One second I was kneeling on the edge, fingers gripping the concrete, and the next I was plummeting feet-first through eight feet of chilly water, fully-clothed in my new shorts, light-up sneakers, and favorite Spider-Man t-shirt.
I didn’t know how to hold my breath, much less swim, so the pungent chlorine instantly burned a path up my nostrils, and down my throat. Gravity was pulling and releasing at my limbs like I was its marionette, and I couldn’t tell what was up from down.
Death…
It wasn’t something I really thought about before. Not really. I knew it could take people away from me, but I didn’t know it could take me, a kid. Nor did I know where it would take me. I never thought to ask. I just knew it was somewhere far, far away; somewhere you couldn’t come back from.
I remember terror like nothing I’d ever felt before shooting through me, making a beeline straight to my chest. It dug its claws in, sank its teeth in my heart, and squeezed like I was its prey, claiming me. Never letting up.
And I froze.
I just… stopped.
Eyes wide, all I could do was watch the way the bubbles around me dispersed as blackness creeped around my vision.
It was over. It was all over…
But then something weird happened.
The water… it started to settle, slowly, and then all at once. And no longer victim to gravity’s vicious grip, I found myself suddenly… weightless.
For the first time since I hit the water, I felt in control.
The teeth pulled back.
The claws retracted.
The blackness receded.
My arms—arms that were, only moments ago, flailing—were now floating around my head, my fingers reaching, seeking above me. And it was then that I finally looked up, and I could see the sun—a rippling yellow light that didn’t feel so blinding from way down here, under the water—and I didn’t feel quite so scared anymore.
It was still there of course—that black, bottomless terror—hovering just behind me, breathing foully down my neck.
But it no longer felt like something I had to outrun, despite the water burning its way through me, setting me ablaze from the inside out. Despite the silence pounding in my ears so loud, I thought my head would explode.
Everything was just… muted, and it had all felt so very, very far away, like I couldn’t be bothered to worry about it.
But then I saw Izzy—my brave, reckless, twin sister, who so rarely ever frowned or cried—and I remembered who I was. Where I was.
I didn’t want that blackness to come for her.
Take me, take me, but not her, never her, I begged silently.
She couldn’t have been more than two feet away from me. How I got to her, I have no idea. But after all that struggle, she was right there, within arm’s reach.
Her amber-brown eyes the same shade as mine were open wide and petrified; her rosy mouth parted. Her lanky arms were floating out next to her head just like mine, but her fingers were downturned and motionless. She was frozen, not unlike how I was.
Looking back, we couldn’t have been under the water for more than seconds, even though the image that sears across my brain is one that carries an eternity. Because just as I reached for Izzy’s ghost-white fingers, desperate to get to her, desperate to find a way to get her up, up, up toward the light?—
Something grabbed my wrist, yanking me away from her.
Bubbles exploded out of my mouth as I screamed silently into the water, flailing my legs, trying desperately to free myself.
No, I remember begging and begging and begging. Take me, not her, please…
