MY GRANDMOTHER MADE HER LEMON-FACE when I told her that I didn’t want to hold hands with a girl. I said girl, but what I meant was her, specifically. I might’ve held hands with, say, the girl who sat behind me in Math class. Not that I had a crush on her. Girls were gross! But, well, she gave me a Valentine back in February and she’d dotted her ‘i’ with a heart....
I didn’t say this to my Grandmother. What I said was, “I’m too old to hold hands with a girl.”
“Oh, well, if you’re too old....” Her pursed mouth melted into a slow smile. If I hadn’t been so satisfied in my victory, so self-absorbed in my need to be rid of my parental figure, I might have seen the devious gleam in her eye.
She’d taken me to the Wild Rapids Waterslide Park. Our beach blanket was emblazoned with Garfield’s face, orange and black and hating Mondays, and laid out as our claim on a small patch of grass.
My Grandmother wore an embarrassing, blue, one-piece bathing suit. Her everything sagged with age. So, I said that I wouldn’t be holding hands.
“In fact,” I told her, “you should go swim. I can handle the waterslides by myself.”
I sucked in my stomach and pushed out my chest, adopted a stance that I imagined looked brave. I was old enough to be self-conscious about my lack of a six-pack and my undefined pectorals. I was only ten years old, but I knew that I was supposed to look like the models on the cover of Men’s Health.
My Grandmother was courteous enough not to comment.
“Go on then,” she said, “I don’t see the appeal in sliding down a distilling tube, anyhow.”
With that said, she lay back on the blanket, sunglasses on against the glare, and looked for all the world as if she’d instantly fallen asleep. I crept away across the lawn, lest she wake and change her mind.
Of course, I headed straight for the best waterslides. Not the longest, no—the steepest. And the newest. The two most talked about at school. Kami Kazi and Hari Kari: twin slides named after suicide, to amuse children too young to understand.
The chatter among my classmates was that competitive speed-runs down the side-by-side slides were to be the new ritual of birthday parties and field trips. It was universally known that the losers of said races—the rotten eggs—were due for ridicule. Chickens wouldn’t be invited at all.
I was determined to practice—if one can practice at sliding down a piece of plastic—before too many of my peers had beaten me to it.
The line leading to the top of the waterslides took an agonizing ten minutes to traverse. I ignored the people around me, save for the heavy-set man immediately in front. His grey arm hair was streaked with water and chlorine and his moustache glistened with water. Whenever he moved, I followed—so close that I almost stepped on his oversized sandal heels.
Somehow I was both hot and cold. The sun-soaked asphalt was blistering against my bare feet, while at the same time a cold breeze pimpled my wet skin with gooseflesh. I was dry before I reached the top of the slide.
When my turn came, I lingered on the lip of the slide. I stared down at the steep decline and at the roaring waterfall between my legs, as one might look over the edge of that world.
The lifeguard asked me if I was OK, if maybe I didn’t want to try a different slide.
I told her no. I told her I could do it.
I steeled myself. My legs and arms tensed, my stomach clenched into a knot. I willed myself over that precipice ... but I didn’t move.
I told the lifeguard I had forgotten that I really needed to go the bathroom first. She excused me from the line. I watched a child half my age take my place at the waterslide’s mouth, push off, then plummet like a missile aimed at the earth. He hit the water ten seconds later—an impact that sent spray flying high in the air.
I walked to the bottom of the line, shame hot on my face. I didn’t look at the people around me, just reinserted myself at the very bottom. I wasn’t so eager now. I didn’t shuffle forward quite as willingly. Whenever the line moved, I forced my legs to follow. I had to try.
When far too short a time passed, I once again stood at the front of the line. The smiling lifeguard ushered me into the lips of one of the slides, though whether Kami Kazi or Hari Kari, I didn’t know. And once more, I stared down the river Styx flowing into Hades below.
Then I heard a shrill whistle and I looked over at my slide’s twin. My Grandmother grinned back at me. She sat in the froth of the other slide and said, “Race you. When I win, I get to hold your hand back to the car.”
Then she snapped a pair of terribly embarrassing swimming goggles up over her eyes and pushed off the edge.
A strangled protest emerged from my lips. I launched out after her, my fear forgotten in the wake of my shame. I made myself as small and frictionless as possible as I shot through that plastic tube, desperate to win.
Even over the roar of the water, I could hear her laughing from the other slide, whooping as she sloshed her way down to the pool below. I chased that laughter all the way to the pool at the slide’s end. I didn’t win our race.