I’m working on a new book, a collection of short stories for middle grade children. Here’s a rough draft of the first one.

THE HIGH DIVE

highdive

“Jump, you chicken!” Laurie yelled, shaking her clenched fist, feet planted firmly on the cement below.

I stood there on the high dive. The long board slowly swayed up and down. My heart beat so loudly that it sounded like a bass drum in my head. I shivered. 90 degrees in the shade, but still my gangly, 10-year old body shook. So did my legs.

Why is she doing this? I thought. Why is she teasing me? Friends aren’t supposed to do this. They’re supposed to be there by your side. But Laurie raised her hand high like Captain Hook, and there I was, on the gangplank, sure to meet my death.

Water dripped from my bathing suit. Each drop like cannon fire. Boom. Drip. Boom.

I looked out across the Raccoon Valley Swim Club. Old ladies lounged in their loungers on the neatly clipped grass, chatting away. Some of their husbands sat behind them sipping beers, secretly, in insulated beer holders. Other men played shuffleboard on the hill above the shallow baby pool. The ladies’ bodies were far enough towards brown from the sun that Laurie and I called them the Pool Prunes. Mrs. Harris was the most leathery of the bunch.

Next to the shuffleboard court was the tetherball, which Mark Griffin was ducking from as it spun round and round. He was a Special Ed kid from school. I always ate my lunch with him. His mom sat by the pool. She had one leg. Laurie said her name should have been Eileen, but I didn’t think that was funny. Nobody said anything about Mrs. Griffin’s missing leg. You just didn’t do that.

The American flag hung flapped in the muggy June breeze. Lifeguards sat like birds perched on their stands, bumbershoots overhead, noses painted white with zinc oxide paste. I always thought they’d like someone to drown just to have something to do.

All seemed right as I stood on the high dive. Life moved along and part of me felt content standing there twenty feet in the air.

Splat! Right on my shoulder. Something warm and oozy sliding down towards my elbow, then towards my wrist. A bird had crapped on me. There I was, on the high dive, a defining moment of my adolescent life and a bird had just let its bowels loose on me.

“What the hang dang!” I shouted.

“Don’t be a chicken. Jump!” Laurie yelled.

Laurie had jumped last year when she was nine. Susan Kershaw was only seven and she’d jumped two weeks ago.

“I am not a chicken!” I screamed. I clenched my jaw and dug my fingernails into my palms.

“More like a big baby!” she yelled back, then stuck out her tongue.

Bird poop on my arm, Laurie taunting me, the sun getting hotter by the second…I took the plunge.

Down I went like a bullet. The water was warm but refreshing; it cleaned the bird crap from my arm, cleansed me of my fear, and I sighed, bubbles popping out from my mouth as I kicked my legs and pushed my body up to the surface.

If you’re a boy, the one thing you should definitely check before jumping from a high dive is that the drawstring of your bathing suit is tightly tied and knotted.

Laurie laughed as I grabbed my bathing suit that had relieved itself from my small buttocks and put it back on.

“Congratulations,” she said as I climbed up the ladder, extending her hand and shaking mine. “You’re now in the high dive club. I’ll buy you a Coke and a Snickers bar.” Her dad, Dr. Cohen, actually bought it, but he didn’t know it. All six of the Cohen kids had an expense account at Wilson’s snack bar. I didn’t have an expense account, so I always made sure Laurie won at Marco Polo, but she probably would have won anyway.

We sat at a picnic table by the snack bar and I asked, “Why did you keep teasing me?”

Laurie smiled and jabbed me in the ribs. “Because if I didn’t, you never would have jumped.”

I thought for a moment, looked up at the passing clouds, and then I got it. She was a good friend, even though I didn’t think it at the time when I stood on the high dive.

We finished our snack and high-tailed it back to the diving pool, only that time I made sure my bathing suit drawstring was tied tight.