The pool room is not what I was expecting. An indoor pool is a luxury, but nothing about this room is luxurious. It’s like a tiled cave.
The tiles were likely white at some point, but they’ve yellowed with age. They line the pool, the walls, the ceiling, though there’s not really any distinction between the surfaces, since every one is curved. I imagine this is what it feels like inside a submarine. Acutely claustrophobic.
Sophie sets the lemonade tray down on a small glass table. She sits along the ledge, her dress fanning around her.
“Are you comfortable?” I ask. “You’re really just going to watch me swim?”
“Is that strange?”
“A little.”
She pulls a small leather-bound book out from behind her. No idea where it came from.
“I’ll read,” she says. “Or write. Or draw you.”
“Very funny,” I say.
I hope she was kidding. Most of the time, I can tell when Sophie’s kidding. Most of the time.
I shimmy out of my pants and sweater, dip a toe in to check the temperature of the water. It’s warm.
I step into the shallow end, which isn’t actually that shallow. I dunk myself under and begin to do the backstroke. When I get to the other side of the pool, I let myself float there.
“How is it?” Sophie asks.
“It’s great,” I say. “What are you reading?”
“Some book of alchemy,” she says. She fakes snoring.
“That bad?”
“No,” she says. “I’m melodramatic.”
“You? No.”
“Sarcasm, darling.”
I begin to swim around, do some laps. I was on the swim team throughout middle school but decided to quit freshmen year after Kim Schulman made a comment about my flat chest. I’d spent three years trying to convince myself that no one cared about my lack of boobs except me, only to have my paranoia validated.
I wonder what Kim is up to now. I bet she’s married. I make a mental note to Internet-stalk her later.
And while I’m envisioning what her wedding dress might have looked like, if she wore a ball gown or something more fitted, I’m able to ignore the sensation working its way up my foot, around my ankle.
But as it becomes tighter, colder, more aggressive, I’m forced to open my eyes and look beneath me, directly under the spot where I’m treading water in the deep end.
At first, I think it’s my shadow, until I see the distinct fingers.
With a single violent tug, I’m underwater.
The sting of water up my nose, inside my lungs, shocks me into complete stasis. I’m being dragged down to the bottom of the pool. The whirring in my ears is vicious.
I make the mistake of turning. There’s a person there. Kind of. A person with grayish pocked skin and bulging eyes, the color in them like melted wax. I scream and water punches down my throat.
I thrash around, trying to get the thing away. I fight for the surface, but it becomes very clear to me very quickly that it will not let me go. I manage to move us over to the side, and with everything I have, I kick, smashing it into the wall.
But it’s gone. It’s my foot that absorbs the impact.
I float up to the surface. I throw myself onto the ledge, coughing up pool water and probably my lungs along with the rest of my internal organs. The gum I swallowed when I was six.
“Annie, what happened? Are you okay?”
Sophie reaches out and pulls me up over the ledge.
“Your foot!” she says.
I look down. It’s mangled. Bleeding. I can’t feel it.
“What the fuck, Sophie?!”
“What?” she asks, looking confused, hurt by my anger.
“There was a . . . a . . . a thing! A guy! A person in your pool! It just tried to drown me!”
She inches toward the edge, carefully craning her neck to see into the pool.
“It’s gone now,” I say. “It’s . . . it’s a ghost! It looked like a ghost!”
“Hmm,” she says, tapping her lip.
“I thought you said your house wasn’t haunted.”
She doesn’t answer. She won’t look at me.
“I almost drowned,” I say. “Is your house haunted?”
Without raising her eyes to meet mine, she mumbles, “Maybe a little.”
“Sophie!”
“If I had told you, you would have never wanted to come over again!” she says. “You’re not in any danger. They’re just . . . inconvenient.”
“Who are they? And I’d say almost drowning isn’t an inconvenience. Death isn’t an inconvenience.”