Hidden Valley (D. SWING)

XII. On Eggshells

Humidity is on the rise. Everybody's hot and sticky even when cooled down but that's just the Charlotte summer way of life. My perspiration urges me to remove my tank top and enter the YMCA shirtless. It's been about a year since I've stood in here with Evelyn. I found a way to get her into the high school but my sudden disappearance threw her back into the unbalanced pH levels of the local youth center.

My entrance brings a resurgence of familiar faces, all of which kindly greeting me. I power through with a wide smile and half thought out answers until I make it to the pool area. There she is. My ex-protégé stands at the end of the pool, a little girl also in her bathing suit standing in the bleachers with a stopwatch. Evelyn leaps from the starting board with the celerity we worked on improving last winter. I can see what she's worked on since we last met beside a pool. I can see what she's lost touch with too. Too much splashing flying from the blades she created with her limbs tells the secret of her over exertion in the water.

"Five seconds flat," screams the girl standing in the bleachers. "Way to go!"

I approach the edge of the pool, my hands in my pockets. "She can do it faster than that." Evelyn's eyes shoot to my existence. An unsure glimmer in her stare, she lacks the confidence in herself. I don't like what I see. When I left, she was talking the biggest shit in the water and rightfully so. "Do it again. One more time before we go get your sisters."

Evelyn reluctantly swims to her starting point as I walk to the bleachers and take a seat next to the girl accompanying her. "You're Lil' Don," she points to me. "I guess you aren't a myth." My nose turns up, a squint at the peculiar greeting of the child standing next to me. "You're kinda' somebody she's always talked about but I never met," she explains. "I'm Sharonda." Her hand extends politely.

I have to admit that I'm a little hesitant to shake her hand but the extra hard twang in her speech and the gap between her two biggest front teeth is too charming for me to play her any kinds of ways. "Hi, how are you?" I plan for our palms to meet though my own swallows the majority of her hand in my grasping. "Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you," she brightly beams. Her head snaps to Evelyn as she emerges from the water. "You ready?" A thumbs up is shot back into our directions. Sharonda recalibrates her timepiece before she screams, "Go!" She grins at Evelyn as she shoots across the pool. "Would ya' look at that!" As Evelyn comes to an abrupt halt at her ending point, Sharonda leaps to her feet. "Almost four seconds flat! Wow!"

On my feet, I feel my grin spreading as Evelyn stares in shock. "Get dressed, Ev. We finna' go get Kitty and Letty then we goin' grocery shopping." Evelyn jumps out of the water. Her land legs are wobbly as she jogs to the locker-room. "Sometimes you gotta' push her a little bit more or she'll stop where she got comfortable," I inform Sharonda. She doesn't know it but I'll assure this little fireball will permanently take over timing Evelyn when I leave.

"You swim too?"

My head disappointingly moves from east to west. "Nah, I liked the water a little bit when I was young but that's 'bout as far as it goes for me."

"Then how'd you teach Evelyn so much?"

Caught in my lie, I tell myself I don't have to explain myself to a child as a coping mechanism. I force a smile regardless of my discomfort. "I have my ways... Nice meetin' you. Tell Ev that I'll be in the car." It was the end of that as I turn on my heels, pushing my body out of the room, refusing to even glance at the swimming pool behind me.

The vents of my dashboard fills the car with as much cool air as they can. I dig in my arm rest for the right tape I'm looking for as the radio continues to spew lyrics I've heard all summer. "I'm going back to Cali. Shaking 'em, baking 'em, takin 'em to spots they never before hung." Evelyn comes skipping out of the YMCA. She stops at the door to say something to Sharonda, their smiles matching like the bracelets Kitty and her friends wear. "They know the place, on Sunset it's a trip, where the A.C.'s cold, but the girls still strip. The record skip, but this girl kept dancing, prancing, grinding, grinning, romancing..." As I lift my head with the tape I sought after, my passenger-to-be comes skipping to the car.