From Dawn (published)

One

Friday
2:00pm

"I dare you!"

"What are we? Ten?" Dawn flipped her long hair out of her eyes and stared at her grinning friend, nonplussed.

"I double dare you," the tanned brunette insisted. Putting her hands on her hips, she continued to smile a little manically.

It was a particularly hot summer day, just one in a long string of unpleasantly hot days, and Dawn had somehow found herself dragged away from the air conditioning by her oldest friend. Kay had wanted to go for a walk down one of the backroads that the pair had regularly terrorized in their teens. As usual, Dawn found it nearly impossible to tell her friend no, and the trip down memory lane had happened like it or not.

She was lamenting her desire to make Kay happy at the moment, as she stared down at the murky water below. A thick green scum floated on the surface. What had once been a favorite swimming hole on the river had been mostly cut off from it's source when a flood changed the course of the water, and this was what was left. A stinking pit of stagnant water and slime. Toes lined up on the edge of the big rock that she had jumped off of a thousand times before, Dawn eyed the water skeptically.

"If I jump in there, I'm going to smell like ass all of the way home."

"If you jump in there, I'll cover your shift tomorrow night."

Eyes still locked on the water ten feet below, Dawn sighed. She hated working Saturday nights, all of them did. Kyle, the owner's jerk of a son, managed the restaurant then. Obnoxiously loud, and more than a little misogynistic, he was a nightmare for the female staff to work with. "Why do you hate me?"

Laughing, Kay replied, "I love you. That's why I'm saving you from Kyle tomorrow, but I want something in return. And I think it'll be hysterical if you have to explain to your mom why you're covered in pond scum." Kay's eyes flashed with humor at the thought.

Silently, Dawn pulled the hair tie off of her wrist and used it to secure her long blonde hair in a tight ponytail. This was exactly the kind of trouble that she always managed to find herself in when Kay was involved. The pair had been fast friends since middle school, and the only time they had been separated had been the four years Dawn went to college three states away.

They might be twenty-six now, but Kay still thought it was funny to get Dawn in hot water with her mom. The fact that Dawn had been forced to move back in with her mother last year, only made it easier for her friend to cause trouble.

Kicking off her scuffed sneakers, she did not want to have to squish her way back home, Dawn stepped up to the edge of the rock again. With a last look back at her gleeful friend, before she could change her mind, Dawn launched from the rock.

As soon as she felt her feet leave the safety of the rock, the tall blonde regretted her decision. But it was to late to back out, and she plummeted the short drop and splashed through the thick green scum. The surface made a weird sucking sound as she broke through and sunk into the murky depths.

Dawn kept her eyes closed tightly, determined to not get any of the filthy water in them. Paddling her way toward the surface, she cringed at the thought of her head having to break back through the slime. She must be crazy to have agreed to this.

She kept swimming.

She was starting to run low on air. Dawn had never been able to hold her breath for all that long, and to her, it felt like it was taking forever to reach the surface again. Eyes still clenched shut, she began swimming a little faster. And faster.

Lungs burning, Dawn finally opened her eyes to figure out what was wrong. She hated the thought of that nasty water touching them, but she hated the idea of drowning even more. The water was just as dirty as she had expected, and she couldn't see more than a few feet away. But she could make out the dim glow from the sun, and it wasn't in the direction that she had been swimming.

Correcting herself, Dawn pulled frantically for the surface. She didn't even mind when, choking and sputtering, she broke through the surface and the green stuff stuck in her hair and across her face.

""Dawn, what the hell?"

Kay sounded much farther away than she should have. Turning around to face the voice, she attempted to wipe her eyes clear enough to see her friend. She was shocked to see just how far across the swimming hole she had swam. No wonder she had been running out of air.

"I'm good. Just got a little turned around down there," she began swimming back toward the bank where Kay stood. The process was slower than she would have liked because she had to swim through the green scum on the surface. It sucked at her and weighed her down.

By the time she pulled herself onto blessedly dry ground, Dawn was exhausted. She let herself collapse in the tall grass, still coughing up traces of the rancid water.

"Are you ok?" Kay squatted down next to her, obviously concerned. "Man, that's not how I expected that to go."

She complained, "My nose freaking burns. That's not water, it's toxic waste. The municipality should do something about it."

Now that she was assured that her friend was ok, Kay was back to her usual self. "You smell like toxic waste. Maybe you'll get a brain eating amoeba."

"Don't laugh," she threw a handful of grass, rather ineffectually. "I saw a show about that once. It happens." Dawn pulled herself to her feet with a groan. "Let's get out of here. I won't feel human again until I get a shower."