SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

Day 20 Friday, December 8, 2017

My father always told me you never know how important money is until you don't have it anymore. But, of course, I never knew what he was talking about.

My father also said the only people who say money isn't important to them are people who already have money or whose families have always had money, or spoiled Starbucks-a-holics who were still in high school, going on college, and never had to work a retail job or lift a finger of manual labor in their lives. I couldn't tell if he was trying to make a point about me, because that sounded a whole lot like me.

My father believed fear was a necessary motivator for doing well in life. When I was six on a family vacation in Dubai for my cousin Cecile's first wedding, I had heard some nasty anti-Muslim jokes by one of the groomsmen at the rehearsal dinner overlooking the city 1,450 feet up in the sky from the Burj Khalifa building, in the tallest restaurant in the world called At.mosphere (I only understood the cleverness of the restaurant's name until I was twelve and I learned what the atmosphere was). The spikey-haired groomsmen had mentioned that cousin Cecile wasn't Muslim, and the second the Kalifate would find out, the entire Burj Khalifa would implode in a bombastic clouded mushroom and we would be burned to ashes in the name of Allah. I would find out far too late that this was all merely a gross joke materialized by locker-room talk debauchery elevated by wedding jitters and bachelor party alcohol and stripper excitement, and I was the butt end of the joke when I ended up running to my daddy in front of the entire congregation of feasting relatives, screaming and shouting for my life, and eventually embarrassing myself in a wave of tears following a river of urine down my white dress. . .

I've never been to Dubai ever since. Although I have dated a Muslim. He was very nice. No bombs, just roses.

I haven't wet myself since that time either, except maybe that time I went away to camp in Lake Tahoe and it was my first time away from my parents for a full week. I had trouble engaging with the other girls, and when one yelled at me and accused me of stealing her Bratz doll or Barbie doll (she couldn't remember which one she brought in her luggage and thus could not determine which one I had stolen, which made no sense to me because how could you accuse someone of stealing your doll when you had no evidence to refute you forgot to bring it to camp in the first place? Duh!). I peed my pants the very same night of the accusation. I was seven.

It was telling that I was stressed, fearful or downright insecure about something the moment I wet the bed at my current age and woke Jack in a confused panic. "What's wrong! Are you okay?" He thought I might be dying, on account of the time he was twelve and his nasty next-door neighbor threw a rock at his pet rat thinking it was a street rat, and Jack could only watch in horror as Ratatouille lay flat as a buttermilk pancake in his corpse splay by the flower garden, twitched once and immediately died after a final leak of urination.

Jack never had a pet after that, nor said goodbye when his nasty neighbor moved to Colorado, good riddance.

When Jack and I cleaned the bed sheets, my cheeks were rosy red with embarrassment and I begged him not to tell the others. I should have assumed he wouldn't, he was a good boyfriend and a decent enough human being not to tattle on my curious ailments, but he was heavily concerned and was worried I was getting sick. He also said I was talking in my sleep, saying Jack, Jack, Jack and then screaming when I woke up. I told him all about my dream, the clear weather, the yellow sand road, the ocean wave and the boy in the tux (however I told him the boy in the tux was him, and never mentioned that the boy turned out to be Craig. I simply couldn't tell him the truth about that, because, first of all, it wouldn't help anything. Second of all I was afraid that that would lead to more questions, and that I wouldn't be able to have my evening religious sessions with Craig one-on-one by the Vanilla candlelight in the library alone. It made me feel warm and full inside every time I heard Craig read a verse with me. And it seemed, I must admit, that our chairs were getting closer and closer each night we came together.) I couldn't tell Jack I had had that dream about Craig. Because if I had told Jack I had that dream about Craig last night, I might feel compelled to tell Jack the truth. . .

. . . that I had dreamed about Craig every night before that, too, starting with the night we danced on the boat, and I had seen Craig looking at me the way he did, when I was dancing with Jack.