SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

Day 46.2 Wednesday, December 3, 2017

My body quaked in the shivering cold while I yanked my body over the fence. My eyes still burning from whatever toxins were in the water, gritted my teeth and carried on until I hopscotched my body over debris close enough to touch Travis where the orange lamp light thinned.

"Travis," I begged, "No, no, please, come on. Get up, Travis. Come one, please." I pulled his hand, his very cold hand. . . and it felt like rubber. I wasn't going to let him die here. The boys upstairs didn't even realize what they'd done to Travis. And I was going to make sure they saw him so could feel the terrible rotting in their hearts the same way I was suffering.

"Come on," I cried. I mix of depression over seeing him this way as well as inflowing shots of adrenaline made me shake and feel confused while I put my arms under him and breathed and bent my way into hoisting him and pulling him onto the metal gate my knees currently stationed.

I felt as though I was going to vomit from the smell of the waves, and the nauseating sway. I was able to shift his body onto the fence and pushed the fence across the water by kicking off the debris behind us. I spit the grossness from my mouth, and finally we reached the broken wooden balcony, where I shifted on all fours over Travis's body, and in a rickety balancing act pulled us both onto the wooden landing that was still left hanging under the doorway, and pulled us inside the orange living room. I gasped from exhaustion on the tile floor, and when I examined the floor underneath us, I saw the blackened water had followed us in.

The waves kicked up from outside, and they splashed in through the doorway, as if the devil in the tsunami was trying one last time to take Travis away. . . and swallow him whole.

When I looked over at Travis, and saw he wasn't breathing, I leapt over him without a second thought (I'd already cheated on Jack, though I regret it deeply, with both Craig and—in a way—Brett), so I had no inhibitions now to drop my lips onto Travis for the first and last time, to fill him and his lungs with all the breath I could give.

He might have turned his back on me, by passively excommunicating me along with Jack and the other boys. But unlike them, I wasn't about to turn my back on my friends. Travis was my friend and I planned for him always to stay my friend. So, to save his life, I engaged in this final kiss—wishing it will save him.

But as I did and then performed CPR by pressing my hands under his diaphragm over and over to pulsate his breaths, I noticed the venomous taste in my mouth that wouldn't go away. And on top of that I saw the water underneath Travis's head turn from black to red. I realized he was bleeding, and likely suffering concussion. If wasn't dead.

But then I started to feel queasy. And this feeling increased as my CPR performance dwindled; my hands pushing into his abdomen slowed. I looked over, suddenly seeing the world at a tilt. And over by the window, I saw two things. Two animals. One alive, one dead:

A kitten, a ball of wet fur, limped in a stammering crawl off the wooden debris and in through the doorway. He was as big as my hand, and his back leg was dragging. It meowed in a painful, high-pitched cry.

And as it embodied the pain I felt in my heart, for both Travis, for it, and for myself. . . my attention was then taken away from the kitten, when beyond, in the water I finally recognized the reason for the poisonous taste in my mouth. The taste I had also tasted from Travis's lips when I had poured air into him. . .

In the water something yellow floated up to the surface. A yellow-bellied snake, rolled up against the wooden debris by the door, a dead yellow-bellied snake, with a pool of venom swimming neatly in a long radius across the water.

I had no doubt, that Travis and I had kissed it. And the little kitten too. . . I heard a thud—the kitten landed on its side. Without a sound, it closed its eyes.