girl I was infatuated with a girl at the pool. The predicted eight-day heat wave had both brought us to the water, her with an older man that I readily assumed was her relative (father? Grandfather? Uncle?), and I with my aunt and cousin. She was there when I arrived, and at first I did not notice her well enough. She was sitting upright reading The DaVinci Code and I stood in front of her chair, applying sunscreen. While I was in the water she stood up and I looked. She was tall, and healthy-thin, and pale. And freckly, but not so that it would resemble the chicken pox. As she turned to walk I saw she had short red-brown hair in a ponytail that you could tell would be wavy if it was long, but it only flipped a little listlessly at the end. She stretched and stood in the sun and it was obvious she was trying to tan. She never smiled, on her chair or while she was up. She was stoic, and had no one to swim with. When she finally slipped into the pool our eyes met and I tried to smile but she swam away. A string bikini was what she had on; pink and yellow and red in an exotic pattern and it was cute and I liked it, but mostly I liked it on her. She dived underwater and swam the length of the pool, getting out once she'd hit the other end. Then she retreated back to her chair and lay down. I looked at the clock. It had only been three minutes and yet, as these things go, it had felt like twenty. Later on I realised that what I admired about her was her image of feminity, which made her, in my eyes, an attractive soul. She had clear skin and pretty eyes and nice hair, but she wasn't perfect. She had freckles and she looked a little wan and she was lanky. She might have even had a horrible personality, but my imagination refuses to believe so. Either way I thought she was beautiful. I liked how her bikini fit her body and I wanted her to live in my words, exist in my art, flow through the music that I'm not really so good at but should be. And I wanted her to smile because I thought she would look incredible like that, but she did not. When I left I looked back at her seat, which I had steadily ignored after she returned from swimming, and she had gone. back