Daylight Saving Read Online Free PDF

you. This should be your game.
    “Listen, have you seen a girl swimming in here this week, with long black hair?” I asked. “Swims like a . . . she swims really well.”
    “Lot of girls come through here, man.”
    “She might have had a black eye. I don’t know.”
    “Is she nice?”
    “I guess so. Something a bit, I don’t know,
different
about her.”
    “I’ll keep a lookout.”
    The wave machine was coming to a halt, and kids were climbing out of the water. A spiky-haired boy stood in front of us, ready to smack another lad on the head with an inflatable hammer. He raised it behind his back, and just as he was about to swing, Ryan took it out of his hands. The boy swung anyway and looked surprised to find that his weapon had vanished. He turned around, amazed. “Peace in the pool, matey,” Ryan said to him, and gave him the hammer back.
    I looked at the water, the lines of the tiles wavy and blue beneath.
    “You should get in, man. You look tense. Water’s the best thing for tension,” Ryan said.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “Part of the service,” he said.
    I waited for him to walk away, and then I quickly took my T-shirt off, threw it under a palm tree, and climbed into the water, trying to keep my body facing away from the crowds of juice drinkers and sunbathers. I felt the tiny bubbles I had made climb up the hairs on my legs and arms. Closing my eyes, I plunged under and battered out a few strokes, hearing the noise muffled above. When I came up, I was gasping for air, and I felt like all the energy had drained out of me. I wasn’t in great shape.
    The world looks massive when you’re in water. It rises high, but you feel safe. You feel like a child again. The plants curved out over the pool, and I let myself be dragged along in the rapids, feeling the jet streams against my body. The ceiling of the Dome seemed miles away, in the same way it does when you go into a cathedral.
    There weren’t many people around, and the water came up to our necks, so nobody stared at me. Everyone’s hairstyles were just about the same. The wet look. By the time the rapids ejected me back into the pool, I had my breath back.
    I let myself be carried by the momentum, and then I rolled beneath the surface and opened my eyes to that glassy underworld. What had Lexi said?
“Swimming’s easy. You just make a wave and ride it.”
I thought about her, the rhythm of her strokes, the perfect timing of them that made her motion look so effortless. One. And. Two. And. Three. And.
    I counted the rhythm in my mind. Eventually, I felt my arm coming over my head, and then the other. I felt the bowed swell of the water in front of me, and I chased it, settled into the slipstream. My body moved slowly but inevitably, as if the strokes had already happened and I was just following them. I remembered to breathe and put my face out of the water for a moment. The noise came crashing in — the music, the shouting, the chitchat, the clink of glasses, and the rude squeeze of the inflatables — and then, mercifully, it stopped when I went back under.
    This was a space I could be in. Outside of time, outside of my father’s moods and my own hang-ups. There were moments when I felt my legs slowly and forcefully propelling me forward, when I felt like she was there in the pool with me. I half opened my eyes, but the water was clear and empty. I heard the bowstring echo of voices.
    For a few moments, I felt completely relaxed. But then I thought of the faint coloring around her eye. Something wasn’t right. I could feel it. I kept swimming, but I was panicking now, my body shuddering, the air going out of me in great bubbles. It was her hand — when she held out her fist for me to bump — there was something not right about her hand. I saw it in my mind. The long fingers, the watch with the digital seconds flickering. It was the watch. I did not have to search my memory, because the images seemed to come without my bidding. The seconds