Surfacing Read Online Free PDF

actually stood completely nude, her towel lying on the bench in a crumpled heap, while she rolled deodorant under her arms. They made Cecily Keitel look like a prude.
    There was no way Maggie was taking a sauna.
    “I’ll wait,” Julie called back into the shower curtain.
    “No, go, Julie. I’m fine. I’m taking the late bus. It’s always late — you know that. I’ll call you when I get home.”
    “If you want to be alone, Mags,” Julie said finally, “just say so. I know you, and I still love you.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “No need,” Julie called out. She grabbed her stuff, waved back toward the showers, and left.
    Slowly the locker room sounds diminished: the last toilet flushed; the few remaining voices drifted toward the hall. You weren’t supposed to have cell phones near the pool, but the girls turned them on as soon as they got out of the water. Eventually, even the musical rings and beeps of voice messages and chimes of texts stopped. Maggie wrung out her bathing suit, rolled it up, wrapped a second towel around her waist, and stepped out into the locker room. Other than the steady drips of wet bathing suits secured by their straps to the outside of the lockers, it was quiet.
    As she passed one of the long mirrors at the end of the aisle, Maggie paused. She stood facing herself and then slowly let her towel drop completely to the floor. She was naked, full frontal, so unfamiliar — like a drawing from her health book, the one that showed the stages of puberty. How could her own image be so foreign to her?
    Well, in her own defense, she hadn’t had much opportunity to stare at herself nude. At home there was always worry of her brothers barging in or banging on the bathroom door. Besides, the only full-length mirror was in her parents’ bedroom. Who stands naked in their parents’ room?
    Maggie could feel goose bumps rise up so suddenly on her skin they hurt. She had read once that a mirror image is not a true representation of one’s self. It is a
reverse
image, and if you could ever really see yourself the way others see you — because still photography or even a video is a flat and altered one-dimensional image — you wouldn’t recognize yourself.
    Yet, here she was, her flesh dripping with water, tight with cold. The curve of her hips, the darkness between her legs. Her shoulders, broad from swimming. Her neck, her chin, her lips. The long bones of her shins stuck out. The tendons of her feet and toes were flexed and visible. Her wet hair stuck to her neck and down her back, here and there, clumped together. Her belly, both flat and soft, inviting as a woman’s. Here was her body, stretching and pulling and yearning in ways that Leah’s never had.
    Here was Maggie, seven years older than her sister would ever get to be.
    Her brothers clamored around Maggie when she came home from practice.
    “Daddy’s home not tonight. Eat we get in front of the TV,” Dylan sang.
    When Mr. Paris was on a business trip, not only did they scrap the family dinner, but usually the boys slept in bed with their mother.
    “Oh, right.” Maggie stopped. She dropped her swim bag on the floor. “So what’s for dinner?”
    Lucas answered. The boys would talk like that, taking turns in an easy synchronization. “Spaghetti and.”
    “Meat sauce,” Dylan finished.
    “Sounds good.” Maggie left her swim bag on the floor and hoisted her knapsack higher on her shoulder. “I gotta start my homework. Where’s Mom?”
    “In the.”
    “Kitchen,” Lucas said.
    Maggie poked her head in, leaving her body outside, her hands holding on to the door frame.
    “Hi, Mom. I’m home.”
    “Oh, you are.”
    Her mother looked up with surprise from the counter, where she was cutting carrots, but of course, she had heard the door open. She probably heard the boys talking and Maggie’s voice. She would have heard the flop of the swim bag, heavier footsteps. The thing was, Mrs. Paris never missed a beat. Mr. Paris called it