Hunger

Two more blurs raced toward the pool’s edge and there were two more shouts, followed by two more cannonball splashes.

“Hey!” Duck yelled.

One of the kids was a jerk named Zil. The other two Duck didn’t recognize right away.

“Hey!” he yelled again.

“Who are you yelling at?” Zil demanded.

“This is my pool,” Duck said. “I found it and I cleaned it. Go get your own pool.”

Duck was aware that he was smaller than any of the three. But he was angry enough to feel bold. The float sank beneath him and he wondered if one of the boys had poked a hole in it.

“I’m serious,” Duck yelled. “You guys take off.”

“He’s serious,” one of the boys mocked.

Before he knew it Zil was leaping up from beneath the water and had grabbed Duck by the neck. Duck was plunged underwater, gasping, choking, sucking water into his nose.

He surfaced with difficulty, fighting with suddenly leaden arms to stay afloat.

They hit him again, just roughhousing, not really trying to hurt him, but forcing him under once more. This time he touched down on the bottom of the pool and had to kick his way back to the surface to gasp for air. He clutched at the float, but one of the boys yanked it away, giggling loudly.

Duck was filled with sudden rage. He had one good thing in his life, this pool, one good thing, and now it was being ruined.

“Get out!” he shrieked, but the last word glub-glub-glubbed as he sank like a rock.

What was going on? Suddenly he couldn’t swim. He was on the bottom of the pool, in the deep end, under ten feet of water. He kicked at the tile bottom, trying to shoot back up, but his foot shattered the tile and sent pieces of it spinning through the water.

Now panic took hold. What were they doing to him?

He kicked again, both feet as hard as he could. But he did not rise to the surface. Instead, both feet punched through the tile. He rose not at all. In fact, he was still sinking. His feet were sinking through the tile, scraping through jagged mortar and crumbled concrete, down into mud beneath.

It was impossible.

Impossible.

Duck Zhang was falling through the bottom of the pool. Through the ground beneath the bottom of the pool. It was as if he were standing in quicksand.

Up to his knees.

Up to his thighs.

Up to his waist.

He thrashed madly but he only fell faster.

Broken tile scraped his flanks. Mud slithered into his bathing suit.

His lungs burned. His vision was blurring now, head pounding, and still he fell through solid earth, as if the ground itself were nothing but water.

As the tile reached his chest he slammed his arms down to block himself falling farther, but his arms plowed through the tile and the concrete beneath and the dirt beneath that, and all of it swirled around his head in a cloud of murk and mud.

The pool water was now rushing down around him, pushing into his mouth and nose. He was a loose plug caught in a drain.

Duck Zhang’s world swirled, crazy flashes of feet kicking above him, sparkling sunlight, then his vision tunneled, narrowed, and darkness crowded out the light.

It had been funny for the first minute or so. Zil Sperry had enjoyed sneaking up on Dork Zhang: he and Hank and Antoine creeping around the side of the house, shoving one another playfully, suppressing giggles.

It was Hank who’d found out about Duck’s secret swimming pool. Hank was a born spy. But it was Zil’s idea to wait until Duck had it all cleaned up, until he adjusted the chlorine and got the filter working.

“Let him do the work first,” Zil had argued. “Then we take it from him.”

Antoine and Hank were cool, Zil realized, but if there was serious thinking or planning to be done, it was up to him.

They had achieved total surprise. Duck had probably wet himself. Stupid dork. Big, whiny baby.

But then things had gone wrong. Duck had sunk like a rock. And kept sinking. And suddenly the sun-dappled water had turned into a whirlpool of shocking power. Hank had been standing on the steps and managed to leap up and out of the pool. But Antoine was with Zil in the deep end when Duck pulled the plug.

Zil had managed, just barely, to grab on to the end of the diving board. The water sucked at him, practically pulled his bathing suit off. He barely held on, fingertips scrabbling at the sandpapery surface of the board.

Antoine had been swept away, drawn into the circular motion. The force of the water had rammed him into the chrome ladder, and Antoine had managed to wedge one fat leg between the ladder, and the side of the pool. He was lucky he hadn’t broken his ankle.

Hank hauled Zil to safety. The two of them together helped Antoine clamber awkwardly up where he collapsed like a beached whale on the deck.

“Dude, we almost drowned,” Antoine gasped weakly.

“What happened?” Hank asked. “I couldn’t see.”

“Duck, man,” Zil said, his voice shaky. “He, like, sank through the water and just kept going.”

“I almost got sucked down,” Antoine said, practically in tears.

“More like you almost got flushed,” Hank said. “You looked like a big pink turd going down the bowl.”

Zil didn’t feel like laughing at the joke. He had been humiliated. He’d been made a fool of. He’d been hanging on for dear life, scared to death. He turned his hands palm-up and looked at his scraped, ragged fingertips. They burned.

He could imagine what he must have looked like, dangling from the end of the board, his swimsuit halfway down his butt as the water tugged at him.