We find the pool on the roof. And at first we think it’s just a joke; a senior prank put on by the other seniors who have filled a hole with drinking fountain water, adding a cup or two between classes. But the water reeks of chlorine, and it’s blue.
We’d heard about the pool in passing, from the teachers and upperclassmen, or our parents who giggled to themselves as they said it facetiously. It was a hazing of sorts, waiting for doe-eyed freshmen in swim trunks to wander up to the fourth floor and find a room full of electrical tubing. But this is where they said it would be, just sitting there, untouched. No floating leaves or bugs, no hole in the floor, just sun-baked concrete and blue tile.
We’ve never been to this part of the building before, only accessible by the maintenance elevator, the key sitting amongst the other dozens on the belt loop of staff members we tend to ignore. We start to imagine them spending most of their days up here, wearing floral swim caps and doing handstands in the water, bringing their wives and kids up for birthday parties and secret swim meets.
It was no secret the school was lined with asbestos; the wallpaper in the bathrooms started to turn yellow and peel from the carcinogenic smoke, and the cafeteria smelled like the rotten apples people would throw up onto the beams, disintegrating into little piles of mush. But now we had a pool. No soap in our bathrooms, but we had an olympic sized pool. And it hurt only a little bit, finding such a thing on our last day, but we still weren’t quite sure it was there at all, or a collective hallucination.
We all dive in fully clothed, shoes and all. The water is cold, but we don’t care. Our lips turn beautiful shades of violet, and the lights from below radiate onto our chins, showing faces as
young as they will ever be. We know things about one another that our spouses will never know. The awkward, shameful parts of ourselves that we’ll spend the next decade trying to erase as if they were never there. The seeds of all of us, in this shared mirage, this oasis, floating like ice cubes. We feel after tomorrow we will likely never see one another again. And this is true: in 10 years our only interactions will be in passing, through frosty car windows or fumbling through small talk at the grocery store. We will return to look for the carvings left behind in the desks and trace them with our fingers, so we know it wasn’t all a dream.
But, right now, we have found it, and we have dove in.