WORK BY ALLISON GREEN

Sioux Falls

White girl looking in the aluminum mirror in the locker room of the public pool of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I've been dropped off by my mother, who's taken my brother to the swings. Me and my mother and my brother and my father, who is drinking iced rum by the motel's air conditioning unit, have been driving west all day, the sun first rising on our necks and then falling in our faces, and it's been hot in the green vinyl back seat of that Valiant. All afternoon Peter and I sucked ice, threw ice, shoved ice down each other's shirts, sat on ice. And now it is dusk and we have stopped for the night and I am going for the swim I was promised.

You'd think a girl raised by academics would know some things. I don't. I don't know girls can have wet dreams. I can't stop my belly fisting when Roy Schmidt barfs twenty-four chocolate puddings on the cafeteria table. I don't know where to pin my locker key.

I jab the point of my locker key into the sherbet-orange fabric above my right thigh, watching in the mirror, and work the pin into the catch. I wanted to swim earlier, when Mom talked about it in the car, and ice chips melted in my palm. Now the air is cooler, and the straps of this suit cut my shoulders. The locker room smells like a refrigerator that hasn't been opened in a long time. But Mom went out of her way to find me a pool, and I better swim.

Mosquitoes float the clogged drains in the shower room. The shower heads drip. Outside, two yellow towels hang over a bleacher and in the pool are two kids, an older girl, a boy my age. Just two kids making all that splash noise and those screams. Two kids with broad noses and cheeks, thick, brown hair. Deep dimples in their cheeks and their shoulders slick.

I squat at the pool edge, touch the water. Too cold. Too cold to swim now. I hold the soles of my feet. And the kids are loud. The girl splashes and splashes and splashes. The boy turns his head, whipping his hair into brown peaks. He blinks, forgetting his mouth's open.

I sit on the concrete. Toes then heels then ankles in the water, sucking air through my teeth. Going in slow the way you eat ice cream slow so it doesn't ache in your head. The waterline comes just below my knees. My calves scrape the pool wall.

The girl is calling the boy names -- chicken, wuss -- and her voice is flatter than mine, and her arms are bigger around, and her laugh is louder than the laugh of boys watching Roy Schmidt. The boy swallows air and dives. The girl catches his feet. His arms flipper against the pool bottom, metal bracelet shining, but the girl holds his feet. Mosquitoes want the blood under her hair. She elbows them away; her hand lets go; the boy comes up spitting.

My chest rises with his chest. He turns on her, a splash machine. She flat- hands them back. The waves trough and swell, tidal waving over the lip of the pool, tidal waving under me. My heels push me back and out. It's that ice cream ache but not in my head.

Mom is sitting on a park bench chewing a popsicle stick. "Out so fast? You just went in." Damp spreads across my shorts.

Indian kids. Not the ones on the placemat at breakfast, not the ones on the wallet in the drug store in Fargo. Indian kids with fat cheeks and loud voices and big, flat-hand splashes.

White is something different. White is watching chocolate-pudding-barf and you better not throw up. White has that ice cream ache. But white has a new Valiant all the way from Green Bay to Seattle, bag of ice on the back seat, and most every other face looking out of every other car a mirror back.