In Search of the Unknown Chaptered Version

Part 2

Story of Eli Luther

About my experiences with my high school pool

I live in a small town named Jo-Lake, in Kansas. It was what you would expect from a partly suburbanized town. I say partly because half of it was rural houses that had been passed down from generation by generation. Having long dirt roads that were surprisingly fun to glide around on.

The other half was where I lived. My family like most others moving came for the new meatpacking factory. New businesses were popping up all over. My father was the proprietor in the creation of the first supermarket in that town.

A lot more things were being built now that there was an influx of workers. New parks, new houses, new buildings, new benches, and new roads. The most surprising thing that didn't need much added to it was the high school.

From what I heard the high school was built long before any of this happened and it was for most of its time in the town, was considered too big for how many students were there. The halls were wide, made for a large number of kids to be moving in and out the corridors. Most of its rooms weren't used, maybe five out of the twenty classrooms, and after being unused for so long was barely cleaned by the custodians. There was a school swimming pool, that until I and the other suburbanites arrived, never had a swimming team. The architecture was even more jarring, with completely unrelated rooms having doors leading to another. It was confusing, and I and my friends sometimes called this place a maze.

Before moving to this landlocked town, I grew up near the east coast. As a child I loved swimming. I relished in the feeling of pushing through the water, feeling the cold water against my skin. To move in the water felt almost meditative. Some people joked that God intended me to be a fish, but there was a slight accident, and my soul was thrown into a human body. So, I was the perfect fit to become one of the members of the town's first swim team.

Another thing that kept me there was my friend, Joshua. Well, I say friend, but that's all I could have called him at the time. It was the 90's and we just came off the Reagan Era and the Aids epidemic. It's hard to say if my family would have ever accepted me, I never told them. The best I could have hoped for was they tolerated me, but I knew that they would have treated me as "the other", and I wasn't for taking my chances on how they'll react. Plus, I knew that I would be ostracized by at least half of the people there, and that's being generous.

So, our relationship stayed secretive, having to find different places to hide, so we could be together in peace. Cornfields, and abandoned farm, the janitor's closet in my father's supermarket. Whoever sees it as romantic is wrong, and reads too many novels. The feeling that we could never express ourselves, that we could never be in the open holding hands, that if anybody found out we would probably lose every ounce of respect and dignity anybody felt towards us. It ate at us, made us scared and jumpy when together, and we couldn't feel safe alone.

Luckily for us, no one ever found out. I was muscular at the time and was perceived as a jock, so nobody accused me or called me names. On the other hand, Joshua was weaker, and less aggressive, more passive. They saw him as feminine and thusly gay, and he was bullied for it. This logic was painful to see in action, and I felt so much seething rage for the people that threw slurs at Joshua like he was some freak.

It was close to the summer. It was getting warmer, and the break was ticking closer and closer along with our last year of high school. Joshua and I had plans to celebrate, and we wanted to do it alone.

We tried to look for a nice place to hide out, and just enjoy each other's company. That's when Joshua suggested to me that we should go to the swimming pool when the school is closed. It sounded amazing to me, and Joshua knew it would be a great time for me.