Summer Camp Fieldtrip to the Waterpark

Abstract

Summer Camp Fieldtrip to the Waterpark Taylor Byas (bio) My white friend says you can't swim, can you—as if she's known the answer to this question all her life—then changes the subject. Did you really wear a one piece instead of a bikini? Before they unleash us into the park, the counselors tell us to follow the buddy system. But come on, the system is rigged. We know which buddies will follow each other into the single-family restrooms, who will emerge with their bikini straps loosened, the shoddy re-tie job. We place bets on who will cement their centers together in the deep end of a pool, who will steal a feel in the lazy river's march. I buddy up with another black girl so we can wet our hair in solidarity. We share a double tube on the park's steepest slide, emerge from its black mouth with both hands in the air, our tongues primed for the smack of chlorine. In the wave pool, an older white boy carries me out to the deep end on his shoulders to play a game. And it happens without warning, my two-foot ejection into the air, my accidental cannonball into too-deep water. I thought I would die only seeing the bottom half of everyone, their legs working to keep them afloat as I drifted to the bottom. The emergency whistle sounded like a siren-song from the pool floor, and the white boy's legs circled a few feet away. I knew he was watching the balloons of my last breaths pop on the water's surface and hoping that nothing else came up at all. [End Page 8] Taylor Byas Taylor Byas is a black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is now a second year PhD student and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She was the 1st place winner of both the Poetry Super Highway and the Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests. Her chapbook, BLOODWARM, is forthcoming from Variant Lit in the summer of 2021. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Glass, Iron Horse Literary Review, Hobart, Frontier Poetry, SWWIM, TriQuarterly, and others. Copyright © 2021 Pleiades and Pleiades Press