If Holden Caulfield Was a Swimmer

But I like the kind ones who hold the locker room door and don’t say anything gross when I walk through. The sweet ones who say Good set, who ask me what I’m listening to on my Walkman because they really want to know, who won’t make fun of Adam Ant even if they want to. When I spot a certain nice swimmer with a shy smile standing on the other side of the pool, I squirm, thinking naked as he looks back and waves, the muscles in his lean arms undulating like water. Yearnings wrestle inside of me like ferocious animals, sending feelings into parts of my body that up until now have been sleeping.

Everyone knows that in swimming love it’s always the girl who sacrifices her future for the sake of great passion and not the horny swimmer, who keeps on winning medals.

But avoiding horniness is like avoiding life. The continuous stream of hot thought mixes with keen curiosity, eventually wearing me down, girl or no, and I find myself on a couch at a Friday night swimming party, his tongue in my mouth, and my old world empties, the new one filling up with sexy stuff. He turns his head, breathing slowly into my ear, causing both my ear cords and my vagina to whir.

My vagina has done many things in her short life. She’s jumped down hard on new bike; ridden the occasional, misbehaving pony; sat quietly in class listening to a nun. She’s plunged off a high dive the wrong way, vibrated along with a vibrating plane, idled sweetly with an idling bus, spent many summer hours soaking up heat from a faraway sun, but up until this moment, she’d never whirred.

He stops kissing me, whispering: You OK?

I say I think so, and Holy Name shoots up toward the heavens, small and smaller the faster it goes, exploding in a shower of burning black stars that disappear as they fall.

We make out in the parking lot, at the Peggys’ behind their wall of trees. We make out in the shady parts of the street, we make out lying down on the floor in the empty weight room, we make out by the bluish light of an empty pool. He’s never pushy. I no longer worry about the breadth of my shoulders, the muscular boobs that flex when I move; I’m basking in the discovery that kindhearted, cute but not handsome swimmers love everything about me, not suspecting for one second that I’m still girl.

Peggy doesn’t understand. Are you really going out with him? He’s so...She looks for a word she doesn’t have the patience to find. I can give you one of my old ones if you want.

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Nicola Keegan lives in Paris with her husband and three children. Swimming is her debut novel.