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Just Another Story

The crowd grew silent as I was introduced to take the podium. The emcee made an off-hand comment about my skin color, but that didn't phase me. I was too focused on what I knew was my clear purpose. I stepped upon that pedestal, that holy hill of mine, surrounded on all sides by onlookers eager to gauge my mettle. Some people prepare their entire lives for events like this one, but the task was handed to me just earlier that day. Still, I made the most of it. I hesitated, on purpose, before I took my last breath and began. This was my calling. This was my life. This was the day I would reign victorious in a camp belly flop contest.

It started earlier when I was asked to represent the adult counselor for my team's set of cabins. I was excited at the prospect, and agreed. I had a special move that I performed on a large trampoline that my parents had bought my brother and I, and I thought I could use it here, as well.

When the entire camp surrounded that pool, however, and the kids and counselors who went before me sailed through the air in deft form over glistening water, I found that the butterflies in my stomach began to awaken. I wondered whether my secret, never-before-seen move would strike the crowd as peculiar, rather than brilliant. Still, there was no turning back. As the camp manager began to introduce me, he saw how white I was and mentioned that perhaps it would be a good idea to keep my shirt off more often.

I didn't care. I was here to prove a point. I took my time placing the ball of each foot on the edge of that launch pad, took a few suspenseful breaths, bent my knees, and sailed. I sailed high and I sailed far, but I also sailed in a way no one in that camp had ever sailed before: I sailed as a fish. This was my signature move, what I called "the fish." With the fish, you look as though you are a salmon jumping out of water and swimming upstream.

I performed it with rare aplomb, keeping my arms tightly against my sides and waving the entirety of my body so that I appeared to be leaping from the depths of a raging river. Things seemed to go well in that split second, and when I came up from under water, it was to deafening applause. I turned to the judges to see that I had two tens and a nine. I had won the contest, and I was happy.

Still, something wasn't right, for when I struck the water, the brunt of the impact from the water was borne by the right side of my head. I had slapped my ear against it as I made contact with that serene liquid, and now I felt a sting as I surfaced. What I didn't know at the time was that I had blown out my right eardrum. I went to the camp nurse immediately. Thinking it was swimmer's ear, she administered droplets of alcohol solution inside my ear. It burned, to say the least.

I can't say that my victory was worth a slightly reduced sense of hearing in my right ear, but I will always remember that day somewhat fondly; for it was on that day that a simple swimming pool surrounded by a semi-interested crowd was, to me, a stage, a proving ground, a kingdom. I had come home victorious, and though I knew only a few select people would remember it, I knew that I would be one of them; and to me, that was enough.

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