Fiction: We Thought We Would Be That Way Forever by Alys Abbott

Photo Source: Unsplash

The last night at the cabin, Mom let me and my cousin Izzie stay up past our bedtime alone. We lay on the floor in front of the fireplace playing Gin Rummy hours after everyone else had gone to bed. I was in the perfect mood.

  Earlier that day, when we rode our bikes to the gas station to buy King Cones, the boy behind the register called us sisters. When we told our parents, they agreed and laughed, ice clanking in their glasses. Izzie thought he had to be blind. Izzie said a lot of things that didn’t make sense. Mom called her a pathological liar, but I just thought she was braver than me.

  “Gin!” Izzie shouted. Then, she slapped her cards on the floor and jumped up. “Let’s go swimming.”

  “Now?” I said. Our bathing suits were still wet from earlier.

  “Why not?”

  She was out the door before I could decide what to say.

  Outside, the evergreens and oaks trembled against the night sky as Izzie skipped through the dark. By the time I made it to the dock, she was down to her underwear. She stripped off the rest like it was nothing.

 My insides flipped.

 “Aren’t you freezing?” I asked.

  “It’s not that bad.” The whites of her eyes gleamed in the dark. “Hurry up.”

 This was not how it was done in the locker room. The right thing to do was to hunch in on yourself until you were small enough to disappear every bare inch. But Izzie just stood there in front of me, hips tilted, leaving everything important uncovered.

 I thought about going back for my suit. I needed to decide fast before it go weird.

  “I don’t care if you look,” she said.

  She jiggled as she spun in a clumsy circle, feet slapping on the wooden dock. She didn’t look like the models, but not bad either—her own kind of beautiful.

  When we’d told our parents about the gas station employee they’d all agreed, we could be sisters.

 “Well, are we doing this or not?” she said, stomping her feet to stay warm.

  How many times in a lifetime would I get a chance like this?

 I stripped out of my clothing as fast as I could and tried not to think about who might be behind me getting an eyeful of butt pimples. Toes curled over the edge of the dock, we looked up at the star-pricked dome above. It was impossible to tell where the sky ended and the water began.

  There was a crash as Izzie broke the surface.

  Our bodies sluiced through the warm water. We stayed for an eon, only emerging when her dad shouted from the cabin. When we finally climbed out, our skin pruned and wrinkled beyond recognition, I almost walked right back inside that way, as if it were natural going around like when we were toddlers who didn’t know the difference.

  Tugging on my jeans over damp skin, I kept reaching, trying to place where that had ended and this had begun.

Alys Abbott is a non-binary writer and filmmaker from Minneapolis. Their writing has been recognized by the Jerome Foundation through its Verve Grant for spoken word poetry and by the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Competition, and published by Mobius Blvd Magazine and other independent outlets. As a director and producer, her films have been optioned by AMC, Shudder, and DeskPop Entertainment; screened at festivals around the world; and featured in Vanity Fair and at SXSW under the name Alice Shindelar.