The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) by Brent Hartinger Read Free Book Online Page A

been—bubbles that were already disappearing. From this angle, with the sun on the water, I couldn't really see the dark form anymore. This is why it's so important to never look away from the spot where you think the person is, not even for a second.
    I dove down into the lake. I kept my eyes open underwater, and even though the lake is murky, I could see the woman's pale white skin and the blue of her one-piece swim-suit (but not the pink of her bathing cap). She wasn't moving, just drifting under the water, which meant she was unconscious.
    I knew she hadn't been diving off a dock or near the diving board, that she'd been swimming the crawl stroke only minutes before, so there was no real danger of a back injury. Right now the most important thing was to get her out of the water and breathing again, so I reached out and grabbed her in the lifesaving hold (one arm over her shoulder from behind, around her body, and then under the armpit). Once I had her tight, I furiously kicked my way up again.
    She was heavier than I expected, difficult to drag. That could mean her lungs were already full of water—very bad news.
    My head broke the surface.
    Still gripping the woman with one arm, I stroked with my other arm, and furiously kicked my way toward shore.
    Once I was in the shallow water, I dragged her up onto the small rocky beach where I could stretch her out and start doing mouth-to-mouth and CPR if necessary. She was older than I expected, in her sixties at least.
    By now, two of the other lifeguards from the office had joined me. We turned the woman onto her side, to see if we could drain the water out of her mouth. Then we rolled her back again, and I tilted her head back to open the airway.
    As soon as I did that, she started coughing, then gasping for air. This is exactly what they'd said might happen when I'd learned mouth-to-mouth. If it hadn't happened, her situation would have immediately been a hell of a lot more serious.
    Another lifeguard appeared with a red wool blanket, pulling her upright, wrapping it around her, comforting her, telling her that help was coming. That's when I realized that at some point whoever had been playing the Green Lake piano had stopped. Everything was eerily quiet—so much so I could hear people breathing.
    That's also when I realized what had just happened, everything I'd just done.
    Talk about being in the lifeguard zone! I'd barely had a conscious thought the whole time I'd been saving her. I definitely didn't remember making any actual decisions. I'd just seen what needed to be done and did it. But now it was hitting me what a big deal my job was, and how easily I could have screwed it all up. The world started to spin. I even started shaking. Maybe it was some kind of adrenalin withdrawal.
    But then sirens rose in the distance, focusing me again.
     
    *   *   *
     
    Lifeguards don't actually save that many people from drowning. I'd never done it before—except in the reach-for-a-small-kid-having-trouble kind of way. It had only happened to anyone three other times in the entire two years I'd been a lifeguard at Green Lake. So it was kind of a big deal that I'd done it, and so flawlessly.
    I guess you could say I was kind of a celebrity, at least for that day. Of course I wasn't so much of a celebrity that anyone offered to give me the rest of the day off, or the next day either. But the other lifeguards were totally cool, high-fiving me and generally carrying on like I was a rock star. And as I worked my shifts in the office and out in the lifeguarding rotation, just about every single person who had been swimming in Green Lake that day came up to me to thank me or congratulate me for a job well done (including the DILF—yeow!— and the "free kisses" guy, though I politely declined the kiss. Isn't that life for you? It's always the guy in the creepy g-string offering the free kiss, not the hairy-chested DILF in the board shorts. Why is that?).
    Toward the end of the day,