The Extra Swimmer

The CampfireThe openingFree

I was a lifeguard at a summer camp when I was eighteen. A big lake, surrounded by woods. A wooden dock. A roped-off swimming area with two floats. And a tall white lifeguard chair at the end of the dock.

The camp had a system for swimming. The buddy system. Every kid had a buddy. Every fifteen minutes, the head lifeguard blew a whistle, and all the kids in the water had to stop, find their buddy, grab their hand, and hold it up in the air.

Then we counted. Pairs of hands. And we checked the count against the board on the dock, where every swimmer's tag was hung.

The count always had to match. Always. If it didn't, everybody out of the water, right now, and we searched.

The head lifeguard that summer was a woman named Carol. She'd been at the camp for twenty-two summers. She was tough. Strict. She'd never had a kid drown on her watch, she said, and she never would.

On my first day she gave me one rule that wasn't in the manual.

"When you count," she said, "count heads. Not hands. Heads."

I asked why.

She said, "Because hands can be faked."

I thought she was joking.