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sixteen-year-old breasts, long legs, the outline of her female parts where the wet cloth of the suit pulled tight, and I felt a surprising warmth flow down from my racing heart to fill the netted sling in my swim trunks with muscular intensity. I could barely breathe. My head seemed to float above my shoulders, and as I stared like a hypnotized animal, she caught my look and smiled.
I never saw her again until that fall. It was almost supper time; the street was deserted and it had begun to get cold. She came right up to me and I felt my chest tighten till I was breathless and a little giddy. I couldn’t read the look on her face. It was amused, but not quite sure of what she was going to do, as if she were crossing a line, or testing something, and there was a challenge too, and I remembered that smile from the summer and I saw it now as something else, something that made me feel a flicker of anxiety along with the excitement and the wonder of this unexpected proximity.
She didn’t say hello, or what’s your name, or I know you, she just blurted it out, “Wanna wrestle?” and she was a little breathless too. It was something my friends and I did all the time, but I’d never even imagined wrestling with a girl, much less an older girl who was already a woman, and I didn’t know what to think about that, and before I could think anything, she stepped up and put her right arm around my neck, trying to pull me into a headlock. I slipped out, spun around, grabbed her forearm and wrist and attempted to force her arm behind her back, but she was taller and heavier than I was and she used her weight to push me off balance. She grabbed me from behind, but I squirmed around until we were face to face inside her bear hug, and I could feel her warmth, smell the light fragrance of her deodorant and a deeper, muskier scent that astonished and aroused me so quickly that I could feel my stiffness fit between her legs, and her face looked shocked and she tried to twist away and we fell, and my ankle caught on the curb and she landed on top of me, both of us breathing hard, and I heard a dull crack, and a stab of pain like an electric current that shot up my left leg, and I went pale and started to faint, and she looked scared, rolled off of me, took off at a full run down the street.
I lay there catching my breath and wondering what to do next. When I tried to get back on my feet, the pain shot up from my ankle again and I felt a moment of panic. How long would I have to lie here before I could walk? Should I yell for someone to help me?
Manolis Aligizakis 