Surface Tension by Meg McKinlay

through the mud.
    Because the mud wasn’t thick here. Because there was something else underneath it, something my feet were touching, and walking on, finding a firm, stable footing.
    “There’s a road,” I said.
    Liam knelt down. He was at the very edge, where mud met dry dirt and gravel. He used a stick to clear away the dirt along the line I was following.
    It was grey and faded. It had been weathered and washed out, and no one had walked on it in years. But it was regular, tightly packed, a sheet of once-dark stones flattened into place by long-ago hands.
    Liam looked up at me. “Yeah,” he said. “There is.”

fourteen
    We didn’t make plans for the next day, or the day after that.
    We didn’t make any plans at all. We just turned up.
    Sometimes I got there first and sometimes Liam did. When I saw his bike parked alongside the break in the fence, I caught myself smiling.
    I wondered if he did the same.
    When we went out to the tree, we took turns on the raft – me swimming one way and Liam the other. He didn’t need to stay alongside me any more, though. I was getting stronger. I was coughing and spluttering less.
    And I was getting faster. Even without flags and black lines, I could tell. The platform seemed closer, and not only because the shoreline was continuing to recede.
    I still couldn’t come close to Liam. When we swam next to each other, he pulled away from me immediately.
    When I asked how he made it seem so easy, he shrugged. “It’s all underwater.”
    That’s why good swimmers look so relaxed, he said. You can’t believe they’re going that fast because it’s all invisible. Everything that matters happens out of sight, under the surface. I nodded, thinking of Amber and her clean, butter-slice stroke.
    Christmas came and went and there were days when I couldn’t get up there. There were days when Mum said we should spend time as a family and we went to the pool, where Mum got mad because I wouldn’t wear the rainbow-striped bikini she had bought me for Christmas. Or round to the Point, where I swam out past the jet skis till Mum started yelling and waving her arms, where I stared out across the surface, wondering if Liam was over there on the other side, hauling himself down.
    Liam and I cleared off the road, at least as much as we could. As you went further up the bank, it veered off into the bush, where undergrowth and trees had grown up and over it.
    We walked down the road towards the lake, into the water, but we kept bobbing up to the surface. I told Liam about my idea, with the stones in the pockets, and he laughed.
    We tried swimming down the road, following it as far as we could underwater. It was tricky, though. It was hard to stay down without anything to hang on to and difficult to stay with the line of the road when it was dark down there and everything was covered with mud.
    Slowly, but noticeably now that we were paying attention, the water level continued to drop. We had to walk further to get to the water. We made it further down the road. We wondered how close we were – to the town, to the houses, to the places where our families used to live.
    Out at the platform, we pulled ourselves down the pegs. The water got lower and lower. We dived further and further, counting ourselves down.
    When Liam went under, I timed him, so I’d know when to panic. After a while I stopped worrying. The bubbles always came back up. He was always there eventually, sticking his head through the opening, flicking his wet hair out of his eyes.
    The water had receded below the level of the platform now and the raft was tethered to a branch underneath us. We had to climb up to the platform using the pegs, the way people used to. It was weird to think that Elijah had been here, had done this before me, years and years ago.
    One afternoon we sketched out a map in the mud halfway up the bank. Together we laid out the whole town, etching out its squares and sloping curves with pointed