The stainless steel mirror glints as I grasp it. It goes straight up to the high diving board at the community center swimming pool, and I am climbing with a rocking motion, my arm muscles tensed and steady. The bathing suit sticks to my skin, for I am wet, dripping wet, and I know if I don't hold on tight, in a dazed second I might be splayed across the concrete. It happened to my sister's friend, and she was in a cast all summer. That is why my sister won't even go off the low board, why she averts her eyes as I climb.

She is seven years old, and I am eight. I am afraid, too, but I won't confess it. When I reach the top, I release the breath I was holding without realizing it and begin to walk out on the board, my fingers gripping the rails. Its surface is rough so I won't slip. I look below me, beyond the edge: the pool shimmers in the sunlight. It seems farther away than I thought. The dark blue stripes painted on its bottom waver as I try to hold them in my gaze. I think I am seeing them from an immense distance. I reach the end of the rails: a tongue of board, and then air. I bounce lightly, testing the spring. Other children in line below yell at me to hurry. "Go ahead, take your turn," and the lifeguard's whistle is shrill, as terrifying as a scream. "Ten-minute break," he calls, "everyone out of the water."

If I go quickly, he won't notice. I run and jump out, far and high. I know the instant my feet leave the board for empty air, I will close my eyes. I don't see myself falling or the water spraying out in tiny drops as I break the surface, but I feel the rush, always a shock, as I sink, and the bubbles graze past my skin. I almost touch bottom before I begin to swim for the rope underwater, my legs flapping like fins.

When I emerge, the pool is empty. Again, the lifeguard's whistle barks. "Break," he yells, just for me. I lift myself out onto the brick gutter, I dangle my legs in the quiet water. Now the blue stripes are as straight as the lanes on a blacktop. I inhale the intense smell of chlorine and of the pines growing up the hill behind the chain-link fence.

During the ten-minute break, only adults are allowed in the pool, but this time no one goes in but my grandfather, and he doesn't swim. He lies on an inflated raft, wearing green-tinted sunglasses and a baseball cap to protect his bald skull from sunburn. When it is not ten-minute break, he likes me to swim under the raft, but not to disturb him. When he is tired of floating, he lets my sister and me take the raft while he reads in a shaded lawn chair. We both try to get on at once. We overturn it and slip off and then get back on. We pretend it is our boat. Paddling with our legs and arms, we have gone the whole length of the pool in it. Then we have to give it back so my grandfather can let it dry before he lays it across the back seat of his car and drives it home. He keeps it inflated so he won't have to blow it up each time he comes to the pool.

I jump off the high board until the cold water hurts my nose and my head. I am afraid to dive. Once I landed on my stomach; it made a sickening sound and was red for two days. Another time my legs curled over like when I do a backbend. Even though I couldn't see them, I felt them waving disconnectedly before I broke the surface. So now I jump, but someday I hope I will dive, aimed for the surface like an arrow and like an arrow, sever it without a ripple.

Sometimes Peggy comes to the pool and brings her friend Karen. Peggy is my age, and Karen is a year younger, like my sister. Peggy and Karen have dark curly hair and deep tans. We play freeze tag with them or swim through each other's legs. My grandfather watches from a distance. He doesn't like commotion. Sometimes we race across freestyle or float like dead men. Or we play underwater tea party, sitting on the pool bottom and sipping from make-believe cups in a pretend conversation like ladies at a country club. Then we try to guess what each of us said, but mostly we are wrong. I love the way the bubbles look as they float upward. We usually end up laughing. Once my sister began to choke, and I had to help her to her feet, into the air again, and slap her between her shoulder blades while she raised her arms above her head.

For me the best times are when Abby comes. She is Karen's younger sister, and although she is not yet six years old, she is the best diver I have ever seen. Abby is deaf. The lifeguard's shrill whistle, the cries of toddlers in the wading pool, and their mothers' reprimands are nothing to her. When I first saw her, I didn't know she was deaf. Peggy told me later in a whisper as if she might overhear. But Abby knew I was staring at her because she tried to hide behind my grandfather's raft, propped up against the chain-link fence to dry.

After I met Abby, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be deaf. I stuffed cotton in my ears as I walked around the house, but I could still hear my mother running the vacuum cleaner; I could hear the air conditioner switching on and the steady hum of the refrigerator. I walked out on the patio, and the hot moist air enclosed me. I wondered if Abby lives in utter stillness or if she always hears against the background of her mind something like traffic swishing down our street.

Abby was born deaf. She has never heard a human voice. She sometimes makes strange sounds like gurgles, and she laughs and cries. Karen told Peggy who told me that in the fall Abby is going to a special school in Atlanta just for deaf children. She already knows how to make sign language. Sometimes I go to Peggy's and we all play hide-and-go-seek, but no one can ever find Abby except sometimes Karen. Maybe that is because Karen knows her the best and can guess where she would go.

Abby runs the fastest of all of us. After the day she caught me staring at her, she tried to avoid me. Maybe she thought I was too curious or she was afraid of me. But recently, when Karen was buying snow cones at the pool's snack bar, Abby let me hold her. I wrapped my arms around her wet waist and she didn't even squirm, though as soon as she saw Karen coming, she broke away.

It is at the moment I reach for the rope and surface to the lifeguard's second whistle, my hair and eyes streaming, lungs bursting, that the comparison flashes on me that maybe Abby’s deafness is like swimming underwater. Underwater, everything is different. There is sound underwater but not as we speak it. Our voices are mangled. When I watch divers break the surface from underwater, I see a long shaft of whiteness parting before them. Their legs pump up and down. And then the water is perfectly blue again, even bluer than the sky which even at its clearest is always streaked by the ghost of a cloud.

After the break is over and the pool is ours again, I see Abby arriving with Peggy and Karen. She dances down the steps, she is so glad to be here. She is wearing a red one-piece suit of silky nylon, like members of the swim team have, and her legs against the steps are as thin and brown as bamboo. Peggy sees me and waves, and I walk rapidly--it is against the rules to run--to greet her. "I knew you would be here"; she says, "because I called your mother. Where is your sister?"

My sister is talking to my grandfather. We all go over, Peggy, Karen, Abby, and me. "I can crack my fingers, I can crack my ankles and my wrists, I can even crack my knees," my sister is telling my grandfather as she sits cross-legged at his feet. He is in a lawn chair, and this time his baseball cap has a shaded green visor but he also wears sunglasses, just to make sure.

"Better watch it," he says, "if you crack your fingers too much, they will look like mine," and he holds his up to show us his knuckles swollen from arthritis.

Abby is restless; she shifts her weight from one foot to the other and pulls on Karen's arm. "She wants to go in," Karen explains and then signs to her sister. They head for the diving area across the pool from us, where the deep water is. We all watch, even my grandfather.

Swiftly Abby climbs the ladder, whereas I, unsure, must put both feet on a rung before I try for the next. She walks out to the end and back. No one tells her to hurry. Even if she could hear them, it wouldn't matter, it wouldn't change anything. Holding onto the rails, she lifts her light body into the air and then down, and then she runs the length of the board, and bounces, and jumps out far and high, the plane of her body horizontal to the water; arms outstretched, she is poised for that motionless instant--and then her arms form a V over her head and she curves straight down into the water, severing it with the sharpness of her confident accuracy.

Only then do I realize that I have been holding my breath too, as if I were Abby. She swims all the way across the pool, over to us, and when she gets out, my grandfather begins to clap, and, realizing, abruptly stops, frozen. But Abby delights in our smiles. She waves and flashes, into the pool again, into the sparkling water. In his benevolence, my grandfather offers us his raft though it is already dry. All five of us try to get on at once; then Karen, my sister, and Abby sit astride it, spreading their legs across its width while Peggy and I pull them around the pool.

When the lifeguard calls the next break, my grandfather gives us money for ice cream. They sell vanilla cones topped with chocolate and nuts. Sometimes the nuts stick to the paper wrapping, and you have to eat them off. We lick ours slowly, without saying much, as the sun dries our skin and bathing suits and hair. Later Abby dives again and again. Karen goes after her, and although she is good, your eyes don't rivet on her as they do on Abby.

My mother takes us all home in the station wagon. Before we sit down, she makes us spread our towels across the seats. We are tired; my sister dozes in the front seat. Abby rests her head on Karen's shoulder.

The station wagon has a window in the roof. I lean my head back on the seat and watch the clouds cover the sun and the sun escape, and the anticipation fills me, of all the summer that still remains for me. Will I overcome my fear? I will never learn to dive like Abby.

Suddenly Abby starts in the back seat: out of a dream, a cry; and Karen shushes her, strokes her head softly. In the fall Abby will go to Atlanta. That is what Peggy said, and Peggy knows because Karen told her. But it is June; three blank pages of the calendar's sheets stretch before us, with no school, no Sunday school, no scout meetings or lessons to be filled in. Just the sun getting hotter and burning the dew off the grass, and the pungent scent of the pines growing up the hill. And all the days at the pool where time is measured by the lifeguard's whistle, except for Abby who will never hear it, even if, in that distant unknown school, she learns to speak.