Hunger

view, was the pool. It wasn’t exactly his pool, but it might as well be because here he was, floating in it. On a Monday morning in early March when he normally would have been in school.
    No school. Nothing but pool. It took some of the sting out of hunger.
    He was a sixth grader, small for his age, Asian, although his family had been American since the 1930s. Back in the day his folks had worried he was getting fat. Well, no one was very fat in the FAYZ. Not anymore.
    Duck loved the water. But not the ocean. The ocean scaredhim. He couldn’t get past the idea that a whole world was down there below the waves, invisible to him while he was visible to them. Them being squids, octopi, fish, eels, jellyfish and, above all, sharks.
    Pools on the other hand were great. You could see all the way to the bottom.
    But he’d never had a pool of his own. There was no public pool in Perdido Beach, so he could only swim when he happened to have a friend with a pool, or when he was on vacation with his parents and they stayed at a hotel with a pool.
    Now, however, with kids in Perdido Beach able to live pretty much wherever they liked, and go pretty much wherever they liked, Duck had found a perfect, secluded, private pool. Whom it belonged to, he couldn’t say. But whoever they were, they had a great setup. The pool was big, kidney-shaped, with a ten-foot depth at one end so you could dive in headfirst. The whole thing was the prettiest shade of aqua tile with a gold sunburst pattern in the bottom. The water—once he’d figured out how to add chlorine and clean the filters—was as clear as glass.
    There was a nice wrought-iron table with an umbrella in the middle and some very comfortable chaise lounges for him to lie out on if he chose. But he didn’t choose to lie out. He chose to lie back on a float. A bottle of water bobbed alongside him on its own separate float. He had a cool pair of Ray-Bans on and a light coating of sunblock and he was—in a word—happy. Hungry, but happy.
    Sometimes, when Duck felt particularly good, it almost seemed as if he didn’t even need the raft to hold him up. Sometimes if he was happy enough he could actually feel the pressure of his back on the plastic lessen. Like he weighed less or something. In fact he’d once awakened suddenly from a happy dream and had fallen a couple of feet into the water. At least, that’s what it seemed like, although it was obviously just part of the dream.
    Other times, if he became angry for some reason, maybe just remembering some slight, it seemed to him that he grew heavier and the float would actually start to sink into the water.
    But Duck was seldom either very happy or very angry. Mostly he was just peaceful.
    “Yeee-ahhh!”
    The shout was completely unexpected. As was the huge splash that followed it.
    Duck sat up on his raft.
    Water sloshed over him. Someone was in the water. His water.
    Two more blurs raced toward the pool’s edge and there were two more shouts, followed by two more cannonball splashes.
    “Hey!” Duck yelled.
    One of the kids was a jerk named Zil. The other two Duck didn’t recognize right away.
    “Hey!” he yelled again.
    “Who are you yelling at?” Zil demanded.
    “This is my pool,” Duck said. “I found it and I cleaned it. Go get your own pool.”
    Duck was aware that he was smaller than any of the three. But he was angry enough to feel bold. The float sank beneath him and he wondered if one of the boys had poked a hole in it.
    “I’m serious,” Duck yelled. “You guys take off.”
    “He’s serious,” one of the boys mocked.
    Before he knew it Zil was leaping up from beneath the water and had grabbed Duck by the neck. Duck was plunged underwater, gasping, choking, sucking water into his nose.
    He surfaced with difficulty, fighting with suddenly leaden arms to stay afloat.
    They hit him again, just roughhousing, not really trying to hurt him, but forcing him under once more. This time he touched down on the bottom of the pool and had to kick his way back to the surface to gasp for air. He clutched at the float, but one of the boys yanked it away, giggling loudly.
    Duck was filled with sudden rage. He had one good thing in his life, this pool, one good thing, and now it was being ruined.
    “Get out!” he shrieked, but the last word glub-glub-glubbed as he sank like a rock.
    What was going on? Suddenly he couldn’t swim. He was on the bottom of the pool, in the deep end, under ten feet of water. He