My Kind of Woman

1. Norah "Fish" Cook

It was through Jackie Reed that I met her. I first met Jackie "Jacks" Reed at the end of eleventh grade. She was a late joiner to the swim team, and despite her short stature, I thought she swam like a real life mermaid. She had technique and excellent form, and best of all, she wanted to be my friend. My best friend, even then perhaps. We first spoke when stood, waiting for our names to be called, shivering at the school's poolside. Our knees were trembling, droplets of pool water gathering at our fingertips and dripping. She looked at me, then back at the pool, then to me again.

"You're an amazing swimmer, you know?" She said.

I looked at her, "thank you. I think you're a good swimmer too."

"No—like amazing. How long have you been swimming?" She asked, hopping from one foot to the other cautiously.

"Since I could, so like five or six maybe?" I said, shrugging. "How long have you?"

She puffed out her cheeks as she thought, then said, "I think since I was like ten or eleven. I guess you wanna be a swimmer then."

"Who knows what I'll be... maybe I'll swim, maybe I'll just work." I said, then our names were called out.

I was quite easy to reveal myself to Jackie, I figured it was because I'd felt a change in future—even then. Our friendship formed quickly after our first interaction. There were long conversations on our shared walk home, races in the pool, constant texting during summer break. After only a month, I'd already considered her my closest friend. I'd been ready to tell her everything about me, and I managed to tell her something new about myself every week until there was nothing new left to say. She caught on quick to the nickname I'd been given by the swim team and my other friends; Fish. And while I'd usually found it quite weird to be called, it felt strangely intimate when Jackie said it, in an entirely platonic sense.

Jackie and I differed a lot in height, and I often teased her when we stood together. I was an average 5"6, whilst she was around 5"1. Jackie had poker-straight long black hair, and I'd noticed her faintly foriegn facial structure—I wanted to guess what country she was from when we'd met, but I instead waited for her to tell me herself. She revealed to me during the summer break between eleventh and twelfth grade that her dad was American but her mother, she, was Japanese.

I didn't have much that was special about me. And with Jackie being as interesting as she was, I started to wonder how I would make my dull life interesting—where I would go after high school, what job I'd settle with, where I'd travel, what kind of situations I may end up in. All I had to me was the fact I loved swimming and I'd been swimming since I could. Otherwise, my life hadn't gone anywhere yet.

There were a few times when I thought that it was lucky that Jackie and I grew up in the same town, that we went to the same private high school—the only school for miles that had a uniform. It was such a boring uniform too; girls had to wear navy and green plaid skirts and white button ups with sweaters, boys the same only with trousers. Jackie, I think, represented a turning point in my life.

Despite our friendship beginning much earlier, I first went to Jackie's house on the last week of september. She'd mentioned earlier in the day - a day that we didn't have swim practise—that she had an indoor pool in her house.

"Who has an indoor pool in their house?" I asked, still in disbelief, as we were on our way there. I was pushing my bike along as she walked. The road she lived on was single-sided; one rowed with houses and the other side had a fence that ran all the way along it, beyond it, a field of tall grass.

"Me, obviously."

"Is it heated?"

"Of course," she said proudly. Then she added: " Also, my mom will be the only one home."