Little Lizzie's A Chicken

A Story by Alexzandria R.

Marci, out with her younger sister Lizzie past curfew, peer pressures Lizzie into doing something seemingly harmless that quickly goes awry. Curfew is the least of Marci's worries.

“Come on, Lizzie. It’ll be fun,” Marci said, a strange excited look in her large brown eyes. She’d been begging like this for ten minutes now and I still wouldn’t budge. I was always the good sister.
“I don’t think so, Marci,” I replied “We’re not supposed to. And besides, it’s late. Let’s just go home. We’re already out past curfew.”
“Who cares about curfew, Lizzie? Can’t you just live a little? It’ll be fun. Let’s just go in for a little bit. Come on. Or are you too scared?”
I looked at her for a second, not sure what to say. Was I just too scared? Always so scared of breaking the rules.
"I knew it,” she said, “Little Lizzie’s a chicken.”
“I am not, Marci!” I shouted at my older sister, “I just don’t think this is such a good idea! What happens if we get caught?”
“We won’t. No one will ever know. Pinkie swear.” She smiled a familiar mischievous smile and held out her right pinkie finger. The light from the street lamps glinted off of her favorite sparkly purple nail polish. I stared at it for a bit, deciding whether or not I should go through with this. 'Just do it Lizzie. What’s the worst that could happen?' I thought. Then I linked my pinkie finger with hers and we proceeded.
It was almost midnight. Our curfew was 10:30 PM but Marci was my only way home since she was the one who could drive. She wanted to stay out. We spent a while hanging out at her friend Toby’s house. She wasn’t supposed to see him but she went anyway, bringing me with her. Afterward, we just walked around for a while. We really should’ve gone home. I wanted to go home. But I could tell that she was looking for something else to get us in trouble. Sure enough, she found something.
The neighborhood swim club. Marci decided that it would be a good idea to break in and go for a midnight dip. After begging me to go for about ten or fifteen minutes, she finally persuaded me to go inside. I stood back as she picked the lock on the gate with her hairpin.
“Count the seconds, Liz,” she said as she always does when she does things like this.
“One, two, three, four, five, si--”
“Done!” she shouted. Six seconds. She was getting faster.
We entered the building and went into the locker rooms. For a moment, I questioned why we were going in there when we had nothing to change into, until she pulled a couple of swimsuits out of her bag. She had this all planned out. After changing into the swimsuits she brought for us, we went out to the pool area.
“See Lizzie? It’s not so bad,” she said as she emerged from the water after a perfect swan dive. I stood at the edge of the pool, looking down at the water. Without all the people in it, it looked so deep and wide like the ocean. It looked as if it could just swallow me up.
“Hurry up, chicken,” Marci says, getting out of the water and walking toward me, stopping at my side.
“I don’t know. You know I’m not the best swimmer and I--” I was cut off when the breath was knocked out of me by a sharp shove to my back. The next thing I knew, I was in the water. I hit my head on the side of the pool. Or was it the bottom? I couldn’t tell which direction was up. I splashed and thrashed in the water, panicking. Eventually, I broke the surface, coughing and gasping for air. Something didn’t feel right. It didn’t even feel like I had lungs anymore. Then I saw it. Marci was rushing back into the water, a look of terror and panic on her face. And floating on the surface in the middle of a spreading mixture of blood and pool water… was my body. I rushed toward it. The water didn’t seem to slow me down. Marci didn’t seem to see me. But I could see her. And I could see the gash in my head which seemed to be the source of all this blood. The water around me was turning pink and Marci was just standing over my body, one hand over her mouth and those same big brown eyes that usually had a hint of mischief were now filled with tears. I watched her expression as the realization hit her that she had just killed her sister.