The Boy at the Pool

The boy who causes the disaster appears only briefly but is the trigger for everything that follows. He is a big, older boy of about eighteen, a strong physical specimen, who finds the small, skinny Douglas alone at the pool, yells "Hi, Skinny! How'd you like to be ducked?", and flings him into the deep end as a thoughtless joke. He is careless and unkind rather than deliberately murderous -- afterwards he protests, "But I was only fooling" -- but his prank very nearly drowns the boy and plants a fear that lasts for decades. His role in the essay is to show how a single reckless act by another person can inflict lasting psychological harm, and to set up the ordeal that Douglas must eventually overcome. …