The wind howled. On the television, I saw the meteorologist speak. “Down… in… Houston… we… have… thirty… two… degreeeeeeess..” The meteorologist’s voice droned on and on. Outside, it was freezing.

Today was in the thirties. Fahrenheit. Uh, yeah. 30s. And I did not want to go swimming outside in this freezing water.  My mom didn’t really want to take me there either.  So we decided not to go.

However, when we were sitting inside are warm cozy house, we decided to make up a very, very crazy story. Here’s how it goes. (Oh, and please note it’s FICTION)

It was a frosty day. I walked up to the pool. No teacher. But everyone was listening to something. I was just about to ask somebody when a voice came from a chair. An empty chair.

“Brad, please hop into the water and give me a hundred freestyle.”

THE CHAIR WAS TALKING TO ME! I looked at the chair. Count to three and turn around, I told myself. One… two… two and a half… three…”

There on the chair was a walky-talky. I was relieved. No ghosts for me. But the voice in the walky-talky was mad. “Brad, please get into the water and give me a hundred freestyle.”

As I jumped into the water, I was embraced by an icy force inside the outside pool. As soon as my body adjusted (something which felt like only 25% adjusting), my teeth were chattering.

All the other swimmers whispered silently to me, “She’s at home. She can’t see a thing, she just acts like she knows us. But really, she doesn’t. Just listen,”

I heard her go, “Brad, please put your arm high up!”

I wasn’t even swimming yet! They were right; she could not take any more control than she had at home. We could just walk home this instant, except she wouldn’t here us swimming.

As usual, I had an idea. I grabbed a voice recorder, the type that will automatically play itself over and over again if you tell it to. I told somebody to make some splashing noises in the water. I recorded that. Now I put it in repeat mode. It was now repeating our swimming! Well, at least our sounds, but she couldn’t tell anyways.

Then I put the recorder next to the walky-talky. This was getting fun. I grabbed some walky-talkies. I put one next to the coach’s walky-talkies and then gave one to each of the swimmers. The swimmers all hopped out and began observing my contraption.

After explaining my plan, we gave it a test run. The teacher on the other end (who didn’t know what we were doing) said, “Johnny, are you kicking correctly?” Johnny pressed down his button and said, “Sorry, coach.” In a second we heard it being amplified onto the chair. The sound went into the teacher’s set.

The teacher was fooled. She said, “Try harder. You’re doing a pretty good job now.”

We all cheered! This was fun! We had outsmarted the teacher!

OK. Was this funny? I hoped you liked it. But I just can’t help telling you the story of what happens after the story….

It was way past our swim practice time. The teacher at the other end was getting suspicious. It had been already an hour past our swim time and the splashing was still going on.

Furthermore, those splashes were repeating! Splash… splash-splash… and then a laugh. Splash… splash-splash… and then a laugh. Something was quirky here.

She went to the swimming place to pick up her walky-talky. She was about to grab it except she noticed there were two of them!

Which one was hers? She didn’t know. But just one look at the recorder and she knew the whole story…