Moments later, there's a hubbub on the far side of the pool, 30 or so kids standing in a huddle. Staffers jog over worriedly, apparently expecting to see a fight. George stands at the center of the crowd. In fact, it's not a fight. It's a dance battle between a couple of kids, whom George is cheering on. A tall, muscular boy does a Dance of the Seven Veils with a pair of soggy towels. The girl he's dancing against does a boogieing robot sequence, leading up to a move where she pretends to peer down the boy's trousers and then makes a dismissive face. The looking-down-the-pants stunt is too much for the staff, who immediately break up the dance battle.
Some girls regroup up on the terrace and start a big synchronized dance. The girls are so confident with the dance, and so deeply ensconced in their mutual groove, that the boys who try to join them can handle it for only a second or two before scampering off abashedly. Then George joins in. He turns out to be a pretty magnificent dancer, stepping along with the girls, grinning a wide, white grin. But George and the dancing girls seem to vex an older boy, a raucous parodist who keeps jumping between the dancers and doing a violent parody of the dance until the whole choreography falls apart. When the dancers scatter, George looks lost and wounded, but moments later he finds a couple of other girls to dance with.
George Romero tries to chat with Ana Chicas at the Wheaton-Glenmont Pool.
(Photograph by Greg Miller)
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Then a voice comes over the PA, announcing that teen night is over. The music stops. George goes to find his brothers. Kids hoist themselves reluctantly from the pool, trailing wet footprints toward the gate.
It's 11 p.m. Ryan has been here since 9 a.m.; he'll be back tomorrow morning at 7:30. He stands by the leisure pool, watching the kids mill toward the parking lot. He appears nearly drunk with exhaustion and relief.
EACH DAY AFTER THE POOL CLOSES, when the frolicsome daytime crowds are gone and the water is serene and dusky, the staff lingers a while to clean up, and also, on some evenings, to hold swimming lessons. One night four students are attending a class for adults who never learned to swim. It is chilly for a summer night, and the water is cold enough to raise goose flesh. The students, who do not seem pleased to be in the water to begin with, stand against the wall in the shallow end, rubbing their arms against the cold.
Lifeguard Adriana Burgos, 19, stands before the group and hands each student a kickboard. Lenoria Maxwell of Takoma Park, a woman in her mid-twenties, looks at the kickboard and frowns. "I don't think this is going to keep me up," she says.
Burgos smiles, and her tongue stud, adorned with a small chartreuse bead, glimmers in the half-light. "It will," she says. "I promise."
"You could give her two kickboards," suggests another student, Jaswant Matheru, 49, a civil engineer who lives in Rockville. Matheru, who grew up in New Delhi, is a member of the Sikh faith, and he wears a bathing cap in place of his customary turban. He explains that during his childhood, New Delhi was short on public pools, and he never had a chance to learn to swim.
Maxwell says she's learning to swim because her son, a boy of about 6 who sits impatiently on a nearby bench, is already an able swimmer, and she wants to be able to keep up with him. The trouble is, she's suffered all her life from hydrophobia ("I used to get so nervous in the shower I'd start to hyperventilate"), exacerbated, she says, by people who used to toss her into the pool.
Next, the group tries some swimming unassisted by kickboards. Comparatively speaking, swimming does not come easily to human beings. Of the creatures that choose to swim, we are among the world's worst swimmers. "Only one animal that swims at all is less efficient at it: the mink," writes Thomas A.P. vanLeeuwen, author of The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool. Children, nevertheless, learn swimming the way they learn language, effortlessly. Adults learn swimming the way native English speakers learn Latin or Chinese: laboriously.
Matheru takes a crack at the breaststroke. His swimming style consists mainly of walking -- a few vigorous kicks and strokes before settling on the simpler strategy of strolling along on his feet. A third student is an emigre from Ivory Coast. His swimming style consists mainly of sinking. He pushes off from the wall, descending steadily toward the pool floor as his propulsion expends itself, like someone paddling a dinghy with the bottom cut out.
Maxwell has started swimming on her own. But when it comes time to stop, she sinks and comes up sputtering. "How do you stop and not sink?" she says. No one has an answer for her.
IT'S SATURDAY MORNING, and a swim meet is underway, the Glenmont Gators versus a team from Potomac Glen, also the Gators. Kids in caps and goggles strive heartily through the lap lanes. Parents and coaches stand by the water, shouting boisterous encouragement. A few minutes into the meet, George Romero arrives, fully clad, regardless of the fact that he was supposed to be swimming in the meet today. "George," says one of the coaches, "we didn't know if you were gonna show up," and then explains that the coaches had to scratch him from the competitors' roster. George, who isn't among the team's fastest swimmers, doesn't appear to mind.
After an hour or so, George tires of the swim meet and goes back to his house, about a minute walk from the pool. The house is a well-kept brick ranch with a carefully landscaped yard. The living room holds a vase with silk flowers, a comfortable new lounge chair that George sometimes puts his feet on, irritating his mother, and a matching sofa facing a multitiered shelf with studio portraits of George, his five brothers and his sister in large, shiny frames.
Not far from his house is a patch of woods where George and his friends sometimes hang out. It is an especially exciting place to George, he says, because rumor has it that a few years ago, some gang members killed someone and hid the body there. With another hour or so until the pool opens, George asks me, "You wanna go try to find the body?" I say okay. We drive through his neighborhood, past many houses that, according to George, harbor criminal secrets. "That's a Crip house," he says, pointing out a small, cozy cottage. "They always be stealing people's bikes." A little later he nods at a house where weeds are growing up in the yard. "Crackheads live there" -- information George says he's gotten more through neighborhood rumors than verifiable fact.
According to Musser of Wheaton's gang unit, although police are seeing "significant" numbers of MS-13 members, there's no evidence of "groups like the Crips or the Bloods moving into the area," and, Musser points out, Wheaton hasn't had a single gang-related homicide. Nevertheless, George's preoccupation with gang violence is not the stuff of pure fantasy. This spring, as George and a couple of female friends were walking through a service alley behind a CVS drugstore downtown, the boy says, they ran afoul of two gang members who waved a knife in his face and robbed him of a pair of sneakers. "I thought the girls were going to get raped, so I told the girls to run," George says, his voice growing quiet. "Then he held [the knife] up to my neck, but instead of stabbing me, he looked at me for 10 seconds. He just looked at me, when he could have stabbed me and left me to die. I don't know why he didn't."
We pull over near a stretch of forest, and George slips down a bank where a shallow, gravy-colored stream feeds into a pair of graffiti-covered culverts. George says some of it is gang graffiti, and also that somewhere in there he and his brothers wrote "Romeros," but so many people have visited with spray cans to distinguish themselves on the culvert that hardly any words or names are readable.
Then George bolts up the path, into the spacious interior of the tall, hardwood forest. Shouts and laughter from the swim meet across the road echo off the tree trunks. George knows the trails well. In today's quest for the body, he jogs through the underbrush energized by the mystery of his search, as though he's discovering this place for the first time in his life. He is on the lookout for a tree and a rock, which are the supposed landmarks identifying the grave. He finds a fallen tree and walks carefully along the trunk, which is slippery with cool moss. "Where is it?" he says to himself with consternation. "It's supposed to be around here somewhere."
The police haven't found a body back here either, or even had a reason to look for one. But George's hazy conviction that the body is in fact "around here somewhere" appears unshaken by the fact that he can't turn it up. Perhaps he believes the story of the body because he knows something the police don't. Or perhaps it's that even though there may not be a dead body in these woods, in George's world, at age 13, the idea that there could be resonates with just enough credibility to capture his imagination.
George brushes past vines and leafy branches. He comes across the shopping cart that he and his friends use to play "Jackass," a show on MTV in which guys do things like ride in shopping carts while someone rams them into a tree. He shows me a runneled path he and his friends like to ride their bikes along. And for now, having exhausted the secrets of the forest, the dead body seemingly forgotten, George ambles down the shady path into the full light of day. After the swim meet, George will head back to catch up with his brothers and his friends, who are convening at the chilling spot to pass another afternoon. "Without the pool," he says, "what's the point of summer?"
IT'S A CLEAR, HOT WEEKEND DAY, a good day for swimming. Ryan White is spending the afternoon trying to eradicate the yellowjackets still lurking under the water slides and also beneath the bleachers. The staff has laid out yellow signs that read "BEES!!!" with multiple underscores. Despite the warnings, by midday, Ryan has another sting victim to attend to. It's George. "I disobeyed Ryan," he tells me. "I stomped on the bleachers."
"The ones with the signs that say, 'Do not sit! BEES!!!'?" I ask.
"Yeah," he says. "Those."
Ryan sighs and leads him into the guardhouse. With a pair of needlenose tweezers, he extracts the stinger from the back of George's hand. George watches unflinchingly, his expression more one of curiosity than pain or apprehension. After careful work, Ryan holds the stinger up to George, who stares at it. Then he glances down at the little pale welt beginning to grow between his knuckles. He looks up at Ryan, and a giant grin spreads over his face. "Hey, man," he says with mock gratitude, "you just saved my life."
Wells Tower is a frequent contributor to the Magazine. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Tuesday on washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
