Alligator Wrestler: Part 4

The girls made their way back to the shallow end, where they once again began to chatter, giggle and point. The rest of the boys lined up behind me. The game was about to begin again and I was at the front of the line. The alligator floated in the center of the deep end.

"Alright, Ben," said Travis, who was standing behind me in line. "Let round two begin!"

"Yeah, go already!" yelled Billy, who was waiting at the end of the line.

Oh, I was going to go alright. I was going to leap…no…fly on top of that alligator and with one mighty squeeze of my legs, I was going to crush it to pieces in front of all the girls who stared at me from the shallow end.

"Go, Ben, Go!" their eyes screamed to me as I stepped out to the edge of the diving board, took a deep breath and jumped.

But this was no ordinary jump. This was a super jump. The jump of all jumps. The uber-jump. It was one of those jumps that takes you so high, when you hit the apex, time seems to slow to a crawl and stop. And in that frozen moment, I could do no wrong. Nothing mattered. Not my year old swim trunks, my ultra white thighs, or the fact that I was a puny ten year old boy. All that mattered was that I was about to make Alligator Wrestler history.

I landed with a thud. My eyes and ears became filled with all the sights and sounds of the moment. The girls squealed with delight. The boys yelled their manly battle cries. The parents cheered from the side of the pool. But in the mix of all these sights and sounds, I also heard another sound.

Rrrrrrriiiiiiiiiippppppppp!

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "No big deal. Threads pop and tear, but it couldn't be that bad, right?"

Wrong.

I quickly slipped off the alligator as Travis jumped on behind me and swam to the edge of the pool to assess the damage. My hand shot to my backside to feel the area and see if the tear was bad. I felt nothing. In some cases, feeling nothing would be wonderful, but in this case it meant I felt exactly that…nothing! Where I should have been feeling swimsuit, I felt nothing but the skin on my now exposed and bare butt! It was the mother of all tears.

I continued to feel about, but the more I felt, the more shocked I became. The hole, if you could even call it that, was not just in the back. The sheer force of my super, spectacular, uber-jump had torn my swimsuit in two. The only thing holding the two pieces together was the elastic waist band, which looked as if it too was about to pop.

"Great," I thought to myself. Not only was my butt hanging out the back, but mini-Ben and the boys were dangling out the front as well.

"You still playing?" Billy yelled from the alligator.

"Yeah," I quickly replied. "I'll be back in a second. I'm just taking a breather."

"But we just started back up! Just admit it," he said, "you're not man enough to continue."

Oh, I was man enough all right. If I got out of the pool right there he'd have been able to see how manly I was whether he wanted to or not.

"What am I going to do?" I thought as I continued to tread water by the side of the pool.