At my elementary school the 5th Graders all got to have their own special "going away" parties at the end of the year. Some students would have pizza parties or go to the skate rink. My class wanted to go to the new outdoor swimming pool that had just opened up. The pool we'd be visiting was a steady 3 feet the entire length, it had a floating basketball court and slides. It was meant for playing, not so much swimming. We were playing basketball when one of my classmates kind of slipped and went under. He started thrashing his arms around and we all kind of laughed because who could drown in 3 feet of water when we're all well over 4 feet tall. I mean if he was really drowning why didn't he just stand up?! That was my 5th grade logic anyway. Within a few seconds he stopped thrashing and just started floating, again 5 minutes before this the entire class was doing the "dead man float" so we didn't think much of it but then the lifeguard jumped in an pulled him out and he was completely a purpley white. That's when we all started screaming and crying and got out of the pool. The lifeguard gave him CPR and the ambulance came and took him away. We had no idea if he was okay or what but it didn't look good. All our parents had to come pick us up from the pool because of the circumstances and on Monday (this happened on Friday) our teacher told us that "K" was in a medically induced coma and his parents would likely take him off life support. We spent the last few days of school making cards and visited him as a class. I didn't hear anything about it over the summer but thought of it often, when I started 6th grade and saw some of my fellow classmates I learned that they had taken him off life support that summer. It's been 20 years since that happened and I still think about it quite often. What if we took him seriously, what if someone just pulled him up, what if we hadn't been doing that stupid dead mans float, what if we picked roller skating instead of swimming? So many what if's. I haven't visited a public swimming pool since then, I still live near the swimming pool and I can't even drive past it, I'll go around it if I need to.