The bus pulled up at a dingy gray building. People around me were standing and gathering their things. They were thronging to get off the bus. My bladder felt so tight I was almost airborne. Just one more minute to close my eyes. Just a few more seconds with my head against the window. My red swim bag rested on my thighs. Erika tapped my elbow. She said, Earth to you! and slipped into the line ahead of me.
THE POOLS I’D seen my brother swim at were huge and new and gleamed like science labs. The water, viewed from the stands, was clear and blue, and the swimmers dropped gently into the pool as if from conveyor belts. I remembered my brother mentioning a sauna.
I pushed open the door to the Y. The lobby had scuffed, beige floors and dingy white walls. It had plastic chairs with some white and black children and parents sitting in them. It had bulletin boards with fliers piled on. Somewhere, behind some scratched-windowed door or another, was a pool I’d been suited since dawn to dive into. Alexis waved from across the lobby. She was talking to one of the white-hats. I knew his name. Greg looked up and Alexis whispered in his ear, still hoisting a weak wave to distract me, I guessed, from her whispering. Greg raised a hand and nodded in my direction. Or it could have been anyone’s direction, he didn’t know me, and I didn’t nod or raise my hand back.
Coach stood in his silver-white tracksuit in the midst of us. He said, All right! He told the boys to go right and the girls to go left. He tapped his clipboard against his watch and said, Seven minutes! He could have blown the silver whistle around his neck to start us. He might have blown it if not for the children and parents sitting on the plastic chairs.
Erika and I massed with the girls to the left. I said, Is it weird here?
Erika said, She speaks! She said, Weird why?
She was going to make me lose it. The weirdness of the Y was obvious. If Erika didn’t find it weird, or depressing, it was only because she what, knew Northeast so well, ate at all its broken-signed restaurants. She’d probably come to this dumpy Y as a kid.
I said, It’s just different from what I expected.
Some girls went straight to the lockers, stashed their bags, and started stripping. The rest of us hovered in the horseshoe of dinged-up half lockers. A few girls were already stepping into their suits, their bare backs curled against the room. Alexis and Melanie stood laughing at something in their satiny bras, as if they stood around talking in bras all the time. I made for the toilets. Squatting an inch above the toilet with my suit around my ankles, I let a day’s worth of pee pour out of me. Someone came into the stall next to me. She stepped out of her shoes and stood on the tops of them, and she pulled off her pants and underwear. Changing in the bathroom was too much. It was taking privacy too seriously. It was drawing attention to something more easily accomplished by facing the wall and dealing with it. My pee finally finished draining. The girl next door reached down to pull up her suit. I reached to do the same, and it hit me: it was going to look as if I’d changed in the bathroom, too. Either that or that I’d, even weirder, had my suit on under my clothes all day. Someone yelled, Four minutes! There wasn’t time to undress and dress again.
The girl next door walked out first. She was a redhead with bare legs and an oversize T-shirt on over her suit. She had huge boobs, real obstacles, the kind that were impossible not to notice even with the T-shirt. I felt badly for her. There was no question why she was wearing the shirt, or why she’d changed in the bathroom. She was perfect cover — no one would notice me.
Erika was waiting by our lockers. She flicked her eyes over me and I tensed myself for a question. She said, Oh, good. Seven minutes isn’t that long, is it? She had her leg propped up on the bench that ran the length of the lockers and she pointed to a spot on her thigh. She said, I feel like I always miss exactly the same spot shaving. Is that possible? A few light hairs sprouted from the spot she was pointing at.
I stuffed my parka and swim bag in a locker and clicked the combo lock closed, like it was the most casual gesture, the completion of a habitual action. I said, Maybe you should draw a circle around that spot before you shave, and then you won’t miss it.
Erika said, That is a genius idea. Except then I’d have this circle on my thigh.
The scumminess of the Y wasn’t that big a deal. And I wasn’t annoyed at Erika anymore. There was some new thing I felt, my energy, maybe, that made me feel generous. It was good to have Erika there with me in the locker room. It was good to have her to walk with to the shower room and, when we saw that all the spaces except one were taken, to share a spigot for our pre-swim rinse. It was good, even, to have her point out that other swimmers were filling their swim caps with water from the shower and dumping them out and stretching them on over their ponytails or buns before they left the shower room, though I might have thought to do that on my own.
COACH SAID, NOW, some of you might be a little bit rusty. The water might be a little rust-colored at the end of practice, ha. Seriously. For some of you, it’s your first time swimming as part of a team. Some of you are itching to get in the pool and show me how many seconds you’ve peeled off your time since last season.
Little hairs pulled at the base of my swim cap. It felt as if the latex of the cap was plucking the hairs from their follicles. My towel, if it hadn’t been in my locker, would have made for decent padding between my butt and the metal bleachers. Maybe my cap was the wrong size, or Erika had showed me the wrong way to rinse and stretch it. Coach explained that today was just an assessment. Today was the day for us to get into the pool and do our thing and he would walk around and notice us and take down notes. Then he would look at these notes and make decisions and assign us to lanes by the end of the week.
Erika raised her hand. She said, So what are the lanes? Like, ranks?
Coach said, Good question. There was never anything in Erika that made her not want to raise her hand to ask a question, even if it was a question she could have easily asked me. Coach said, To answer your question, yes. And no. Typically we’ve got the fastest swimmers in Lane One, and so on down to Lane Six. But nothing’s set in stone. Water — it’s the opposite of stone. Water moves.
Normally this sort of hokey cheerleading, this chummy waffling, would have won an eye roll from Erika, but she was rapt to Coach. Everyone was, as if they didn’t know that Lane One only ever meant Lane One, and so on down to Lane Six. Coach finished his speech and everyone hooted and clapped and clambered off the bleachers to get in the water for the so-called assessment. Already diving into Lane One were Alexis and Melanie and a few sleek, aloof strangers who were clearly pros, translucent in the water, and already clumping uncertainly at Lane Six were freshman, scared gangly sinkers. The redheaded girl from the bathroom in the T-shirt stood on deck, talking to Coach.
Erika said, He’s not going to let her wear that T-shirt, and, sure enough, Coach walked away and the girl set her jaw and lifted the T-shirt over her boobs, let the shirt drop on the tile. She stood there for a minute, glaring at nobody.