I got the bottle from the fridge and stood there holding it. I said, I joined swim team. I said, I thought I should tell you before you found out from Ben.
My mom said, Ben?
I didn’t know why I had told Ben. I said, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.
My mom said, Well, we’re not shocked.
My dad said, We had a feeling.
I wasn’t telling them to shock them. I said, You had a feeling when?
He said, When you told me about Erika.
I felt myself getting angry. The angry feeling flared over something else. I said, Then why were you asking me how Erika was doing?
My mom said, We wanted to give you the opportunity to tell us on your own.
They’d gummed me up in a trap. I waited for them to get mad, to ask why I hadn’t told them. My dad reached for the last drumstick.
I said, Do you want me to tell you anything else about it? I waited for them to ask what events I was swimming, and how good I was. I wouldn’t tell them about stopping, but I’d describe how I swam just after stopping, when the machine of my body worked best.
My mom said, What else do you want to tell us?
I said, Nothing.
I made myself watch a little TV with my parents after dinner and I got up at a commercial to get a snack. This felt like Ben’s fault. In the front of the Rolodex was a business card with a green background and a small graphic of a crossed rake and another garden tool, and above it it said Benjamin Mitchell, Landscaping and Yardwork. In quotes it said Competitive Rates. My parents were probably overpaying him. I took a sheet of scrap paper from the grocery-list pad and wrote down the address and phone number from the card. I didn’t write anyone’s name on it. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.
ALEXIS GAVE ME a strip of her Kit Kat. Melanie offered me some gummy bears. Erika said I could get rich starting a resale business, with all the treats they gave me. She said she’d passed PT in the hall and he’d said Hey, and the next time the two of them were thrown into a circumstance like that, she was going to keep the conversation going. I said she could go sit with him on the bus if she wanted to. She said sitting with him would be like entering his inner sanctum.
Our opening meet was a week away. I was the first to take off for the first drill, without anyone asking me to, practically before the whistle blew, and I swam as hard as I could to get some distance between me and the rest of my lane. Coach was walking around with his clipboard. He’d watch us and let us know our races on the day of the meet. I lifted my head higher. Looking ahead made my body feel lighter. I slapped the wall and turned quickly. Freestyle was the stroke that made the most sense to me — my arms pulling water, my legs more or less kicking to propel me. 50 or 100 Freestyle was something I could more than handle. After eight lengths I stopped at the wall.
The striver sidled up to me before Coach called out the cooldown. She said, Can I give you a little tip?
I said, What?
She said, Your head? You shouldn’t hold it up quite so much. It spoils the line?
I said, What?
She said, The line? That your body’s supposed to stay in when you swim. It sounded like something from a textbook about swimming. What did she do, read up at night and memorize tips? She said, What race do you hope he puts you in? I’m really hoping for 100 Breast. Or a breast spot in the Medley Relay.
On her cheek was a whitehead shiny with pus. I said, I thought you were into the fly.
She said, I changed my mind, after you talked to me about it. She said, What do you think my chances are?
I wanted to say, Why are you asking me? but I knew why.
Coach called me over on my way to the locker room. If he asked me what race I wanted to swim, I’d say 100 Free. I wouldn’t tell Erika he’d asked me, because she wanted so badly to swim 100 Back, the same race as PT. I’d save her from knowing I’d gotten to choose and she hadn’t.
Coach said, I found this in my files. Thought you might want to take a look.
The pamphlet said Miracle Swimming. The smaller print said How to Feel Safe in Deep Water. I said, I’m not afraid of the water.
Coach said, Sure.
I said, You see me swimming in there every day.
Coach said, Right. I was thinking about this part. He took the pamphlet back and pointed to a heading that said Panic Prevention. He said, Believe it or not, I was there once. I had these little pink pills I would take.
The pamphlet said when panic came to take deep breaths and count back slowly from ten. It had nothing to do with me. I said, I’m not panicking. I get cramps.
Coach said, Sure. Same story with me.
The pool deck was freezing. I hated that my towel was in my locker. I said, Why don’t you just cut me?
Coach said, That’s not in my philosophy.
I got my swim bag out of my locker and stuffed the pamphlet in the bottom. I didn’t want to risk throwing it in a can where anyone could find it.
THE CLASSIC ROCK station was coming in staticky. I moved my arm toward the dial and the signal got clearer. I dropped my arm on my pillow and the fuzz came back. My body felt dead. I put the back of my hand to my forehead. Coach was so full of shit, the way he thought he was helping me out. Handing me that pamphlet was him tossing me in a hole and saying, Swim out of it. Or saying I was already in a hole and he was sorry but he didn’t know if I could swim out of it. He hadn’t said he was sorry.
Pledge’s body warmed my feet. Any minute she would start barking and the doorbell would ring and Ben would be there in the yard, digging holes. If I had the energy or desire to get out of bed, I would put on R.E.M., loud, and time it so that Country Feedback was playing when Ben came in for his coffee. Then he would get over his idea that I only liked the same songs everyone liked. I wanted to see the look on Ben’s face when I told him I was going to quit. I wanted to see him awkwardly figuring out what look to throw on. He’d been so self-satisfied when I told him I was swimming, so sure he’d known from the first time he met me. He thought he knew me better than I knew myself.
Pledge jumped up and started barking and it was my mom coming back from grocery shopping, and I got up and put on a hoodie and slip-ons. I wanted to see if she’d gotten the Hot Pockets I’d put on the list.
My dad was outside pushing wood chips around. My mom said she thought the landscaper was supposed to take care of that. My dad said that Ben had been called in to his other job and couldn’t make it until next week. My mom said if the project got left halfway done, she wasn’t planning to be the one to help finish it. She was right to be pissed off.
I said, I’m not helping either.
He used the back of his work gloves to sop up his sweat. I thought he was going to tell us Ben was fired. He said he was glad to know he could count on us. He held his back as he stood up, a comic-book version of an old man straightening. He was too old to be doing yard work.
TWO BUSES THAT weren’t mine came first. Nothing felt stupider than stepping up to the curb and raising my hand to make the driver stop, and then realizing that it wasn’t the 47. The jumpy guy in a running suit bouncing his knees in the bus shelter said, Fucking buses. His accent sounded like something. When the 47 came he stood behind me in the aisle. He looked like Baryshnikov. He hadn’t shaved, or he couldn’t grow a real moustache. He was wearing an outfit Coach might wear, but he didn’t remind me of Coach. Once he reached into his pants and adjusted, or whatever it was guys did when they did that. I thought, after the adjustment, that I could make out the edge of something pushing against the shiny fabric. The guy was wearing cologne. He cracked his knuckles and stared at nothing. If he were a coach of something, he would be a mean coach. He would act as if he didn’t care about us, but would never give up on us just when we were getting going.