She said, Oh my god, you’re right. I’m so sorry. It’s been hectic.
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t that big a deal. Getting quotes from three different printers did sound hectic.
She said, But I thought you weren’t interested?
I said, I thought about it some more. I said, But if you don’t need me, that’s okay.
I could easily put the camera away. I could bury it in its bandana in the bottom of my bag.
Alexis said, No way! She clapped her hands. It was a get-pepped-up-for-sports move, the kind of clap a team would make before rushing the field. She said, No, that’s great. Totally. Melanie and I were talking, and we really did want to give you something better to do.
I said, Are you sure? I didn’t quite believe that Melanie had been a part of it.
Alexis said, Absolutely. What do you want to do — clubs? Candids?
I said, Clubs?
She said, Perfect.
I said, Should I start right now?
Alexis laughed. She said, There’s not anything for you to take photos of now. She said, Unless you want to take a photo of me? She leaned against the table and turned and tilted her head as if she were posing for a portrait. She arranged her hair in front of her shoulders, then brushed it behind them. The room really was almost empty. I put a yogurt raisin in my mouth and bit: the sweet, grainy outside, the chewy center. Did she really want me to take her picture?
Alexis shrugged and straightened up. She said, Anyway. She said, We need someone to shoot Help the Homeless next month. The benefit concert? I will totally recommend you for that.
The yogurt coated my mouth like paste. I said, Okay. Was she saying that I would do the benefit, or that I might do it? She didn’t have time, I got it, to browse old yearbooks with me, or to explain exactly what she’d been thinking when she looked at me and thought Photographer.
Alexis said, There was something else I wanted to ask you.
I’d picked up my scissors without thinking about it. They were open, poised in my hand.
She said, We were wondering. Do you swim?
I said, What?
She said, Melanie and I are captains this year. We were talking the other day, and we were wondering, is Julie Winter a swimmer?
I said, What about soccer?
She said, The season ended last week.
Of course, different sports happened in different seasons, and people who played sports played sports. But swimming didn’t strike me as that kind of sport. Alexis didn’t strike me as what I thought of as a swimmer.
She said, So are you?
I said, No.
She said, Really? She said, We thought you might. You look like you could be.
I said, I do?
She said, You look like you’re built for it.
I felt the stretch of my shoulders beneath my layers — my T-shirt, my henley, my flannel. I felt around her words for a taunt or a trap. Alexis was nice. She said, Let me show you our new sweatshirts.
She went to the front of the room to grab her bag. She took off the soccer sweatshirt she was wearing and pulled on the new one. She untrapped her hair from the hood. In the center of the sweatshirt were two blue squiggly lines and above them a figure reaching, and above the figure it said Jackson and below it it said Swimming. She said, Aren’t they great? We convinced Coach last year that everyone wanted hoodies. The sweatshirt was a dark-flecked gray, a real sweatshirt color. It looked thick and warm. The thing about the way Alexis wore sweatshirts was that, even though the sweatshirt was oversized, there was clearly a girl’s body beneath it.
I said, I haven’t swum in a while.
She said, Do you ever think about starting again?
Maybe I was completely wrong about Alexis not seeming like a swimmer. Maybe she was more of a swimmer than anything else. She was being, it felt like, so honest with me; she was asking the question in a way that felt honest, as if she cared about the answer. I said, I think about it a little.
Alexis said, Really? She said, That’s awesome.
My mind pulled for a question about swimming. I said, Where do you practice?
Alexis said, At the Y in Northeast. It’s kind of ghetto, but it’s fine.
I said, What stroke do you swim?
She said, Mainly breaststroke. I came this close to All County last year. She said the part about All County quietly, as if it were the kind of thing she didn’t say to many people. She said, Maybe it’s a dumb thing to want.
I said, It’s not dumb. The conversation glided. I said, I bet you’ll get All County this year.
She looked down and then back at me, from behind her eyelashes, as if although she stood above me, leaning against my table, she was looking up at me. As if shy, but shy on purpose. She said, Thanks.
It felt, truly, as if we could stay there all day, talking about swimming. There were a million things I could ask her about. There were things I knew or wondered about swimming that I had literally never talked about with anyone else before. If she looked at my body and saw it as a swimmer’s body, it was possible there could be something she knew that I didn’t.
Ms. C. called Alexis’s name. Alexis snapped an irritated blink. She said, It’s too hectic. I’m over it.
I said, Three quotes from three printers sounds like a lot.
Alexis pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt. She clapped. She said, Well, listen. No pressure, but think about it?
The swimming sweatshirt was a really nice one, nicer than the soccer sweatshirt that lay on the floor where she’d dropped it.
I TOOK OFF my sneakers and socks and my flannel. I took off my henley. I dug through my underwear drawer and found solo socks, old shapeless underwear. I took off my jeans. I’d thought I still had one suit that I hadn’t gotten rid of, a neon green T-back that I’d probably outgrown but that could give me some sense of what I’d look like. In the swimming magazines the girls’ suits smashed their boobs flat, or they hardly had boobs to begin with. My body was whatever it was. I took off my underwear and my bra. I hardly ever looked at my body in the mirror. One day I didn’t have boobs and the next here they went. Or there they came. My new suit, if I got one, should have thick straps to break up the span of my shoulders. It should have a long enough torso to account for my height, and it should be blue or brick red. I pulled my low ponytail tighter. The team suits might have to be a certain color. That was something I could ask Alexis about, or maybe it was something I should just know. I lifted my arms above my head to stretch and saw my armpit stubble — if I swam, I’d have to shave more often. It was ridiculous to be standing around naked in my bedroom.
I got dressed and called Erika. I said, Alexis asked me something today.
She said, Alexis. Which one is that again?
She knew which one Alexis was. I said, Melanie’s blonder.
She said, Right. And Alexis wishes she was.
I said, She seems pretty nice.
I still had some of the yogurt raisins in my jeans pocket. I took them out of the baggie I’d saved them in and laid them on the shelf next to the phone.
Erika said, What did she ask you? Did she say she was going to give us something better to do?
I leapfrogged the raisins. I swam one past the other. There was nothing for me to say to Erika about swimming if I didn’t know how I felt about it. I said, She asked if I wanted to take photos.
Erika said, Just you?
I said, I guess. Erika went quiet. I said, I’m sorry.
Erika said, You don’t have to be sorry. It’s exactly the kind of thing I’d expect from a girl like that.
Erika didn’t know anything about Alexis. She didn’t know that Alexis was a swimmer, or that she had really wanted to make All County and hadn’t. Erika hadn’t given Alexis the chance to be as nice to her as she’d been to me, and to feel what that felt like. In a way I was still feeling it. I said, I figured if I said yes you could come with me.