In Yearbook Erika told me that she’d gone down to Coach’s office to make sure it was okay if she came to practice. She said she’d mentioned my name and Coach had said, Any friend of Julie’s.
Erika said, He’s so nice. She sliced out a caption and said, I didn’t know you knew him so well.
I said, I don’t. I wondered if Coach had said Erika’s name twice, bounced it like a ball. Her name would be awkward to say twice like that. I said, What stroke did you tell him you wanted to swim?
Erika said, He didn’t ask.
I said, He was probably busy. He’ll probably just see what you’re good at today.
It was hard to talk and cut captions neatly, to keep the corners crisp and a uniform border of white around the words. It was harder when I was also keeping an eye on the front of the room. Alexis should know that Erika had decided to join on her own, that she hadn’t been asked by me, or anyone, that I hadn’t dragged her along because I needed a buddy.
Erika was in the bathroom when Alexis and Melanie came up to me. Alexis said, Sorry again for being a stalker. Your dad must hate me for calling so late.
I said, He doesn’t care. I said, Thanks for reminding me about the towel.
Melanie said, Oh, that’s good you told her. You can’t blow-dry your hair at the Y. We’ve tried. Under the hand dryer thing?
Alexis said, That thing sucks.
Melanie said, Or blows, and she and Alexis laughed. They laughed harder than the pun called for. They were laughing, clearly, about actual blow jobs, not just the idea of them. I waited out their laughter. If I had laughed as hard as Melanie and Alexis were laughing, I might have peed my pants. Melanie reached into the pocket of her sweatshirt. She said, Dried apricot? She said, Take more. The apricots felt like wrinkled skin. Melanie said, We’re really psyched to have you on the team. It was such a great coincidence that you were in Yearbook so we could track you down.
I looked at Alexis, to see if she agreed with the idea that she and Melanie had tracked me down together. Alexis gave me the shy-on-purpose smile. I might have blushed. It seemed to me, just a feeling, that it was Melanie who’d given the blow job.
Melanie said, We’re psyched to see you swim. I shrugged. Melanie and Alexis laughed. I allowed myself a micro laugh. Melanie said, She’s so modest.
Alexis and Melanie went back to work and I laid out the four dried apricots on the table in front of me. Erika, falling into her chair with an exaggerated sigh — she was so sick of captions — said, Where did you get those?
I said, Melanie was giving them out.
Erika said, Were they talking to you about the team? Did you tell them I joined? She said, Do you think they’d give me apricots, too? She was clearly making fun of it, of them and of the apricots and of them giving the apricots to me. Erika leaned conspiratorially close. She said, I think swimming is going to help us out in Yearbook.
I said, You can have my apricots.
We had a lot of cutting left to do. We’d moved on to the News in Review, a section no one cared about. Anyone who wanted to look at a yearbook just wanted to look at pictures of themselves and their friends. There was nothing on my News in Review sheet about the AIDS guy getting charged with murder. It was too recent. It wasn’t big enough news. The title of the article I’d seen was AIDS as a Weapon. That just seemed like the wrong way to think about it. AIDS as a Weapon made me picture a blade strapped to the guy’s dick and the guy swinging his dick-blade around. A girl reaching through a guy’s open fly and the teeth of the zipper clamping down on her wrist. In health class they were unclear about whether someone could get AIDS from a blow job, or they’d told us the medical research was unclear. The caption I was cutting said Balkan War Escalates. Having to pee so badly made me nauseated.
Erika said, Shit. She said, Can you fix this? She passed me a strip where she’d grazed off the bottoms of the letters. The sliver she’d saved was too small to glue back.
I said, You’ll have to print out another copy. I said, Just so you know, there are no blow-dryers at the Y.
Erika tried to press the parts back together. She said, Crap. She said, Where?
IT WAS RAINING, a bored drizzle, as if the sky couldn’t care enough to rain harder. The contents of my swim bag were surely dampening. Coach stood at the bus door, clipboard in hand, with a greeting for everybody — a fist-bump, a handshake, a nod. He could have taken faster attendance, if that’s what he was doing, by loading us onto the dry bus and consulting his clipboard there. People didn’t seem to mind. They stood as if they weren’t freezing, as if their towels and swim things weren’t getting wet. Alexis and Melanie were near the front of the line. I kept an eye on Alexis so if she turned around to check that I’d gotten there okay I could make it easy for her to find me.
At the bus door, Coach shook my hand. He looked me in the eyes and said, Julie-Julie. You ready?
The bus smell was familiar — plastic and exhaust, body odor. Alexis, from the rowdy back of the bus, called, Julie, you made it! She was with Melanie and some guys. I waved. I stepped into a two-seater about halfway back.
Erika took the aisle to my window. She said, Weird how they love you.
I said, They don’t love me. The guys Alexis was with weren’t particularly cute. They were regular guys in white hats. They looked like they should be headed to football, or baseball.
Erika said, I don’t think Coach remembered my name.
I said, He remembered.
Erika said, I’m pretty sure he didn’t. I just told him.
I said, You told him?
I could see it, and was glad I hadn’t: Coach trying to move on to the next person and Erika chirpily offering her name without being asked for it.
The bus was hot. Breath fogged the windows and sweat filmed my skin beneath my suit. My need to pee had become a dull, comfortable throb. It had always been easy for me to fall asleep on buses — the hum of the crowd, the lull of the motor. Coach bounded on board. He said, All right! He stood next to the driver, a lightning bolt in a white shiny sweatsuit with blue stripes down the sides. He gave the driver the thumbs-up and the driver levered the door closed. Coach said, I am psyched for this season. Are you psyched? The back of the bus and Erika and everyone cheered and whistled. The cheers braided into a din and I cushioned my elbows on my swim bag. If I leaned my head against the window I’d be out in an instant.
I woke up to a view of the river. I didn’t know, for a minute, where we were. We were on one of the bridges heading west to east. I cleared the window to see more. Through the rain, everything was the same color, the river and the sky and the other bridges.
Erika said, Hey sleepyhead. I can’t believe you fell asleep. She said, My dad lives super close to here.
I had no idea where we were. The east side meant next to nothing to me. My mouth was metallic from napping, and my bladder felt ready to burst. We passed a community college and a Vietnamese restaurant with the E dimmed out on the OPEN sign. Erika said, Oh, my dad and I ate there once. I asked how it was and didn’t listen to the answer. I felt a webless sense, a slipping downward. Maybe it was the murk of waking up from my brief, deep nap to a landscape that was utterly unfamiliar. People talked about the east side, Northeast especially, as if it were a place they’d never have a reason to go — kind of ghetto, like Alexis had said, though I wouldn’t have said it that way. I never visited Erika at her dad’s house, not for any real reason, her mom’s was closer, and there was the story about how in Northeast once someone flashed their lights at a lightless car and ended up shot. Erika said that was an urban myth. The people on the street, who were mostly black, must have wondered why this busload of white kids was driving through their neighborhood. Was it dangerous? It was embarrassing. It seemed hard to believe that there wasn’t a closer pool they could have taken us to.