“Are you sure?”
Jack shrugs. “I supposedly call the shots on our account, so yeah, I’m sure.”
He’s not finished, though. I pause mid-chew, waiting for whatever is about to bloom on his face to take shape. Sure enough, he’s smirking into his desk before he finally looks up and aims it at me in full force.
“But if you think I’m letting you off the hook about the high dive…”
I swallow, hard.
He raises an eyebrow.
“Oh, that old thing?” I say, dusting a few crumbs off of my skirt.
“Yeah.” His eyes are suddenly focused on mine. I can’t look away. “Don’t tell me you’re still scared.”
I lean in close to his desk, propping my palms on it. “Jack, last night I went on the Tumblr tags for Big League Burger and Girl Cheesing. If that didn’t scare the ever-loving crap out of me, nothing will.”
Jack blanches. “We’re on Tumblr tags?”
I lower my voice. “I’ve seen things I can never unsee.”
“God, I wish this were not my legacy.”
I doubt he really means that, though. While I got a few weird looks in the hall and during study group and a ton of jokes from Pooja about the shipping, our classmates are weirdly into Jack being the underdog of Twitter. Yesterday at practice, a group of freshmen on the swim team practically cornered him in the pool, asking for his “real life” Twitter handle. I nearly choked on chlorinated water when he had to confess that, despite our shenanigans, neither of us has one.
I pop another bite of macaroon into my mouth. “This is actually delicious.”
“Why the surprise?” And then, before I can answer: “You know, you’ve never tried any of our stuff.”
“Pretty sure I would burst into flames if I tried to walk through the door at this point. Especially now that my face is plastered on those tweets, and I’ve basically become public enemy number one.”
The smile drops on Jack’s face so fast, I almost turn around, wondering if something happened behind me.
“Nobody’s actually bothering you about that, are they?”
“What? No.” The article, at least, didn’t use our last names, and didn’t mention I’m related to my mom. Taffy didn’t throw me under the bus so much as she lovingly, with the best of intentions, nudged me under one. “I’m so far off the grid even Jasmine Yang couldn’t fully blow up my spot. Nobody could find me if they wanted to.”
Jack relaxes, marginally. I can still see his foot tapping under the desk. “Yeah, well. Be careful, I guess.”
“You too. You have quite the fan club now.”
Jack shakes his head. “I’m a flash in the pan.”
“In the grilled cheese pan, maybe. In real life…”
Jack’s cheeks redden. There’s a beat where I think maybe I’ve gone too far, or that my face has given away something my words didn’t quite mean to. But then he punctures the moment, pointing a finger at me.
“If you think you can sweet talk your way out of the high dive, think again. You’re in for a reckoning, Pepperoni. Five o’clock. Bleachers.”
I roll my eyes. “We’ll see.”
Pepper
But that is exactly where I am at the precise time, at the precise place, all of the bravado from this morning leaked out of me like a balloon.
I haven’t thought about the high dive since freshman year. It’s a symptom of a larger problem, maybe: if I’m not immediately good at something, I drop it. As a kid I took piano classes for a month, ballet classes for a year, even soccer for one ill-fated practice that ended with me hauling ass across the field and leaping into my dad’s arms when the ball came within five feet of me. I’m a perfectionist, through and through, and even at five, I had no interest in embarrassing myself.
Swimming is something I’m good at, something I don’t even remember having to learn. It’s probably why I stuck with it so long, even when there were other, more impressive things I could have put on my resume. But diving …
I didn’t have to try it to know I was terrible at it. There is nothing intuitive about leaping that high up from the ground, in twisting your body into ridiculous shapes, in praying you time it down to the split second so you end up slipping into the water instead of face-planting into it. And having a front-row seat to the dive team’s practice sessions means I have seen plenty of face-planting in my day.
Jack is waiting at the top of the high dive, grinning down at me.
“How’s the weather down there, Pep?” he asks, shifting his weight on the board so it creaks up and down and up and down. Just watching him is enough to make me nauseous.
I glance over my shoulder to make sure most of our teammates have headed into the locker room. Pooja pauses at the door and shoots me a look, but I wave her off.
“Okay,” I mutter. “Let’s get this over with.”
Jack laughs. “It’s really not that scary.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re so tall, the world is like your high dive.”
“It’s not like you’re exactly short.”
My heart is in my throat. I swear to god he’s tilting on purpose, walking right up to the edge like he’s daring the slightest gust of wind to topple him.
“No, but I clearly have a much stronger respect for gravity than you.”
“Then just pretend it’s the deli’s Twitter account. We all know you don’t have any respect for that,” he says cheekily.
Before I can respond, he straightens up and propels himself toward the water, contorting his body so fast, I could blink and miss it. In fact, this might be one of the first times I haven’t missed it. The dive team makes me so nervous that as a general rule I try not to look at them during practice or meets, in constant fear of watching one of them belly flop or smack their heads on the board.
But I couldn’t look away from him if I wanted to. It’s mesmerizing, like his body isn’t his own for those brief few seconds. I’m used to Jack being all in motion at once, all foot-tapping six-foot-something of him. But I’m not used to motion like this: smooth, seamless, practiced. He projects himself off the board and somersaults in the air and twists and then glides into the water with an almost soundless kind of grace.
I forget to breathe until he’s poking his head out of the pool, shaking his hair out of his face.
“Your turn.”
My jaw drops.
“You don’t have to do anything fancy. Just jump.” He mimes it to me, treading water as he holds a flat palm up and pretends his finger is me, leaping off of it.
I’m still replaying Jack’s dive over and over, reeling from it. I always thought it would be so scary to watch, but it was exhilarating. So fluid and over so fast, I didn’t even have a chance to be worried something would go wrong.
That confidence does not, however, extend to my own abilities. “Yeah. Yep. Sure.”
“Five-year-olds jump off this board, Pep.”
“Five-year-olds don’t understand mortality.”
“Y’know, the longer you wait, the worse it’s gonna get.”
He’s right, of course. He swims over to the edge of the pool, and I inch to the ladder, propping my arms on it and taking a deep breath before hoisting myself up a few rungs.
“How’d you even learn to do that, anyway?”
Jack’s voice calls up from the bottom of the ladder. “You’re stalling.”
I climb up another rung to satisfy him, but I’m genuinely curious. “How does a person just like — know that they can do that? And not die?”