I ask how she knows about Chris.
“Are you kidding? Mike hangs out with Rich all the time. Half of what they talk about is how things are going to hell at Cutter High. I swear, if I’m ever going to get over Rich, it will be because he’s dumber than dirt. Who cares about a high school football team?”
By the time we get to the conference meet, which is held at Frost High School in Spokane this year, all of us are pretty much assured of lettering if the Athletic Council doesn’t do a recall vote. Simet says it would be close anyway. A couple of the girls’ coaches would vote our way, and several votes are up in the air. Anyway, it will be the last meet for everyone but me, and we’ve tapered off our workouts, so times are dropping like rocks. Actually, I’m the only one who came close to not making it. In the second to last dual meet I almost missed my turn in the fifty, had to haul serious ass to get back, and, in fact, bettered my time by only a hundredth of a second. Coach isn’t going to swim anyone but me in that event at conference, because it’s too easy to miss a turn or get off the blocks slow and wreck your chances, and my time already qualifies me for State.
By now the coaches in the other sports are behind me a hundred percent, Benson included, because if I pull out a couple of top three finishes in the sprints and even as low as sixth in the two hundred, we’ll have serious pointage toward the all-sport championship, and the school who gets that has major bragging rights. Cutter has never won it because we’ve always been big in the major sports but have fallen down in sports like gymnastics and soccer and cross-country. And, of course, we’ve never had a swim team before.
On Friday morning the student body gathers on the school lawn, complete with the cheerleaders lined up on the steps like Rockettes, as Icko brings the bus around, and though no one is going to watch us swim, they cheer as if we’re the football team. Mott is on the bus already, having stopped Icko as he came through the parking lot. Chris stands totally amazed, waving at the crowd, while Jackie simply watches, not embarrassed, not anything that I can see. I see Tay-Roy tap Kristen on the shoulder before coming down to join us, and as we stand there ready to board, I elbow him. “Kristen Sweetwater?”
He looks embarrassed but keeps smiling. That would be so sweet.
“She’s cool,” I whisper, “but what are you going to tell your girls in Birmingham? And Evanston?”
Dan Hole is so busy calculating the times he should hit, he is oblivious to the celebration. Barbour and some of the football guys stand together to one side; only a few of them clap or cheer because he has convinced them this whole thing is a ploy to diminish their standing as nobility at Cutter High. The jock wars continue.
Carly moves quickly through the crowd to my side. “You sure you don’t want me to come see this?” she asks. “You’ve never missed one of my games.”
“I’ll tell you again what I tell my parents,” I say. “On the boredom scale, watching a swim meet is one step below watching mold grow. Come see me at Hoopfest.”
She says, “Come see me at Hoopfest.” And I say, “Will do.”
The bleachers at the conference pool at Frost are packed; swimming is a much bigger thing among schools with swimming history. There’s only one guy in our conference who can challenge me in the sprints when I’m at my best, and that’s Scott Wakefield from Frost. He’s within a tenth of me in the fifty and two-tenths in the hundred. A couple of guys have slightly better times than mine in the two hundred. The big sprinters are on the coast, around Tacoma and Seattle. The fifty at State would look like a six-way dead heat if it weren’t for the electronic touchpads, but over here Wakefield and I should blow the field away. I’m gaining a bit of celebrity on our side of the state, partly because of the number of black swimmers any of them have seen, and partly because it’s by now well known what our training facility looks like. The Spokane and Wenatchee coaches have already approached me to swim on their summer teams-they think I could actually make the Olympic trials down the road, with proper training-but I’m pretty sure this will be my last season in the water. Spring is around the corner, and I’m antsy to resume honing my basketball skills for Hoopfest. I believe there are no black swimmers in the swimming hall of fame because swimming is no damn fun.
We are not prepared for Chris’s response to crowds. He’s been gathering confidence every time he touches the wall and sees his time is faster than the last, which, by the way, speaks to his ability to learn, because he knows the second he sees it. The swimmers on the other teams know his story now and always cheer him on. This kid hits times that would win fourth place in the 11-12 age group of a novice meet, and every time he finishes, the crowd erupts. He has taken to blowing kisses toward the cheers.
He and Mott are entered in the five hundred freestyle, and the entire team from Moses Lake chants his name as he steps onto the block. He turns and waves, smiling wide and basking in the glow as the starting gun fires. The crowd screams, “Go!”-which confuses him, and he watches in bewilderment as the field pulls away. Jackie has the presence of mind to run over and push him in, which should technically disqualify Chris, but the judges give us leeway, and once he hits the water, instinct takes over and his arms rotate like propellers. Adrenaline alone puts him back on pace for his best time at a hundred-fifty yards, and when he sees his time at the finish, he squeals. His opponents have passed the word not to get out of the water before any of our guys finish, and though it’s only a prelim, they all duck under their lane ropes to congratulate him. Something about the entire experience makes me like these guys a lot.
The rest of the meet is uneventful. I lose the fifty by a hair, but I didn’t get the best start, so I’m not worried, and I win the hundred by almost a half body length. I finish third in the two hundred, and we climb on to the bus in the late Saturday afternoon darkness with the best meet of our lives under our belts.
We get our traditional pizza to go, and soon we’re on the highway, having entered our mermen’s cocoon for what we believe is the last time. The school won’t fund any of the other guys to go along with Simet and me to State. We get mileage for Simet’s Humvee, a double room at Motel 6, and per diem of fifteen bucks a day each. The football team stayed at the Doubletree.
As we roll over bare roads through the cold, clear night, Simet stands next to Icko, facing us, holding tight to the bar by the door. He says, “Guys, I’ve been with some good teams in my time. My AAU team took fifteen swimmers to Nationals when I was sixteen, and several of us made it to the NAIA finals my junior and senior years in college. But I’ve never had an athletic experience like this one. I’ve never swum on or coached a team where not one swimmer backed off on even one repeat. I know there’s been controversy over whether or not you guys should letter, but most of that controversy is being caused by guys who couldn’t carry your jocks, if you had any. There is not an athlete at Cutter who has more right to wear the blue and gold than the guys on this bus.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Mott says from the back of the bus.
“Fuckin’ A,” Coach says right back at him.
“Fuckin’ A,” Chris Coughlin says, and covers his mouth.
Mott waits a few minutes, then sneaks up into the seat behind me. “You gonna go over there and make us look good, hotshot?” he says.
“Do my best.”
“The muscle man says we got to swim relays against you for the next couple of weeks. That right?”
“You guys don’t have to do that. You kept me going all this time. It’d be shitty to make you stretch out another two weeks when you don’t even get to swim.”
Tay-Roy says, “No, man, this is a team. Our season lasts as long as one of us is still alive.”