Photograph by Amy Hart
Driscoll’s got us drilling flip turns this morning. I hate flip turns. I can never suck in enough air to make it through the full revolution, and my ass always buoys up halfway through, like a lopsided pool inflatable.
“Hawkins!” Driscoll shouts once I surface. He looks like a cop on his day off, tight polo shirt, khaki slacks. Dads on TV wear those, yeah, but at home, Jimmy, Mom’s boyfriend, only ever puts on old dungarees. Too skinny for standard-issue pants, he ties the waist up with a rope Mom found in the landlord’s garage.
Driscoll mimes keeping his head down. I give a thumbs up and dive back into somebody’s wake. Best I can do is a quick 25-free and then try again.
Swish, swish. Water laps what it can touch. In the lane, you don’t think. You barely breathe. It’s just stroke, stroke, stroke, turn, and stroke again. In season, I smell chlorine in my dreams, a chemical cloud fogging everything.
“Amazing, Evans!” Driscoll shouts. You can hear him on the mic, even underwater. My stomach sinks, threatening to bring my arms and legs down with it. Great place to die, the bottom of a pool, quiet and blue and peaceful. I’ll sink down with the broken fingernails, the lost Band-Aids, the earring backs and skin cells, and I’ll close my eyes, welcome that cruel, eternal sleep.
Not that I didn’t already know Caroline Evans’s flip turns are better than the rest of ours combined. Tall, strong, and blonder than an Olsen twin, she barely raises her head on the approach. Her cells need no oxygen. She’ll glide in, smooth as freshly glossed lips, and fast, before disappearing below an unbroken surface, neither splish nor splash fouling her soft thigh. You’ll see her again maybe ten meters later, arms tight, hands locked, gathering the speed of the wealthy, the safe. Before meets, Caroline’s equally blonde mom hosts spaghetti dinners in their humongous kitchen, which they recently had renovated to look like the Olive Garden. Our apartment kitchen, by contrast, is just a fridge and a sink at one end of the living room. Mom, bless her, has in recent months managed to put in a table she found in the garbage, someplace to put our abalone shells, our incense, our hot plate.
Instead of trying to flip again, I come to a stop in the shallow end, pull myself out of the pool, and pretend to head for the restroom. Without me, practice will continue on just the same—the slosh, the groan. Leaving it behind feels right, the imperative of my people, we losers, we rejects, all.
Inside the changing room, I go straight to Jackie’s locker, which she, like everyone else, has left wide open. She stashed a Snickers on the top shelf, I noticed when we were suiting up. It’s been about a month since Jimmy threw out all the sugar we had in the house (these’re poison, Jimmy said, dangling an innocent bag of store-brand chocolate chips over the wastebasket), and the pull inside me is ragged, desperate, like the riptide Mom warned me about that one time she and her last boyfriend took me down to the Jersey Shore.
The trick, she told me, is not to swim against it.
I grab the candy bar, unwrap it, and stuff nearly the entire thing into my mouth.
“Oh my God,” I say out loud to nobody. The sweetness is insane, delicious, even with a chlorine finish from the water on my fingers. I reach out a hand to steady myself.
Next to the candy bar in Jackie’s locker is one of those plastic claw clips everyone is wearing. I take it off the shelf and squeeze it open and shut a few times. I’ve been wanting one of these, but every time I ask at the grocery store, Mom looks at Jimmy, and Jimmy looks up at the sky, presumably making direct contact with God himself, who Jimmy for some reason believes in, and who doubtless has unlimited time to weigh in on matters as consequential as a young girl’s accessories, and then, of course, Jimmy shakes his head gravely, as if pronouncing me dead.
I drift toward the mirror, pull off my cap, and hold the clip up. It’s the exact same color as my soot-brown hair. That’s fate. I bring it over to my own locker and tuck it into my backpack, an old JanSport I found at Goodwill. Another kid wrote her name on the pocket in marker. I tried to scribble it out, but you can still see the letters. If anyone asks who “Allie” is, I’ll have to tell them that’s what my cousins call me—it’s kind of close to Michelle, no? I don’t have any cousins, at least none Mom lets me talk to, but nobody needs to know that.
Feet are slip-slopping in from the pool, I can hear it. I shove the remaining knob of nougat into my mouth and try to lick the chocolate off my fingers. Shit, I’m going to have to hide in the shower. No way I’ll be able to swallow all these sticky peanuts in time. What’s most worrisome, though, is how I’ve clearly missed the last bit of drill. Since I’m not a believer myself, I pray to Keanu Reeves (in Johnny Mnemonic, specifically) that Driscoll didn’t notice I disappeared. I’m swimming the 100-back against Mamaroneck next Wednesday, my first solo race, and we all know my turns still need work.
“Hey,” I can hear Jackie saying, her voice sharp in the distance. “Where’s my Snickers?”
I swallow and turn the shower on full blast, even though the water’s freezing. I open my mouth to it, let the hard spray hurt my tongue. I’ve got to slosh the liquid around my gums, cleanse the caramel from between my teeth, before I can go back out there.
After school, Jimmy’s in front of the TV again, left hand down the front of his pants. Not that he’s doing anything more than just being the most disgusting person on earth. When he scratches, I can hear the sandpaper sound his pubes make. Barf.
“Gina!” he calls to my mom. That isn’t even her name. “You’ve got to see this!”
On screen, some men in scrubs are dissecting an obviously fake rubber alien. Its flower of fingers hangs open. The belly is high and fat, like it’s pregnant. The man with the biggest mustache holds a scalpel to the thing’s chest and the camera hugs in close.
“That’s not fucking real,” I mumble.
“Watch your fucking mouth, Shelly,” Jimmy hisses, and he reaches out with his gross crotch hand to give me a slap. Only catches the back of my head, though.
“That’s not my name,” I say.
Jimmy doesn’t answer. He’s staring at the screen again, his pupils round as Smarties.
On my way to the so-called kitchen, I rifle Jimmy’s jean jacket for a Marlboro, which I hide inside the little pocket of my obscenely large JNCOs, inside just one leg of which you could fit—conservative estimate—four more of me. Then, I open the cabinets to look for a snack. Even after housing an entire king-sized candy bar, I’m still starving. Always am, after practice.
Of course, there’s nothing. A box of whole wheat linguine, a sack of dry black beans, some canned peas. No actual food. If I were to complain, which I used to, believe me, when Jimmy first moved in, before I realized how futile, how stupid it was to express needs and desires, Jimmy would simply tell me to make some beans and rice, as if that made any sense, as if I could wait that long, as if plain beans and rice would actually taste good.
I take out a bag of puffed wheat and turn to the fridge for milk.
“How was school?” Mom asks, coming in from the bathroom. She gives me a hug, and I can feel her boobs squish under her tie-dyed dress. She smells a little like Pine-Sol, a little like weed.
“Gina!” Jimmy yells. “I asked you to get in here.” He hates when Mom talks to me.
Tell him to shut the fuck up, I try to say with just my eyes, which I make big and wet and innocent. Mom only smiles her sad smile and pats my arm, like a nurse about to give me a shot.
I take my bowl of cereal and my pilfered cigarette and I head outside to the front patio. We’re not supposed to come out here—it’s reserved for Tony, the landlord, and his girlfriend, America, who live in the big white house attached to our apartment—but there aren’t any other cars in the driveway. I cross the flagstone, sit down at the round glass table, and spoon some soggy grains into my mouth. Tastes like papier mache, bit of paste, bit of misery. When Mom used to feel generous, she’d let me get Lucky Charms at the ShopRite.
I’m not finished swallowing, but I bring out the cigarette, tap the filter a few times on the tabletop, like they do in prison movies, and light it with the Zippo I borrowed from Grandpa’s woodshed last Easter. My lungs grow with the smoke, bigger, better.
This patio’s at the top of a hill, way up on stilts, higher than the high trees growing up from the slope below. I look out over the leaves and branches. Soon, the entire mountain will turn red, yellow, and eventually, always, brown, but for now, at the beginning of October, the green holds. Beyond there’s the Hudson, maybe gray, maybe blue, the boats streaking white and wild underneath the Tappan Zee. Next week, we’ll be driving across that bridge in a school bus to reach Mamaroneck, where I’ll swim faster than I’ve ever swam before in a crazy, unlikely bid to bring glory to my team and name.
“Shelly?” Mom calls from the back door. Shit, now she’s saying it, too.
“Michelle,” I mumble to myself, but I’m smart enough to rush around to the side yard before I answer Mom. She doesn’t like me disobeying Tony.
“Yes, Regina?” I call.
“Come on, honey,” she says, as I round the corner. “I’m still Mom.”
I roll my eyes.
“Come in here a minute,” she says. “We have something to tell you.” In loose cotton and dreads, she’s holding the door open for me like some kind of hippie butler.
It’s always “we” with her these days, ever since Jimmy moved in, what was it, a mere six months ago? You’d think they’d been married a lifetime already, even though they aren’t married at all. What she really means, of course, is that Jimmy wants to tell me something. He doesn’t like to use his own mouth, though. He’d rather use hers. And trust me, these little messages aren’t ever good. Last time, Mom told me I’m not allowed to see Grandma anymore, not after she fed me poison (read: Funfetti) at her house. If it weren’t for Grandma, who bought me these jeans, which I could tell she absolutely hated when I brought them up to the register at Hot Topic, I’d only have stained leggings and old sweaters from the Salvation Army to wear.
“Okay, Mom,” I say, but I don’t mean it.
Mom follows me in and shuts the door behind her. She sits down next to Jimmy on the futon. The TV’s off now, for some reason. No, this isn’t going to be good. I wipe the backs of my hands on my Nirvana T-shirt.
Jimmy takes Mom’s hand and gives her a look I can tell is supposed to be encouraging. He will have already told her what to say, I’m well aware. I hear him doing it before she gets on the phone with Aunt Penelope, or her ex-best friend Rachel, or the DMV. All Mom has to do is impress Jimmy by saying it.
“Honey,” Mom says. “Come here.”
I sigh, come closer, but not too close. There’s got to be a way to disappear in plain sight. If I focus hard enough on the paisleys on the rug, maybe I can become one of them. They look like tadpoles, or fish, bountiful and swift and red.
“Come on, you little asshole,” Jimmy growls. “Get close to your mother. She’s trying to have a moment with you.”
I do it. I step forward once, and I step forward again. I’m standing in front of her now, Mom, Mommy, Mama. She smells like the past—like starshine, like soil. Jimmy’s palm is on her thigh now, his fingers pressing, digging in.
Mom takes both my hands in hers and looks into my eyes. The floor feels unsteady beneath me, like perhaps my wish to become a part of it is about to come true.
“Honey,” she says again, breathing in around the word. “We’re pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”
Her face is the sun, bright, kind. She’s always been the sweetest person, my everything, my world.
“You’re going to be a big sister!”
I’m stunned. In the center of my chest, fireworks, planets. I open my mouth, and then I close it again.
A baby could be okay, right? A baby could be cute, good. A brother, a sister. A baby can’t hurt anyone. I can cuddle it. I can walk it. I can teach it to read—
“Fuck,” Jimmy says. He’s shaking his head, his long, greasy hair barely stirring against his skull. “She’s jealous, Gina. Just look at her. She thinks she’s still the baby. Shit, Shelly, you’re, what, thirteen?”
Of course. Motherfucker. How could I be so stupid. This baby is going to be Jimmy’s baby. Mean and cruel. Greasy. A smoker? Can babies smoke? And this baby, I’ll bet this baby means that Jimmy’s going to stick around here, forever and ever and evermore, goodnight, sayonara, amen.
Keanu, please. I close my eyes. Breath in. I can see him, clear as Crystal Pepsi, standing on the subway platform in his black suit and skinny tie. Please. Help me.
Soon as I wake up, it’s practice again. Always and everywhere, it’s practice. Jimmy takes Mom’s car to work at the garage now, so Mom doesn’t drive me anymore. That means I’ve got to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and run down an entire hill to Tamra’s house so I can hitch a ride and make it to South Orangetown Middle School by 6:15. And today I’m late, skidding down the hillside through the first of the fallen leaves, one sneaker in my hand, the other doused in mud.
By the time I get to Tamra’s, I’m starving. As usual. Lucky for me, Tamra’s mom stocks a countertop basket with name-brand breakfast items: Pop Tarts, Nature Valley granola bars, Little Bites blueberry muffins, sometimes even those Little Debbie Spinwheels I like to steal from the gas station, and she always asks me if I want anything. I say no, obviously, it’s too embarrassing to accept kindness from strangers. When she turns her back, however, I make sure to pocket at least a couple servings of poison.
“Mmmmm.” I’m channeling Homer Simpson: head tipped back, eyes slitted, drool hanging. “Poison.”
I mean, Christ, the Pop Tarts this morning are s’mores flavored.
“What’s that, my dear?” Tamra’s mom asks. She’s at the sink washing the most elegant stemware I’ve ever seen. Did they have a party last night? On a Monday?
I pretend I didn’t hear her and head upstairs to Tamra’s room. When I see that she’s still asleep, tucked sweetly into the exact canopy bed I once dreamed about as a child, the pencil posts high and gentle, the curtains white and gauzy, I stand awkwardly in the hallway.
When nothing happens, I take out the Pop Tarts and tear open the silver foil.
In the pool, Driscoll is ruthless. He has us swimming IMs, a feat only Caroline can pull off, and okay, maybe Brienne, the seventh grader with short, quick legs and shoulders like a parking lot. Most of us, myself included, only pretend we can do butterfly. The Little Mermaid makes it look easy, but hips aren’t fish.
This time, I barely make it past warmups before I pull myself out of the water. Do I even have to pee? No, I don’t. I did, however, see Ashley tuck a Honeybun into her jacket pocket in the locker room. You can peel the thick layer of white glaze off those—it’s got to be pure sugar—and slurp up the entire strip in one bite.
I’m going to have to work a little harder on this one. I don’t want to get Ashley’s jacket wet. I try the hand dryer, but it just moves the water around. I have to shake my hands violently.
The bun is perfectly nestled inside the pocket of Ashley’s North Face windbreaker. I pull it out. Here’s a mini-spray bottle of Calgon vanilla body mist, too. I spray some on my wrist and try to breathe it in.
“Michelle?”
I drop the Honeybun and spin around. I’m still clutching the spray bottle.
Shit. Jackie. How did I not hear her coming?
Like an idiot, I put my hands behind my back, the classic tell you’re hiding something. I can’t help it, though. I’m practically naked, except for my suit.
Jackie stares at me. She’s either confused or disgusted, possibly both.
“What are you doing?” she asks. She sounds like a Valley Girl. It occurs to me that I don’t even know which valley these girls are supposed to come from.
“Nothing,” I say. I sound desperate, suspicious. My face feels hot all of a sudden, as if I’m about to catch fire, burst into a thousand suns, disappear into white flames. Obviously, it would be better if I did. But instead, I let my hands drop, and I stand there, a person-shaped hole in the universe. I haven’t got any choice.
Jackie sees the body mist in my hand then. She looks around with narrowed eyes. “That’s Ashley’s locker,” she says.
“I—I—I know,” I stammer. “I was, um . . . I just saw this . . . this body spray was on the floor. I was going to put it back.”
Jackie watches me as I turn to the locker. I lift the little bottle, uncertain what I should do with it, exactly. I can’t put it back in the pocket. That would demonstrate an inappropriate level of familiarity with Ashley’s locker. In the end, I kind of push the bottle in, and it clatters down to the bottom, coming to rest on top of Ashley’s Nikes.
Did it work? Keanu, tell me it worked.
I’m afraid to look back at Jackie, but I make myself do it.
Her flat, white lips keep pressing and smushing, but no words come from between them. Instead, she shakes her head and walks slowly past me, into the bathroom.
“Alex, can you please help me?” Mrs. Fine is leaning against the doorframe, her breath coming in bursts. It’s third period, and she’s trying to wheel in the school’s worst AV cart. Looks from here like one of the wheels is snagged on the baseboard, but I’m not trying to get involved.
“Yes, ma’am,” Alex mumbles, consummately polite. He’s used to this. Jackie says Mrs. Fine has a crush on him. Anyone with common sense can see he’s simply the largest male in the eighth grade.
Alex grips the side of the cart in his substantial fists and wrenches it free.
“Thank you, Alex,” says Mrs. Fine. Folded over her sleeveless shirt, her armpits look like butts.
She turns on the enormous tube television and spins the ancient dial past static, Bob Barker, Days of Our Lives. At home, our TV has dials, too, but you won’t catch me admitting that to anyone. Thanks to Jimmy, my secret is safe. He doesn’t let me have anybody over to the apartment anymore, not with all the homemade bongs he’s got lying around.
Alex returns to his seat, and Chris throws a wadded-up piece of looseleaf at him. Alex doesn’t notice, or he pretends not to. He’s implacable, huge, his hair beautiful, afloat on air, and he has nothing to prove.
“Mrs. Fine?” Caroline, who sits next to me because of the alphabet, not because of free will, doesn’t bother to raise her hand. Her tone is world-weary, as if, at the age of thirteen, she’s already seen too much. And yet, I know from the spaghetti dinners she keeps an army of Beanie Babies on her bed.
“Yes, Caroline?” Mrs. Fine is adjusting the TV’s bunny ears. I fear the tube will break free of its strap and crash to the ground.
“When are they going to announce it?” Caroline asks.
She means the verdict. The trial of the century (you can say that; the century’s almost over) is scheduled to wrap up any minute now. Before Earth Science ends, someone on the other side of the country is going to pronounce O.J. Simpson guilty. Or innocent.
“Days! Weeks!” Chris shouts, pounding his desk with a fist. His hair flops down over his eyes so that he looks like a Muppet of lesser renown.
Caroline rolls her eyes and chews on the eraser at the end of her pencil, which is shaped like a bunch of grapes. I know from experience it isn’t going to taste good.
“Like I said, Caroline.” The picture is coming into focus now. You can see a skinny white guy in a suit and glasses sitting at a table. “They’re going to announce it in a few minutes, around 1 p.m.”
“Hey, put the sound on,” Derek calls from the back of the class. I’ve always hated him. His T-shirt, like most of the T-shirts in the room, says NO FEAR in angry caps, and below that, Second Place Is the First Loser.
Mrs. Fine spins the second dial with such aggressive enthusiasm the sound blasts out at us from the speaker like a weapon. Somebody over by the pencil sharpener cries out.
Fuck this. I get up to grab the hall pass, an oversized wooden sphere hanging from the blackboard. I’m rolling the flint wheel on the Zippo inside the pocket of my JNCOs (okay, yes, I wear them every goddamn day; they are my only actual pants). It’s time to head down to the first-floor bathroom, which doesn’t have any windows. In there, the hall monitors can barely make out the smoke rising from the stall.
“Michelle,” Mrs. Fine calls out.
I jump. She’s one of the few wardens to allow us prisoners free and easy access to the restroom, perhaps, you can speculate, due to some kind of menstrual trauma she herself experienced in middle school. Did they have middle school back then?
“Stay put, please,” Mrs. Fine says. “They’re going to announce the verdict any minute.”
I’m frozen in front of the TV. Everyone is looking at me. When I tell my legs to move, they don’t. This feels like instinct, but one of those stupid instincts we’re desperate to outgrow, like binge-eating sugar or mating with the square-jawed.
“Move!” Derek shouts.
Okay, yelling. Yup, that’ll do it. Always does. I rush back to my seat, just as, Keanu be praised, a lady with fluffy bangs comes on the screen to tell us it’s time to go live to the courtroom.
“Shhhhh,” Chris hisses loudly at no one.
I sigh and collapse a little in my chair. Occupying time and space is horrific, embarrassing.
But I’m breathing too soon, I realize. Caroline, anyone can see, is still staring directly at me. She’s smiling, and not in a good way.
“Nice hair clip,” she whispers, all drippy and slow, like she’s telling me off. “Where’d you get it?”
“Shhhhh,” Mrs. Fine admonishes us, for real this time. “Girls, please. We’re witnessing history.”
I take Jackie’s clip out of my hair and shove it under the desk. My mind goes aquatic, splashing at its own edges, and I’m deep beneath it, low on air, eyes fixed on O.J., who, from down here, looks unstable, gray. Someone in the courtroom is talking, but I can’t hear any of the words.
Caroline knows.
What does that mean, though, really? What is Caroline going to do with this information?
O.J.’s face, close up. He’s trying to keep the eyebrows apart. He’s trying not to let his pupils disappear into twin black holes of nothing and jail and death and hell.
Keanu, she knows.
I risk glancing sideways at Caroline. She isn’t looking at me anymore. Smooth cheek, question mark of a nose, miniature ear. Every part of her is now pointed screenward, where O.J.’s jaw is set. The flesh puffs out around his lips. His teeth must be stones rubbing together at the bottom of a river.
Caroline could tell Jackie. She could tell Driscoll. I could get kicked off the swim team, maybe. I definitely wouldn’t be able to swim against Mamaroneck tomorrow.
A woman is speaking very fast now. “In the matter of the State of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097211, we the jury in the above-entitled action find the defendant—”
If Caroline tells the police, Mom and Jimmy will find out. Cops show up at the apartment, Jimmy’s going to murder me right then and there.
Better to go to jail.
On the TV, O.J. squeezes his mouth down, and then, even though he doesn’t want to, he is smiling, he’s glad, the man behind him touches his shoulder, O.J. expands, his entire body opens up, he kind of flattens out, like gas in a suit.
I picture Caroline in her room, surrounded by stuffed bunnies and doggies, picking up one of those phones you see in the movies, the ones that are shaped like red lips. She punches somebody’s number into it.
“That’s right!” Derek yells from the back. “Not guilty!” He has an opinion about how a couple of rich people got killed three thousand miles away.
The bell rings.
You’d think everybody’d wait a minute, let things sink in, but they start to gather up their textbooks, PEZ dispensers, scrunchies, Tamagotchis.
“See you on the bus tomorrow,” Caroline says. We don’t practice before meets.
Sure, I think, unless I wake up in prison.
The TV’s still on. In the courtroom, a lady is screaming. Mrs. Fine stands there, watching. Her cheeks look wet.
I take forever to pack up, and then, on the way out, I throw Jackie’s claw clip into the garbage can.
I’m half in the water, my feet on the rough tile, arms hanging from the block. I should be freezing, but I’m not. My body isn’t me. It’s tight and high, muscles ready when the buzzer goes off to carry me into another world, where everything is motion and nothing has a name.
Caroline’s mom is in the stands. So is Jackie’s mom. Tamra’s, too. Mine’s home with Jimmy. Getting ready for baby. I was a baby once, wasn’t I? I lived in water. The sounds were on the inside.
The buzzer. Off it goes.
I push hard, up and out, legs together, and then, my head hits, hands high above my head, joined, a reverse prayer, and now I’m kicking, kicking, kicking, like an engine, a rhythm.
A race is a song.
My face breaks the surface and I thrash, building, moving. Left, right, left, right. I’m scooping water, scooping like mad, like someone in danger, taking on sea.
A race is a struggle.
I try to keep the lane rope in the corner of my vision. If I hit it, all is lost. I don’t feel my shoulders cutting the water, exactly. I’m more like a process than a being.
Everything that’s happening happens in near silence. If I let my head turn too much, I can hear the crowd. Who are they cheering for? I could be pulling ahead. I could be in last place.
At the reservoir behind Grandma’s, Mom used to take me out to the center on her belly. Little otter, she called me. But in her gold bathing suit, she was a trout or a salmon. The suit flashed in the light like scales.
Here comes the turn. I count five strokes from the flags overhead and then I flip. I glide in, like ice, like cream, like a puddle of gasoline, smooth, slick as any of the other girls on the team.
I can picture it now: they’ll all be there waiting for me at the end of this race, Jackie and Tamra and Ashley and Caroline, and everybody else, too. They’ll gather around the block the same way they gather for each other, cheering and waving, proud. Nice. Forgiving. At the end of this, I’m not going to be the weird girl who watches them sleep, who steals their stuff, who wants to smell like they do. No. I’ll be one of them.
It’s not impossible. Caroline hasn’t said anything to me yet. Nobody else has, either. Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe none of them do. I mean, I’m here. I haven’t been suspended, or expelled, or incarcerated.
Final lap. I’m exhausted, limbs scarves I can barely wave. Doesn’t matter. I keep going. I’ll go on like this forever, not knowing whether I’ve lost or won, pushing on until all the parts of me turn into fins.
My hand bangs tile and I float down, grip the wall.
Nobody’s there at the block.
It doesn’t take long. In an instant, here’s my time, up on the board.
Second place. Wow. Holy shit. Better than I was hoping for. Better than I let myself imagine.
I crawl out. By the bleachers, Tanya, the sixth grader who wears prescription goggles and isn’t good enough to compete, tries to pat me on the back.
“Good job, Shelly,” she says.
“It’s Michelle,” I say.
Brienne wins the IM. Caroline wins the 200-fly. We place twice in the relay. The numbers keep coming in, seconds shaved off, meters counted. And then, we win.
Driscoll blows his whistle. He is pleased. You can tell because he sings the fight song with us on the way back to the locker room: We are the dragons, say it loud, say it proud!
Caroline comes up alongside me and gives me a smile.
“Nice job, Michelle,” she says.
I think she means it. Can’t be sure.
“Thanks,” I say, but Jackie elbows her and giggles and whispers close to Caroline’s face until they disappear behind me.
I drop down on the bench and open my locker. I’m tired, maybe more tired than I’ve ever been. It’s okay. It was worth it. I did it. I was good. A little better than good, maybe. I was strong. And I’ll be home soon. If Jimmy’s already asleep, I’ll be able to tell Mom how I almost won.
I take out my towel and my T-shirt. I take out my underwear and my socks. I’m cold all of a sudden, perilously cold, as if I’ve returned to my body after a trip away to find it malfunctioning.
And that’s when I realize it. Something’s not right. In an instant, everything changes.
They’re gone. My pants are gone.
Racheal Fest: I’m a writer and critic based in Central New York. My critical and creative work has appeared in venues such as Colorado Review, Lemonwood Quarterly, Entropy, Mediations, Jump Cut and Politics/Letters. My manuscript, Future Ghosts of Pittsburgh, was longlisted for Alternating Current’s 2023 Electric Book Award in fiction. I host Writers Salon, a literary reading series featuring established and emerging writers local to the Catskills and beyond at Community Arts Network of Oneonta. At SUNY Oneonta, I teach composition courses and support faculty pedagogy. Find me at rachealfest.com.