Underwater(5)

I study Rolle’s theorem.

I e-mail an analysis of colors in The Great Gatsby to my English teacher.

I wait for Brenda.

I wait for one p.m.

*

At noon, I know Brenda is coming soon. It is because of this that I feel zingy electricity in my veins. I know she’s coming and I have to open the door to let her in.

I have to talk. I have to tell.

Maybe a shower will help.

I duck my head under the hot water and let it soak through to my skull. My hair suctions itself to my ears, locking the noise out. I like being underwater where it’s only me. Sounds and the world are far away.

I’ve spent a lot of time underwater because I used to be on my high school swim team. I swam every weekday, even in the off-season, from three until four thirty p.m., in the twenty-five-yard lanes of the Pacific Palms High School pool. I swam with the same three friends I’d met on youth squad when I was eleven and my dad first received orders to a base near Pacific Palms.

My mom was newly pregnant with Ben so we’d hoped my dad’s transfer meant he would be home for a while. But we’d barely gotten settled when he was called up for his third tour in Afghanistan. So he returned to combat and my mom and I committed to making the best of Pacific Palms.

I got close to my swim team friends, and by the time we got to high school, we’d become an inseparable foursome. Chelsea was brilliant and beautiful in that blond SoCal way that made boys stutter when they talked to her. Brianna swam the fifty-yard freestyle faster than any other girl in the history of our high school. And my best friend, Sage, was wise beyond her years, poised to perfection on Model UN and talking about things other sixteen-year-olds didn’t even know existed.

I was a little of all of that. But after October fifteenth, after that day, Pacific Palms High School shut down. My friends and I had to go to different schools so construction workers could get busy changing the parts of PPHS that would haunt us forever. The administration split up students based on a set of neighborhood boundaries they’d come up with. The four of us didn’t live close enough to go to the same place, so we drifted as things continued to change.

Brianna got a boyfriend.

I started online high school.

Chelsea stopped calling.

And Sage moved away before she was even supposed to start at her new school.

But at our old school, I imagined the bright blue championship banners still hanging from the rungs of the metal fence that ran around the outdoor pool deck. I didn’t know if they were still there, but I wanted them to be. Because my name was on one of them. I held a record. I was a long-distance swimmer. I was someone who could go on and on forever, steady and even, then finish hard to pull off the win.

Now my whole life is a race. Every minute leading to the next. Every day feeding into another. It’s a constant crossing of the finish line. It’s like playing a fast song slow.

Chelsea and Brianna don’t understand that. They tried. They’d come over, but we’d only end up sitting and staring at the television.

“Come with us to the party,” Brianna would beg. “There are going to be so many cute boys.”

“So many,” Chelsea would echo.

I’d curl up tighter on the couch, tucking my slippered feet underneath me. “I don’t care about cute boys or parties right now. But don’t let me stop you from enjoying them.”

“It’s not the same without you,” Chelsea would whine.

Sage would call from her new house on the weekends. More often than not, she’d sound distant and sad and in search of solutions. “So you quit school?” she’d ask. “Is it easier?”

“A little,” I’d say.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

*

Brenda knocks her knuckles against my door at 12:57 p.m. I want those three minutes before one p.m. to myself. But she’s here. So I breathe deep. I breathe long. And I open the door. Brenda smiles, and I can see the gap between her top two teeth that makes her look like a little kid. I know how old she is because I once asked her to tell me.

“If it really matters, I’m twenty-nine,” she said. “But why do you want to know?”

“I just wanted to see if you would tell me.”

Today, a long burgundy dreadlock falls into her face, and she tucks it back into the other chunk of dreads she has fastened with an oversize ponytail holder at the nape of her neck. I can see the string of tiny silver loops that line her lobe when she does it. And the peace sign tattoo etched into the skin behind her ear. I pull the door all the way open, and she comes inside.

She sits. She is to the left of me because she knows. She takes out a notebook and a pen. She has pages filled about me. I’m sure she goes back to her office after we meet and types the notes into her computer. She didn’t tell me that. I just know. I’d be stupid not to know. Everyone keeps everything on computers.

She pulls the remote from my hand and shuts off the TV with a click.

We stare. We start.

“So. How have the last couple days been for you?”

I tell her about the mundane stuff that happened yesterday and today. Soup. Soap operas. School assignments. And then I tell her about Evan.

“A boy? Your age?” She’s intrigued. I can tell by the way she taps her pen against her notebook. “Tell me about him.”