“I’m a parent too!” he yells at the teacher, gesturing toward Teddy. “Of a student. Ofthatstudent.”
The silence is beginning to turn into whispers and murmurs and muffled snickers. Uncle Jake finally reaches Charlie, and when he does he bends his head to speak to him in a low voice. To my great relief, whatever he says does the trick. Charlie sweeps his eyes across the crowd with a look of slow comprehension before landing on his son, who turns away. Finally he sighs and allows himself to be led out into the hallway.
“Good luck, kid!” he shouts vaguely in Teddy’s direction, and the minute the door slams shut behind him the bleachers fill with noise. The other man follows him out a second later, but by then nobody is paying attention.
“Good luck, kid!”people begin to yell, cupping their hands around their mouths and shouting the words. “Do it for your pop!”
I turn back to Teddy, who is staring at the too-blue water of the pool, his back to the crowd. With a burst of static, Mr. Dill speaks into his megaphone: “Pardon the interruption, folks. But it looks like we’re ready for the next race now.”
“Hey,” I say to Teddy, so softly that I’m not even sure he hears me over all the many voices. “Are you okay?”
He inclines his head, just slightly, and I can see that his mouth is set in a thin line. Without answering, he bends to push the boat into the water, holding it steady while I climb into the front. I fold my knees underneath me and grab one of the paddles, which are made from cardboard tubes. Then he gets in behind me, the boat tipping wildly from one side to the other before righting itself. I’m alarmed by how low we’ve settled into the water; my calculations had us riding a lot higher. But test runs were against the rules, so this is our maiden voyage, and it’s all a bit of a guessing game at this point.
I grip my paddle hard, waiting for Mr. Dill’s whistle to split the air. To our left, Mitchell and Alexis are staring straight ahead, their faces rigid with focus, and behind them the bleachers are a blur of people and noise.
“On your marks,” says Mr. Dill, who is sitting in the lifeguard chair at the halfway point, a clipboard balanced on his lap. “Get set….”
Then the whistle sounds and we’re off.
Teddy lunges forward so quickly that he knocks his head against my shoulder, and I immediately drop my paddle. He reaches for it before it can float away, shoving it back into my hand, then begins to row frantically. But he’s much faster than me, and instead of moving forward we start to spin in circles.
He groans, then pulls his paddle out of the water to bring it to the other side and help me, but he manages to bonk me on the head in the process and I drop mine again. By the time he fishes it out, we’re already a few lengths behind, the other boat splashing ahead of us, our two classmates somehow as synchronized in their movements as members of a crew team.
“Faster!” Teddy yells through gritted teeth, and I lean forward, paddling as hard as I can. I’m so focused on catching up that it takes me a minute to notice there’s water in the bottom of our boat, at least an inch of it, soaking my knees and my bare feet. I turn to give Teddy a panicked look, but he just shakes his head at me and says it again: “Faster!”
The crowd is clapping hard now, half of them laughing and half of them booing as they watch us flounder in the middle of the pool.
The water in the boat gets higher, and I can feel the bottom start to bend.
“Teddy,” I say, whipping around, but his eyes are hard and he doesn’t even seem to see me: he’s looking past me to the finish line.
The noise is now deafening, the voices ringing off the tiled floor and the concrete walls. The other boat has made it to the finish line, and we’re still rowing fast but we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, sinking deeper into the turquoise water.
Still, Teddy continues to paddle, unwilling to give up, and so I do the same in spite of the soggy cardboard, in spite of the rising water, in spite of the jeering crowd.
We’re three-quarters of the way to the finish line when the whole thing collapses. There’s no surprise to it by that point, no dunk tank moment; I’m already half-soaked, and the edges of the boat are starting to bow. It’s like a blanket being folded in half, all four corners drawn inward, and just before it happens, before the bottom gives out entirely, the whole thing caving in at once, I manage to close my eyes and hold my breath. And just like that we’re plunged into the deep end of the pool.
It’s still something of a shock: the water is cold and the fall is sudden. For a few seconds I remain underwater, suspended in the muffled quiet. But when I open my stinging eyes to search for Teddy I don’t see anything, so I kick hard and let myself drift back up to the surface just in time to catch him hoisting himself out of the pool.
“Teddy!” I shout, but it’s lost to the sound of our classmates, who are stomping their feet, hooting and laughing and pointing.
Better luck next time, kid!
Can’t win ’em all, Moneybags!
Where’s your yacht when you need it?
Beside me our crumpled boat is still bobbing in the chlorinated water like something dead, the bottom already beginning to break apart, so I grab the edge and start swimming toward the shallow end, dragging it behind me.
I look up just in time to see Teddy disappearing through the door to the locker room without a backward glance, and suddenly I’m angry. I’m angry that we lost, angry that we failed. Angry that Teddy changed the design after contributing nothing for so long. Angry that he left me with the battered boat and the sneering crowd.
Angry that he left me at all.
By the time I make it to the end of the pool the next heat is lined up and ready to go, and I stand there, waist-deep in the shallow water, dripping and shivering and tugging at my clinging T-shirt as I look around for someone to help me pull the sodden cardboard mess out of the pool. But nobody seems to care. Mr. Dill is marking something down on his clipboard—probably our failing grade—and the audience has shifted its attention to the next race, no doubt hoping for an even more spectacular fail.
I start to heave the damp remains of the boat over the concrete lip of the pool, but it’s unwieldy and surprisingly heavy, and I’m relieved when someone reaches down from above and pulls the whole thing out at once, hauling it onto the blue tiles, where it slumps to the floor like some sort of beached animal.
When I look up, I’m surprised to see that it’s Sawyer who has come to my rescue. Only seniors are excused to watch the races, which means he must have cut class. “What are you doing here?” I ask as he reaches out a hand. But I wade over to the ladder and climb out on my own, eyeing him as I wring out my dripping shorts.
