“You can see when you get to the room.” I set my bag onthe bench and pull my shirt over my head. “You’re cleaning it all up.”
His face drops for just a second. “It can’t be that bad.”
“It is. And you shouldn’t have let her in our room.”
Ryan shakes his head at me. “A hot girl wanting into your room seems like an okay deal to me. You’re just hangry.” He punches me in the shoulder.
“This isn’t any hot girl, this is Sidney. And it doesn’t mean what you think it does.” I don’t want to get into this with him in the crowded locker room. For Sidney, pranking me was just getting all of her frustration out. For me, pranks were the only way for me to connect with her after she shut down at the end of that first summer. We didn’t prank each other when we were actually together, and I can’t go back to that. Maybe I can’t let myself admit that pranks wouldn’t turn out the same way this time around. “Just don’t let her in again, okay?”
Ryan doesn’t get it, but he nods anyway. I have to see Sidney at practices and in the dining hall, and around campus, but my room is the one place I’m safe from this new reality.
67 DAYS AFTER
Sidney
I flinch every time I walk into my dorm room. And that should be a bad thing, but actually it feels strangely comforting. Like slipping on an old pair of pajamas. The ratty kind that are ugly and worn, but make you feel nostalgic. In the shower, I wish and pray that I’ll be soaked by cherry Kool-Aid. That my slippers will mysteriously be filled with tapioca pudding, or glued to the floor. But day after day, things in my room are uneventful. It’s a week before I realize that Asher isn’t going to retaliate, and two before I admit to myself that I’ve gone about this all wrong.
I can’t go backward with Asher. There’s no re-creating the past with us. We aren’t the same people we were when we were freezing each other’s underwear and sabotaging shampoo. The only thing I can control right now is swimming, so when Ellie gets home from classes we go on a run before dinner. After dinner, we eat our weight in ice cream, and I tell her all about my summer, and Asher. It feels good to get it off my chest, and the next time I get in the pool, I feel a little bit lighter, and a whole lot more like myself.
72 DAYS AFTER
Sidney
Our third meet is at home on a Friday night in mid-October. My first meet wasn’t horrible, and my second was better, but I still wasn’t where I wanted to be. But as I kneel next to the starting block, splashing water on my suit, the water doesn’t look as intimidating as it did a few weeks ago. This pool—and everyone standing around it—isstarting to feel like home. I shake out my legs and stretch my arms, swinging them behind me and in front, letting my shoulders relax. When the whistle sounds, I take my place on the block, the roughness under my feet comforting somehow. And when the starting buzzer blares, everything around me melts away.
I’ve been in my head a lot since I got to Oakwood. Thinking about everything my body is doing, making myself crazy. But as I cut through the water tonight, feel it rush over me as I break the surface on entry, I just shut it all off. The only thing I think about is the water and the way I feel moving through it. When my arms burn I think about the lake, and how much harder it was swimming against the light chop. I think about that tiny bottle ofmylake in this pool. I swim lap after lap, thinking about nothing but the water and how I’m meant to be in it.
When my palms slam against the touch pad, I don’t look atthe scoreboard right away. I look up at my mom and dad, to the spot where I know they’re perched in the bleachers. They’re both on their feet. Everyone around them is sitting, but my parents are standing, clapping and cheering like absolute lunatics. Mom is pointing to the far corner, to where our times are lit up in lights. To where I shaved three seconds off of her event time. Ellie reaches her hand down to me, helping to hoist me up and throwing her arms around me.I did it.
Mom and Dad take me to dinner to celebrate. We sit in a booth at a little Italian restaurant in town, plates of spaghetti in front of us. Swimming makes me ravenously hungry, and I’m practically shoveling noodles into my mouth. My parents have been making small talk about my school year so far, what Ellie is like, how my classes are. Even though we talk at least once a week.
Dad picks his napkin up and then sets it back in his lap. “Sylvie and Greg wanted us to tell you congratulations. We thought about inviting them, but”—Dad glances from me to Mom—“you know.” I saw Sylvie and Greg up in the stands by my parents. It was slightly weird seeing them all together. It’s how I once imagined things would be: our parents watching us swim together, all of us going to dinner afterward.
I almost apologize that they’re not here, but all I can think right now is that Dad and Greg are the whole reason this happened. Greg pushing Asher to fix things with me, my dad deciding he didn’t want to do morning swims with me anymore.
“This isyourfault,” I say, matter-of-factly. “If you’d sucked it up and just spotted me across the lake…” I wave my fork at him. “Your boredom is what started this whole mess.”
I expect Dad to laugh, but he doesn’t. Instead, his voice is apologetic and soft when he says, “I’m sorry, Chipmunk.”
Guilt immediately wells up in my chest. “I’m just kidding. It’s my fault, not yours.”
“It’s… a little mine.” Dad runs a hand over his head, the same move as when Mom catches him smuggling vacation jerky out of a grocery bag. He lets out a long sigh that almost whistles. “You’re right.”
“About?”
“I wasn’t actually bored spotting you. I love spotting you, I—”
“Wait, what?”
“It’s just… this thing with you and Asher has gone on so long, and we all thought, if we could just put the two of you together, out on the water, that maybe—”
“What?” My voice is angry, harder than I mean it to be. “Maybe we’d just fall in love and swim off into the sunset?”
Dad’s face softens and his voice is slow and controlled. “We thought you two would finally have it out. That whatever was going on, whatever the issue was between the two of you… that you’d have time to hash it out. The two of you falling in love was the farthest thing from my mind.” Dad looks up to the ceiling and runs his hand over his head again. “Though I can’t say your mother and Sylvie have never considered the possibility.”
“At least they never tried to push us together,” I mutter. “Not like you and Greg.” I wonder if it was a coordinated effort, Dad opting out of morning swims and Greg prodding Asher to fix things between us.
“Iamsorry, Chipmunk.”
