Surviving High School (3 page)

“Are you crazy?” asked Spencer. “Dominique is basically the perfect woman. She’s like a guy—but in an incredibly hot girl’s body. And did you hear that she watches every NFL game on Sundays while she runs on the treadmill—for six
hours? I started fantasizing about her listing quarterback ratings while she wrestled me to the ground and—”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” said his friend. “But can you imagine going on dates? She’d totally empty your wallet every time you went out for dinner. I’ll stick to girls who only want a slice or two.”

“Whatever, man,” said Spencer. “I still say she’s hot. I could see her perfect abs
through her dress
! Where did she even
put
those pizzas?”

The guys began walking toward the door, on a path that would take them right past Emily and Kimi’s table. Emily instinctively looked down, preparing herself to avoid eye contact, and then she remembered the banquet she’d laid out for herself.
I’ll stick to girls who only want a slice or two.
Great. This guy clearly wasn’t going to be impressed by her megacalorie meal. Now the only boy in the world she actually thought was hot (besides Taylor Lautner, maybe) was going to think she was just as high maintenance as Dominique.

“Kimi!” she said, trying to keep her voice down. “Help!”

“Help what?”

Emily picked the bread and turkey off the table and laid them on the bench by her side. She reached for her vitamins next. Catching on, Kimi picked up the almonds and set the can in her lap.

Emily was reaching forward, trying to hide one more thing when the guys walked by, and she tried to sneak a glance at the cute one. As he passed, a strong scent filled her nostrils, something like a combination of vanilla and
chocolate chip cookies. Emily couldn’t believe it: She was literally salivating over a guy.

Suddenly, the boys stopped. Right in front of Emily and Kimi’s table. Emily tried to act like she’d been looking at something over the guys’ shoulders.

“Uh, hey. Are you okay?” asked the cute one.

Emily looked up to confirm that, yes, he was
actually
talking to her. He had a confused look on his face, but she detected the faintest hint of a smile arcing up at the side of his mouth.

“I’m—fine,” she finally said.

“It’s just”—he glanced down at the table—“you have your hand in a bowl of yogurt.”

Emily looked down and saw that what he’d said was true.

“Oh. That’s. Yes. That’s, uh. I burned my hand on—a beaker. In Chemistry. And the yogurt is supposed to help the skin heal.”

The guys stood silent for a second, looking at her. Then the cute one broke out into a big full-faced smile that reached all the way up to his eyes.

“Chemistry, huh?” he said. Then he turned and left, laughing a little to himself as he and Spencer walked out the side door. Emily took her fingers out of the yogurt and wiped them off on a napkin. Perfect. Now the rest of the container would taste like her hand—meaning it would taste like chlorine. Maybe she could make up the yogurt calories at dinner.

“I can’t believe it,” said Kimi, putting the almonds back on the table. “You were just talking to Ben Kale!”

Emily spent the rest of the day in constant alert mode. Now she had three people to avoid at all costs: Nick, Dominique—and Ben Kale. Not that she would
hate
to see him again, but the thought of running into him in the hall and having him ask about her “injured” hand filled her with enough embarrassment to send a shiver down her back.

At least her classes didn’t seem too hard—that was, until she got to her last one of the day: Honors History, where the teacher, Mr. McBride, gleefully handed out thick “supplementary” textbooks to the entire class. Mr. McBride was a tall, wiry man, towering over the students. He was Ping-Pong–ball bald, but he made up for it with two extremely bushy eyebrows whose gray hairs seemed to stick out as far as a cat’s whiskers.

“Technically, the administration has deemed this textbook too difficult for first-year students,” he said, pacing the room and slamming the books down one by one on the students’ desks. “They even went so far as to ban the library from passing them out to Twin Branches students. Luckily, I have a friend at a used bookstore who picked me up my own personal set for pennies on the dollar. But be warned! There are no replacement copies. Lose your book, and I dock you a letter grade. Worse than that, though, you won’t have a book to read. Get the message? Hold on to this book as if your very life depends on it! In many ways, it does.”

Mr. McBride got to Emily’s desk and slammed her textbook down. Her heart skipped several beats as he glowered down at her and said, “Welcome to Honors History.” Then he
turned on one foot, took two monumental steps toward his dry-erase board, and shouted, “Lesson one: the Fertile Crescent!”

Emily took a deep breath, trying to slow her heartbeat. Why hadn’t she just taken regular classes with Kimi? Emily carefully opened the book, trying to make sure she didn’t so much as bend a page.

It wasn’t until after school, when she’d changed into her swim gear and walked into the gym housing the indoor pool, that the tension drained from Emily’s body and she felt at peace. The deep chlorine scent of the water filled the air, and the tight fabric of her swimsuit hugged her like a long-lost sister.

She got up on one of the blocks and stared down the length of the pool. Official practices during the fall semester were on Mondays and Thursdays. Right now, the rest of the girls on the team would be in their living rooms, snacking and watching MTV or texting their friends about which guys had gotten cuter over the summer. The gym was empty, the water perfectly smooth. Emily felt like a mermaid returning home: Over the past few years, she had probably spent as much time in the water as out of it.

The smooth grain of the white block tickled the undersides of her feet as she rocked slightly back and forth, readying her body for the wet shock of the water. She leaned forward and bent her knees to get into the forward-start position.

She imagined the announcer’s voice echoing through the gym: “Three… Two… One…” And then the horn.

Emily dove forward, slicing through the water. She came up a third of the way down the lane and reached forward with both hands, pulling her head up for air. She did the breaststroke down the length of the pool, touched the wall with both hands, and pushed off again, kicking once underwater, the way Sara had shown her.

Sara’s nickname had been “the Machine,” and it fit her well: Her mechanics were perfect. She’d shown Emily how to look for the overhead flags when she did the backstroke to gauge how long she had until she hit the wall and the way to breathe on every other stroke in freestyle to maximize her oxygen flow.

Their father had liked Sara’s nickname. “Girls don’t win gold medals,” he’d say. “Machines do.” And when Emily would ask to go to the mall with Kimi, her dad would remind her of it, telling her, “Just ask any swimmer who’s ever stood on the podium how many parties she’s gone to, what her favorite stand at the food court is, how many boyfriends she’s had. She’ll look at you like you’re nuts. Those are things you do when you’re too old to win anymore.”

Emily went back and forth for several laps at 75 percent effort and kept swimming well beyond the length of an actual race. As she felt the cool water slide over her skin, the stresses of the day—the bad picture, the confrontation with Dominique, learning that she shared no classes with Kimi, embarrassing
herself in front of Ben, and Mr. McBride’s supplemental textbook—escaped her body and dissolved into the water.

The only thing she couldn’t quite shake was her fear of seeing Nick Brown. Even now, she half expected to pop out of the water and find him staring down at her from the side of the pool. The last time she’d seen him had been at the hospital, when he’d tried to get in to see Sara’s body. Black stitches had lined the bridge of his nose, and both of his eyes had been bruised purple in the crash. When she imagined running into him in the hallways here, she still saw him like that—cut, bruised, and shaken, barely alive.

But when Emily pulled up her goggles and rested her arms over the side of the pool, it wasn’t Nick Brown she saw but rather her father, sitting on one of the blocks, his legs dangling above the water. His paunch stuck out over his too-tight pants, and his dark beard couldn’t cover up his fast-growing double chin. Looking at him, you’d barely recognize the guy who’d shocked the world by winning the Olympic gold medal for the butterfly in ’84. Even a few years ago he’d still been trim, swimming in the mornings—but not anymore. Emily wondered how long he’d been watching her.

“Why are you in your race gear?” he asked. “We bought you that resistance suit for a reason. You’ve got to build muscle or you’re never going to lower your split times.”

“It’s my first day here. I just want to relax.”

“And you think Dominique is relaxing in that big indoor pool her parents built her? Or Chelsea Wong? Or Kate—”

“Fine. Fine, Dad. I’ll change.”

“Coach,” he said. “You’ll call me Coach while we’re at school. Just like the other girls.” She nodded. At least she didn’t have any actual classes with him. Although the school had hired him for his proficiency as a coach, district policy dictated that he had to teach at least two classes. He had ended up teaching two juniors-only courses in Family Health, which included such topics as nutrition, stress management, and—most disturbing—sex ed.

He looked down at Emily resting, and she reflexively pulled off the pool’s edge and started treading water. “One other thing—I almost forgot. A reporter from
Swimmer’s Monthly
is coming by in a couple of weeks to do a story on you and Dominique. It’s a chance to get your name out there, and it’s good practice for later. Unfortunately, part of being an athlete of your caliber means dealing with the press.”

Emily frowned. The swimming she could handle. Reporters were a different matter. Not that she had a choice. She tried to make eye contact with her dad, but he looked away from her, up at a list of names and times on the wall of the gym:

MARION KNOWLES, 50M FREESTYLE, 25.45

STACEY JACKSON, 100M FREESTYLE, 58.22

And there, in the bottom right-hand corner:

SARA KESSLER, 50M BACKSTROKE, 28.30

In fact, Sara’s name appeared in several places across the board, but it was the 50-meter-backstroke time that truly
mattered—not just a school record, but a national one for high schoolers. The mark had stood for almost a year now. Most impressive, Sara had set it as only a sophomore.

“You’re on the right track,” Emily’s father said as he got to his feet and hopped off the block. “Stick with your training program, and you could own every record on that board.” He looked again at the wall of names, and Emily could tell which one he was concentrating on. “Now get to the locker room and put on your resistance gear. We’ve only got two hours before this place shuts down.”

A couple of hours to go—and then a four-mile run to get home. Not that Emily minded. Better a thirty-minute jog than getting in the car. Better than the panicked feeling of strapping on her seat belt and feeling her stomach lurch as her dad started the engine.

For almost a month after Sara’s accident, Emily had refused to even sit in a car. She’d ridden her bike to school, refused trips to movie theaters that were too far away to walk to, and insisted her family cancel their annual road trip to SeaWorld.

Eventually, she’d relented and started letting her father drive her around when it was absolutely necessary, reassuring herself that he’d never been in an accident and consistently went five miles per hour under the speed limit, much to the displeasure of other drivers.

Still, she wished the whole world could just be a pool, with people swimming from place to place. It could be like Venice, with men in silly hats pushing their gondolas down
canals instead of streets. Emily wouldn’t have minded getting in a boat: Those hardly ever wrecked, right?
Titanic
was, like, a hundred years ago.

A boat never went so fast that a crash would kill you. A boat rocked gently on the waves, putting you to sleep. A boat would never have spun out of control because some stupid teenage boy was at the wheel.

It wasn’t until the second week of school that Emily bumped into Nick Brown.

At lunch on Monday, as Emily entered the cafeteria and began walking to what had become her usual spot in the corner, she noticed Dominique and Lindsay sitting in the no-man’s-land between the band geeks and the wrestling-team jocks. The two girls were leaning close to each other, whispering and giggling. Whatever they were talking about must have been top secret—and important enough that they’d leave their usual spot at the center table in order to get some privacy.

Emily altered her route through the cafeteria so that it would take her right behind the girls. When she neared them, she slowed her pace, both so that they wouldn’t hear her footsteps
and to have more time to overhear them. As she approached, Emily distinctly heard Lindsay say “Ben Kale.” Emily slowed to a glacial pace, but it was no use: A few more steps and she’d be out of listening range.

To her right was an empty table, close enough that she’d hear everything. But could she really risk occupying a random table all by herself? She looked around the cafeteria, hoping to find Kimi and summon her over, but couldn’t spot her anywhere.

“Come on. What happened to you at the party Friday?” Lindsay whispered. “It was, like, one second I was pouring you a drink, then the next,
poof
. You and Ben were gone.”

There was no choice. Emily had to hear this. She sat with her back to Dominique and Lindsay and prayed that they wouldn’t notice her. She pulled a bag of almonds out of her backpack. Her new strategy was to eat one food item at a time in order to avoid a repeat of the yogurt incident.

“And then you didn’t respond to
one
text all weekend?” continued Lindsay. “
Tell me
you made out with Ben and ran off to Vegas to get married.”