The Color War (4 page)
The girl who had been in the lead was just now pulling up beside him. Raymond gasped, his narrow chest rising and falling as the shouts of the Blue team covered his shoulders like a cloak. “The Blue team recaptures the lead,” Reverend Helm announced as Raymond glanced around wildly, trying to find Melody.
She stood in the path of the sun, so that Raymond had to squint, and even then he could make out only her silhouette. She was cheering, like everyone else. She was leaning back against the lifeguard with the birthmark, whose arms encircled her like a walled city, like she belonged to him.
It was harder for Raymond to breathe now than it had been when he was swimming. He ducked beneath the buoys that formed the swimming lanes, so that he was in the no-man’s-land of the lake, the part that was not roped off for swimming. He pointed himself toward the horizon, toward the far side of the lake, where he’d never been. Then he began to swim so hard that the muscles in his arms burned and his chest was on fire. He swam as if he were being chased. He knew that Melody was watching, and that he was surprising her with a skill he wasn’t supposed to have as a beginner. He knew she would not have believed he had it in him.
Raymond swam until he couldn’t hear people calling his name, until the sun branded the lake with a hiss. Then he stopped, treading water. In the falling light, he saw a rowboat coming toward him, all planes and angles. The world in that moment was two-dimensional, nothing but stripes and edges and marks. The lines, he realized, were already drawn; even a kindergartner knew that color was meant to stay inside them.
“Raymond?” Reverend Helm’s voice came from the boat. “Let us help you.”
For a moment Raymond hesitated. He could see the far shore of the lake now—the whisper of reeds, the bruised sand. He was certain he could make it—but he also was certain they would follow. So Raymond pivoted and swam wearily toward the rowboat. He felt himself being pulled into a shiver of air, tucked onto the narrow wooden seat, wrapped in a clean towel; and he knew as he sat surrounded by their safety that he was drowning.
Jodi Picoult
is the bestselling author of twenty-one novels, including
The Storyteller, The Pact: A Love Story, Lone Wolf, Nineteen Minutes, Keeping Faith,
and
My Sister's Keeper.
Among her other works is the young adult novel
Between the Lines,
co-written with her daughter Samantha van Leer, and five issues of the
Wonder Woman
comic-book series. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard, Picoult is the recipient of the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction, among others. Her volunteer work includes serving on the Writers Council of the National Writing Project, and she is active in promoting youth theater and athletics. She lives with her family in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Read more of
Jodi Picoult’s best stories
at Byliner.com
Photograph courtesy of Jodi Picoult
Byliner
works directly with the world’s best writers to deliver great stories to readers. Named “one of the 10 Most Innovative Media Companies in the World” (
Fast Company
), Byliner is a subscription reading service and digital publisher of award-winning short fiction and nonfiction. A Byliner subscription provides unlimited access to more than 30,000 stories by hundreds of bestselling authors, as well as personalized story suggestions based on your reading time and interests. The entire library of
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—including bestselling e-books by Margaret Atwood, Nick Hornby, Jon Krakauer, Ann Patchett, Nicole Krauss, Alexandra Fuller, Richard Russo, and Sebastian Junger—is available in the subscription service and through the major digital bookstores.
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POSITRON | EPISODE 1
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