She couldn’t let Judy get away with that prank. And she couldn’t disappoint her friends—not after they’d come to her rescue when the other kids were taunting her in the school hall.
One, two. Then breathe.
Shelly swam as fast as she could, slicing through the water with her arms and legs in perfect rhythm. But after the first flip turn, she started to lose speed. She still had three more laps to go, but her arms were starting to feel like molasses. Her legs were wearing out, too.
Maybe it was from almost drowning in the ocean the day before? Terrible memories swirled through her head, making it hard to focus. The nightmare. The nautilus. The contract. Fighting with Dawson. The dead fish and gross trash in her locker. Despite her efforts, she couldn’t focus or keep pace with the others.
Especially Judy.
The purple swim cap kept getting farther and farther away, no matter how hard Shelly struggled in the pool. The water fought her every stroke, every breath, every lap.
Come on, you can do this! She turned her head to breathe but swallowed a mouthful of water instead, choking and almost losing her stroke altogether, which would disqualify her. This was nothing like swimming in the salty open ocean, where she felt at peace. This felt all wrong.
For three more miserable laps, Shelly struggled, trying to catch up with Judy but only falling farther behind. The purple swim cap was now half a pool length ahead. Shelly wasn’t just losing to Judy Weisberg, though that was bad enough, especially since she still suspected that Judy had something to do with the dead fish. No. Shelly slapped the edge off the pool and popped her head up but didn’t bother reading the scoreboard. She knew that Judy had won the race by a long shot. And like she’d feared, Shelly had come in last. Dead last.
Demoralized and exhausted, she hoisted herself out of the pool. She was freezing and reeked of chlorine. One lane over, Judy celebrated her win with her Little River teammates. Their jubilant cheers only made Shelly feel worse.
Judy shot her an icy smile. “Better luck next time. Hopefully you won’t stink like a fish.”
The rival swimmers all laughed.
Heat crept into Shelly’s cheeks. So it had been Judy who planted the dead fish.
Desperately, Shelly looked for her friends, hoping for moral support. Kendall, Attina, and Alana huddled on the bench with the rest of the team, with towels wrapped around them, wet hair, and swim cap lines on their foreheads. There was no jubilant cheering in the Triton Bay stands behind them. Just glum faces and glummer conversation. Shelly tentatively walked to the bench for a towel.
“This, like, majorly sucks,” Kendall said. “I hate it when we lose.”
“Yeah, it sucks worse than straws,” Attina chimed in.
“Hashtag straws suck,” Alana added, but no one laughed.
Shelly’s friends looked crestfallen and deflated. She felt terrible for letting them down. Like next level terrible. The kind of terrible that made her want to curl up into a ball and disappear. As team captain, Kendall took all their races personally, even when she wasn’t the one diving off the starting block. While it was true that Shelly had swum as hard as she could—she’d tried her best—she hadn’t swum well enough to win her race. Judy had sailed past her. Shelly realized that the locker prank had worked; it had gotten in her head. She had lost focus, had lost rhythm, and had fallen precious seconds behind. She caught Judy eyeing her with a triumphant expression on her face, but quickly looked away, feeling humiliated.
“I especially hate losing the whole swim meet,” Kendall told her teammates. “Little River will never let us live this down.”
Shelly wrapped a towel around herself. “What do you mean? We lost the whole meet?”
“Look at the scoreboard,” Kendall said, pointing across the pool, to where the other side of the stands was beginning to empty out as people filed from the room.
Shelly studied the scoreboard and saw the final tally for Triton Bay versus Little River. Not only had Shelly lost her race, but coming in dead last had caused her entire team to lose the meet overall, despite Kendall’s winning her fifty-meter breaststroke and Attina’s and Alana’s placing first and second in the hundred-meter backstroke. As if she could feel any worse.
“Next week is a new chance!” said Coach Greeley, their swim coach, in an effort to cheer them up. She peered at them through her thick glasses. Her dreadlocks pooled around her face. In front of her, she clutched her clipboard, on which she kept track of their times. “We’ll hit the pool hard in practice this week. Everyone rest up.”
Shelly followed the dejected team and their coach into the locker room. There, she and her teammates changed out of their competition suits. The new suits had looked so cheerful when they had put them on before the meet: deep navy striped with sunshine yellow, their school colors. But now they were sodden and balled up, and her teammates shot Shelly dark looks.
Shelly suddenly wanted more than anything to be alone in that instant. She glanced at Kendall, who had donned an expensive new athleisure outfit and was lacing her sneakers. The twins stood on either side of her, dressed and ready to go and glued to their cell phones.
“Hey, Kendall. I’m sorry I lost,” Shelly said, zipping up her tracksuit jacket. “I’ll work harder at practice this week, promise. I won’t lose to Judy again. I can’t believe she beat me.”
Kendall frowned, but her expression softened. “Fine. Luckily, we have one more
