Take your marks. My mark is a hunch on the diving block with a lot of nervous shaking. This is embarrassing.
The buzzer sounds, and I spring off.
Butterfly is the last event of every meet, so by the time it comes around everyone else on the team is always tired and bundled up in their towels and cheering, which is nice, but it also means that the warm-up before the meet began has already lost all its effect, and i'm as shocked by the cold water as I would be if I'd never been wet before. I'm a Miami girl. I'm not meant to be in anything under eighty degrees, ever.
Shut up and swim, Cipriano.
My start's actually my weak point. My mother says I'm the only swimmer she's ever seen come up out of the water first after the dive and still, occasionally, win. The good divers glide for as long as possible. My dives suck so badly that it's really just a frantic race to the surface so I can start actually swimming. But my kick is strong enough to make up for it. That's where I have my strength. Thank you, heavy legs. They come down with force.
I'm ahead at the turn, barely; little Miss Longlegs is a quarter of a second behind me, at most. On the second lap I always force myself to stop looking at people. I'm awful when I first starts out a race, always taking my breaths sideways so I can creep on the people next to me. Second lap is when I focus.
I can't hear anything, between my swim cap and my goggles and the water crashing up and over my head each time I pull another stroke, but I pretend I can hear my mom. I always do.
I could make this a romantic moment, and say I'm imagining Theo cheering me on, or even Josey. But I'm not. This moment is me and my mom.
I guess this is what happens, when being in love just fits into your life.
I slam my feet down with one last kick and push my hands into the wall. I come up for air just in time to see Longlegs finish next to me. I beat her.
“Good race,” she tells me, with a smile, and I say it back and turn and shake hands with the girl next to me as well, just like my very first swim coach drilled into me. Then I look up at the volunteers and their stopwatches and say, “What was my time?”
“59:17,” one of them tells me.
No. No way. “Say that again?”
She laughs. “You heard me.”
“I broke a minute?”
“Nice job, kid.”
I climb out of the pool, my arms and legs like jelly, and immediately my arms are full of Elisha, who's squeezing me and screaming, because I broke a minute.
And up in the stands, my mother is on her feet cheering so loudly that I think maybe the whole time I'd been hearing her after all.
“I broke a minute,” I say.
Elisha lets go of me and smacks me with the corner of her towel. “Now imagine what you could do if you'd come to practice.”
“Did you do good?” a voice says from by my hip. It's Alexis, who's somehow freed herself from the bleachers and forced her way through my team to get to me. I usher her away from the pool because everyone's always talking about little kids and drowning.
“I did,” I say. “Did you see me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you like it?”
“Yeah. Can I have a snow cone?”
“I don't have any money, ask Lucas.”
She huffs and stomps back to the bleachers. I just cannot make any headway with this one.
I follow her up once my legs are feeling a little less shaky, and my mom ignores how I'm still dripping wet and hugs and kisses me, and Dominic gives me a much more reasonable squeeze around my toweled shoulder. I can practically hear Theo a few rows down, where I had to walk completely by him, waiting for his turn, impatient for his attention like a puppy.
I tell them I have to go back to my team and nudge Theo's shoulder with my heel on my way down. “Behind the scoreboard,” I mumble.
He's on his feet immediately. “You got it.”
“Be cool!” I hiss.
“I'm Antarctica.”
The scoreboard's heavy and big and has very little space behind it, and by carefully staggering how we walk and waiting for people to walk by who we can duck behind, Theo and I turn it into our own little crouching alcove. I scoped it out as a possibility an hour ago. It's a little depressing how good I'm getting at sneaking around.
All right, so it's a lot depressing. I got through a whole race imagining my mother being proud of me, and then there she was ten feet away from my seriously amazing new boyfriend and I couldn't even introduce them. And everyone else is getting out of the pool and having celebratory dry-hump sessions with their boyfriend and girlfriends in front of a crowd of strangers, and of course there's a part of me that wants to do that. I've never made a huge group of people that blatantly uncomfortable. For a smart ass sixteen-year-old, that's pretty much the dream.
But no. Instead here I am, already getting a leg cramp from the awkward half-kneeling position I have to be in to for us both to fit behind this scoreboard at the same time.
But
