How to Breathe Underwater

by Vicky Skinner

  I could practically hear him rolling his eyes. “You know how it is. Coach yelled way too loud and everyone ground their teeth until it felt like the world was going to split open. Cal hurled in the pool.”

  “Can you not call him Coach? It’s weird.”

  Harris was silent for a moment. “That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said to me. He’s my coach. I’ve always called him Coach.”

  “I know, but everything’s different now. It’s like, you guys are there, and I’m here, and how can he be Coach when I’m not there?”

  “That makes absolutely no sense.”

  I tossed the book in my hand onto my desk, where it landed with a loud smack. “I know it doesn’t make sense.” Nothing seemed to make sense in my brain these days.

  “You could always come back.”

  I thought he meant it as a joke, but there was something about the silence that followed that told me he didn’t. “Come on, Harris. You know that’s not an option. I can’t even look him in the eye without feeling like I’m going to be sick. Or claw his eyes out. Or both.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, I know. This all just feels so wrong, you know?”

  It felt wrong to me, too. The whole world felt inverted, spinning in funny directions like a kaleidoscope. I thought going back to swim would make everything feel normal, but when I thought about it, my skin prickled and went hot in fear. But how could I be scared of swimming? “Okay, new topic.”

  “Yeah, um, there’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  I didn’t like the hesitation in his voice. It was like sirens going off seconds before a tornado hit. “What?”

  “I’m not going to be able to make it to Lily’s wedding. I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you earlier, but I didn’t want to add to your stress.”

  “Oh.” It was hard to explain why, but this news was a punch to the chest. Maybe because when my dad got caught, Harris was there every second afterward, and now, I hadn’t seen him in almost a week, and that was somehow more painful than I thought it would be. “Oh. Okay. Other plans?”

  “This stupid family thing. The parentals want me to look at a college up in Seattle, and we have to visit my grandmother while we’re there. We’re driving up for the weekend. I really am sorry, Kate. I tried to get out of it.”

  “I’m not mad.” It almost felt like the truth. It wasn’t as much that I was mad as hurt, I supposed. “I was just looking forward to seeing you.”

  “Me, too. God. I didn’t think I was going to miss you this much. Hey, now that you live closer, we should totally go to Hoochie’s.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, you’re right.” Hoochie’s was an ice-cream parlor in Hillsboro that Harris and I discovered after a meet freshman year. We used to drive out on special occasions to eat our weight in pistachio ice cream.

  “Why don’t we go out next week? Maybe things with your dad will have calmed down by then.”

  Things would never calm down with my father, but just this once, I thought I’d let Harris’s optimism slide. “Yeah, maybe.”

  *   *   *

  I couldn’t sleep, thinking about meeting my new team the next day. I stared at the ceiling and tried to ignore the way the blood vibrated in my veins, the way anxiety started to roil in my stomach. I wasn’t even sure what I was so afraid of. I knew that I could be the best here, just like I was the best back in Salem. But it felt like more than that. If I was the best, was the rest of the team going to resent me? If I came out of nowhere and outshone their hard work, was I going to be completely alone on the team, with only enemies and no friends?

  I felt like a jackass, assuming I would be better than everyone when I walked in the door. But the research I’d done on my new school’s swim team had told me they weren’t ranked very high and hadn’t made it very far last competition season.

  The apartment was quiet, and I tiptoed past my mother’s bedroom and into the kitchen, looking aimlessly for something to kill my nerves. Then I remembered the rooftop pool. I hadn’t been up yet, but maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to go for a swim before practice tomorrow. I ignored the heavy pounding of my heart and went for the front door.

  The door to the roof was unlocked, but when I stepped out into the cool Portland air, the smell of the pool’s chlorine was tainted by the bitter aroma of cigarette smoke, and I immediately turned to leave. It was the middle of the night, and I wasn’t interested in being stuck on the roof with a stranger. But when I saw the outline of the person perched on the edge of a bench against the roof’s edge with a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other, I stopped.

  I watched Michael for a moment in the light of a wall sconce, wondering if I should leave him alone, but before I could make up my mind, he’d lifted his head and spotted me. His eyebrows furrowed. “Kate?”

  I lifted a hand in an awkward wave. Part of me still wanted to bolt, but I moved closer to him instead, until my toes were hanging over the edge of the pool beside the bench. He was reading The Great Gatsby.

  “I guess your overachievement makes sense now.” I nodded at the book.

  He looked down at it, like he was surprised to find it in his hand. “Yeah. I don’t sleep well.”

  I crossed my arms over myself, cold in my barely-there pajamas out in the exposed air. I took a second to study the pool for the first time. It was generously sized and rectangular.

  “You really shouldn’t smoke,” I told Michael. I might not have had the guts to make a comment like that normally, but I was caught off guard from my anxiety. Didn’t they have health classes in Portland? I imagined the class I took at my old school. They’d shown us pictures of blackened smokers’ lungs to discourage us.

  “What, is it bad for me or something?”

  I looked over my shoulder at him. He was smiling at me. He stubbed out the cigarette on the bench he sat on.

  “That’s the thing about addictions. They’re hard to kick.” He looked at me for a long moment, and the humor on his face seemed to fade. “You okay?”

  I looked away from him, down at the water in front of me. I wasn’t sure what I was, but I didn’t think okay was it. How could I explain to someone that the girl who had set a state record in swimming was terrified to get back in the water?

  When I didn’t say anything, Michael hopped off the bench. “I’ll give you some space,” he said, and I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed that he was leaving.

  I watched him as he went for the door, and then I was alone with the soft beating of the water against the walls of the pool. I stripped down to my bra and underwear and stared down into the water. I took a deep breath, trying to talk some sense into myself. This was my world. What did I have to be afraid of? I dove in.

  The water was warm against my skin, peaceful for a moment before the world seemed to grow loud again. With the water pressing against my eardrums, it was almost like I could hear my father screaming from the sidelines.

  “You’re swimming like you aren’t even trying! You can do better than this! I know it! Push harder! Where’s your head at?”

  Memories slammed into me. Harris in the lane next to me, pushing hard to beat me; Coach Judd on the sidelines; Jenny Carther and April tucking their hair into their swim caps; Chuck making obscene gestures; my hair still dripping when Jenny Carther threw open that door.

  I broke the surface and pressed my head to the edge of the pool. My chest felt hot and tight, and I struggled to catch my breath. My hands shook, coming up to cover my face so that I could hear my panicked gasps against my open palms.

  I pressed my back to the pool wall and looked out at the water I’d disturbed, splashing up against the sides of the pool in agitated waves. For as long as I could remember, the pool had been a safe space, an escape, a second home.

  My stomach clenched, and I curled in on myself. I might not have been the most popular girl in school, and I might not have always gotten straight As or made honor roll or been voted class president. But I’d always h
ad the water to come back to. If everything else fell apart, the pool was always waiting.

  And now it felt like a trap, something that would pull me under until I suffocated beneath the weight of it. He’d already taken my home, and now he’d taken the only other place that had felt like mine.

  Four

  The next morning, Michael was waiting outside my door again. His dark hair was still wet from a shower, his denim button-down was rolled up past his elbows, and a cigarette was already between his fingers, prepared for the moment when we stepped outside.

  As we stood on the curb, I tried not to be too obvious, but I couldn’t seem to stop looking over at him, noticing every feature. I felt like I had to come up with something to say so that I didn’t accidentally tell him that I liked the way his hair stuck up when it was drying in the wind.

  “I’m not riding the bus home today,” I told him. As soon as it came out, I felt like a complete idiot. Why did he care if I rode the bus home? He wasn’t some puppy dog waiting with bated breath for me to re-enter his life.

  “Why?” he asked, blowing smoke out into the air. The sky was painfully blue, the air crisp with oncoming autumn.

  Well, except for the smell of the cigarette smoke.

  “Meeting with my new swim coach after school.” My stomach flipped and I took a deep breath, trying to forget whatever had happened the night before.

  He shrugged. “Maybe you’ll be done in time to ride the bus.”

  “I have to meet her at the pool. It’s not on campus.”

  Like he did the day before, he put his cigarette out on the NO PARKING sign and tossed the butt in the street. “Yeah, they practice at the rec center, right? Why don’t I walk over with you? We can take the TriMet back home.”

  The bus was approaching slowly. “The TriMet?”

  He motioned for me to climb on ahead of him when the doors swung open, and then he clunked up the metal stairs behind me. “Yeah. The city bus. We ride free with our school IDs.”

  “You don’t have plans or anything?” Didn’t he have some beautiful girl waiting on him somewhere? Shouldn’t he be walking her to things and not me, a virtual stranger he’d met the day before?

  “No,” he finally said. “No plans.” So I agreed to let him walk me, and we fell into silence as the bus rolled its way past six more stops and then on to school.

  When we got inside, he pointed me toward my first period class. It was different from the day before, since the school had an alternating A-day/B-day class schedule, and when I turned to leave, he stepped in front of me, successfully keeping me from Health Science.

  “Hey, Kate?”

  Michael stood only an inch or two taller than me, and I barely had to lift my eyes to see his dark-blue ones. His eyes flitted over my head for a second, scanning, and then he focused on me again. “I reserved the pool this Saturday night. Some people are coming over. It’s not a party, really, just a few friends. But I thought maybe you’d want to stop by and meet some people.”

  “Yeah,” I said without thinking. If my answer had come any faster, I would have steamrolled over his invitation entirely.

  He smiled. “Great.”

  And then my brain kicked in. I put up a hand, like I could stop his expectations with it. “Oh crap, no. I can’t. My sister’s wedding is on Saturday.”

  His smile withered slightly. “Oh. Yeah, okay. You’re in the wedding?”

  “Maid of honor.”

  He nodded, his face serious, as if that was pertinent information. “Okay, well, that’s great. I’ll see you after school. Meet me at the bus stop, and we’ll walk over to the rec center.”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but he’d already turned and hurried away from me.

  *   *   *

  I wasn’t so lucky with my B-day schedule. I had zero classes with Michael, lunch period with absolutely nobody, and I felt like I was in one of those nightmares where you’re wandering around school because you’ve forgotten where your class is. I was relieved when it was over and it was time to go to swim, even though my stomach was rocketing around inside me at the idea of it. Out of the frying pan and all that jazz.

  The rec center was four blocks away from campus—not exactly a long walk, but all I could think about was what was waiting for me at the pool, and that made the walk go on forever.

  “You’re quiet,” Michael said when we were almost halfway there. I hadn’t really noticed that we weren’t talking, but as soon as he mentioned it, I became aware of the noise of the city around us: car horns, thumping music, the crunch of concrete beneath our shoes.

  I hugged my arms around my waist. “Sorry. I’m just a little nervous.”

  “Makes sense,” he said, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it without losing pace with me.

  Luckily, the wind blew his smoke away from us, out into the air. “I’ve never done this without my dad with me.”

  When Michael looked over at me, it was with a completely blank expression. He was waiting for me to go on.

  “My mom told you he was my coach, right?”

  He nodded, even though I could see he wished he didn’t have to. What was it about Michael that had made my mother think it was okay to give away all our secrets? And why did I feel like I needed to give him all the ones she hadn’t, as well?

  “He’s always been my coach, and I’ve never had to do anything swim related without him right next to me. It feels…” I trailed off because I didn’t really want to admit that I was scared. And really, it was more than fear. “Bizarre,” I finally said. “Like none of this is real.”

  He watched me, his eyes fixed on me, until we were standing right in front of the rec center.

  I smelled the chlorine as soon as we walked in the door, permeating the entire building like it had soaked into every surface. There was nothing like the sound of an indoor pool, loud with echoing voices and splashing water. The air was thick and moist, like the air before an oncoming storm, and it only took a second for it to stick to my skin.

  The door slammed shut behind us, and all the movement in the room stopped. Spectators peppered the bleachers, and girls in full-body swimsuits hovered around the starting blocks. The only ones who didn’t stop to rubberneck were the girls in the pool. They were running drills, and they had no idea that the universe outside of the pool had seemingly been thrown into suspension.

  “Kate!” An Asian woman who I knew must be Coach Wu approached me with a smile, her face wrinkling around the edges. Her eyes went to Michael.

  “I’ll just wait over here,” he said in lieu of an introduction. He pointed to the bleachers.

  “Let’s talk in here.” Coach Wu gestured toward an open, generically decorated office. I turned to follow her, but at the last second, I looked behind me. Every single girl, even the ones in the pool, who had completed their drills and were floating with their arms draped over the side, was staring at me. Some of them just looked, some of them whispered to each other, and some of them watched me, their eyebrows furrowed or their faces twisted into rude expressions.

  I stood there, taking it all in, and suddenly, everything turned villainous. The chlorine in the air burned my eyes, the moisture made me sweat, the eyes of the girls on me felt like pinpricks, stabbing into my skin. The room became a monster, ready to swallow me whole.

  I’d been swimming for ten years. My whole life, from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep, was nothing but the water, but standing in front of these people, knowing that I was an outsider, I felt the panic start in my stomach again and my head go fuzzy.

  I pressed my back to the wall and bent over, trying to catch my breath, and I could feel everyone in the room looking at me. I covered my face with my hands and sucked in a breath. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me here, in front of everyone.

  “Kate?”

  “Kate! Wake up! What was that first split? You call that pulling out ahead? You call that your best?”

  He wasn’t here. My fa
ther wasn’t here. He couldn’t make me get in that pool. I straightened up to see the look on Coach Wu’s face, concern and horror.

  My father’s pride had turned into this woman’s distress. The cheers of my former swim team had turned into the judgmental storm cloud of the girls by the pool. My satisfaction at being good at something had turned into this pain in my torso, this aching need to never do any of it again.

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  Coach Wu froze. Across the room, Michael watched us.

  “I’m sorry, Coach. I know you probably had big plans for me, but I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to compete anymore.”

  “But—” Coach Wu started.

  Behind me, I could hear the team talking, their whispers loud in the echoing room, some of them even giggling.

  Coach Wu stepped to the side to see around me. “Girls! One-arm drills! Now! Switch off!” Her eyes were back on me then, her arms crossed tight. “Kate, your mother—”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “I don’t understand. You have so much potential. What about college?”

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered, and I turned and left. I heard Michael follow me out of the building, and without speaking, he walked with me to the bus stop, where we sat on the bench under the awning.

  We sat there for a long time before he spoke. “Are you okay?”

  I stared down at the concrete, tires moving over it periodically with a gravelly crunch. “I don’t know.” The panic had started to subside, my body going back to normal. What was I doing?

  “I never wanted this.” It was the first time I’d ever really said it, to myself or to anyone else.

  “You didn’t want to swim?”

  When I looked over at him, I saw the confusion written on his face, and it mirrored my own. Because of course I wanted to swim. But everything was different now, and how could I go back? “I’ve always loved swimming, but competing? That’s always been hard for me.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  I looked at the cigarette dangling between his fingers, not even lit yet, and I reached over without thinking and plucked it from his hand, twirling it in my fingers before handing it back to him. “That’s the thing about addictions. They’re hard to kick.” I wasn’t sure if he knew that I wasn’t talking about swimming. That the only thing I was really addicted to was making my father happy, making him proud, but I didn’t say so, and he didn’t ask.