Could he have moved closer on purpose? Because he wanted to be near Annabelle?
That idea was way too earthshakingly enormous to consider. She buried the letter under the stack of school notebooks and binders that still sat on her desk and picked up Kelsey Bennett’s shell, which she hadn’t even realized she’d brought upstairs.
She had a shell lamp with a clear glass base on the nightstand next to her bed. Mitch had given it to her when they first moved to the island, and she and Mom had walked up and down the beach, searching for the best shells to fill it up with. Whole ones, without broken edges.
Except it turned out to be impossible to find enough unbroken shells to fill up the entire lamp. Eventually, they’d both gotten frustrated, so Mitch had found the rest and set it up. Annabelle had figured he knew some special, protected spot where all the shells stayed whole, but then last spring, she’d finally asked him where he’d gone.
“I bought them at one of the gift shops in town,” he’d admitted. “You wanted all of the shells to be perfect, and there was no way to find enough.”
You wanted all of the shells to be perfect.
Had she really wanted that? Or was it Mom who’d thought her shell lamp wouldn’t be beautiful if it was filled with broken shards?
She took off the shade, unscrewed the cap on top of the base, and set Kelsey’s at the top, turned so she could see the chipped edge.
Then she sat there on her bed, staring at that broken shell and remembering the way Mom had pushed away her plate when Annabelle had asked what would happen if she lost her financial aid. As if just the possibility made her lose her appetite.
She wondered what her dad would say about her terrible report card. He wouldn’t have gasped like Mom had. He hadn’t been a good student—he’d told her that tons of times.
But he had no idea she needed accommodations and learning plans and tutors. None of them had known, back when they still lived in New Jersey. Back then, she didn’t read the highest-level books, which had letters from the end of the alphabet on their spines, like T, or U, or V. But she didn’t read the very lowest-level ones, either.
Mom had always said she’d be able to read at a higher level if only she’d practice more. Build her “reading muscles,” in addition to her swimming ones. Mom kept giving her paperback copies of the books she’d loved when she was a kid and waiting for the “reading bug” to bite, but then Dad would say it still hadn’t bitten him and he was fine.
Except he hadn’t been fine, it turned out.
But maybe now he was?
Maybe now he was a bit like Kelsey’s shell—chipped at the edge from everything that had gone wrong but mostly whole? Mostly okay?
If you ever want to see me. That’s what his letter said.
But did she actually want to see him?
Was she a terrible daughter—a terrible person—if she didn’t?
She opened the top of her shell lamp and turned Kelsey’s shell around. She wasn’t so sure she could handle looking at the chipped part anymore after all.
Chapter 7
The next day, Mitch drove Annabelle to her first high school team practice.
“Knock ’em dead, kiddo,” he said when he pulled up to the curb.
Then he blew her a kiss, which she caught. It was a little bit silly, the kiss-and-catch routine, but they’d always done it. Ever since they’d first met, when Annabelle was in third grade. Her parents’ divorce was just final then, and Dad lived in an apartment where there was almost no furniture and everything was white: the walls, the carpets, the fans that spun from the ceilings, even the fridge and kitchen cabinets. Mom said he wasn’t really up for decorating. But he was still up for seeing Annabelle most Saturdays back then.
One Saturday when he was busy, Mom had made a big thing about taking Annabelle to brunch with her new “friend,” and the friend turned out to be Mitch. There was a make-your-own waffle station at the restaurant, and Mitch made a whipped cream smiley face on Annabelle’s waffle, with blueberries inside the eyes and strawberries for the mouth. And he made Mom laugh so hard she snorted a little bit, and then she covered her whole face with her napkin until he reached over and squeezed her hand.
After they ate, Mom and Annabelle went to their car and Mitch went to his. But before he opened the door, he blew two kisses: one to Mom in the front seat, and one to Annabelle in the back. He’d been doing it ever since.
But Annabelle suddenly realized: She couldn’t even remember how she used to say goodbye to her dad. Before he “dropped out of the picture,” as her mom always put it. Had they hugged? Kissed on the cheek?
Dad had been “in the picture” for way more years than he’d been out of it. They must have said goodbye thousands of times. How did she just not know?
She caught herself biting her bottom lip and heard Mom’s voice in her head saying, “Honey, don’t bite.” A group of older girls she sort of recognized laughed as they walked in from the parking lot.
One of them had driven there, she realized. Some of her new teammates were old enough to drive. She paused inside the gate. It was hard enough to feel like she fit in with the other kids on the middle school team, with all their inside jokes from school and the way they imitated the boarding students from the Academy. How would she possibly fit in with high schoolers?
“Hey, Annabelle!” Doug, the guy at the sign-in desk, said. “The pool’s over there!”
Annabelle forced out a laugh and made herself start moving again. Head up, shoulders back. Carrying herself with confidence, like Mitch would tell her to.
When she came out of the locker room wearing her suit, Connor was joking around with a bunch of other guys and he didn’t notice her. But Kayla waved her over, and then Colette gathered everybody around, and suddenly practice was starting.
Annabelle’s hands shook as she twisted her hair into a bun and stretched her swim cap over it, and it took three tries to get her goggles over her head. But as she pushed off the wall and glided through her first warm-up lap, she was able to block out the whole world each time she put her head underwater. And since she couldn’t hear anything except the muffled splashing of her own arms and legs, she forgot about what it meant that Colette had assigned her to lane 6 with girls going into ninth grade who were okay swimmers but not great, and she forgot how fast the girls in lane 1 were probably swimming, and she even almost forgot that Connor Madison was there, only a few lanes away, with his long arms slicing through the surface of the water.
After warm-ups were finished and they’d done some faster laps, it was time to practice the medley relay.
“We’ve been needing a strong butterfly to round out our team,” Colette said as she walked Annabelle over to the end of the pool where Kayla and Elisa were standing with a pretty summers-only girl who’d been new to the team last year. “We’ve got Kayla on backstroke, Ruby on breaststroke, and Elisa on free. Ladies, do you all know Annabelle?”
“Of course!” Elisa said. “Welcome!”
And Kayla said, “Yay! It’s so great you’re here!”
“Yeah, seriously,” Elisa agreed. “Ruby and I were on the relay last year, and we almost never won a race. Right, Rubes? We need you!”
Annabelle was starting to relax a little bit, but then she noticed how Ruby was sort of examining her, with her eyebrows raised and her lips pressed together.
Annabelle knew she didn’t look like a high school butterflyer. She was taller than the other middle school girls, but she wasn’t as tall as Elisa or Ruby. Her chest and hips curved, but her shoulders were narrow and her arm and leg muscles only rippled when she flexed them. Elisa’s and Ruby’s arms, calves, and thighs were thicker than Annabelle’s and obviously strong. Kayla’s were, too. She’d gotten so, so thin when she was sick, but now she was closer to her size from before. They all looked like swimmers in a way that Annabelle didn’t.
“Congrats on joining the team,” Ruby said. “What grade are you going into? Seventh?”
Her voice was sugary
sweet and too high-pitched—the kind of voice people used to talk to little kids.
“Eighth,” Annabelle said.
“Aww, I loved eighth grade!”
Kayla messed with her goggles strap, and Elisa was still smiling her friendly smile, as if she thought Ruby’s sweetness was genuine. Maybe Annabelle was being oversensitive?
“All right, ladies. There’ll be plenty of time for socializing later. Let’s get going,” Colette said.
Kayla jumped back into the pool, since backstroke goes first, and Ruby lined up by the blocks to go second.
Annabelle had been swimming the fly leg of the medley relay for ages, so she was used to being third in the order, after back and breast. But Kayla and Ruby were a lot faster than anybody she’d ever been on a relay team with. Before she knew it, Ruby was already halfway done with her leg and quickly approaching. Annabelle glanced over to the end of the pool, where Connor stood with a bunch of other almost-sophomores. Her legs shook a little as she stood up on the starting block.
“You got this,” Elisa said quietly. “Just do your thing.”
Annabelle nodded and repeated that in her head. Just do your thing.
There were lots and lots of things she couldn’t do well, but swimming was one thing she could.
So she took her three breaths and dove in as soon as Ruby’s hands touched the edge. She had too much adrenaline at first and was wasting energy, rising up too far out of the water on her first few strokes.
When she took a test at school, that buzz of nerves overtook her muscles and then her brain until she couldn’t think at all. But now the buzz shrunk down smaller and smaller, as if she were turning down the volume on music one notch at a time. The water stopped fighting her and there it was: that feeling she loved. Of knowing exactly what she was doing with every stroke. Of being completely in control of her body.
When she raised her head for a breath, she was dimly aware of the usual background noises—laughter, low voices, splashing. A couple of times, she even made out the sound of someone cheering her name. She sped to the end of the pool, turned, and flew back the other way, her muscles firing.
And when she picked up her head, she could hear two things: the splash of Elisa’s arms hitting the water to start her freestyle leg and applause. Loud cheers, coming from everybody on the team. Ruby was clapping along, and Kayla gave Annabelle a high five. And Connor Madison was right there in the front of the pack, letting out a giant whistle. For her.
Chapter 8
When practice ended, Annabelle felt better than she had in ages.
Visualize yourself achieving your goals. That was another thing Mitch always said. He visualized silly things, like pulling the car into an empty parking spot if they drove into town for ice cream when everything was mobbed with summer people, and important things, like getting the newspaper to run a story about Mom’s new event-planning business at the start of last summer.
“We’ve been needing a strong butterfly to round out the team,” Colette had said.
“We almost never won last year,” Elisa had said.
And Annabelle knew exactly what to visualize.
She pictured herself reaching the wall ahead of the competition on her leg of the medley relay at the Labor Day Invitational, after she’d helped the team win their entire league. The cheers would be ten times as loud as today, and Kayla and Ruby would jump up and down and hug her as they all watched Elisa bring home the win.
Last year the relay team had almost never won. This year, Annabelle wanted to make sure they never lost. Then Mia and Jeremy and everyone else who had ever felt sorry for her would know that she didn’t need their pity.
And even if her grades got worse and worse and she couldn’t stay at the Academy, it wouldn’t be quite so humiliating that she hadn’t been smart enough to make it there. People would think, Sure, she isn’t the smartest, but have you seen that girl swim? When all Mom’s friends and all the summer people whose parties she planned asked about Annabelle, Mom wouldn’t be able to tell them that Annabelle went to the Academy anymore. But she could tell them, My daughter led her high school relay team to a championship as an eighth grader!
As Annabelle walked to the locker room, she felt so good that she didn’t even need to remind herself to hold her head up and her shoulders back. Until she saw Mia.
Mia stood over by the snack bar tables, with Jeremy next to her. She had her hands on her hips and her lips twisted to one side.
Oh no.
Annabelle had meant to call Mia last night to tell her about switching to the high school team, but then she’d seen the letter from Dad. She’d completely forgotten.
“You’re not swimming with us anymore?” Mia asked, and it wasn’t her lacrosse-girl voice she used right now. Mia could shrug off a lot of things that would have bothered Annabelle, but when something upset her, it really upset her. And right now she sounded as upset as she had last winter when her dad had gotten stuck in Chicago on her birthday because of a snowstorm, so they’d had to postpone the special dad-and-daughter birthday breakfast they had every year.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you,” Annabelle said. “It all happened really fast. But I’ll still see you guys all the time! I’ll cheer you on at meets and stuff.”
“Okay. Yeah, that definitely makes up for ditching us and not even saying anything about it.”
And now the lacrosse-girl voice was back, but extra loud and low and with a really, really sharp edge. As sharp as one of the X-Acto knives they weren’t allowed to use without supervision in the art room.
Next to Mia, Jeremy stared down at his flip-flops, which were getting a little too small. His big toes reached the very end. Annabelle tried to catch his eye to figure out if he’d told Mia that he already knew she was moving up to the high school team, but he wouldn’t look up.
Annabelle took her three breaths. Mia was jealous, she told herself.
She was probably as jealous as Annabelle had been when their Spanish teacher had asked Mia to be a peer tutor, since her accent was so good. Or when Jeremy had gotten to move up to ninth-grade math when they were only seventh graders.
And it probably hurt Mia’s feelings that Annabelle hadn’t said anything to her about the high school team the way it had hurt Annabelle’s feelings that time Reagan said something about Mia’s crush on that eighth grader Alex Jones before Annabelle had known about it. Or else Mia was disappointed because, even though she didn’t always act like it, she’d been looking forward to hanging out with Annabelle all summer, too.
Annabelle could make her feel better, though. She could make things right again if she could figure out the right thing to say.
“Um, Mitch can’t pick me up for a while. Maybe I can stick around while you guys practice and then get him to take us all to the Creamery.”
“Sounds good to me,” Jeremy said, and Mia shrugged.
“I bet he’ll get us half-price cookies to take home, too,” Annabelle added. “And maybe that guy will be working. The one Reagan said was flirting with you last time you guys went?”
Jeremy rolled his eyes, but Mia nodded.
“Okay, I’m in,” she said, and her voice wasn’t so sharp now. “I guess we better say goodbye to Annabelle the Swimming Phenomenal and go practice with the middle schoolers.”
“I think you mean phenom,” Jeremy told her. “Or phenomenon, maybe.”
“Whatever,” she said, sliding her arm through his. “Let’s go, Dictionary Boy.”
Jeremy shook his head. “That sounds like the dorkiest superhero in the history of the world.”
“Cheerio!” Mia called over her shoulder in a fake British accent. That’s what she used to say whenever she and Annabelle had to leave each other to go to different classes at school.
Annabelle had done it. They were okay. Or as okay as they had been for a while, anyway.
“Ta-ta!” she called back.
She settled in to watch her friends swim, her muscles the best kind o
f tired and her mind mostly calm. This was going to be good for her and Mia, if she had Kayla and Elisa and even Connor Madison to hang out with, the way Mia had all her other friends. If she didn’t need Mia so much more than Mia needed her but they both made time for each other.
Things would be more even then, and everything went better in a friendship when things were even. She was sure of it.
Chapter 9
The meet on Friday was against South Shore, and South Shore was good. Last summer, their high school team had finished first on the island and second in the league, so they’d made it to the Invitational.
The middle school meet was first, and Annabelle got there early to cheer for Mia and Jeremy. But the longer she sat there, the more nervous she got.
Last year, the middle school team had lost to South Shore, but this year they won without her. Mia took Annabelle’s spot as anchor on the freestyle relay and butterfly on the medley, and at the end of the meet, she collected high fives and hugs from everybody who usually rushed over to congratulate Annabelle.
“Awesome job!” the middle school team coach’s voice boomed as he patted Mia’s shoulder, and Annabelle’s heart lurched.
Stop, she told herself. Compliments weren’t like the equations they learned about in math class that had to stay balanced. There could be plenty to go around.
Mitch would say she should make herself think positive. “Believe to achieve” and all of that. So as she walked over to the end of the pool where the high school team gathered, she tried the visualization trick.
There. She saw herself at the Labor Day Invitational, touching the wall at the end of her medley relay leg ahead of the competition. Setting a team record. A league record, even.
Okay. Her next breath came in easier. She stopped to congratulate Mia and Jeremy and then joined the high school team.
Elisa waved and then twisted her thick curly hair back into a bun and pulled on her cap. She had so much hair that it made an extra big conehead shape in the back. Annabelle had heard her joke once that this was her version of practicing with a second suit on to get more drag, and someday she was going to cut off all of her hair and shave seconds off her racing times.
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