by Emma Lord
It’s not that I don’t like swimming. Paige and I swam in summer leagues growing up, and even as young as six, I was swimming laps around all the other kids. It was fun back then—less about racing and more about playing Uno in the grass between races and begging my parents to let us get those massive baked potatoes at the food truck down the street after swim meets. Once we moved, though, there was no more swimming for fun. People are only here to collect the varsity letter they get every season and slap a line about it on their college apps. Hundreds and hundreds of hours and sweat and chlorine-bleached hair and occasional tears, all reduced to a few printed words.
“Hey, Pep? You want me to run warm-ups or are you gonna be out in a sec?”
Pep. I hate that nickname. Possibly even more than Pepperoni, another Jack Campbell original.
Or maybe it’s less about being called Pep and more about the person who’s saying it.
“I’ll be right out,” I tell Pooja, shoving my backpack into one of the lockers. It feels like I’m shoving Taffy in there with it. Wolf too.
Pooja pushes a lock of hair into her swim cap, then gives me a thumbs-up. “If you’re sure!”
I wait until she’s turned the corner to roll my eyes. The whole exchange was innocuous enough on the surface, sure, but I know Pooja—the two of us have been neck and neck with everything since my first year at Stone Hall. We’re constantly within one point of each other on exams, within milliseconds of each other on our racing times, in all of the same teachers’ office hours. Competing with her has become such a constant in my life that I’m pretty sure on my deathbed, I’ll get a call from her casually bragging about how she bets she’s going to get to die first.
Our eventual mortality aside, there’s no way in hell I’m letting her lead warm-ups on the first day of the season. I earned my spot as the captain of the girls’ team. For once, I had a clear-cut victory over her: I’d gotten the votes. I’d won the numbers game. Coach Martin made her a co-captain in some attempt, maybe, to soften the blow, but if anything, that just made me all the more determined not to let her undermine me in the first hour of the season.
I head out to the pool deck, the smell of chlorine heavy in the air. I probably shouldn’t love the smell so much—and maybe I don’t. It’s the kind of smell that aches, that takes up too much space in your lungs and displaces you in time. It could be last season, or five years ago, or back to a kiddie pool with my floaties on all at once.
I’m knocked out of whatever lingering nostalgia I have, though, when I look down at the pool and see a bunch of people already in it, their arms and legs cutting through the water.
For a second I am frozen, horrified at the idea that Pooja just walked out here and led practice on her own. That I’m going to look like an idiot in front of the whole team because I took an extra minute to write another one of those stupid tweets. But then I see Pooja striding up to me, looking livid.
“We’ve got a problem.”
I follow her scowl to the wall of the pool, realizing I don’t actually know the person who is clinging to the edge of it, shaking water out of her goggles. I look farther up the lanes of the pool and see that really, there is only a cluster of fifteen or so swimmers—just enough to take up most of the three lanes the school is allowed to use at this pool, but not enough for it to be our team.
Someone swims toward the wall and does a flip turn so aggressive, it manages to soak me and Pooja both. I can’t see his face from underwater, but whoever it is seems to be smirking, like I can feel the smirk all over his body. And that’s when I realize it’s none other than Jack Campbell and the band of misfit toys that is our dive team.
Pooja is still sputtering in shock when I take a step toward the pool and mutter, “I’ll handle this.”
I run up to the edge of the pool for momentum and get enough air on my dive that I’m only a few feet behind Jack when I hit the water. I catch up to him in another few seconds, tapping his foot. He keeps kicking as if he hasn’t felt it. I speed up, rope my fingers around his ankle, and yank. Hard.
After a moment of floundering in surprise, Jack emerges from the water, shaking out his dark hair. For a moment, he looks ridiculous without a swim cap on, like a shaggy dog who jumped overboard from someone’s rowboat. Then he runs his fingers through his hair and pushes it back so fast that it’s almost striking, seeing his brown eyes wide on mine, close enough that I can see they’re already tinged with a bit of red from the chlorine.
“Yeesh, Pepperoni,” he says, grabbing the lane line. “No need to go all Sharknado on me.”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Um. Right now? Wondering if the lifeguard will stop you from drowning me, mostly.”
“You can’t be here. We booked the pool. Besides, don’t you guys have a plank to go jump off?”
Jack grins one of those half grins of his, the kind that means he’s about to say something he thinks is super clever. I usually manage to ignore it—but even when it’s not aimed at me, it’s something I’ve come to notice after four years of him in the periphery, interrupting peaceful silences in class or the library or when the rest of us are trying to nap on the pool deck in between heats at swim meets. Jack is the kind of person who fills silences. The kind of person who doesn’t necessarily command attention, but always seems to sneak it from you anyway.
The kind of person who steals your pool lanes and makes you look like an idiot on your first day as team captain. And even though Jack has seemed determined to knock me down a peg for years, this time there’s way too much of my pride on the line to let him.
“You talk a big game for someone who’s terrified of that plank.”
My eyes narrow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jack’s eyes gleam from under his goggles. We both know I absolutely do.
The swim team and the dive team sometimes stay late after Friday practices to play informal water polo games with a beat-up soccer ball, and there’s always some dumb bet based on who loses. It’s why I have some rather off-putting memories of Jack and his brethren gagging on a Kool-Aid–pool water concoction after a loss, and why the swim team was forced to jump off the high dive after we bit it once freshman year.
Except I didn’t exactly jump. It turns out whatever evolutionary compulsion not to die that’s hardwired into my brain is a lot louder than the rest of the team’s, because I stared at that infinite distance between the diving board and the water and immediately climbed back down so fast, I don’t even remember making a conscious decision to do it.
Unlike Jack, who seems to remember the incident all too well.
But I’m not taking the bait. “Your season hasn’t even officially started yet. Get your team out of our pool.”
Jack blows out a breath, the grin’s wattage going down a notch. “Ethan’s our captain this year,” he says, more to the pool than to me. “Take it up with him.”
“Everything okay over there?” I hear someone call. “What’s going on?”
Despite my not-crush on Landon, my cheeks go red on reflex—as though the sound of his voice triggers something Pavlovian in the blood vessels in my face. I turn toward it and see him standing on the edge of the pool deck, somehow still tan from the summer despite it being the middle of October. He’s filled out a bit since last season too, and judging from the diameter of the eyes of the sophomore girls hanging out on the bleachers, I’m not the only one who’s noticed.
“We’re fine,” I call back. “The dive team was just leaving.”
Jack snorts.
“What’s the holdup, Ethan?” Landon asks.
I don’t have to be looking at Jack to feel his eye roll. I push myself through the water to get closer to the wall, my mom’s voice unhelpful in my ears: Anything we can do to make them feel more at ease.
The problem is, Landon’s at ease just about everywhere he goes. He doesn’t need any help.
I am struggling to think of something clever to say, somethin
g that will make some kind of lasting impression, but by the time I hit the wall, I’ve got nothing. How is it I can fire off a stupid text to a guy I literally call Wolf without thinking twice, but when I’m actually confronted with a human being I know, my brain decides to take a hike?
I’m rescued from stammering something dumb when I see Ethan push himself out of the water.
“Hey, sorry—are you guys supposed to have the pool right now?” Ethan asks.
“I mean, it’s all yours, man,” says Landon. “My internship’s got me beat. I’ll take a nap if it’s all the same to you.”
It’s probably my cue to laugh—the sophomore girls sure don’t miss the opportunity—but I’m too thrown off to do anything but get back out of the pool, hyperaware both of my authority being more undermined by the second, and of the fact that I’m pretty sure I have a slight wedgie. For something we do half naked, swimming really is just about the least sexy sport there is.
“Our coach said we needed to put in more laps this year to strengthen up in the preseason,” says Ethan, half to Landon and half to me. He at least has the decency to look apologetic for it. “Cross-training, and all.”
“Where is your coach?” I ask.
“Well, he said he was visiting his mom for the week, but he definitely just posted an Instagram story from Cáncun,” says Ethan with a shrug.
By now Coach Martin has emerged from the lobby of the gym, where she’s been talking to the parents of the new members of the team about the weekend swim meet schedule. She takes one look at all of us in various states of half wet on the pool deck and doesn’t bother holding in her sigh, or asking where the dive coach is. Sightings of Coach Thompkins are so rare that he’s become something of a myth anyway. Considering what a hot mess the dive team is the first few weeks of every season, I guess I can’t blame them for trying to get their shit together without him.
She pulls me and Ethan aside. “I have no idea when Thompkins is going to be back, so in the meantime, we need to work out a schedule. Can you guys meet after practice and figure out who’s going to use the lanes and when?”
“We’ve never shared the lanes before,” I protest.
Coach Martin offers me another one of her trademark I don’t know what to tell you faces. “Technically the school budget for the pool rental times is for both teams, so we can’t tell them no. Work it out.”
Ethan nods, and we make plans to meet up at the coffee shop across the street once practice is over. Already I can feel the seismic shift of trying to adjust my schedule to compensate for it—if I spend twenty minutes with Ethan that means twenty fewer minutes for AP Calc homework, which means it will eat into the time I’ll undoubtedly be answering Taffy’s texts, which means I probably won’t even get to work on my college apps tonight, which, in turn, means I probably won’t be texting Wolf back anytime this century.
I shake the last thought out of my head before I hit the water again. Of all the priorities I’m sinking under right now, banter with some guy I don’t even know should be the absolute last.
Pepper
Two hours later I feel like my entire body has been whipped. I practice often enough in the off-season that it’s not too much of a shock getting into the swing of things, but nobody’s self-directed workouts can reach even half the intensity of Coach Martin’s. I barely have the energy to drag myself over to the coffee shop, let alone run ridiculous negotiations for a pool we shouldn’t be sharing in the first place.
Even if it weren’t for that, the city just makes me nervous in general. I’ve carved myself a little world here in a neat seven-block radius: the apartment, the school, the pool across the street, the bodega where I get my bagels, the drugstore, the good pizza place and the better taco place, and the salon where my mom gets her blowouts. I don’t like leaving my orbit. I know, on a rational level, this part of the city is on a grid, and in the age of smartphones it’s impossible to get lost. But everything is so cramped here, so dense—I hate that I can turn one corner and see an entire world I don’t recognize, have to navigate a street with a completely different mood than the one a few steps away. I hate that I feel like I have to be a different person to match. Some people can weave in and out of these streets like chameleons, but four years have passed, and I still feel like the same kid who rolled up here in a U-Haul wearing cowboy boots—stubborn and unchanged.
In Nashville, there was order. Or at least it felt that way. There was downtown, with its restaurants and honky-tonks and the massive CMA Fest crowds in the summer. There was East Nashville, all earthy and young and hopeful. There was Bellevue, where we lived in the outskirts of the city in an apartment, just beyond Belle Meade, with all of its absurdly decked-out mansions. And then in the city, in the middle of all of it, Centennial Park with its giant Pantheon replica, which to me seemed like the heart of everything, as though all the roads and tangles of freeways led back to it, pumped people in and out each day on their way to and from work.
I miss that. I miss the transition of knowing this is who I am when I’m downtown and this is who I am when I’m home and this is who I am when I visit the restaurant, the original Big League Burger, which was just a stone’s throw away from all the recording studios and publishing houses lined up on Music Row. I miss being able to prepare for things, and knowing where I fit. Not even knowing, really, because when you grow up somewhere, you don’t have to think about fitting into it. You just do.
When Paige is on break from UPenn and deigns to stay with us for a few days at a time, she forces me out of the orbit. We get ramen in the East Village and window shop in Soho and take dorky historical tours that start in different parks. But since she and my mom don’t really talk, the rest of the year it’s just me, a rat in a seven-block cage, wishing something as stupid as walking into an unfamiliar coffee shop didn’t fill me with dread.
Once I actually get inside, I see someone at a table by the window bent over a cup of coffee, wearing Ethan’s baseball hat and holding Ethan’s backpack, with Ethan’s coat draped over the chair. I walk over to him and put my hands on my hips.
“Are you seriously trying to Parent Trap me?”
Jack looks up, brows puckered with disappointment, like he’s a little kid and I just stuck a pin in his balloon. “What gave it away?”
I gesture in the direction of his lanky frame. “Your general Jack-ness.”
“Jack-ness?”
“Well. That, and you’re a little bit of an ass.”
I smirk—a small peace offering—and he returns it and then some, with another one of those half grins. It’s so unabashed that I straighten up a bit, glancing away.
“So where is your brother? Is he in on this little prank of yours? Because if it’s all the same to you, I want to wrap this up quick.”
Jack cocks his head toward the window. “Ethan is currently preoccupied making out with Stephen Chiu on the steps of the Met.”
“So he sent you?”
Jack shrugs. “My brother’s an important dude, in case you haven’t noticed.”
I have. It’s hard not to. Ethan’s one of those man-of-the-people types—always has something nice to say, an extra few minutes to give someone, some practical solution to a problem. Which is why I had been counting on this meeting being a quick one.
Enter Jack, who seems to have absolutely no qualms with wasting time.
My phone pings in my backpack, and I realize with a lurch I haven’t checked it since I got out of the pool. I drop my bag, tell Jack to keep an eye on it while I go grab a tea, and look down at my phone.
Nine texts. Holy crap.
The most recent ones are from my mom: Where are you?? and Is everything okay? My stomach sinks—I never told her I had practice after school today because I didn’t think she’d be home. But then I scroll down and realize that although she is very much worried about my welfare, she was initially more worried about a “Twitter emergency” that needs attending.
I shoot her a quick text to let her know
I’m alive and open the ones from Taffy, who—bless her heart—actually remembered I had practice, and broke down the situation with screenshots.
I’m caught up by the time I reach the cashier. Apparently some tiny little deli in the city is claiming Big League Burger copied their grilled cheese recipe, and the accusation now has ten thousand retweets. A Twitter account dedicated to the welfare of small businesses has even co-opted the #GrilledByBLB hashtag, so #KilledByBLB is trending instead.
Jesus. The internet moves fast.
Your mom wants us to fire a sassy tweet back, Taffy has texted. Which is Taffy code for, I know this is a terrible idea, but your mom is my boss and I’m too scared of her to press the point.
I guess I’ll have to, then. I send my mom what I hope is a pacifying text, telling her we should either just let it go or sit on it for a bit and see if it actually merits some kind of apology. I’m no PR professional, but attacking an itty-bitty deli that can’t rub two Twitter followers together can’t be a good look for a goliath like BLB no matter how you slice it.
By the time the barista puts my tea on the counter, my mom is calling. She starts talking before I can even say hello.
“What do you think our next move is?”
I walk over to the counter, prying off my lid to add sugar and milk. I peer out of the corner of my eye to make sure Jack hasn’t made off with my stuff, but he’s just staring out the window, tapping his foot to the beat of whatever he’s listening to with one earbud in his ear.
“I don’t think we should tweet anything at them. People actually seem kind of mad.”
“Well, let them be mad,” says my mom dismissively. “We’re not going to take this lying down.”
“Okay—but maybe you should—I don’t know, talk to them? Not send a tweet?”
“There’s no point in talking to some sandwich place looking for attention. Give me something to fire back at them. I can’t waste time right now.”
It feels like a gut punch through the phone. I clutch my tea, letting it burn against my palms, waiting for it to anchor me. I want to push back, but I know how this goes—it sounds like the beginning of half of Paige and Mom’s fights. One of them would push, and the other would dig their heels into the cement, and before I knew it Paige would be stalking off into Central Park, and Mom would be on the phone with Dad trying to figure out how to deal with her.
