by Dalya Moon
I dog-paddle my way out into deeper water, right to the very center of the pool, where I can tread water away from other people.
Someone calls out, “Hey, Lainey! Lainey Murphy! Watch this!” Everyone, including me, turns to see the pale girl in a bright green swimsuit, up on the high diving board. Once she's gotten absolutely everyone's attention, she holds her nose, closes her eyes, and steps off the high diving board.
She points her toes and slides in with minimal splash.
She doesn't surface.
Bubbles float up.
Does she even know how to swim? It's not like we checked.
I look around to catch my father's attention, but all I can see of him is his yellow swim cap, bobbing up and down. He wouldn't hear me, unless I really screamed.
The lifeguard. I need to get the lifeguard. I'm looking around for one, my heart starting to gear up to full panic mode, when I feel something tug my ankle.
I look down and see a blur of green and red flash around my ankles, just before I'm pulled underwater.
Water goes up my nose, in my mouth. I open my eyes underwater and see the back of her head. Is she drowning? I reach for her, but I'm pulled away, pulled up by my t-shirt.
I'm up, and Tick surfaces right beside me, water streaming off her bright red head.
My eyes sting as I try to wipe pool water out of them. Someone's still holding on to me by my shirt. I turn and find myself facing someone familiar: Brad Boxer, Briana's older brother.
“No horseplay,” he says.
“No horseplay,” Tick repeats as she squeezes the water from her hair. “I just moved here from Seattle. I don't know all the rules, okay? There seem to be A LOT of rules in Snowy Cove.”
“Keep it safe, dudes,” Brad says. “No street clothes,” he says to me, eyeing my shirt.
“This is exclusively for swimming,” I say. “It's not regular clothes.”
Brad grunts, then paddles away. He hoists himself out of the pool in one smooth motion, like a dolphin, and returns to his lifeguard chair.
“You are a nutbar,” I say to my cousin.
She grins. “Pretty fun, huh? How about you try to pull me under now. I'll be the lady swimming in the forest lake, and you jump off the high board and become the alligator. No, the shark.”
“I don't know, Tick, that's horseplay.”
“I'll let you pull me under. I won't kick or anything. Come on, be the shark.”
“Sharks are saltwater fish. They live in the ocean, not in lakes.”
“Fine, we're in the ocean. Come on, try it once,” she says. “Live a little. I won't tell your boring friends.”
My father is still swimming laps, his yellow swim cap bobbing smoothly along his lane. Even though he hasn't been swimming for a couple of years, he's outpacing most of the other swimmers.
“Do it,” Tick says.
“Fine, I will. But you have to watch me. I'm going to do a proper dive, not just jump in.”
“Sweet.”
I do a butterfly-stroke to the side of the pool and climb up using the ladder, my body becoming heavy and large again as I emerge from the water.
I can feel Brad's lifeguard gaze on me as I walk to the ladder for the high diving board, my wet feet slapping the tiles. The squealing, echoing noise lessens as a family with three small boys exits the pool and heads to the change rooms.
I climb up the big ladder, the plastic treads digging into my soft soles. It's higher than I remember, and everyone looks small below.
Once I catch my cousin's attention, I raise my arms over my head, bend my knees, and tip off. I haven't done this in years, but my muscles remember. I squeeze my eyes shut just before my body slices smoothly into the water.
Under the surface, I open my eyes a crack and scan for Tick's legs and her green swimsuit. My instinct is to surface for air, but I swim my way under her, my knees scraping the concrete bottom of the pool. Instead of one ankle, I grab both, lock on, and pull her down.
Everything is calm for a moment; time is groggy underwater.
Her face passes near mine, her mouth turned up in a big grin. Bubbles emerge from between her teeth. Her eyes open, and she reaches down to the hem of my shirt.
I don't know what she's doing, but my oxygen is running out and my lungs are aching for me to surface. I kick my legs and pop up to the surface. I inhale fresh air, my eyes stinging, and I'm laughing.
I'm laughing out loud, because that was fun. That was so much fun.
Brad the lifeguard is looking right at me, but he's still seated on his plastic chair. Below, Tick seems to be trying to tickle me or something, so I push away from her. Something rubs across my knees, and something about my swimsuit feels different, looser.
Tick surfaces beside me and giggles. “Any cute lifeguards looking at us?”
I glance over at Brad, who is no longer looking in our direction.
“Nope. Operation Shark Attack is a success.”
“Great,” she says. “Do you want these back?”
She holds up something black. The bottom half of my swimsuit.
Chapter 4
I grab for my swimsuit bottoms, but Tick pulls away from me. She rolls onto her back, with her legs up, and keeps the space between us by using her legs to push me back when I try to get closer. I flail around, reaching for the swimsuit bottoms in her hand.
“So help me,” I hiss, “I will strangle you. Give them back this instant. Or else.”
“Wow,” she says. “You just turned into my mother. Relax! Your shirt covers all your business.”
My shirt may cover my business when I'm out of the pool, but it's loose-fitting and moves around in the water, and it's only covering my butt now because I'm holding it down. This also makes it harder to tread water.
“You've gone too far,” I say. “Give them back or you will be sorry.”
We're both still treading water, in the center of the pool, and I don't know about Tick, but my legs are starting to fatigue.
“How sorry?” she asks.
“All I have to do is say the word and nobody will be friends with you at school. Nobody.”
She flips the bottoms into my face, right at my eyes. When I peel them off, she's gone.
A red and green blur is under the surface, moving away, to the deep end. I hope she drowns, I think, and then I feel terrible for thinking that, even for a second. Of course I don't mean it, but I've never met anyone so infuriating.
Trying not make any big gestures that would attract attention, I reach down and wrestle the swimsuit bottoms back on, taking care that they're right-side-out. This is not the easiest thing to do when you're treading water, holding down a t-shirt, and trying to not look suspicious.
My father surfaces at the end of the lap pool, spots me, and waves me over.
I butterfly-stroke to where he is, and grip the edge of the drain lip while I catch my breath.
“Your cheeks are so rosy,” he says. “Nice to see you getting all this good exercise.”
His eyes dart up, looking over my shoulder, and I turn to see Tick leap off the high diving board again, a colorful streak followed by a big splash.
“Dad, she's a menace,” I say. My eyes sting, and I feel like I'm crying, but I can't tell, because my cheeks are wet from the pool. “You didn't see it, did you? We were over there and she pulled off the bottom half of my swimsuit. She just pulled it off.”
He purses his lips together in his amused expression. “Did she give them back?”
“Eventually.”
He looks through me, out the narrow window. “Your Aunt Trudy and I used to do much worse to each other growing up. Tick's got a touch of the old Murphy Prankster in her.”
“A touch?”
Another one of the swimmers surfaces near us, an older woman that Dad knows from his business. He proceeds to tell her what my cousin just did.
After the lady swims off, I give him heck for embarrassing me, but he just laughs. He thinks my cousin's “antics” are
“cute.”
I tell him what she did to Genna at school on Friday—how she tried to nuke my social group by sending hearts to everyone from Genna's phone.
“Hearts?” he says. “There aren't any hearts on my phone, and I text all the time.”
“You can buy symbols, or do hearts with text. That's not the point.”
“How do you do a heart with text?” He seems genuinely intrigued.
“It's like a smiley face, only you use the less-than bracket and the number three.”
“A bracket? How is that a heart?”
“Dad.”
“See that's another reason why kids shouldn't have cell phones. Just one more way to get into trouble.”
“She's been using the computer in the morning, too. I told her we aren't allowed, but she did it anyway.”
“You're not allowed. Whether or not she uses the computer in the morning is up to her mother.”
“Seriously?”
“Why do you always say that? When am I not serious?”
I take a deep breath and plunge under the water, where I count down from ten before I emerge.
When I come up, Tick is in front of me, squealing. Her right hand is locked in my father's as they play Thumb War. “No fair,” she says to him. “Your hands are bigger than mine.”
He shuts his eyes. “I won't look. Just try to lock me down.”
“Dad,” I say. “You're just encouraging her to act like a little brat. She's practically the same age as me.”
“Do you want to play the champion?” he asks.
“No.” I pull my feet up against the tiled wall and push away on my back, the rush of the water against my ears drowning out their fun.
For the remainder of the hour, I swim on my back and watch the ceiling rafters go by.
What am I going to do?
First on the list, obviously, is buying a one-piece swimsuit that can't be yanked down, but that's not going to help with the situation at school.
I've been assuming Genna won't still be angry at me on Monday, but what if she is? Genna's nice, but ...
I hear Tick's words in my head: Nice-but-nice-but. Nice but means Genna isn't nice at all. But that's not true. Genna's my friend. She's never yanked down my swimsuit bottoms.
She'd never do anything that fun.
They say tragedy plus time equals comedy. It's been an hour, and I can almost laugh about my cousin yanking off my bottoms. Almost.
* * *
Monday.
After English class, we're standing at our lockers, and I ask Tick if she's made any new friends at school.
She frowns and answers warily, “No, why?”
“Just curious. I mean, my friends Genna and Briana are fine for me, but we're pretty low-key, probably nothing like your friends back in Seattle.”
She exchanges her English books for a purple binder marked Drama-rama-ding-dong. She says, “Who do you think I should be friends with?”
I've been preparing for this, but I don't want her to know it, so I shrug and pretend to be thinking up the names just now. “Some of the kids in Band are pretty cool. There's a girl with blue hair who I think plays drums. She hangs out with Ty and Josh. Oh, what's her name ...”
Tick's eyes narrow.
“Diane. No, Dana,” I say. “She's in Drama with us.”
“Dana, blue hair, got it. Anything else?”
“Just what we talked about last night.”
She pulls out a pack of sugar-free gum and puts three pieces in her mouth before offering me the last one.
“You said you'd apologize to Genna,” I say to remind her.
“Right,” she says.
* * *
Mrs. Linklater is wearing a scoop-necked shirt that reveals the birds near her clavicle.
“Did that hurt?” Tick asks, pointing to the tattoos.
“Of course it did,” Mrs. Linklater says. “I'd be happy to answer your questions outside of class time, if you still have any. The school would prefer I didn't discuss tattoos and piercings during class.”
“Okay,” Tick says. “Did the tattoo hurt more than getting your eyebrow pierced all those times?”
Mrs. Linklater pats her on the head and finishes walking around us, distributing the scripts. I can hardly wait to get mine home and use a highlighter pen to mark off all my many lines as Tatiana the Fairy Queen.
“GENNA,” Tick stage-whispers.
Genna, who is sitting across the circle from us, glances up without moving her head and glares at us from under her glossy black bangs.
“I'm sorry about sending kisses and hearts from your cell phone,” Tick says, loud enough for the whole Drama class to hear.
“Apology accepted,” Genna says, as though forgiveness is as simple as checking off a box.
I realize I'm holding my breath, and I let it all out. Things are finally getting back to normal.
“LAINEY,” Tick says in her thick and spitty-sounding stage whisper, even though I'm sitting right next to her.
“We're supposed to be reading the script,” I reply.
“I'm sorry I pulled off your swimsuit bottoms at the pool.”
Josh's head pops up, followed by Ty's.
“What?” asks Josh.
“You're a streaker?” Ty asks me. “A flasher?”
“No,” I say, my cheeks fiery-hot. “She's just joking.”
“You're a bare-bottomed exhibitionist,” Ty says. “I knew it. It's always the quiet ones.”
“Dude,” Josh says, elbowing his friend.
Genna comes to sit next to me. “Why do you let her do these things?” she whispers in my ear. “She needs to be properly housebroken.”
Mrs. Linklater claps her hands once. “A little less talking and more reading,” she says.
I try to read my script, but my eyes get halfway down the page and I haven't understood a thing, partly because Ty and Josh won't quit looking over at me, as though they're seeing me for the very first time. This is supposed to be a kid-friendly version of the Shakespeare play, much shorter and with a little less of his dazzling wordplay, but it's still so confusing.
Tick excuses herself and moves away from me and Genna, taking a spot next to blue-haired Dana. She seems to be introducing herself, to my relief.
Ty and Josh keep whispering and looking my way, which isn't helping my concentration.
“You're thinking of Lady Godiva,” Ty says. He's getting a little louder, with more growl in his voice, but he's not at the Chris Rock level of mania yet. “You see, Lady Godiva, she's this crazy chick. She rides around on her horse, and she's got all this long hair, and it covers her interesting parts.”
Dana laughs at Ty and says, “More like Lainey Godiva. Get it?”
Giggles echo around the group.
Josh grimaces at me, looking embarrassed on behalf of his friend. He mouths what looks like sorry.
Beside me, Genna covers her mouth with her hand.
I say, “I can see you laughing, Genna.”
“Lainey Godiva. That's a good one. I would have loved to have seen your face at the pool.”
“You didn't think my cousin was quite so hilarious when she was ruining your social life.”
“Oh, my social life isn't ruined at all. I had ten new friend requests online this weekend,” Genna says. “Thanks to that text message, everyone knows who I am.”
“So now you like my cousin?”
Genna reaches up to run her fingers over her eyelashes—it's something she does in between visual checks with her compact mirror—and says, “I wouldn't go so far as to say I like her.”
I return to reading my script, though it hasn't gotten any easier.
Tick is still talking to Dana, and to Josh and Ty as well.
* * *
At lunch, Tick sits and eats with blue-haired Dana and some of the other Band geeks. They seem to be laughing a lot over something; they're the most boisterous table in the whole cafeteria.
Across from me, Briana finishes one
book and immediately begins another.
“Um, hello,” I say to Briana, fighting to be heard over the raucous laughter from Tick's table. “There are live people here who might appreciate some conversation. Can't you take a breather between books?”
Briana shakes her head. “Cliffhanger.”
I turn to Genna. “Was she always this bad? I swear she's getting worse.”
Genna wipes the lid of her Diet Coke with her sleeve, cracks it open, and slides in a straw. “Wait 'til she hits puberty,” Genna says. “She'll realize there are real-life hotties all around and she'll finally take an interest in personal grooming.”
“Ouch. Genna, be nice,” I say.
Briana doesn't even bat an eyelash. She has beautiful, naturally-curly brown hair that seems to bother Genna—not that it looks bad, but Briana always wears it in a ponytail instead of down in long ringlets, which Genna feels is a waste of “perfect curls.”
Genna's hair is neither curly nor straight enough for her liking. She insists one side is wavier than the other, and she's always envious of my perpetually-limp hair and Briana's curls.
We've both told Genna repeatedly to just get a perm, but she says it won't work on her half-Asian hair. I think it would, but she'd have one less thing to complain about. A couple of times, she's actually whined about being too skinny. Too skinny. That's like complaining about having too much money or too many cute boys liking you.
Behind me, the fun table roars again with laughter. I wish I knew what was so darn funny.
Briana licks her finger and turns another page. Genna pulls out her makeup kit and checks her eyeliner for the third time this hour. Have my friends always been this boring?
I count my pocket change and get up to buy myself an apple fritter before the cafeteria window closes.
I mean to ask the lunch lady for the smallest apple fritter, but she grabs a nice big one with deeply-browned edges—slightly over-fried, just how I like them—and I accept it readily. I'll re-start my diet tomorrow.
* * *
For the rest of the week, Tick sits with the Band geeks at lunch. On Friday, I walk home alone, because she's been invited over to Dana's house for the whole weekend.
Has the walk home always been this long and boring? I used to have Olivia for company, until she left for college. I was on my own for the first four months of grade nine, and I didn't mind the solitude then.
