Surviving High School

by Doty, M.

  At lunch, things got worse. As Emily settled into her usual spot at the center table, Hannah Carmichael leaned over and whispered, “No offense, sweetie, but you might not want to sit here today.”

  Emily was almost too dazed to respond. All she could muster was a confused “Huh?”

  “Word is out,” said Hannah. “Everyone knows how you totally broke Ben’s heart. Now, I’m not as judgmental as, you know, certain people at this school, but still, he’ll be showing up any second, and you might want to do him the courtesy of giving him a little space.”

  “Yeah,” said Emily, picking up her cup of yogurt from the table. “Sure.”

  She walked away from the table and off toward the far corner of the cafeteria, only to find Dominique sitting there, listening to her huge headphones and reciting some sort of mantra. Great. Emily couldn’t even go back to her old spot.

  As Emily passed by, Dominique broke from her trance, smiled, and said, “You look a little upset, Em. I hope your dad didn’t get any incriminating e-mails or anything.”

  “You could have done this anytime you wanted,” said Emily. “Why now?”

  “It just seemed like the right time,” said Dominique. “But don’t worry. You’re tough. I’m sure you’ll still be ready for Quals on Thursday, no matter what else happens to be going on in your personal life. I just hope it doesn’t affect your grades. I mean, I hear McBride’s tough. Is it true he docks you a full letter if you lose your history textbook?”

  A sudden sinking feeling entered Emily’s chest. She opened her backpack to look at her textbooks. There was English… Biology…

  But no History. The book was gone.

  “You should really be more careful about leaving your valuables in the locker room,” added Dominique. “Things get stolen all the time.”

  “You’re a b—” Emily looked over her shoulder to see if any teachers were around to hear her swear. One was. “A bad person.”

  Dominique shrugged.

  “I do whatever it takes to win. You taught me that. See you at the races, Swimbot.”

  Emily briefly contemplated starting a nail-scratching, hair-pulling, old-fashioned girl fight. It would feel nice to mess up Dominique’s pretty little face. But there was too much to lose. A fight might put their eligibility to swim on Thursday at risk. Better just to beat Dominique in the pool. If Emily could beat Dominique.

  Emily turned away without another word and pushed through the door that led to the school’s exterior courtyard. Outside, the sun shone through wispy clouds. It was the kind of day that looked warm but actually felt so bitterly cold you needed a sweater under your jacket to keep from shivering. All Emily had on was an old hoodie of Sara’s.

  She crouched down and rested against the cafeteria wall and ate her lunch with shaking hands. It was all over now—Ben, her new supposed “friends,” all of it. Dominique had the right idea: Emily would be Swimbot again.

  She felt herself rocking and wondered if she might just pitch forward. Weren’t there old monks somewhere who picked a tree to sit under and waited around until they either reached enlightenment or starved to death? Maybe she could just sit here like that.

  “Hey.”

  Emily turned her head a little to the side and saw Kimi settling in beside her.

  “Thanks for coming out,” said Emily softly. “But I’d kind of rather be alone.”

  Kimi sighed, her long gray dress and black boots mirroring the day’s dreary mood.

  “Don’t think I’m coming out only for you,” she said. “I’m not exactly welcome at the center table anymore, either.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s just say I may have miscalculated when I thought I could dump Phil for Marcus. Apparently, contrary to what popular culture would have you believe, boys sometimes do talk to each other about relationships.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It gets worse,” said Kimi. “I kind of accidentally left a few documents open in my e-mail on a library computer. And Amir kind of forwarded them to his account so he could study them in depth. And he may have kind of mass-forwarded them to everyone at school.”

  “So all those pro/con sheets you made—”

  “Public knowledge. What guy in school is going to ever want to go to a dance with me now?”

  “Wow. So someone’s life does suck worse than mine.”

  “Thanks. That’s nice. Really.”

  “Sorry if I’m not exactly in the mood to comfort you about your boy drama.”

  “Well, I’m sorry if my life isn’t as tragic as yours,” said Kimi, getting to her feet. “Sorry for bothering you with my stupid little problems.”

  “Kimi, I didn’t mean—”

  “Even when our lives are going well you find a way to make me feel bad about things. Why would I possibly think you could console me now?”

  “Kimi,” Emily started. “Wait. I didn’t mean to—” But it was too late. Emily’s best friend—the only friend she had left—was gone.

  At the point when her friendship with Kimi imploded, Emily was pretty sure her day couldn’t get any worse. She was wrong. By the time she arrived at Honors History, Emily was so upset about her talk with Kimi that she’d completely forgotten about her missing textbook—that is, until Mr. McBride shouted, “Books out! Flip to two-thirty-nine to consult table twenty-two B. Chinese dynasties.”

  Emily unzipped her backpack and looked helplessly inside, willing her textbook to reappear. It did not.

  “Ms. Kessler,” Mr. McBride said, stopping by her desk. “Left our book at home, did we?”

  “No,” she said quietly. She thought about trying to explain what Dominique had done, but it seemed pointless. She had no proof, and Mr. McBride wasn’t the type to believe students’ excuses anyway.

  “Oh?” he asked. “You’re not trying to tell me it’s—”

  “It’s lost,” she said, defeated, trying not to let her face betray any emotion. Her B-minus would become a C-minus now, the lowest grade she’d ever gotten.

  Mr. McBride took a step back and looked away from her.

  “Right,” he said. “Most unfortunate. You’ll have to look on with another student for the time being. Please come see me after class if you’d like to discuss your other options.”

  When class ended, though, Emily just couldn’t face him. She picked up her backpack and left without a word.

  For the next three nights, Emily could have gone to sleep at ten thirty like usual. She was certainly in bed by then, earlier even. Trying to make up for her lost hours of rest, her dad had instituted a nine o’clock bedtime. But instead of sleeping, Emily stared at the ceiling, thinking about everything that had gone wrong. Ben seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, Kimi wasn’t speaking to her, and Emily couldn’t even get online to IM Kimi, since her dad had taken the computer.

  If Sara really had dated Nick Brown, Emily was starting to understand why she’d kept it a secret. As it turned out, the truth often had consequences—especially when their dad was involved.

  Emily’s mind ran in loops as she tried to figure out how everything had gone wrong, and whether it could be fixed, but no matter how many times she thought things through, the solution eluded her. She might as well have tried to stick a broken egg back together with glue and tape. She couldn’t sneak out anymore, and there was certainly no way she could go to the dance. And she was who she was. She couldn’t change into the kind of friend Kimi wanted her to be.

  Over and over again, she imagined Ben showing up at an unfamiliar house in a well-tailored suit. He approached the doorway and pulled a bouquet of roses from behind his back as Lindsay or Hannah or even Kimi opened the door. The girl threw her arms around him and nearly devoured him with kisses before tossing the flowers carelessly aside and running with him hand in hand to his car. After they’d left, Emily, who had been watching from behind a tree, would pick up the flowers to smell them, but they’d turn stale and brittle at her touch, collapsing into dust.

>   Ben wasn’t hers anymore. He could do what he wanted—and he could have any girl he wanted. It was only a matter of time before her fantasy would become reality and the final, intact piece of her heart would break for good.

  It was all gone. All of it. The only course of action seemed clear. She would resign herself to misery, just like she had before the year started. There was only one thing left: winning.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Quals for Junior Nationals took place at Spartan Academy, an all-boys prep school thirty minutes from Twin Branches that boasted the best swimming facilities in the state. Modeled on prestigious East Coast prep schools, Spartan Academy was built of imported red brick covered with ivy. Everything about it seemed expensive and old.

  The swimming facilities themselves, however, were brand-new and state-of-the-art. Four Olympic-size pools sat side by side, all housed within an enormous glass shell that included a retractable roof and walls for warmer seasons.

  As the Twin Branches swim team entered the building, Emily looked across the room to see a half dozen other squads stretching and gossiping. Many of the girls pointed to her and Dominique, the clear favorites.

  Quals was composed of several heats for each stroke and distance, with eight swimmers participating in every round. The top two finishers from each race would then advance to the finals, and the top two from those races would receive invitations to the Junior Nationals in two weeks. If all went as planned, Dominique and Emily would represent California in most of those races.

  That wasn’t to say that there wouldn’t be competition. Girls like Mira Syzbalski from Monarch Prep, who, aptly, specialized in butterfly, stood a chance of unseating them in a given race. If they wanted to qualify, Dominique and Emily would need to bring their A games.

  And right now, Emily was about as far off her game as she could get. Raccoon-eyed from lack of sleep, she could barely walk a straight line much less swim one.

  Her first race was the 50-meter freestyle, thankfully a short event that she excelled in. Even better, Dominique had been placed in a different heat. They wouldn’t see each other until the finals, provided they both got there.

  As Emily got up on her block, her father, dressed in his usual gray suit, approached and looked up and down the lanes.

  “No one you really need to worry about in this heat,” he said. “Julia Weiss over in lane three has posted a few decent times, but nothing close to yours, and there are a couple of girls I’ve never seen swim, but we would have heard about it if anyone was close to your level.”

  Emily nodded, and without a word to her dad, she adjusted her position on the block. For the first time she could remember, though, the grain of the plastic against her feet felt unfamiliar, and the world seemed to pulse with light. She knelt down and stood up, trying to loosen her muscles, but instead she felt a strange rushing sensation, as if all the blood had suddenly drained from her.

  “Hey,” said the girl from the next lane over. “Are you okay?”

  It was the last thing Emily heard before she fell forward into the pool.

  The next thing Emily knew, she was underwater. She looked up to see the other girls staring down at her. Maybe it would be better just to stay here—at least that way she could avoid the embarrassment of facing them. Was there anyone above the water who even cared if she swam back up?

  She floated there, motionless, weighing her options—and then someone splashed down into the water, wrapped his arms around her, and dragged her to the surface. It wasn’t until he’d pulled her up to the edge of the pool that she realized it was her father.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I must have—slipped.”

  His gray suit had gone black with the wet. He looked less intimidating now, with his suit soaked and clinging to his puffy body—like an overgrown child wearing his father’s clothes. He emptied his pockets to reveal a soaked wallet and a shorted-out cell.

  “You could have—” He looked around him at the gathering crowd of concerned swimmers and parents. He straightened his wet tie. “You could have been disqualified! A few seconds later, and the judges would have counted that as a false start.”

  So that was it. For a few seconds, Emily had seen true fear in her father’s eyes—fear that he’d lose another daughter. She’d wanted so badly to reach up and hug him, to thank him for jumping in and saving her. And then her dad had disappeared, replaced by her coach.

  As Emily got up and walked back toward her starting block, the crowd gave a small round of applause, glad to see she wasn’t seriously hurt. The only one who didn’t clap was Dominique, who stood watching Emily with her arms folded and a look of pure contempt on her face.

  Emily walked back to her block and got on top of it, steady this time. The world seemed in better focus now. As much as her dad pushed her—as much as he made her life miserable—he had jumped into the pool to pull her out when no one else would. That was worth something, right? For the first time in several dark days, she saw a glimmer of light.

  Maybe she could do it. Maybe she did have it in her. She wasn’t at full strength—that much was obvious—but maybe she’d still swim well enough to beat these girls.

  A minute later, the horn blew, and the race began. The first twenty-five meters went by like normal, but Emily knew something was wrong as she touched the far wall. Her muscles had already begun to scream, something that didn’t usually happen in a race this short.

  She tried to ignore the pain and keep up her usual pace, but it was no use. It felt like she was swimming through oatmeal instead of water, like every stroke might rip her muscles from her bones or her arms from her body.

  She touched the far wall and looked up at the huge timer on the opposite wall. She was a full second and a half over her usual time, a huge margin in a race this short. In the next lane over, two unfamiliar girls cheered and embraced as Emily realized that they, not she, had qualified for the finals.

  The rest of the day went only slightly better. Emily reached the finals for about half of the events, though she didn’t qualify in every stroke, as her father had expected her to. Dominique, on the other hand, dominated her heats, outdistancing her competitors by several body-lengths or more in nearly every race.

  “Rough day, Em,” said Dominique. “Did you notice I set a new personal record in fifty-meter backstroke, by the way? Twenty-eight-point-nine seconds.”

  “The only records you’ll ever set are personal,” said Emily, gesturing to the large electronic board on the wall, where the scores and names of national record holders in each event were illuminated. Near the bottom, it blinked out:

  SARA KESSLER, 50M BACKSTROKE, 28.3

  Dominique glanced at the board and shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  Emily and Dominique faced off in a dozen races during the qualifying rounds to see who went to Nationals. Dominique won all twelve. No matter how hard Emily willed her body forward, she just couldn’t seem to catch up to her rival, whose movements through the water seemed unjustly effortless.

  Luckily, Emily managed to place second in several of the races. Though she hadn’t won today, she’d at least get an invitation to the Junior Nationals, where possible redemption awaited.

  Yet when she looked at the times Dominique was posting, Emily’s heart sank. Even at her best, Emily had never swum that fast. Now that Dominique had fully dedicated herself to winning, she was better than ever. Maybe unbeatable.

  As they prepared for their last race of the day, the 50-meter backstroke, Dominique leaned over into Emily’s lane and whispered, “Good luck out there. I just know you’re due to win at least one race today!”

  Emily felt a surge of angry adrenaline course through her veins. Good. Maybe it would help her win. She reached up from the pool and grabbed the underside of the block, getting into start position for backstroke.

  When the gun went off, she pushed off hard, and for the first time that day, Emily didn’t feel tired. Maybe it was the adrenaline, or maybe s
he’d passed the point of exhaustion to where she couldn’t even feel anything. In either case, the pool seemed to part a little more easily, and she skimmed across the lane like a water strider. She made a good turn at the far wall and barreled back, looking for the flags overhead. Finally, she felt her fingers touch the far wall and heard the crowd explode in applause.

  She pulled off her goggles and looked up at the leaderboard. The first thing she saw was her time:

  EMILY KESSLER, 50M BACKSTROKE, 28.7

  She could hardly believe it. After the day she’d had, everything she’d gone through, she’d set a new personal record—a time that was only a few milliseconds behind Sara’s national record. Her heart leaped.

  And then it burst, as if shot down by some malicious hunter. Right above her name was Dominique’s. She’d swum the race in twenty-eight seconds. Flat.

  Not only had Dominique beaten Emily, she’d beaten Sara.

  It was a long drive home. At first, Emily’s father could barely look at her. Finally, he said, “I thought you’d be the one winning every race. You were so dedicated. You could have had it all. Now I see I should have been putting more time into Dominique all along.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Sara—” he said. “Sara would never have lost like that.”

  “Well, it looks like even Sara wasn’t good enough today.”

  There was a new record holder in the 50-meter backstroke. Sara’s name would be crossed out of the record books, replaced by Dominique’s.

  “Yes,” her father said, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “I guess you’re right.” He gripped the wheel hard, and Emily was thankful her mom had skipped this meet—her mom always worked herself up into such a state, worrying he’d give himself a heart attack as he drove.

  “One more thing,” he added. “You may have noticed that the Junior Nationals falls on the same weekend as that home-coming dance you were planning to attend. Just in case you had any idea of sneaking out again, I pulled some strings and made sure that all of your heats are scheduled for the Saturday-night block.”