by Kobe Bryant
The mood here is more subdued. Focused might be a better word, but the point is that it’s quiet. Maybe it’s a social cue taken from the tablecloths. I don’t know, really, but I start to feel sick while I’m picking out what I want to eat because people are watching me and I know I’m taking too long.
I’m on the verge of panicking when Coach Marks comes up behind me and asks what I’m waiting for. His tone is lighthearted—I’ve been forgiven—so I mumble something about too many choices.
“Get the oatmeal,” he says. “Some juice, yogurt, a bagel with cream cheese, and the eggs.”
“Is that all?” I ask.
“You’ll need it.”
He’s right, of course, and I pile my tray with everything he says. Then I join the others. We eat fast, and I get down what I can while Coach Marks goes over the call times for our events. It’ll be more than two hours before I’m in the water, but this includes us getting our shit together, riding the shuttle over to the swim complex at the university, checking into the facility, changing, and warming up.
Two hours is nothing.
From here on out, my actions are preemptive. Proactive. I don’t wait for Raheem to irritate me or for Fitz to chew gum or for me to get annoyed by overhearing someone else’s bullshit on the shuttle. The minute we leave the hotel and head for the meet, I slip in my earbuds and tune the fuck out.
It’s game time.
43.
The buildup’s endless. We reach the UCSD aquatic facility, where we still have to make our way through registration. The line’s long, slow, but it’s the only way to gain access to the changing rooms and pools, and it’s hard not to stare at the streams of people coming in to watch the meet. It’ll be packed. But I force myself to focus on the mundane. No matter how big the venue, all swim meets involve the same steps. You get in. Change. Warm up. Swim.
That’s it, really.
Finally, we’re through. Credentials in hand, we enter the venue by way of a large rec center and follow directions to the West Pool. Winding our way through the building, I take note of the changing rooms, a weight room, and dedicated space for personal training and physical therapy. It’s impressive. Before we step outside, Coach Marks taps me on the shoulder and asks if I’d be willing to “have a chat” with someone whose name I don’t recognize.
“Me?” I say, looking around.
He nods.
“Chat with who?”
He waves to Fitz, who shuffles off with the other guys, then motions for me to follow. I do and we head toward an open door adjacent to the restrooms. But I’m confused. This is clearly a planned detour. Is this about the meeting I missed? Have I done something else wrong?
“—not a big deal in the least,” Coach Marks is telling me. “They just want to get to know you. Smile and nod. Be polite. That’s it. You don’t need to get into anything complicated.”
“Wait, what?” My head feels muddled. I don’t know how I missed what he was saying. It’s the noise, I guess. The crowd.
“In here.” We walk through the open door and up a flight of stairs that opens into a media room of some sort. It’s a wide space set over the swim complex and it’s got this huge glass viewing window that’s angled over each of the aquatic center’s twin pools. West is where we’ll be swimming and East is hosting the diving competition. There are rows of tables filled with laptops, cameras, and what I assume are sports journalists. A tall woman in a black suit walks over to us.
“Colin,” she says briskly. “Thanks for coming.”
“My pleasure,” Coach Marks says.
The woman turns to me, extends her hand. “I’m Renee Matheson. I’m with Swimming World.”
“I’m Gus Bennett.”
“I know who you are,” she says. “Would it be all right if I asked you a few questions?
“About what?”
She smiles. “Nothing too difficult, I hope.”
I glance at Coach Marks, then nod. “Yeah. Okay, sure.”
“First of all, how old are you?”
“Sixteen. I’ll be seventeen next month.”
“And what are you hoping to do here today?”
“Win?”
The woman laughs. “Glad to hear it.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“It’d be quite a surprise, though, wouldn’t it? Winning?”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, I’ve seen your times,” she says.
My spine stiffens. “Then you haven’t seen anything.”
“Well, I’m a fan of your confidence.”
“Okay.”
She pauses, turning serious. “You know, I’m sorry about your brother. I had the pleasure of meeting him a few times. He was a great swimmer.”
“I guess,” I say.
“Well, what do you think Danny would tell you if he were here?”
“What would he tell me?”
“Yeah, what would his mind-set be coming into a situation like this?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m not Danny.”
“I just mean—”
Coach Marks steps in, pulls me back. “We have to get him down to the pool now, Renee. Thank you so much for your time. We can talk later. I’ll give you a call.”
The woman nods. “I’d like that. Thanks for setting this up, Colin.”
“Sure thing.”
“Good luck today.” She hands me her card before walking away.
44.
“You all right?” Coach M asks as we walk down the ramp to the lower level.
I don’t answer. I don’t know how I am, and I didn’t like what just happened.
Not at all.
“I should’ve warned you she’d ask about Danny. I’m sorry.”
I shake my head. “I should’ve expected it. I mean, everyone’s going to ask me about him, won’t they? It’s the only reason they’d want to talk to me in the first place.”
“For now, yes.”
“You think that’ll change?”
“If you win,” he says. “Even then, not for a while.”
Well, I appreciate the honesty. We keep walking, and when I look at him next, Coach Marks has this small smile on his face. A sly one, which is a rarity for him as far as I know.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
His smile grows wider. “You want to know what Danny would’ve told you if he were here?”
“What?”
“Not a fucking thing.”
This is both true and funny and I want to laugh, if only to break the tension, to bond, to feel a little fucking human. But I can’t. It’s my nerves, I guess. Or that interview.
I look over my shoulder.
“Hey, hey, Gus—it’s okay,” Coach Marks tells me.
“What?” I whip my head back around to stare at him.
“However it is you’re feeling right now. If this is hard for you, then that’s okay. Just let it be what it is.”
I nod. Quickly. “Thank you.”
Then: “I’m totally fine.”
“I know you are,” he says.
45.
Out on the pool deck, it’s utter mayhem. The surrounding bleachers are packed with spectators, leaving teams to set up their rest areas on the cement and grass. Coach Marks points to where Fitz has staked out a spot for us, and it’s basically a miracle that we find them. There’s scarcely room to move, much less relax. There’s also no rhyme or reason to our location; it simply exists in a sea of banners and pop-ups and folding chairs and snack tables and wet towels and swimmers who are sprawled all over the place eating food, studying textbooks, playing games on their phones, or sleeping. Music pours from about a million different speakers, a wild cacophony, and it’s impressive that anyone can hear or see anything that’s happening in the actual pool at all.
I take a seat in a chair and face the pool. People like to complain about how long swim meets are—that you wait around all day to get in the water for a total of thirty seconds. And while this is technically true, every sport has its own rhythm and rules. Besides, waiting isn’t an accurate word for what happens at a meet. Waiting is passive, something people do only when they’ve accepted that their fate is in the hands of others.
It’s safe to say that no one here is passive or running out the clock until they get to swim. All of us are engaged in some sort of mental preparation. You have to be at this level. What I personally focus on is maintaining a high level of intensity, and I do this by reminding myself how I got here. How I’m not like the other athletes. I didn’t grow up on swim meets and praise and weeknights spent racing against the guys and hoping my coach would notice me. Instead, for a long time, for years, I simply watched my brother. It was all I could do, seeing as the closest I ever got to a pool was watching Danny practice and compete. So I watched everything he did, and despite my growing resentment toward him, it was thrilling. He deserved the limelight. Absolutely. He was good. Better than good.
He was the best.
It wasn’t until later that the bitterness really seeped in, urging me to seek out my own glory. Even then, it wasn’t Danny that I was mad at so much as myself. And the reason for this was that Darien had moved back home. This was the year I turned twelve and my sister was using then—she’d overdosed twice—and our mother tried desperately to get her into rehab. It didn’t work. Addiction being what it is, Darien toyed with her, always wavering between contrition and total self-destruction.
She was also destructive in other ways. Like the time she and Danny took it upon themselves to tell me the truth about my father’s death and let me know I was the one responsible for it. Partially, at least. All I’d known prior was that my father had died in a car crash before I was born. But the real story was more complicated, Darien said with a smile. The real story was that when our mother was seven months pregnant with me, I stopped moving inside her.
She totally panicked, Darien said, but did everything her pregnancy books recommended—drank orange juice, played loud music, and jabbed her swollen belly in an effort to wake me up. But nothing worked, and when she got her ob-gyn on the phone, she was told in no uncertain terms to get to the ER now. At this point, our mother went into crisis mode. She dumped Darien and Danny at a neighbor’s house, called my father’s work, where she left a frantic message about where she was going and why, and bolted for the hospital.
My father, who worked in construction, was at a jobsite down in Alamo at the time. The way Darien told it, when he got the message, he dropped the phone and sprinted for his truck, hopping onto the northbound highway and heading straight for the hospital. That’s the part of the story that kills me. The fact that my mother never asked him to come, but that he did anyway.
It was late afternoon. Rush-hour traffic on the interstate was sucky and I’ll always wonder if my father grew impatient. If he contemplated jerking the wheel, pulling onto the shoulder, and just hitting the gas, willing to take the heat from the cops if he got pulled over. But he didn’t get that chance. Less than five minutes after hearing my mother’s voice for the very last time, my father was rear-ended by a distracted big-rig driver as he sat at a complete stop on a six-lane highway.
This meant that while my mother was in the ER, lying on an exam table for an ultrasound in which she finally watched me stretch and move inside her, after waking up on my own damn time, first responders twenty miles away were using the Jaws of Life to free my father from his crushed vehicle. A hopeless exercise: he’d died on impact, his life snuffed out for good as my mother broke down in that exam room, sobbing with relief and thanking God that her prayers had been answered.
My siblings told me this story on a night when the three of us were huddled in the backyard around a firepit. Around me sparks and flame leapt toward the sky, and I don’t remember where our mother was, only that I felt scared and guilty and also filled with the most overwhelming sense of understanding.
Of course, I thought.
Of course.
I still don’t know if they were right to tell me the way that they did. And I still don’t know if they were trying to inflict pain or save me from it. But in the end, it explained everything, didn’t it? Why my mother hated me.
Why Danny did, too.
Later, I crawled into bed in my room on the second floor. An open skylight looked out at the stars—a whole summer sky filled with them. Wondrous. Dazzling.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”
46.
“Medley relay team on deck,” Coach M barks, as if we didn’t hear the announcer say the exact same thing thirty seconds ago. He’s excited for us, though. I can hear it in his voice, see the gleam in his eye. He lives for this.
Well, so do I.
I shake myself out of my bad memories, my bad mood. This is the reason I race, after all. The four of us—Caleb, Raheem, Fitz, and me—shuffle toward the pool in a bunch, each of us adjusting our goggles, our suits, making sure our muscles stay loose. Fitz and I are the only two who haven’t gotten in the water yet this morning. Raheem finished second in his IM heat, which means he’ll move on to the finals later, and Caleb was third in his, which means he won’t. For the relay, there’re only five other teams entered in the event, so there’s no need for qualifying heats.
It’s one and done.
We line up in order of our legs. I’m last—the anchor—swimming freestyle, while Raheem will kick us off with the backstroke. That leaves Caleb to do breast and Fitz fly. Coach Marks gathers us around him for last-minute instructions, which I barely make note of because all I want is for the other guys to swim their goddamn asses off. I’ll win it for them from there.
Standing behind the block in those few seconds of calm before the race begins, I glance out at the crowd, my gaze moving up toward the media box where all those cameras are lined up in anticipation of capturing greatness. I roll my neck and hope to God that Renee Matheson’s watching.
That she sees what I can do.
The horn blows and the race does, too. Raheem flails with a bad start from the wall, swiftly falling behind, and Caleb’s no match for his competition. He gives up, from what I can tell, and even though Fitz’s leg is strong—all power and rhythm—there’s only so much he can do. By the time my leg starts, we’re more than half a pool length behind. I make up what I can but we end up third overall. So much for showing what I can do. So much for anything.
Fitz pulls me from the pool. “Nice finish.”
“Who the fuck cares?” I snap.
He rolls his eyes and I sulk inwardly, alight with resentment. As a kid, I can remember watching the Cowboys miss a field goal after Tony Romo botched the snap and John Madden saying he hated it when coaches left their quarterbacks in on fourth down. If they were there, it was only because their previous play had failed, and that was where their mind would be. Madden’s point was that you don’t put someone who’s pissed in a position where you need them to go out and score on the very next play. This is all a long way of saying I don’t get why Coach M would have me swim in that relay knowing we didn’t have a shot. Now my mind’s fixated on a loss in a race I didn’t even want to swim, and my better races are still to come.
No one talks to me after the relay. Especially not Caleb and Raheem. Instead they sit together and glower at me and let me tell you, there are two types of athletes in this world: the ones who let themselves get sucked into petty drama and ones who know how to move the fuck on.
Rally, I tell myself.
Optics are everything.
To this end, I drop my head, let my shoulders droop, and make my way over to where Coach M is sitting.
“Hey, would you tell me something?” I ask.
“What’s that?”
“I know what Danny would’ve said to me before a race. But what did you use to say to him?”
Coach Marks blinks in surprise, turning to look up at me, and I wish I resembled my brother more than I already do. He took after our mother, with her high cheekbones and burnished skin. My overall build is similar, but my features are sharper, more angled and I have our father’s darker eyes, darker everything.
“You really want to know?” he says.
I nod.
“Why?”
“Not sure.”
“Well, sit down,” he says, and there’s real tenderness to his tone. Like he’s been waiting for this moment, the chance to nurture and guide me, or maybe just the chance to talk about his favorite swimmer. But I sit and nod and say “Uh-huh” whenever he pauses in the story he’s telling me. It’s some anecdote about Danny and his anxiety, which followed him well into adolescence, even as he outgrew a lot of his childhood fears. Doctors wrote him numerous prescriptions to manage it over the years, although he was loath to take them for fear of testing positive for something unexpected. Obviously there’s another reason I knew about the pills Danny was given and why he didn’t take them, but that’s not something I like to think about.
Coach Marks keeps talking to me in that slow, soothing voice of his. Now he’s recounting the details of some grounding exercise Danny liked to do. It sounds real out-there, that kind of “feel your feet connected to the earth and plant your roots deep beneath you” type of thing. I’m pretty sure Danny would’ve laughed in my face if I ever suggested something like this. But instead of laughing, I stay seated right beside Coach M and try to act the way Danny might’ve, because I want people to see us together and think of him.
