13:00
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said, glaring at the red stained tissue in my hand. Unsure whether anyone was in the bathroom with me, I threw it in the toilet with an unsatisfactory amount of force, trying to stay docile while my insides boiled.
As the stall door continued to bounce on its hinges from where I’d slammed it in my frustration, I scrubbed my hands under the burning tap water in the sink until they turned bright pink. The soap bubbles filled the white porcelain, growing high only to be burst by the water streaming out of the faucet, clouds of steam rising toward the ceiling like a boiling cauldron.
A shudder ran down my spine.
I hated blood—even if it was mine. It made me feel disgusting. So did the uneasy feeling in my stomach. Everything just seemed so disgusting.
Putting a second quarter in the white box on the wall—after it swallowed my first without compensation—was just another slap in the face and the pitying smile of the girl coming through the door in time to watch me take my prize back into a stall, wasn’t helping.
Nothing like tampons and suddenly too-tight swimsuits on a Monday afternoon to give the week a nice, hopeless outlook.
The girl and I exchanged another knowing glance through the mirrors as we emerged from our stalls simultaneously and washed our hands at the sinks in uncomfortable silence. Her brown eyes avoided mine but the same sorry smile was painted on the soft curves of her face.
It was like a stalemate between us when she realized I washed for an unusually long time—enough to make your skin burn and run dry, sore, and rough. If she shut of her faucet before mine maybe I’d think she was dirty, but if I kept going maybe she’d think I was weird. Either way, I didn’t care much.
I hated blood.
16:00
I had an uncanny ability to time things almost perfectly based on the CDs Shawn had given me for Christmas the year of the accident. He was so grateful I’d brought him back to life, he gave me all his old albums, even the ones from the punk rock group he loved.
Since that day it was like he had been connected to me through some sort of spiritual bond that no one else could see. There was a tether between us and although my parents didn’t know where, they could sense it. So they did their best to cut the strings and throw me into the wind, hoping I’d outrun him and just forget about the boy that used to be my only freedom.
It seemed weird to accept the CDs—he was so proud of them—but it was a persistent begging that he wanted me to have them that made me finally agree. Now they were almost all I had from him. That and a stack of memories that played through my mind like a booklet of Polaroids every night. Flipping through the images in my mind was like watching a movie of our friendship and the albums quickly became the soundtrack.
Besides, he said they were great to swim to and that wasn’t a lie.
The beats were so cohesive throughout the album that it kept my heart rate steady and the lyrics were quick and careless—just like Shawn.
Before diving in, I’d catch the first word and try not to lose place as I went from one end of the pool then back to the start, only hearing splashing until I surfaced in time to match the words in my mind to the ones coming from the speaker. After almost a year, I was never wrong.
I even had the ability to time my schedule events by it.
The CD ended at the same time Coach Godwin walked through the doors into the pool room, just as I’d planned. His thick legs paraded in front of me as I panted in the water, trying to catch a breath from the last lap.
“You’re early,” he smiled.
“No classes,” I said between breaths. “Christmas break.”
Pulling the goggles off my face and smoothing the swim cap off my head, I slammed them onto the concrete and took his hand, allowing him to pluck me from the water.
Tossing me a towel and dodging the streams of water pouring off me he asked, “What time’d you get here?”
“One.”
“Wow. Three hours, huh? You’re training awful hard here lately.”
Hiding behind the rough, white fabric. I rolled my eyes. This place might have had an Olympic sized pool and access to a great gym, but the coaches were severely lacking. It was like having a five star restaurant with fast food workers making the daily specials or an art gallery with five-year olds giving tours.
Of course, that was because Coach Godwin had the extra duty of being a mentor and a counselor, but it still seemed pathetic that he let my training suffer because he would rather be friends. Sometimes I questioned his credentials, wondering if he’d mouthed of “breast stroke” and scored a job simply because the deans had never heard the words before and just assumed he was knowledgeable.
You don’t make it big in the world of swimming by making friends—you make it big by working hard. Maybe I didn’t have the training my old school offered, but I had a drive that could only be fostered by better equipment.
It was just too bad that my parents didn’t have enough money to send me to a better place. One where the entire staff weren’t just Bible thumpers that cared too much about Church and not enough about an actual education complete with reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Why they had to send me anywhere was beyond my comprehension. I guess they couldn’t handle that everyone though their daughter was a freak. But maybe they were right. Maybe I was a freak.
Normal people didn’t raise their friends from the dead.
“I got a few more laps left,” I said, picking up the goggles and swim cap and preparing to jump back into the water to forget my parents.
“Not today,” he said, taking them from my hands. “You’ve done enough.”
“But…”
“Not today, Sam,” he said. “Stretch out and talk to me. How are you?”
“Okay. How are you?”
“I’m doing well, thank you. Tell me about your day.”
He kept his tone soft and his pitch high the way he always did when he was playing counselor instead of coach. It made him feel more fatherly in the same way the thin spot on the back of his head made him seem older than thirty-eight. He claimed it was his “part spot”, where he combed all his red hair in different directions, but I knew better. Coach Godwin was balding prematurely and that was the reason I liked him: he was proof you couldn’t run from time or nature.
Still, it was all I could do not to sigh and the mission of keeping my annoyed tone to a minimal was more of a chore. “My day was okay,” I said, reaching down toward my toes, feeling the pull in my tired legs. “I slept in. Got up. Wrote a paper for Bible studies. Came here. Swam. That’s about it.”
“No breakfast?”
I laughed once, thinking about the episode in the bathroom while shaking my head.
“You say you slept in? How late?”
Taking my foot in hand and pressing my calf to my thighs, I answered, “I dunno. Ten-ish, I guess,”
“Did you go to bed late?”
“Nah.”
Slowly, he lowered himself to the ground and sat dangling his feet in the water. The black shorts he was wearing spread out on the concrete, melting into the cracks almost like blood and I shuddered at the comparison.
The fluorescent lighting overhead reflected in the ripples, blinking and winking like a strobe atop an ambulance.
He patted the water soaked place next to him and I followed orders, plopping down with ease, grateful to have a distraction. “Was something bothering you? Is that why you slept in?” he asked.
As I spoke, he gathered my legs from under me and sat them across his lap, rubbing the muscles in a circular pattern, relieving the tension and easing the approaching soreness.
“No. I was just tired, I guess.”
It made me uncomfortable when he spoke to me so calmly. I wished he would yell at me the way the coaches had at my old school when I hadn’t stuck to schedule.
Bedtime was ten, morning was six. Breakfast—which I always skipped—came before morning swim, then school, and more practice until late in the evening. Then I had to find the energy for homework.
Back in Westville High, everything I did revolved around swimming. When I wasn’t in the pool I was thinking about it. Taking showers, I practiced holding my breath under the streams of water, letting wash the chlorine off my skin, but never out of my nose. At night, I dreamed about swim meets, trials, competitions. Relays raced through my mind and freestyles haunted me hour after hour.
The promise of my future hung like a raincoat from the fragile, practice hook that was swimming. Good colleges didn’t accept mediocre students lacking diversity and a sob story. But they did like athletes that attracted attention, like a swimmer that completely dominated the sport for her entire high school career.
So for me, everything was swimming, swimming, and more swimming.
Except when I was with Shawn. Maybe there hadn’t been wiggle room in my schedule for a social life, but I made sure to find room for Shawn. My parents always counted that in the list of reasons they hated him.
He was like a string of Christmas lights on the biggest pine tree in the forest. Maybe people had heard of its needles or even admired its pinecones, but it was never happy without some festivity. Shawn was my holiday display, complete with the occasional burned out bulb and the tendency to short circuit when he was overloaded.
I spent my entire life striving to reach an untouchable perfection, knowing if I didn’t, my chances of succeeding would be like a fire running down a path of gasoline when I was nothing but water. Shawn didn’t climb the rope in gym class toward his dreams like I did, he chased them down the highway, sometimes stopping to sightsee, sometimes taking the scenic route. Sometimes stopping to shake up my schedule.
Until I came here.
At Aspen Acres schedules were built around church, swimming was my responsibility, and there was absolutely no Shawn. Of course he wouldn’t move seven hours away just to be with me. My parents knew that. It was just another appeal aside from the great price and even better facility.
They would do anything to get me out of Westville High and on the fast track to success, taking a low road for the poor.
Sometimes I wondered if I would have made a name for myself if my parent’s had money, but as I glanced down at the stopwatch next to Coach Godwin, blinking the time of my last run, I smiled to myself.
I didn’t need money to make it big. I had hard work, determination, and a pinch of talent.
Excitedly, I held it up for Coach to see. It dangled in front of his face and his green eyes wagged back and forth like a pendulum as he tried to read the digits. “You see it?” I asked. “The slowest girl to make it to nationals last year qualified with a time a tenth of a second faster.”
“That’s a very good time,” Coach Godwin said. “I’m proud of you.”
Craving affection and acceptance, I leaned forward, my chest pressing against my knees, my face not far from Coach’s. I was close enough to see each individual freckle that usually coated his face like one large mask and I fought back the urge to reach out and touch one.
“You think I’ll make it to the Olympics?” I asked, threading my long arms under my thighs and squeezing myself together, trying to become as small and as innocent as possible. It felt like I could curl up and roll away, like a spinning tire under a car, chasing a dream across pavement. “Shawn always thought I could.”
As I said the words, I knew they were a mistake. All the teacher’s knew about my miracle work and none of them appreciated it. Sure, it was fine when Jesus resurrected people, but when I did it, there was something wrong with me.
“When was the last time you talked to Shawn?” he asked.
I squirmed under his glare, trying to concentrate on the way his top row of teeth were spaced almost too far apart, but the bottom row was smashed together, making one tooth hide behind the others.
I wanted to say something snarky, to knock him into the pool with my words. When my parents shipped me to this hell hole. When they got scared that I liked him more than I liked them. When they decided that it was more important for me to swim than to get an actual education. When they got the idea that I could attract attention and money.
But I didn’t say any of those things. Smashing my cheek into my leg, I answered, my voice dropping into a low growl: “March.”
I knew he took pleasure in this kind of torture. It was like he’d given me a paper cut and was now playing with the split skin, pulling it apart like a talking mouth and watching blood come out of it.
“So you haven’t heard from him in nine months?”
I shook my head, the cold wet hair in my ponytail slapping my face sharply, leaving a stinging sensation that spread through my entire body.
“The anniversary of the accident is soon isn’t it?” he asked.
“December 23rd,” I said.
“Is that what’s bothering you?”
“No.”
“It’s not?”
“The one year anniversary of an almost tragedy doesn’t bother me,” I assured him. “Are we done here?”
“We still have almost the entire hour left, Samantha. Don’t you want to talk about what’s bothering you?”
“Nothing’s bothering me, Coach,” I said. “I’m just tired.”
His skull must have been so thick in compensation for his thinning hair. “Just tell me what’s been keeping you up.”
“Maybe Mary Beth snores? Is that a good answer?”
“It would be a good answer if I didn’t know it was a lie.”
It annoyed me that he wouldn’t return my hostility. More than anything, I wanted a screaming match. I wanted him to change emotions, tones, expressions, anything.
The same white walls of Aspen Acres never changed. The white sheets on the beds and the boring uniforms I wore day in and day out never changed. The blue one piece I’d been accustomed to never fell out of swim style. The same, boring, bland food was served in the cafeteria on a constant cycle. The pH in the pool was always perfect.
Nothing ever changed here and now it felt like even Coach was stuck in some sort of strange rut. It was like living in a painting, seeing the same strokes and same colors. Every day felt like living on a broken record, playing the same part on a constant loop, the needle never able to move past the scratch, until you were so sick you wanted to throw the entire album into the wall so I would shatter into a million different pieces. It was more than I bear.
“I can’t sleep because I miss Shawn. I miss my stupid parents. I miss my brother and my friends. I miss my old coaches and my old school. That’s why I can’t sleep. Happy? Are we done here now?”
He sighed heavily for a moment, thinking long and hard about my request like I’d just asked him to help me murder someone. Although, murdering someone with me would be a safe bet—I did have a record of bringing people back to life.
“Yeah, Sam. We’re done for today.”
Quickly, I pulled my legs away, drug myself to my feet, and stomped toward the locker room. As I hit the crash bar on the door with the force of a hurricane, Coach yelled to me, “Samantha?”
“What?”
“We’ll meet in my office tomorrow. Tonight, I want you to eat some dinner, try to get to bed early, and take a rest day tomorrow.”
I nodded my head in a compulsive lie.
There was no rest for the wicked.