Page 29 of Breathing Under Water

“Yes, many hours.” Leo nods sagely. “I think so too. Can I keep going now?”

“I want to hear about other things that make you happy, not just flying. And we don’t have several hours to be here, so I think we’d better move on to the next thing on your list.”

“My brother makes me happy,” Leo says. “He’s the one who dropped me off. You met him and called him Beck Becker. But he’s not Beck Becker, he’s Harrison Becker. He spends a lot of time with me, but I think my mother wants him to stop, and that does not make me happy. A lot of things don’t make me happy. You didn’t ask about those, but do you want me to talk about them anyway?”

“If you’d like.”

“No,” he says. “I still don’t want to. I like thinking about things that make me happy better.”

“Me too, but sometimes we have to think about the things that make us unhappy so we can fix them or make them better.”

“What if you can’t make them better?” he asks.

It’s a good question, and as I take a second to think about myanswer, my phone chimes to remind me that the other kids in the swim group are going to be showing up soon.

“You know what, Leo? We need to get ready for the lesson. Can we finish this conversation later?”

“No,” Leo says, standing back to his full height, his lanky arms hanging at his sides again. “I don’t want to.”

I don’t argue, and he walks off toward the pool.

Six hours later, I’m back at the Meadowbrook sports complex for the second team practice of the day. I’m keeping pace with Tilda Chen, another rising junior on the team, as we finish our last laps. The horrible AssaultBikes that Coach has been making us ride during dryland workouts are definitely making an impact, and I can feel myself moving better through the water.

I’ve dropped a solid half second off my practice time since summer started. I miss the days when I was younger, when my time drops could be as big as six or eight whole seconds during a new training period. Now that I’m older and my time drops are so much smaller, I’ll take what I can get. The NCAA hasn’t announced qualifying times for the coming year yet, but with the younger generation of swimmers going faster and faster, Coach Cat is expecting the benchmarks to go even lower than last year.

Tilda and I reach the end of our respective lanes at just about the same time, both of us huffing and puffing. Lark is on my other side, also having just finished with her practice partner. She pulls off her goggles and shakes her head at me.

“Freaking swimflation is going to be the death of me,” she says between gulps of air.

“Tell me about it.” I pull off my cap and lean against the wall of the pool while I wait for my chest to stop heaving.

“If they lower the times again, there’s no way I’ll get an A-cut,” I say. “Coach’s expectations might be completely unrealistic.” I wonder if I should be putting in even more hours at the pool so I can accomplish what Coach wants from me, but I can’t stomach the thought of adding a single lap I don’t have to. I remind myself it’s just two more years, and then this soggy, regimented, chlorine-smelling portion of my life will finally be over.

I must be making some sort of face because Lark interrupts my thoughts with her usual pep.

“Hey now,” she says, shaking the plastic of the red-and-white lane line between us. “What do we say when we have the dark thoughts?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumble back at her.

“Nope, not good enough.” She takes off her swim cap and pulls it over a couple of fingers on both hands, creating tension in the silicone and aiming it toward me like a slingshot. “Now say it with me,” she says.

I roll my eyes, but together we both call out, “No bad days!” It’s a line our team uses before meets, and most of us agree it’s a pretty effective mantra generally. But today it pisses me off. Why can’t I have bad days? Why do I always have to worry about the image I’m projecting, about having the right kind of attitude? For once, I’d like to be allowed the freedom to lean into imperfection.

But today is not that day.

“Again!” Lark commands from her lane.

I put on my happy face, slipping back into my prescribed roleas the overachieving, upbeat athlete everyone wants me to be, as we belt out in chorus one more time, “No bad days!”

“That’s right, girls,” I hear from above us, and I look up to see our teammate Jillian making her way toward the locker room. A white towel is wrapped around her waist, and water drips from the curls of her ponytail to the pool deck. “Something fun has got to happen tonight, or I swear I’ll claw my eyeballs out. This town is so dead.”

After practice, the whole team’s going out for our monthly spaghetti dinner off campus. Most of the NARPs, the nonathletic regular people, clear out during the summer, so the town surrounding Meadowbrook becomes just another sleepy suburban hamlet full of families and early bedtimes.

“If nothing else,” I call up to her, playing my part, “at least you’ll get to suck on some long noodles tonight.”

“Oh, shut up, McKenna,” she says on a friendly laugh and then turns back toward the locker room.

As everyone else begins clearing out of the pool, I linger. Even though my arms already feel nearly boneless, I want to do one more sprint just to see where I’m at. Once all the others have disappeared into the locker room, I call out to our assistant coach, Marcy, who’s still busy scribbling notes on the clipboard in her hands.