Sara Jaffe - Dryland

She said, No worries.

I said, I can tell Erika I changed my mind.

She said, No, your friend should do it. She said, Good luck, Julie, and put a smile on her face. It was the smile that cut a curved shape out of me and let the air rush through.

Because it was a home meet, I got to swim in my lane — my Lane Six, still, for now. Coach came over and put his hand on my shoulder. He said, Take it slow and steady. Just think of it as five 100s. He jostled my shoulder a little. He said, But no stopping, right? He tried to make it sound like a joke.

I curled my toes over the end of the starting block. At the other end of the lane, Erika waved and whistled and shook the counting board and looked very far away. The gun went and I went.

ERIKA WAS THEREat the finish to pull me out by my rubbery arms. She said, You did so great!

My breaths swayed my whole body. Nobody was left in the pool. The guys’ 500 swimmers were already climbing on the blocks. I said, I didn’t do great.

Erika put her arm around me. She said, Were you trying to win the gold?

I said, No.

Erika said, Right. I’m super proud of you. It felt like something a mom would say, but I was too exhausted to argue.

The gun went and the guys took off. Coach was in coach mode, yelling Pull! slamming his hands together. I walked past expecting him not to notice me but he grabbed my elbow and pulled me back. He said, Julie. Nice job out there.

I said, Thanks. I said, I got pretty tired near the end.

He said, Comes with the territory. I followed his gaze out to the pool, where lanes of guy swimmers kept their pace up and tumbled from length seven to eight, from eight to nine. It was nothing tangible, nothing I could notice that made them move like that.

Erika came running over from the scorekeepers’ table. She said, Jules, you got fifth place!

I said, No I didn’t. I’d definitely been the last one in the pool. Unless I’d been so bleary that I’d missed another straggler? The last laps had felt uphill, but not impossible.

Erika explained that one of the Franklin swimmers had gotten disqualified for missing the wall on a flip turn.

I said, So it doesn’t count.

Erika said, It does! You still get a point for fifth place.

I turned to ask Coach, but he was crouched toward the pool, red-faced and lunging, pulling for a swimmer who was going to win.

I said, I don’t care about one point.

MELANIE LIVED INa huge house so far out on Route 43 it might have been Lake Oswego. Erika and I got dropped off with our pillows and sleeping bags. We rang the bell and waited what felt like too long. There was obviously a party already going inside, loud music and lights on in all the downstairs windows. Erika tried the door and the latch was unlocked. I said, We should wait. Erika pushed the door open. We went in and stood in a big foyer with a chandelier. Alexis came in from a doorway without a door. She had a drink in her hand. She said, You made it! and stood there, and then came over and hugged Erika and hugged me. It was an idea of a hug, glancing, us all in the foyer, maybe because she also had to hug Erika, and we were still standing there holding all our things.

The house was huge and new. The carpet smelled new and in the huge living room were a big-screen TV and a very clean fireplace and other girls, mostly but not entirely swimmers. Melanie came in and hugged us and asked, Sea Breeze or screwdriver? The other girls were lying on couches or on the carpet, and they wore sweats and had their hair knotted up in buns and their faces full of makeup. Erika and I stood in the middle of the room in our jeans and no makeup. Erika might have been wearing lip gloss. Melanie brought us drinks in real glasses. She said, to the room, These girls are sophomores. They’re swim team, and Yearbook. She said, And if you remember, Jordan Winter, the best swimmer in the history of Jackson? And super hot? She said, That’s Julie’s brother.

We threw our stuff in the pile in the corner. Grease was playing with the sound low. When a song came on, whoever had the remote would crank the volume. We had to watch the scene where Sandy and Danny rediscover each other at the pep rally three times. It was so embarrassing to watch Sandy’s confused face while Danny played it cool and pretended he didn’t know her. The girls on the carpet thought it was hilarious. I drank my drink. It must have been a Sea Breeze. I had Erika’s bare foot and a bottle of nail polish in my lap. Alexis must have been in the kitchen, helping Melanie with snacks.

A girl, an okay butterflier, dove across a sleeping bag toward me. She said, So Julie? What is your brother doing now? She offered me a Werther’s. She said, I forget, was he in the Olympics?

I took the Werther’s. They were my favorite — warm and sweet and salty. I didn’t care about this girl. I said, He almost made Seoul. He missed qualifying by a few seconds.

The girl said, That must have been so hard. She said, What do you do after something like that?

A girl I didn’t know said, What a good question.

I had Erika’s foot in my lap and I kept painting her big toe a dark plum. It was an ugly color. When I finished I’d find the polish remover and swab it off and start over. I didn’t care that Erika could hear me. I said, He does something with computers. I said, He’s married. He lives in Arizona, of all places. I painted Erika’s toe so evenly and precisely I should have been a pedicurist.

I’d vaguely had to pee since we’d arrived, but I knew there would be only so many times I could escape to the toilet. I let Erika put nail polish on me — the palest, clearest pink — and I let my nails dry, and then I went wandering to find the bathroom. I peed and stood there for a while. I felt towels and sniffed shampoo. It was huge for a bathroom. I wished I could sleep in there.

Alexis was waiting outside the door when I got out. I apologized, embarrassed to have been in there so long, and she took my wrist and said, Come here. She led me down some stairs and through a mudroom to a back door and a slab of patio with deck chairs on it. It was cold out. She sat in one deck chair and I sat in another. She said, I’m sorry about not inviting you guys sooner. I was busy and I spaced it.

I said, It’s okay. The dampness of the concrete seeped through my socks.

She said, You did a great job with the 500 today. I could tell from how she said it that she hadn’t been watching. If I’d let her count laps for me, she would have been.

Alexis said, Listen Julie. I know I’m probably making a bigger deal of it, you’re probably not even thinking about it, but just to be clear. I just wanted to tell you that I can’t do that stuff we did anymore.

I said, Okay.

She said, I mean, I have a boyfriend.

I said, Okay.

She said, You probably will soon, too.

I didn’t feel anything. I’d only been feeling one thing since the moment she had taken my wrist and said, Come here. I was waiting for her to kiss me. We weren’t in her room or my room, or my house or her house. We were on a neutral slab of patio in the suburbs, a stage for anything.

She said, Sorry for making such a big deal about it. She said, I knew you’d understand.

In the living room, the girls were singing Hopelessly Devoted to You at the top of their lungs, swaying and pretending to drop perfumed paper into kiddie pools. Erika was singing, propped up in a nest of sleeping bags. Someone rewound the song to the beginning. Melanie pulled Alexis into a mock swoon against the bookshelf. It was as if Alexis had always been in there singing with them. In the lull at the end of the song, someone said, Did you hear something? No one had heard anything. Then someone else heard something, a pebble at a window, and it was as if it had been planned from the get-go, and maybe it had, as if it were a scene from a movie, at the big picture window that framed the living room was Grapestuff, and another boy, and another. There were masses of boys, clown cars of them, all the boys from swimming and beyond. And all the girls inside, with wet nails, shrieking.