Chapter 2: Someone Else’s Swimsuit

By early afternoon the crying had thinned into the raw, tired version that sits behind your eyes and waits. Carrie decided water would help, and she was not wrong. Grief can be sticky, and chlorine at least gives it a different smell.

“Pool,” she said. “You are not spending the first day of break rehearsing his speech in my kitchen.”

“I did not bring a suit.”

“I have suits.”

That was true in the technical sense. Carrie had suits built for a body that she liked to show off in the sunlight. I had a body that had only recently arrived in a smaller version of itself and still flinched when fabric got too small and exposed too much. I had just started wearing two-piece suits, and they were the full-coverage kind. The one she handed me was dark, small, and overly optimistic about how much skin it was supposed to show. The bottoms covered my ass like they were a mere suggestion, and the fabric diminished rapidly as the suit traveled down my cheeks. When I pulled them on in her bathroom and turned around, I saw more of my own ass than I had ever signed up to show another human being on purpose.

“Absolutely not,” I said through the door.

“Come out.”

I came out wrapped in a towel like a hostage. Carrie tugged the towel down, looked, and made the face she made when she thought I was being dramatic about something that, in her opinion, was a win.