Chapter 3

Nao didn’t speak to me for the rest of the school year. She would occasionally shoot contemptuous glances at me across the pool. I would try not to let her catch me watching her. When she wasn’t shooting telepathic daggers of ice towards me, she was warm and bubbly towards others. It made her obvious dislike of me that much harder to take.

I admired her from afar. I loved the way she tilted her head and folded her right arm across her body to hold her left shoulder whilst she concentrated on whatever the coaching staff were saying. I loved the way she shook her hair out after she removed her swimming cap. I loved the way her eyes would crinkle when she smiled. I loved watching her laugh, and it caused me strange pangs of jealousy whenever she laughed at something one of the other guys would say. I wished it was me saying those things, but any time I even got close to talking to her, she would enter another conversation or find some reason to move away.

The word through the team grapevine was that Nao was still pissed at me. She took her swimming very seriously; she’d moved a lot due to her father’s work and, outside of family, competitive swimming was the one constant she’d had, given that she’d had to regularly change friends and move towns. In her eyes, I had made fun of her and been dismissive of the one thing she felt at most at ease with. And what was even worse, I had implied that girls weren’t or couldn’t be good swimmers; a dangerous assertion to make to a strong young woman who lived in the water. I doubted she’d spit on me if I was on fire. She probably would have poured petrol on the flames and invited everyone to piss on the ashes.

During the summer break I didn’t see Nao at all. I heard that she’d gone to Japan with her mother to visit family. Even though we were officially on vacation, and the coaching staff were as well, most of the squad used to come to use the gym, to swim laps during the open training sessions at the pool in order to stay in condition or just to hang out at the pool since it was our turf. I passed the summer days at the campus pool, working on my technique and lap pacing, and spent the rest of the time hanging out with other members of the swim team at the beach or the houses of friends who were lucky or well-off enough to have pools. We used to laugh at the goons who would start hitting the gym at the end of winter to get ‘beach ready’. Swimmers were ready to go three-hundred-sixty-five days a year!

Whilst I was infatuated with Nao, I was still a teenage boy. Hours spent poolside or at the beach certainly made for pleasant viewing and given that I had worked hard to earn a swimmer’s physique, I certainly got my fair share of female attention in return. There was even a memorable episode with someone’s cousin during a party at Derek’s house. Derek’s parents were pretty cool, so they would let him hold a blow-out once or twice during the vacation break. They’d been taking Derek to swim meets since he was seven, so they knew everybody in the team. Hell, they knew most of the swimmers our age in the state by now. No-one went too crazy; Coach had made it clear that illicit drug use or getting arrested were a one-way ticket off the squad, but there was a certain amount of alcohol consumption that went on at Derek’s parties.

It was the final party of the summer. We’d been going at it since late-afternoon when the sun had gone down enough to be comfortable. As was usual with a Derek-party, most of the members of the squad were in attendance with various friends and admirers, including the seniors. A three-to-four-year difference in high school feels like a world of difference to most teenagers but when you’ve been drilled on burpees until you’ve puked together, there’s not much difference between a senior and a freshman. Especially when there can be less than a second between your finishing times. Derek’s parents had put on the obligatory BBQ, but we’d feasted on grilled chicken in place of the regular greasy burgers and mystery-meat dogs.

Derek and his dad had stretched a rope across the middle of their big inground saltwater pool as a makeshift net and that had consumed a good number of hours as we splashed around playing water volleyball. We’d played all-in together, then girls vs boys. Of course, with many of the boys having the height advantage, the girls decided that they would have to double-up on each other’s shoulders to compensate. That led to someone suggesting a game where girls were on guy’s shoulders and that’s when I met Zoë.

I should explain something: I had made out with girls before, even gotten to second base (under the shirt, over the bra) at one point. I wasn’t a prude, but I also carried a warning bell in the back of my head from my first year of junior high when two seniors on the swim team had left in less than salubrious circumstances. The girl had begun ‘showing’ through her swimsuit and had to leave the team. The guy responsible had to leave school to get a job in order to satisfy her shotgun-toting father. There’d been a sudden freezing of mutual interest between guys and girls that had lasted months, and (we’d heard) a rush of girls to the student health office for birth control. I’d vowed then (right before my hormones had really kicked in) that it would never happen to me. The cautionary tale had worked for everyone in the swimming circles I moved in as well, so due to the girls’ own sense of self-preservation I was never given the opportunity to make a stupid decision.

However, Zoë wasn’t from the swimming circles. She was someone’s cousin, a cute junior from New Zealand who was visiting family for the summer. She was about half a foot shorter than me, petite but with a large bosom for such a short girl. She had strategically wrapped it in a sunshine yellow bikini which had strings holding the back and sides together, a risqué choice around boys who had included flicking bra straps in their repertoire of flirting up until recently. The yellow bikini contrasted nicely with her ash blonde hair and green eyes. When people had been pairing up to play shoulders-on volleyball, I had felt a tap on my shoulder.