Deep End

HE LEFT A MARK ON ME.

Several, in fact.

The largest, the one I believe was intentional—but how can I know for certain?—is on my inner thigh, close to the place where the leg meets the abdomen. It aches and hums just below my skin, a slight discomfort that reminds and promises, and I spend my Sunday alternating between studying and pressing into it, just to reassure myself that yes, yes it happened.

The other marks I don’t find until Monday after practice. Peeling off my suit in a corner that’s reflected by the mirror reveals thumb-sized bruises on both sides of my waistline, angled toward my spine. They look perfectly symmetrical. A depraved twist on angel wings. I do not remember pain. I do, however, remember Lukas gripping my waist and holding me still as he—

Why has he not contacted me?

“Everything okay?” Bree asks. “You seem distracted.”

“Oh, yeah. I just have a test this week.”

“For what?”

“Psych.”

“Oh, right. Let me tell you what my questions were like last year.”

Pen is out, sick with some virus that’s been making her “puke my soul out,” which means that it’s just me and the twins—which means, in turn, lots of one-on-one time with Coach Sima, corrections, dryland.

“How are your exercises going, Scarlett?” Sam asks on Wednesday.

“Honestly, I think they’re helping,” I say. Not honestly.

Because I may have been rewriting neural pathways, but I’m no closer to inward diving, and that’s . . . pretty fucking crucial. “Do you think . . . is there any chance that I’ll just be able to, you know, do my dives at our first dual meet?”

She cocks her head. “What’s a dual meet?”

“When two universities compete against each other, during the preseason. It’s informal, but good practice.”

“And when is yours?”

“Two weekends from now.”

“I see.”

“Maybe what I really need to get over my block is to be put on the spot?” I swallow. “Maybe if I just have to do it, my brain will bypass the fear . . .”

She just looks—not dismissive, but measuring. “Fear of what, Scarlett? You have not answered my question.”

What are you afraid of?

I curb the urge to roll my eyes. This—this needling psychoanalytic digging—is not helping. I need to be able to do an inward dive in ten days, I nearly scream. Can we focus on that?

On the upside, I get a whole-ass seven out of ten on my next German assignment—Ich bin so stolz auf dich, Scharlach! Herr Karl-Heinz writes. It requires some googling to figure out that he’s proud of me, but once I do I’m a bit teary-eyed. I do my conditioning. I call Barb and ask her to put Pipsqueak on the phone. I bring Pen a batch of homemade soup, watch comfort rom-coms with her, and hug her when she comes back on Friday, looking pale but whole. I restart my med school essays. I fight with Maryam, eat plenty of lean proteins, and by the following weekend, when it looks like the bruises Lukas left behind might fade, I press hard into them, biting my tongue, hoping the trick will make them last.

I always wear one-pieces for training, mostly out of an irrational terror that a bikini top will come off. I could keep these marks forever, and no one would see. Not even Lukas, because as it becomes obvious by Friday, he has no interest in further contact with me.

I text him once more over the weekend, short and to the point (Let me know if you’d like to meet this weekend) and the reply I receive is: I will.

That’s it.

He has dropped the (perfectly processed) input dataset on Dr. Smith’s server for me, and I find out only because Zach emails me. All signs point to Leave me the fuck alone, Scarlett.

I guess I have failed at sex. It’s nothing new (my first blow job to Josh ended with us debating whether I should drive him to the ER). Tragically, this time I failed at the kind of sex I hoped to be good at.

Since I’m also failing, ranging from moderately to spectacularly, at diving, school, applying to med school, and hanging out with my dog as much as I’d like, I should be used to it—but I have failed at that, too. After Saturday practice I let out a half-miserable, half-amused laugh into the jet of the shower. It gets me puzzled looks from two freshman swimmers, and I summon my most nothing to see here smile.

I used to define myself by how well I could perform. I used to flail myself alive when I got less than nines for my dives, or wasn’t first in my class. Now, I’d just like to not crash and burn.

It doesn’t help that I see Lukas around all the time—a painful reminder that I should be . . . different. Because Lukas is not dead, not kidnapped, not too swamped. I catch sight of him around Avery. In the dining hall with Johan and other people I don’t recognize. In the weight room as he hands Pen his water bottle, busy with a thick, low conversation that ends in laughter. Part of me wants to feel the rage of having been used and discarded and bedpost-notched, but it doesn’t add up. Lukas is not the kind of asshole who’d leave me on read out of boredom.

I could confront him. But I don’t, and it stems from more than my well-cultivated conflict avoidance. Stuff like what we did—the potential to hurt the other person goes both ways. Boundaries are important. So I quietly step out of Lukas’s way whenever it looks like we might be thrown together. It works so well, I have to wonder if he’s doing the same.

By Sunday night, I’m knee-deep in the cognitive restructuring of what happened: a Manna-like, onetime event that confirmed something about myself. I’d been wondering if I’d like the real thing as much as the fantasies of it, and . . . it was the best sex of my life, and it did what I hoped it would: Gathered my scattered thoughts. Stilled me. Quieted my mind for a few hours.

It doesn’t make Lukas’s rejection less painful, but it’s at least worth it. He’s probably pining after Pen, anyway, I tell myself. It was never going to be anything serious. I do my best to shrug it off and re-download my old dating apps, as well as a couple more sex-forward ones.

“Want me to start with the good news or the bad?” Coach Sima asks Pen and me on Monday, at synchro practice.

My “Bad,” fully overlaps with Pen’s “Good.” We burst into laughter.

“Glad to see y’all are having a jolly time, since your dives clearly are not.”

Pen fights a smile. I pretend to look for my shammy.

“Today’s practice wasn’t as bad as last week’s.” Coach wags his finger in our direction. “But it better be heaps worse than the next.”

Pen bats her eyes. “No need to spare our feelings, Coach.”

“Hush. You”—he points at Pen—“splashed like the fountain on Trevi, and your arm circle looked like a parallelogram, and”—he turns to me—“you came out of that pike position way too late, and did you hear that tutum?”

“Do the synchro judges even listen for that?”

“Are you serious? The judges’ only purpose on this overheated rock of a planet is to take points off for the inanest reason. You think, Oh, our hurdles didn’t match but we caught up in the air, they won’t mind.” His impression of me is high-pitched and a little breathy. Do I sound like that? “They are drooling for every little point-ducking splatter.”

“Doesn’t sound paranoid at all,” Pen mutters, which earns her a tundra-blazing glare.

“Wanna try the backward pike again?” I ask her.

“I tell you what to do next,” Coach grunts. “Go try that backward pike again.”

Pen and I exchange a grin. It’s fun, bearing together the brunt of Coach Sima’s grumpiness. “I’m going to try to get my hurdle a bit higher,” I tell her, walking by her side.

“Can you?”

“Honestly, changing the fulcrum—”

“Actually,” Coach yells after us. “Since your dives are hopeless, you may as well come back here.”

We turn, and my heart trips in my chest.

Coach is pointing at Victoria, who stands next to him and glances around wide-eyed, as though while she was gone the pool went through a full remodeling.

On her foot, I spot a cast.

My first instinct is to run to her for a hug, but I stop myself because I’m wet—and because we never really did that before her injury. Do I even have the right?

I quickly glance at Pen. I know they’ve been in contact the entire time, but she seems surprised to see her here. “Vic!” She smiles, dragging me back. She forces Victoria into something that looks like a choke hold, clearly aiming for maximum dripping on her dry clothes. When she pulls away, Victoria is staring at me, a small smile on her lips.

“So, you stole my spot.”

My heart sinks, but I point at Coach. “Please, direct your complaints to HR.”

She motions me closer like she really, truly wants a hug, and . . .

“I’m so happy you’re here,” I whisper in her ear. I wish to go back to before she got hurt. A simpler, more balanced time.

“Me, too, Vandy.” We move back at the same time. She glances between Pen and me, sighs dramatically, and says, “You two really suck at synchro.”

I flinch.

“Ouch,” Pen says.

“Here’s the deal. I’m never going to dive competitively again, synchro or individual. And it’s fucking horrible. And I’ve spent the last two weeks sobbing into the Get Well Soon hedgehog stuffie my cousin Cece sent me. But.”

I cock my head.

“The magnitude of which you both suck is larger than I ever suspected, and it’s my civic duty to reduce it. And there is an open volunteer coach position . . .”

I’m nodding desperately.

Next to me, Pen seems to be tearing up. “God, please. Save us from ourselves.”

“Then it’s settled. I mean—” She shrugs. “It’s not like you could have said no after a fucking three-centimeter gap between crash mats ravaged my lifelong hopes and dreams.” Victoria widens her arms, and Pen and I walk into what could very well be the first three-way hug of my life. “And hey,” she mumbles into my hair—or Pen’s. “Maybe I’ll get a Nobel Prize or something, if I help create the world in which you two suck a bit less.”