Deep End

BY THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I’M STARTING TO SEE THE LAY OF the academic land.

English composition is not impossible (my professor doesn’t care whether my opinions are valid, only that I argue for them with my whole chest). Psychology, not as wishy-washy as I originally thought (there is a method to the madness of human behavior). Computational biology is a piece of cake (even if Dr. Carlsen’s perennial glower is a little unsettling). And then there’s German. A tentacled, homicidal swamp, infested with sharks and tarantulas and sentient currywurst ready to mangle me.

“Aren’t there tutoring programs for people who are . . . less than gifted when it comes to languages?” Barb asks during our weekly call, after I air out my anti-Germanic propaganda speech for thirty minutes of despair.

“Nothing works with my schedule. I should have booked some help sooner.” Like back in the womb. “But I think I’ll be fine.” I got a two out of ten for the first assignment, and a three for the second. Yay for upward trends.

“I’m sure you will, Scar.” After she left Dad, after the battle royal that won her custody of me, after our lives became ours, Barb moved us to St. Louis, where she rules the division of orthopedic surgery like an autocratic nation-state. Her job is incomprehensibly high-stakes, pays her a semi-sickening amount of money, and keeps her so shockingly busy, one of my middle school teachers suspected I was a runaway secretly living on my own.

She is, without question, the reason I want to be a physician. A bit of a cliché, I know, but it didn’t come completely out of left field. I’ve always gravitated toward science, but it wasn’t until I started doing my homework in Barb’s office that I realized how admirable her work is. How she makes a difference. The breadth of her knowledge and the depth of her care.

“Why can’t Dr. Madden or Dr. Davis take care of your patient?” I once whined when she said she wouldn’t be able to come to my meet.

“Because”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“Dr. Madden is an assho—an anus, and Dr. Davis is so spectacularly incompetent, I’m never sure whether he’s rooting for the patient or the disease. Mrs. Reyes has been in pain for a long time. She deserves to be treated by someone who’s not mediocre and will take her seriously. Would you agree?”

I was fourteen at the time, but it made perfect sense. Not only was I proud of how incredibly badass Barb was, but I wanted nothing more than to be a non-mediocre physician who’d take people seriously.

And now, here I am. Daydreaming of liver failure to escape the MCAT.

“By the way,” Barb tells me, “I met Coach Kumar the other day.”

I flinch. He’s my high school coach. “How is he?”

“Good. He sends his love. Asked me about you.”

“And you lied and told him that I’m a twelve-time NCAA champion and Olympic hopeful?”

“I considered that, but then I remembered that there are public records of this stuff. Like, online. A Google search away.”

I sigh. “Is he mortified? Am I bestowing dishonor upon my old club?”

“What? No. You’re not a white-collar defense attorney on the Sacklers’ payroll, Scarlett. You had a bad injury. Everyone’s rooting for you.”

I cannot wait to disappoint them once again. “How’s the love of my life?”

“Currently occupied with her prescheduled junk licking.”

“Important business.”

“Hang on, I think she wants to talk to you.”

Pipsqueak, the husky-pug mix who was once up on Facebook Marketplace because of “a bad temperament” (falsehoods, slander) and “an unbreakable scooting habit” (yet to be broken), howls her love for me and tries to lick my face over Barb’s phone. I baby-talk at her for fifteen minutes, then leave for practice.

It’s preseason, which means conditioning. Skill refinement. Takeoffs, entries, body positions, rotations, corrections—hours in the gym, the diving well, the weight room, and then more hours at home, in class, in bed, the nagging worry that all this training won’t be enough poking at the back of my skull.

I’m a good athlete. I’ve TiVoed my dives enough times to know that. My body is strong and healthy at last. My mind . . .

My mind hates me, sometimes. Especially when I’m on a platform, ten meters above the rest of my life.

Because ten meters is high, but people don’t realize how high until it takes them over fifty steps to climb a tower. They reach the top, look down, and suddenly get that queasy feeling in their stomach. It’s a three-story building. A whole McMansion, stretching between you and the water. Lots of things can happen in ten meters—including a body accelerating to thirty miles per hour, and the water becoming as difficult to crack as the universe’s hardest eggshell.

On the platform, punishments are swift and merciless. Room for error, nonexistent. A bad dive is not just ungainly and humiliating—a bad dive is the end of an athlete’s career. A bad dive is the last dive.

“The pool closes at eight, but take your time, Vandy,” Coach Sima yells up at me.

I smile, palms flush against the coarse edge, and slowly lift my legs in a headstand. My shoulders, core, thighs, they all ache in that good, clenched way that means control. I linger there, a perfect straight line, just to prove to myself that I’m capable of it. I have what it takes. It’s a relief, seeing the world resized. Liberating how insignificant everyone else looks from here, small and irrelevant.

“No hurry at all! I’m not bored out of my mind here!”

I huff and let the rest of the dive flow out of me: pike. Half twist. A somersault. Another. I enter the water with just a handful of bubbles. When I resurface, Coach is crouching poolside. “Vandy.”

I lift myself on the edge, clutching my shoulder. Doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t bleed. Still intact. “Yeah?”

“That is NCAA material there.”

I squeeze water out of my braid.

“Problem is—that’s not the dive I asked you to do.”

I look around. Where did I throw my shammy?

“Vandy. Look at me.”

I do. I have to.

“You can keep doing your emotional support dives, yes. But we have other issues we need to be focusing on.” He taps the spot between my eyes with his knuckles, like he’s inspecting coconuts at the grocery store. “You have to work on what’s in here.”

“I know.”

“Then do as I say, and don’t change the damn dive when you’re up there.” He sighs and shakes his head. “It’s okay, kid. We got time. Go get changed. Y’all are coming over tonight.” The cookout. Yearly team-building tradition. He winks at me, crow’s feet multiplying by a factor of ten. “Ain’t no party like a Coach Sima party.”

Tragically true. Because a Coach Sima party is compulsory.

I head for the locker room, sparing one last glance at the forward tuck the twins are practicing together on the springboard. I used to do synchronized diving, too, back in St. Louis, but there’s only five of us in the Stanford team, which makes me the odd girl out. Bella and Bree compete together (two athletes who simultaneously perform the exact same dive and look identical? Judges eat that shit up). Pen and Victoria have been partners for three years, and have a good thing going on. Maybe next year a new recruit will pair up with me. Or maybe I’ll die alone in a vale of tears, clutching German present perfect flash cards. Who can say?

I catch a ride to the Simas’ with Victoria, who spends it updating me on a recently confirmed human case of the bubonic plague. We’re the last to get there, and the only two losers to show up without a plus-one. “Love this taste of what my Thanksgivings are gonna be like for the next fifty years,” she grumbles, pasting a smile on her face and reaching out to hug Mrs. Sima.

I chat with Leo, Coach’s thirteen-year-old son, who’s about as awkward as I am, until he pretends to remember outstanding homework and ducks back into the house. Then I go in search of something to drink—and run into a wall.

And by wall I mean, Lukas Blomqvist.

When it comes to DI college swimmers, he’s not too much of a standout. Most of them are tall. Most of them are muscular. Lots of them are handsome. His proportions—broad shoulders, long arms and torso, huge hands and feet—are basically an instructional drawing. That is to say: it’s not because of his looks that my thoughts swerve to a halt.

“Sorry.” I am physically unable to produce a smile. Temporary cranial nerve VII paresis. It’s okay, though, because he doesn’t smile, either.

His eyes pin me in place. “No problem.”

He has a nice voice, deep and resonant. Familiar, but only vaguely, like an ad in the middle of a podcast: heard it before, but tuned it out. Must be a by-product of his orbiting the periphery of my life for the past two years, since the pool where the swimmers train is across from the diving well.

“Where did you get that?” I point at a sports drink that looks oddly kid-sized in his hand. He gestures with his chin to a cooler that I could have easily located on my own. If only I wasn’t an idiot. “Right. Thanks.”

Lukas nods, only once. I wonder if he came with Pen, if they ended up solving their issues, but she’s nowhere in sight. He and I are, kind of hilariously, both wearing jeans and the same gray Stanford Swimming and Diving tees—except, he’s barefoot. Why is he barefoot in my coach’s backyard? Also, why is he staring at me? Why am I staring back?

I can’t tear my gaze away, and I think it’s because of his eyes. They’re studious. Focused. Dialed in. Preternaturally blue. Somewhere in the Baltic Sea, a cod splashes through a patch of water that precise color, and—

Did Pen tell him about me? Did Pen tell him that she told me about him? Is that why Lukas looks so . . . I don’t know. Curious? Absorbed? Something.

“What were you saying about the Swedish Open, dear?” Mrs. Sima asks. Lukas turns back to her, and I realize that I crashed right in the middle of their conversation. Or, most likely, her interrogation of Lukas. I’ve been on the receiving end of a few of those through the years, and they’re no picnic. “When is that happening?”

“Next year. The week after the NCAAs.”

“Oh my goodness. And you’ll need to attend to qualify for the Melbourne Olympics, right?”

“Not after the world championship.” He has an accent, in that faint, northern European way. I’m not even sure what letters it coats, but I occasionally pick up on it.

“Right, earlier this year. And you won that, so you’re officially going to Australia next year?”

He nods, indifferent, like being an Olympian is not a big deal. His face is . . . that jaw has me thinking of diving cliffs, and the cleft in his chin—textbook movie-star shit. He could be Captain America.

Captain Sweden. Whatever.

“That is fantastic, dear. Now, here’s hoping that Penelope qualifies, too. She was bronze at the Pan Am games last summer, but with so many mistakes.” Typical Mrs. Sima jab. She loves to imply that the diving team is an untalented bunch, chronically unworthy of her husband’s coaching skills. I’d challenge her on this, but when it comes to me, I’m not sure she’s wrong.

Lukas, thankfully, has no such qualms. “She was still recovering from injury.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course.” A nervous laugh. “Well, still. You won all your races, didn’t you?”

His reply is a noncommittal grunt.

“I bet your mother’s so proud of you.”

No reply at all, but the ink on Lukas’s skin shifts, like he’s flexing his muscles. Maybe his relationship with his mom is as lovely and uncontentious as mine with Dad?

“Will she be in Melbourne, too?”

Lukas’s face could be a megalith on Easter Island.

“I bet she cannot wait to cheer you on.”

Sudden twitch in his jaw, like he’s a single question away from a rampage. Come on, Mrs. Sima. Read the Swede.

“If it was one of my children, I would take my whole extended family—”

“By the way, Lukas,” I interrupt, “Pen was looking for you a minute ago.”

His eyes fix mine. “Was she.” He’s not really asking. He knows it’s a lie.

“Yup.” Fly, little bird. Be free.

“Excuse me,” he says in the general direction of Mrs. Sima. I help myself to some coconut milk, but when I glance to make sure he escaped safely, his attention is once again on me, and—

Maybe Pen did tell him about me, and that’s why he’s so interested. Does he want to chat with me? Vent? Find someone who’ll sympathize? Does he want a heart-to-heart, kinkster to kinkster?

Maybe I should become a couples counselor. Nice alternative to med school. They might waive the foreign language requirement.

“First batch is ready,” Coach yells from the grilling area. “Everyone, help yourself!”

I eat my chicken burger slowly, quietly, while conversations flow. Pen sits in front of me, the center of attention, dispensing funny stories and warm feelings. Lukas is next to her, arms crossed on his chest, saying little, smiling rarely. He seems like a quiet, reserved guy. Together they are viciously, comprehension-defyingly good-looking. I don’t consider myself ugly by any means, but I had my years of braces and constant breakouts, which are not too far off. These two were clearly never less than radiant. Hard to stomach, really.

For the first time, everyone on the team is over twenty-one. Coach hands out his home brew, muttering something about how this better be our last sip of alcohol for the season. I picture him stirring and fermenting in the same bathtub where Leo discovered masturbation, and give it a pass. Lukas and Victoria, who both drove here, stop after the first bottle. The twins have two each, and comment on how much stronger than regular beer they are. Pen . . . I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t, either. Her laugh is a little loud, but she’s still her charming self.

After dinner I move to the patio with Bree, Bella, Devin, and Dale, where I struggle not to show how mind-boggled I am that two monozygotic twins are dating another set of monozygotic twins.

Was this preplanned? How did they meet? Did one couple find true love, then force the other into a relationship? Is kinky stuff involved? And, why am I so goddamn curious about other people’s private lives? Bold of someone who enjoys being tied up like a mesh bag full of limes. It’s a big relief when Pen wobbles over to “steal Vandy for a sec” and whispers at me, “Kinda weird, right? Twins dating twins?”

“I was thinking the exact same, and felt so bad about it.”

“I know, me too.”

“It’s inappropriate that this even occurred to me, but if each couple has a kid—”

“They’d be fraternal brothers!”

“Oh my god, yes!”

We high-five like we cracked the human genome and end up in the back of the house, toward a set of swings Coach must have installed when his kids were little.

“Is everything okay?” I ask when we sit. I rock a little, testing the sturdiness of this setup.

“Yup.” She giggles. Her eyes are glassy. “Except that Coach’s toilet beer is hitting me hard. I just needed a bit of quiet. You looked like you might, too.”

When do I not? “Want me to find Lukas and ask him to take you home?”

“God, that’s a great idea.” I make to stand, but she stops me. Taps at her phone. “I’ll just text him. He only came because I’d already told Coach that he would, anyway.”

“Oh. Did you two end up . . .”

“Breaking up? Yup. I’m free as a bird.” Her words slur, just a bit. She doesn’t look particularly happy.

“Do you want to, um, talk about it?” I’m not sure I’m equipped for it, but the idea of Pen wanting to confide in me is a warm, pleasant weight in my chest. Between my injury and my inability to stop working until I achieve perfection (i.e., never), I haven’t made many friends in college. Or before.

“Do I?” A shaky, forced laugh. Then her gaze fixes somewhere beyond me and she repeats, louder, “Do I?”

I turn around. Lukas is walking toward us, and my first thought is he didn’t need to come here. I was going to deliver Pen to him. In front of his car.

But his barefoot stride never falters. The sun is a fuzzy halo around his short hair when he asks, “Should I drive you home?”

Pen regards him lovingly for a long, sluggish while—so long, I start wondering whether she’s much drunker than I originally believed. “Vandy, you’ve never formally met my ex-boyfriend, have you?”

And there is my second thought: this is clearly a messy breakup, a sore one that’s still being negotiated. And I want no part in it.

“She did.” Lukas’s impassible gaze flits to mine. “During her recruitment trip.”

No memory of it, but I nod anyway, glad I didn’t stand to shake his hand.

“Oh, that’s cool.” She shrugs. “Yeah, Luk, you can take me ho—”

Pen stops suddenly, with a gasp that turns into a smile so manic, unease slithers down my nape. “Oh my god, you guys. I just had the best idea in the fucking universe!” She glances at Lukas, at me, at Lukas again. She’s going to bring up something ridiculous that only sounds good to a drunk person. Let’s go to Taco Bell. Let’s prank call our middle school teachers. Let’s shave our eyebrows. I’m desperately looking for a gentle way to talk her out of karaoke—and then stop.

Because what Pen actually says is, “You two should have sex!”