Goldfish (10 page)

“Laverne! That's a terrible thing to say!” exclaims Mom.

We both look at her and try to work out which part she means.

“No, Mom, it's true,” I say. “Now that Hannah's gone, I don't have anyone to hang out with.”

“Which is not her fault,” Lav informs Mom.

“It is a
little
,” I say gloomily.

“Why don't you ‘hang out' with each other?” Mom asks.

We look at her as if she's suggested we grow tails.

“Anyway, it's because you always had Hannah,” Lav continues. “You didn't know she'd just disappear one day to Swim Team School.”

“High Performance Training Camp,” I correct her, but quietly.

“And school is stupid.” She looks very adult all of a sudden. “You know who your school friends are?”

“Invisible Girl and Nonexistent Boy.”

She ignores this. “They're people who
happen
to be your age who
happen
to live near you. So you end up in the same class, and that's who you've got to choose from. Just sit tight a few more years, and then there's a whole world out there of people you'll like more.”

We all sit and digest that.

“Well,” says Mom, “Lou has a job and Laverne's become a philosopher.” She looks at Dad and shrugs. “I guess our work is done. I don't know about you, but I'm going to hang around outside Mickey D's and take selfies.”

“Nice for some,” says Dad, getting up from the table. “I've got to get my nails done for prom and I have literally
nothing
to wear!”

Lav and I roll our eyes. They think they're so funny.

“I don't take selfies,” I inform them sniffily.

“Yes,” says Lav, not really helping, “and I don't wear acrylics. They're so bad for your natural nails.”

 

chapter 14

Lou

Guys, click on the link, could we do this move?

Pete

I could.

Roman

We could if we had gills. Seriously, Lou?

Lou

Sorry, sorry, just a thought.

Pete

Are you having trouble with the routine?

Lou

No!! Course not, no. LOL.

Gabe

Hey guys, what did I miss? I was washing my gills.

Lou

Ha ha.

Gabe

Don't make fun of my gills.

Roman creates a WhatsApp group for me, him, Pete, and Gabe. When it first popped up on my phone, I was sitting in the cafeteria by myself and I went bright red. Cammie would kill to be WhatsApping Pete and Roman every day. If only she
knew.
Ha!

I hug my smugness to myself, wishing everyone knew.

I watch her, holding court at her table of girls, her shiny ponytail swooshing with every overdramatic gesture. She feels me looking at her and turns her head to fix me with a challenging stare. She mouths at me: “Stop staring at me, you lesbian.”

I go red again and return to being
very
interested in my lunch.
Aha, Ms. Bread Roll, we meet again
.

Forget Cammie. I still feel smug. Though less smug when Roman and Gabe walk past and completely and utterly ignore me. I look up at them with a friendly smile that I turn into a cough, then a grimace, and finally some choking on bread.

So I sort of have friends, but they're secret friends, too ashamed to acknowledge me in public. Cool, cool, that's cool.

It's a tricky week. I spend every lunchtime and evening Googling synchronized swimming, but it all looks so boring. I wonder what Debs's team is doing, but I know there's no way I can spy on them. Cammie seems to have a Lou-radar. I spend most of my time trying, and failing, to be ignored by her.

Every time I finish on the school computer, I dump my cache. The last thing I need is to be outed as some sort of synchronized swimming obsessive. During lessons I doodle ideas in my notebook and try to think like Hannah—constant optimism! Maybe underwater synchronized swimming is a Thing. It's just a new Thing.

New things always look weird to begin with. Imagine being the first monkey who grew a thumb. No one realized how useful that was going to be. They probably all ran around yelling, “Look at Clive's hand! It's icky, hit it with a rock!” Thousands of years later, we're texting with it and Clive has the last laugh.

By the end of the week I'm so obsessed with synchronized swimming routines that at dinner I stick six green beans in a pile of mashed potatoes and imagine they're legs. I'm up all night with my phone in my mouth, using it as a flashlight so I can see my notebook as I scribble in it. Lav has made several two a.m. death threats, but I argue, quite reasonably, that now I'm frightened to turn the light off in case she sneaks up on me.

I don't have time to juggle everything, and I find I'm having this conversation a lot:

“Louise, where is your homework?”

“Ah … is it not in the pile on your desk?”

“No, because you didn't put it on my desk, so if it were on my desk, that would be spooky, wouldn't it?”

“Ha ha ha ha ha, that's funny, Mr. P. Great stuff.”

“Louise?”

“Hello, yes?”

“GIVE. ME. YOUR. HOMEWORK.”

Teachers always used to give me extra time to do my homework because, between training and traveling to competitions, I only had my morning breaks to scribble out something. Now I'm working even harder, but because it's secret, I have to do my homework too!

Not to sound like a Classic Teenager here, but seriously,
so
unfair. Fascists.

And I
am
trying. I hate being the densest person in my class. I stick my hand up for every question (I mainly get them wrong, but hey, good arm exercise, right?) and take tons of notes in class, even if my books are covered in long jagged scrawls from where I fall asleep midword.

A week after our first training session, I meet the boys for another one after school. They all seem pretty excited. Even Pete's eyes light up as I pull my big notebook out of my backpack, open it carefully, and hold it up for them to admire.

In places I've had to tape extra pages onto it to make a bigger canvas for my designs. I feel like a mad scientist unveiling some freakish experiment—“
Behold!
I have bent the laws of Nature to my own demonic will!” (
Maniacal cackling.
)

The boys stare at it in silence. I feel my smile falter. Do they not like it? Maybe it's not ambitious enough. Did I draw Gabriel too small? I should've just put
G
,
P
, and
R
on their heads.

Roman looks at me, opens his mouth, frowns, and closes it again. He goes back to scrutinizing the notepad.

“Lou,” Pete says with typical grace and politeness, “what the f—?”

“It's amazing!” Gabriel jumps in loudly.

“Thanks.” I beam at him.

“It's just … what is it?”

Really? I thought it was perfectly obvious. I take them through it patiently.

“Here's the three of you—”

“Am I the one with the big ears?” Pete interrupts.

“Yes.”

“And I'm the little one?” Gabe says.

Definitely should've just put
G
,
R
and
P
over stick figures.

“Um, yes. Now this is the three of you doing a twist dive in from the side, then barreling down to the bottom, where you form a circle.”

“Form a circle how?” asks Roman.

“Hold your ankles! Now,
here's
where it gets a tad tricky.…” I'm engrossed in my diagrams and only look up when I realize they're not crowding around my notebook. They're all bent double.

“Are you … ill?” I ask.

“I can't touch my toes!” gasps Gabe.

“Yours are a lot closer than mine, man,” pants Pete.

Roman straightens up. “We can't touch our toes,” he asserts, as if it's
my
fault.

“Really?”

“Well, touch yours, then,” Pete challenges me.

I bend, wrap my fingers around my toes, and stand up. Honestly, call themselves dancers?

“Don't worry.” I say. “Bodies are bendier in water.”

“Are they?” Of course it's Pete who challenges me. I blow my whistle at him.

“Yes.” (I have no idea.) “Everyone in the water and let's try it out!”

They line up along the edge of the pool, looking dubious. I stand on a bench and demonstrate a twist dive as best I can. They all nod.

“Three … two … one … DIVE!”

Let me say right here and now: I thought they could do this routine.

I swear I wasn't trying to make them look stupid, as Pete suggests through a bloody tissue. (Roman kicked him in the face and caused a nosebleed.) I wasn't trying to kill anyone either, though I accept, if that had been my aim, I'd have been pretty happy with how the evening went.

But I'm not happy with it; I'm quietly devastated. I sit on a bench at the side of the pool as Pete lists the many reasons he wants this week's twenty quid back. He twists a tissue up his nose to leave both hands free for gesticulating. My stupidity demands a lot of hand gestures, apparently.

I bow my head and mutter “Sorry” every time Pete pauses for breath.

“All right, that's enough.” I didn't notice Roman come back from the bathroom. He's finished throwing up now, after Gabe accidentally head-butted him in the stomach.

Gabe isn't unharmed either. I hadn't really factored in enough places to breathe, so he got dizzy and had to be fished out of the pool.

There's a silence, and I seize the opportunity. “I thought you were better swimmers!”

Three pairs of eyes swivel toward me. The mood isn't friendly.

“OK. I didn't mean it like I'm blaming you. I honestly thought it would be good. I'm really sorry.”

My voice cracks and trails off. I feel a tear slip down my cheek.

“I can come up with an easier routine! I mean better one. A
better
one.” I'm begging them now. No one is looking at me, not even Gabe. I pick up my backpack and head for the door.

I walk slowly, giving them time to calm down and stop bleeding and retching long enough to say it's OK and let's try again.

When I finally reach the door,
still
no one has said, “Come back, Lou! Sorry we're lame swimmers! This is all our fault now that we think about it, but please could you give us an easier routine for our feeble abilities?”

First Debs, now them. People are hard-hearted around here.

I sit on the grass for twenty minutes waiting for Dad. The boys don't come out in that time, which is a shame because I sat on the ground to look pathetic and sad.

Dad's car pulls into the parking lot and I stagger stiffly to my feet, brushing wet grass off my butt. I get in the passenger seat.

“Daaaad.”

He turns a worried face to me. “What?”

“I think I got
fired
.”

He lights up with sympathy. “It sucks, doesn't it?”

“It sucks so much!”

“You feel really embarrassed but angry too.”

“Right! I
know
.…”

“And the surprise, that makes it worse.”

“Totally does.”

We bond all the way home about being treated badly. We agree that we are the most unappreciated, brave people we know. We pull into the driveway. Dad turns off the car and sits, looking like he's thinking carefully about his next words.

“When you get
dumped
dumped,” he says slowly, “it's even worse because they may well have seen you naked.”

“That would be so much worse!”

“Yes, it is. If someone rejects you who has seen your butt, it's extra hurtful.”

“I'm never going to take my clothes off in front of
anyone
,” I say emphatically.

We get out of the car.

“Wait, Dad, was
that
the sex talk? It was a little brief.”

“It was efficient! In ten seconds I turned one of my girls into a nun.”

“Ha. Good luck with the other one.”

 

chapter 15

You got dumped?! Weez, you're having real Boy Trouble now. Are you honestly never going to take your clothes off in front of anyone? I guess you won't have to buy matching underwear so there's a saving! Your mom said when she joined match.com she bought so much lingerie, they knew her by name in Victoria's Secret!

HANNAH! I have to wash my brain now!

Sorry. Forget I ever said that. How are your folks?

Good. Think I'll keep them. How are yours?

Ugh. If I find a receipt, I'm getting a refund. SO MUCH PRESSURE! If it wasn't for you and Candy Crush I'd chuck my phone and get some peace.

I trudge into school the next day feeling like I have
DUMPED
written on my forehead. Typical, Dad drops me off
just
as Roman and Gabe's mom does the same. Displaying the sort of perfect timing they can't achieve in a swimming pool, I think to myself and smirk meanly.

They don't say hi. No matter, they never did anyway. Gabe and I make eye contact and he gives me a fleeting smile. Between him and Melia, I've got two secret, silent “friends.” My birthday party will be a riot.

I take my phone out—nothing. Hannah and I are talking a bit more, but nothing on WhatsApp. Dad's sent me a photo of his most recent job rejection.
Dear Murk,
it begins.

Only the coolest people get dumped,
he writes underneath.
Lots of love and best wishes, Murk Brown. (Do I sound like a paint color?)