Rival (9 page)

“
READY, SET, GO
!”

I dove into the pool, breaststroked across it and back, and then bobbed up near where Kathryn's feet were dangling in the water.

“A minute fifty-seven,” she said. “Is that good?”

“Not good enough,” I told her. “I need to shave off a couple more seconds before spring season starts. Time me again.”

She gave the signal. I dove back into the water and came up doing a butterfly stroke. The exercise felt good. With nothing but the sound of splashing in my ears, I could finally think straight. Ever since Boodawg's party a few weeks earlier, this blackness had started creeping into how I felt about Kathryn. It was like somebody knocked over a can of paint the night Miles started acting all interested in her. The blackness started around the corners of everything, and it pushed in a little bit at
a time. I tried to tell myself it wasn't her fault if Miles liked her. She didn't know I liked him, too. But knowing all that didn't help; I still had a hard time being around her.

Except when it was just Kathryn and me alone together. When the two of us could work on our music or hang out at the coffee shop and make plans about all the things we were going to do after leaving Douglas, then the blackness moved back and things felt almost like they did in the beginning.

Two laps. Up and back. I popped out of the water as Kathryn punched the stopwatch.

“A minute fifty-five seconds!” she said. “Good!”

She was sitting cross-legged on the pool deck in a tank top and cutoff shorts. Earlier, when I changed into my swimsuit, she'd told me she'd forgotten hers.

“You can get in with your clothes on,” I told her. “Plenty of people have done it. It's no big deal.”

“That's okay,” she said. “I don't really feel like swimming.”

“Why not? Afraid to get your hair wet?” I swam up and reached for her calves. She yanked back and stood up, looking freaked out.

“Don't do that.”

“Um…okay.” I pushed away from the side. “Sorry.”

“I said I didn't feel like swimming.”

“I know. I heard you. I said I was sorry.”

She let her shoulders relax. After a couple of seconds, she came back to the edge of the pool and sat down.

“No,
I'm
sorry.” She kept her feet under her legs and wouldn't put them back in the water. “I shouldn't freak out like that. It's just—God, this is embarrassing.”

“What is?”

“I can't swim,” she said, tugging on her ponytail. “I never learned how.”

“How'd you manage to never learn? I thought everybody took swimming lessons when they were kids.”

“I was always kind of afraid of water. And my mom and dad were spending so much on other things, like ballet and piano lessons, I guess they figured they'd save by not getting a Y membership. Only now I've got this phobia about pretty much anything deeper than a bathtub.”

“Man, that sucks,” I said. I thought about all the summers I'd spent at the pool as a kid—whole afternoons just floating by while my friends and I splashed around, getting waterlogged and tan. What had Kathryn been doing?

“Don't tell anybody, okay?” she said. “It's completely embarrassing.”

She looked really vulnerable, which made me feel good in a weird kind of way. “No worries,” I said. “You
can just keep on being my timekeeper.”

She smiled and gripped the stopwatch. “Okay.”

“Okay. So, ready? I still need to get rid of two seconds.”

She reset the watch. Then she gave me the countdown. I dove in and tore through the water, faster than ever. I couldn't wait to get back to the other side and find out my time.

But when I popped up again, Kathryn wasn't there. I had to lift onto the deck to see where she went. First I saw her bare feet. And next to them, a pair of Ralph Lauren flip-flops.

“Crap…,” I muttered.

It was Chloe.

“Hey, Brooke,” she called. “Kathryn said to come over.”

The blackness started creeping in again as Chloe stripped off her T-shirt and jeans. She stretched, showing off her matching bra and panties and the little pearl in her perfect, pierced belly button. She dove into the pool with a big splash.

I got out. I didn't feel like swimming anymore.

Chloe came up for air. She backstroked around while Kathryn and I stood on the side.

“Hey, Kathryn!” Chloe shouted. “Get your clothes off and come in. I'm not swimming by myself.”

Kathryn stopped smiling and blushed. “I'm okay. Really. You go ahead.”

She looked trapped. And even though I was pissed at her for inviting Chloe over, I didn't want her to have to tell her secret to the biggest bigmouth in school. So I decided to try and help.

“We're quitting, actually,” I said. “It's getting cold.”

“What are you talking about? It's
not
cold. Seriously, Kath. Get in. What if it's your last chance until next year?”

“I don't have a suit.”

“Hello?” Chloe pointed to her own pink bra, which by now was completely see-through. “Neither do I.”

“I'm not skinny-dipping,” Kathryn told her. “Sorry! No suit, no swim.”

“So borrow one of Brooke's.”

Then Kathryn did something weird. She started laughing.

“You're kidding, right? There's no way I'm fitting into something of Brooke's.”

I felt like I'd been slapped in the face. It was true: Kathryn's probably a two to my size ten. But did she need to make a joke about it? She turned to me with a sorry little smile. I couldn't smile back. I was too busy trying to see through all of that black.

Chloe kept looking from me to Kathryn, then back to me again. She swam to the ladder and started to climb out. “Fine,” she said. “God, Brooke. Talk about a
buzzkill.” I watched as Kathryn offered her my towel to dry off with. How did the whole thing get to be
my
fault?

I escaped to the kitchen for drinks and snacks, and when I came back outside, Chloe and Kathryn were in the gazebo, laughing their asses off.

“Oh my God, Brooke, you've got to hear this,” said Chloe. “You know that guy Matt that Kathryn used to hang around with? He's into, like, Ren faires and stuff.”

Kathryn looked like she expected me to laugh, too. But I didn't get the joke. Our junior high madrigal group performed at a Renaissance festival once. It was actually a lot of fun. I could see why Chloe wouldn't go for it. But Kathryn? I bet she'd been to a lot of Ren faires before, and liked them, too.

“He used to dress up in elf ears,” Kathryn told us, stepping over and taking some lemonade from my tray. “And wear a cloak.”

“No!” said Chloe.

“Yes!”

“Oh my GOD!”

“I know! Huzzah!” They both bent over, laughing so hard they almost spilled their drinks. I felt bad for Matt. He was the kind of person who kept to himself, but not in a snobbish way. More of an
I've got my own stuff going on
type of way. Everybody liked Matt—well, everybody who didn't have something to prove. But ever
since Chloe started tagging along with me and Kathryn, I'd seen him lurking in the hallways with this lost look on his face. Kathryn never hung out with him anymore. When I asked her about it, she told me it was okay. “He gets it.”

“Gets what?” I'd said.

“This,” she'd replied, as if there was something about the two of us that made it impossible for her to have other friends. But the truth is that it wasn't just the two of us anymore. It was Chloe and Dina and Angela and all of the other people who grabbed and followed and acted like getting seen with us would make them part of some special group. It seemed like the days when Kathryn and I could hang out just the two of us were pretty much over.

I slumped in a chair and watched the two of them talking. I hated the way Kathryn wrinkled up her nose whenever Chloe made a joke. The way her eyes would get big, like every word Chloe said was the most interesting thing she'd ever heard.

The more I listened, the more I wanted to push back time. I wanted to go back to the first day of Honors Choir and start talking to Kathryn because she was sitting alone in the back row, not because Chloe had decided to have a stupid rush party. If I had met Kathryn on my own I could have stopped her from turning into this
weird, fake person I barely knew. I could have told Chloe and the others that she was just another music freak. Pretended not to like her until I found a way of becoming a music freak myself—somebody none of them would ever give a crap about. I wanted to get Kathryn away from Chloe and everyone else who had nothing to do with music. And while I was getting Kathryn away, I wanted to get away, too.

“So what's on for tonight?” Chloe asked me. She dangled her flip-flops off her pedicured toes. “We doing a party or something else? Dina could come over. Maybe Angela, too.”

I put a lie together quick. “Bill and Brice trashed the house last week. So Mom said no sleepovers for a month. Besides, I'm going to bed early.”

“Why?” Chloe made a face. As if getting a good night's sleep was one of the stupidest things a person could do.

I waited to see if Kathryn would say something. She didn't, so I said it for her.

“Kathryn and I are going to the Blackmore tomorrow. Over at Baldwin. It starts at nine and goes all day. The finals aren't until eight or something.”

Kathryn looked caught in the middle, but it was true. The two of us had been talking about the Blackmore since practically the day we'd met.

“I did tell Brooke I'd go with her, Chloe,” she said.

Chloe gave the ice in her glass a ticked-off rattle. “So basically, what you're telling me is that you're leaving me stranded so you can go watch a bunch of people screech and scream all day. Thanks a lot.”

The guilt trip almost worked, until I thought about how Kathryn and I hadn't done anything by ourselves in weeks. I scooted my chair around, so she and I were sitting closer together. “You could come,” I told Chloe. “But I know how much you hate music freaks. So Kath and I'll just have to catch you later. Right, Kath?”

Kathryn went red again. She stared into her lemonade.

“Right.”

 

Lake Champion changes completely when the festival comes around. Big banners go up all over campus. The light posts up and down Main Street get red, yellow, and orange streamers, and you start to see a lot of sophisticated people walking around—women with bobbed hair and men with pale skin, almost all of them dressed in black. There are reporters, talent scouts, and people who are such huge music fans that they don't mind traveling to the middle of nowhere if it means getting to hear the next Renée Fleming. Usually the celebrity judges stay to themselves, but sometimes you can catch one of them in the restroom. It's weird to see somebody you've watched
play a Valkyrie on TV washing their hands at the sink like everybody else.

And then you have the contestants. They come from all over the country—about a hundred of them in any given year. Up in the practice rooms, it's like a soup of different accents and even different languages, with everybody sizing everybody else up.

That morning Kathryn and I snuck in while the singers were still getting registered. We snagged two seats, right in the middle of the hall. For the first two rounds, singers are split between the main theater, the opera workshop theater, and one of the big choir rooms. Kathryn and I staked out the main venue. We ate granola bars and read the morning paper until it was time for the competition to start.

“Gee, I wonder who they're picking to win,” I said, showing Kathryn the arts section. They'd done a huge spread on the competition with a map showing where everybody came from and profiles on the Douglas people who were competing that year. There were three from our school—Hannan Ameri, an alto; Beatrix Stahl, soprano; and Joel Graham, a tenor. They each got a write-up, but one of the articles was bigger than the rest. It took up half the page.

“Hannan,” said Kathryn, reading over my shoulder. “I heard somebody came from Eastman just to hear her.”

“I wonder if she's nervous,” I said as the houselights went down. “I would be if it was me in that dress.”

Hannan was first up, since rounds one and two are always alphabetical. There she was, the best singer at our school, wearing a purple evening gown with puffy sleeves at nine on a Saturday morning. It looked funny, but then everybody overdresses at the Blackmore. Because if you make it to the finals, then you don't look funny at all.

We sat superstill while Hannan sang her first two pieces. Halfway through the first one it was obvious something was wrong. She seemed tired. Jittery. Nothing about her performance was bad; something was just…missing. Kathryn fished a piece of paper and a pen out of her purse while Hannan took her bow.
Uh-oh,
she wrote.

An hour and a half later, Beatrix came on wearing a pink gown that showed off her end-of-summer tan. I pulled the crossword out of the paper and pretended to work it while she got ready to sing. Boring Beatrix. Kathryn swatted my hand. I yawned, not even bothering to cover my mouth. Kathryn giggled, and Beatrix nodded to let her accompanist know she was ready.

Her first piece was a Schubert lied. Nice, lyrical, and Beatrix made it look easy. Kathryn glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. Boring or not, Beatrix sounded
better than most of the people we'd heard so far.

Then, she did something that made everybody gasp.

“No way!” Kathryn whispered as the pianist started the first, trilling notes to Bernstein's “Glitter and Be Gay.”

“Glitter and Be Gay” is a total soprano showpiece. It's packed with vocal acrobatics. Not only that, but you have to act because it's a song about a hooker who feels bad about her life until she thinks about all the jewelry she's got, and then she gets insanely happy. Most high school singers wouldn't touch that song. If they did, it would be a finals piece because it's so showy. But Beatrix pulled it out for the first round.