Surviving High School (18 page)

There was a new record holder in the 50-meter backstroke. Sara’s name would be crossed out of the record books, replaced by Dominique’s.

“Yes,” her father said, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “I guess you’re right.” He gripped the wheel hard, and Emily
was thankful her mom had skipped this meet—her mom always worked herself up into such a state, worrying he’d give himself a heart attack as he drove.

“One more thing,” he added. “You may have noticed that the Junior Nationals falls on the same weekend as that home-coming dance you were planning to attend. Just in case you had any idea of sneaking out again, I pulled some strings and made sure that all of your heats are scheduled for the Saturday-night block.”

Heats for the various matches took place all day Saturday and Sunday, and the organizers could have scheduled her for any block of time. But her dad asked them to choose that one. Just to let her know
he
was in charge of her life. She would have cried, but she was just too tired, too beaten down to even react. She let herself sag against the side of the car and felt the cold of the window glass against her cheek as her last hopes of going to homecoming died.

They drove the rest of the way home in total silence.

The next Monday at school, Emily ate her lunch as fast as possible outside the cafeteria, then ran straight for the library, where no one would bother her. At least it was warm there. She logged on to one of the computers to check her e-mail and Facebook for the first time in days and found an invitation to a group called I Bet I Can Find 500 Twin Branches Students Who Don’t Like Kimi Chen. Curious, she clicked the link.

She found a page featuring a picture of Kimi with devil horns Photoshopped onto her forehead and a wall of posts,
most of which were by angry guys upset about the ratings Kimi had given them. Several had written their own pro/con sheets about Kimi, none of which were very nice.

Emily closed the window. Suddenly, Kimi’s problems didn’t seem so trivial, and Emily felt a strange mixture of guilt and anger. Yeah, Kimi had messed up, but this was way worse than she deserved. And worst of all, Emily wasn’t even there to comfort her. Some friend she’d turned out to be.

By the time the end of the day arrived, Emily’s father had already printed out a new placard and placed it on the Twin Branches High leaderboard on the wall above the pool. It read:

DOMINIQUE CLARK, 50M BACKSTROKE, 28.0

Emily stood looking at it as she waited for her father to show up for her individual coaching session.

When fifteen minutes passed and he still hadn’t shown, she walked down to the counselor’s office and asked if she could use the phone. She dialed her dad’s cell before remembering that he’d destroyed it jumping into the pool to save her. She decided to try the home phone.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Dad, what’s going on? I’m here waiting for you.”

“I figured if neither of us wanted to be there, what’s the point,” he said at the other end of the line.

“Dad, don’t do this.”

“Why should I keep trying when you won’t?”

“Please, please don’t give up on me.”

“Em, you already gave up on yourself.”

He hung up without saying good-bye.

For a while, Emily just sat in the empty counselor’s office, looking at the keypad, wondering if there was anyone she could possibly call. She didn’t even know Kimi’s number—she’d always counted on her cell to remember it for her. She was half contemplating dialing up a random stranger to talk to when she felt a tap on her shoulder and looked around to see Alicia.

“Emily, how nice to bump into you. I’ve been looking for you, actually.”

Emily wiped at her eyes, hoping she wasn’t tearing up.

“Everything okay?” Alicia asked. “You want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

Alicia sat down on a chair in the counselor’s waiting room and gestured for Emily to sit with her. She reluctantly complied.

“Look, I’m not going to be one of those adults who comes in and tries to tell you your problems are small, or that they’ll go away, or that I can solve them for you,” said Alicia. “Honestly, for me at least, high school was the most stressful time of my life. Way worse than college. And I’m sure I didn’t even have to deal with half of what you’re going through. I was just
a straight-up nerd. I didn’t play sports. And I never had to deal with some other girl stealing one of my textbooks.”

“You heard about that?”

“Just a rumor in the faculty lunchroom—not enough to actually punish anyone, but I’m tempted to believe it.” Alicia opened her bag and pulled out a book. It took a few seconds for Emily to realize it was a history textbook.

“Would you believe that Honors History was my favorite class back when Mr. McBride was
my
teacher?” asked Alicia. “Or that I loved it so much I ‘lost’ my textbook on purpose? Of course, those were in the days before he started docking you a letter grade for that. I just had to pay a twenty-dollar replacement fee.”

She handed the book over to Emily.

“I wish I could do more,” she said. “I know you’re going through a lot. But maybe the book will help just a little.”

For a few seconds, Emily just sat there, dazed, looking at the textbook, not knowing what to say. Finally she asked, “You were a nerd?”

Alicia smiled. “Definitely. Still am. What other twenty-three-year-old would be so eager to go back to high school?”

Emily took the book and tucked it under her arm.

“Thanks,” she said. “This really helps.”

“The rest is up to you,” said Alicia. “Good luck. As hopeless as things seem, remember, they will get better.”

A few minutes later, after Alicia had left, Emily walked back to the pool. She sat by the edge of the pool and dangled her feet
over the side, feeling the warm water against her toes. She looked again at the leaderboard, where her sister’s name had now been replaced by Dominique’s.

Things had seemed better after her talk with Alicia, but seeing the changed leaderboard brought her feeling of helplessness flooding back. Maybe her father was right. What was the point of going on if no matter how well you swam, someone would eventually come along and erase your name? Sara had given everything to swimming, and what had it given her in return? A name on a leaderboard that was destined to be replaced.

Emily must have been sitting alone with her thoughts for twenty minutes before he came in. She recognized the long shadow, the figure distorted by a camera that hung around his neck.

“I had to see it to believe it,” said Nick Brown. “I thought her name would be up there forever—or at least for a few more years.”

She was too tired to scream at him this time. Instead, she spoke with soft, slow-boiling rage.

“Someone like you could never know what it means to have your name up on that board.” She refused to look at him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She gave up everything—everything—to get her name on that board. And then you—you took it all away.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. I loved her, too, you know.”

She turned to look at him now and saw that he was crying.
He wasn’t sobbing, but tears were unmistakably rolling down his face. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a guy her age cry like that, even an emo one like Nick Brown. Was what Samantha had said true? Could Nick and Sara really have dated?

Hot tears escaped her eyes. Sara was erased now, forever. And even worse, the sister she’d known had apparently been a fake. If she and Nick had really dated, then Sara had spent the last year of her life lying to Emily.

“I don’t even—” Emily said. “I don’t even know who she was.”

Nick knelt by her side and offered her a packet of tissues from his backpack.

“I do,” he said. “Will you come with me for a minute?”

“Come with you?” she asked, getting to her feet. “Whatever happened, whoever you were to her—it doesn’t change the fact that you killed her.”

She imagined throwing him in the pool, jumping in after him, and forcing him to the bottom. She imagined keeping him there until he took a deep lungful of water.

Nick looked stricken, but Emily kept talking. “You put her in your car and drove off the road and killed her.”

“Emily,” he said. “I wasn’t driving.”

The yearbook room glowed with the faint blue light of computer monitors and smelled like rotten eggs, and Emily, despite being used to the constant scent of chlorine, made a face as she walked in.

“Sorry about that,” said Nick. “We still have a traditional photo-processing lab in back, and the chemicals kind of stink.”

“What are we doing here?”

“I’ve got all my photos from the last year stored here. I figured if you really wanted to get to know your sister, this would be a good place to start.”

He booted up the computer and clicked through a few files before getting to one called Summer/Fall/Winter Sara Photos.

“These pictures didn’t exactly make it into the yearbook,” said Nick, his finger hovering over the mouse, ready to click open the folder. “Sara made a big deal over keeping our relationship a secret. Almost no one at school knew about it. Then after she was—gone—she kind of became this legend, you know? The girl who’d given up everything for her swimming. Most people didn’t know she even had a social life. And when I saw your dad in the ER the night she died, he wouldn’t even let me go into her room. I tried calling him a couple of days later, to see if I could come to the funeral, but he wouldn’t talk to me other than to say I’d better stay away. I think he preferred to pretend that I didn’t exist, that I was just some stranger. Maybe she and I—our relationship—didn’t fit with the image of the perfect daughter he had in his head.”

Emily sat glassy-eyed, trying to take it all in. Her father had known about Nick and Sara?

“You said you weren’t driving,” she said, remembering why she’d come here in the first place. “Who was?”

“I was teaching her. We’d been practicing for weeks. When she was supposed to do her jog home, I’d get in the passenger seat, and she’d get behind the wheel. Your dad wouldn’t give her lessons. He said it would be too dangerous. Really, though, I think he didn’t want her to be able to go where she wanted. He didn’t want to give up that control.”

“Sara was driving?”

“She begged me to teach her,” he said. “She’d never driven in the rain before. It was late and wet, the first storm of the season. Before sunset, I’d been leaning out the window, taking
photos of the clouds as your sister drove. And then it was dark. Time to go home. Except we didn’t make it back to your place. We came around a bend—not even going fast or anything—and the car just kept skidding on a patch of water. Right over the side of a ditch.”

“My dad—he never told me. He always said that you—”

“What’s it matter?” Nick asked. “It’s still my fault. Even if I wasn’t behind the wheel, I was still the one who let her drive. Everyone just assumed I was the driver—and I felt so guilty about what happened—I let them think what they wanted. We’d always kept each other’s secrets. I wanted to keep this last one.”

Emily turned back to look at the monitor.

“Can you open the folder?” she asked. “I want to see the photos.”

Nick double-clicked the file and took a step back. A dozen thumbnails of photos filled the screen.

“There’s a few hundred pictures in there if you scroll down,” he said. “Why don’t you look through them? Take your time. I’ve got—uh—work to do over in the next room. Come get me when you’re done.”

For the next hour, Emily looked at Nick’s photos one by one.

She saw Sara sitting on a mountaintop at dusk, her light brown hair dark with shadows.

Sara in a Ferris wheel car at an amusement park, smiling wider than Emily had even thought possible as the city’s lights glimmered in the background.

Sara doing a cartwheel at the beach.

Sara towering over a bowl filled with thirty-two scoops of ice cream, a huge spoon in hand, her mouth open wide as if prepared to swallow everything whole.

Sara grabbing a snowman by his carrot nose.

Sara on the beach, covered in sand shaped to look like a mermaid’s tail.

Sara asleep on an unfamiliar couch.

Sara curled up against Nick, nuzzling into his chest.

Emily was crying again now—she’d been crying so much lately—but this time, she realized, they were happy tears. Sara hadn’t been the Machine at all. She’d been a girl, just like Emily, a girl who sneaked out and saw her boyfriend and lived a happy life. And in the end, her name on the leaderboard hadn’t survived, but these photos had. For the first time in her life, Emily felt like she actually knew her sister.

After she’d looked over the last photo, one of Sara sitting on a picnic blanket on a sunny day in the park, Emily closed the window, got up, and walked over to the next room to find Nick waiting for her.

As he rose from the desk where he’d been sitting, Emily approached him and hugged him close. With her arms around him like this, Nick felt skeletal and frail, and Emily hoped she wasn’t hurting him. He hugged her back.

“Thank you,” she said, “for introducing me to her.”

That night, Emily got home later than usual. After saying good-bye to Nick, she’d skipped the usual run home in favor
of a long walk so that she’d have some time to think. So much had been coming at her over the last few weeks that she’d had no time to step back and take it all into consideration.

She’d felt like a juggler asked to deal with ten, twenty, and then thirty bowling pins, so that at some point she wasn’t even sure how many were in the air. Now it was time to let the pins drop to the ground and pick up only the ones she cared about.

She could see now that she’d given up too much to be a swimmer. She’d spent so much of her life unhappy, trying to please her father—and also trying to live up to her sister’s legacy, one that had turned out to be a lie.