Goldfish (5 page)

And a minute later:

Melia! That girl's name is Melia.

Thanks, brain.

 

chapter 5

The next day I wake up feeling less pathetic. I'm going to have a talk with Debs. I was her favorite swimmer—I will
make
her care about me again! I'm going to catch her when she's not busy, first thing in the morning, before classes start. When I head downstairs, there are four empty beer bottles in the kitchen. Mom and Dad will be grumpy this morning. Glad I'm missing that.

I leave Dad a note saying I'm walking to school and head off, feeling adventurous in the chilly, damp morning.

I go straight to Debs's office, which is unlocked and has coffee cooling on her desk. Excellent, she should be back soon. I sit in a chair (although not the one behind her desk—I wouldn't dare). She takes ages. I'm stuck eyeing her bookcase full of trophies for fifteen boring minutes. Eventually she walks in.

“There you are!” I shout.

“ARGH!” she shouts back. OK, that was a little bit of an ambush.

She holds her heart and looks irritably at me as she heads to her seat and flips open her laptop.

She doesn't seem delighted to see me, which is pretty flat lemonade from a woman who threw me in the air when I won gold at the County Championships last year. No one has attempted to throw me anywhere since I was in diapers, and even then there were probably anxious people yelling, “Lift with your legs, not your back!”

“Nice summer, Lou?”

NICE SUMMER?!
How very dare she.

“Not great, Debs.”

“Have you spoken to Hannah?”

Woohoo, someone else who wants to talk about Hannah.

“Yeah, she seems fine. Now,
I
…”

“I hear she's shaved a second off her personal best in individual already. I've said if she stays focused, she can almost certainly take another one off, although of course it won't be as quick as the first improvement. It never is.”

She looks at me intently as she talks about Hannah.
Now
I have her full attention. I feel small. I look down at my hands and pick at a cuticle.

“Aaaaanyway, Debs.” (Back to me, please.) “It's weird not training every night. I don't really know what to do with myself.”

I'm hoping she'll understand and say something helpful. I look up from my hands and all I get is a view of the top of her head. She's checking her email.

“Yeah, my last bunch of burnouts said the same. I think they all got boyfriends!” She laughs as if she's said something funny. I must've missed that part.

“I'm a burnout?” I say, noticing how wobbly my voice has gone. She finally looks up.

“Lou, are you
upset
with me?”

“No,” I lie. “Are you disappointed in me?”

“No,” she lies. “But your turns weren't tight enough and your backstroke was nowhere up to your usual standard. Your arms just weren't strong enough on the day. So you got the result you got. You burned out, it happens.”

I stare at her. “OK, Debs, only winners welcome in here. I get it.” I stand up to leave, really slowly, giving her time to yell, “
Lou!
I didn't mean it to sound like that! Of course I don't care if you win or lose; we're pals. I was just being tough love with you because I care and I want to help you get over this.”

I bend down and tie my shoelaces in silence, then retie them because emotional outbursts can't be rushed. Especially from a woman with the tenderness of a rock. I finally look up and realize that she's not teetering on the edge of anything emotional—she's just checking her email again.

Well, this first week at school has sucked, but it has taught me many things:

1. I have no friends.

2. This probably won't change, as no one in my class likes me, except as a tampon dartboard.

3. I am basically uneducated.

4. I'm
really
good at pretending I'm not about to cry.

I put number four into practice as I leave Debs's office. I don't want to enter my homeroom with a wobbling chin and blotchy eyes—“Damn this early autumn hay fever, right?” I don't want to go home and worry Mom, and I don't want to cry in public. That just leaves the one place that still makes me feel safe.

I scoot along the corridor to the pool, head down, hoping no adult will stop me and question my loose interpretation of the school rules. I'm glad to hear nothing from the locker rooms and there's no one in the pool, so I'm left in peace to sit on one of the poolside benches and watch the steam floating over the top of the water.

I start to cry, and it very quickly turns into one of those enjoyable sessions. When it's a relief to let it all out and you feel so much better. I think of every sad thing that's ever happened to me and wallow in self-pity.

Once I reach our dog, Mr. Hughes, who died peacefully of fat old age five years ago, it's clear I've run out of things to cry about.

After a while I subside into hiccups and dry my eyes. I root around in my bag for a tissue and find an old bathing suit, zipped up in an internal pocket and forgotten. Oh well, I think, it's not like I'll be using this again. So I blow my nose in it.

I feel much better, though I can tell that my face has already gone puffy. I'm such an ugly crier. I look like boiled ham glazed in snot.

I hear a noise across the pool and I freeze, holding the bathing suit/hankie to my streaming nose. Pete is lounging in the open doorway of the swimming pool. I think he's flicking away a cigarette.

I don't want him to see me covered in snot. (Admittedly, who
would
you want to parade your snotty face in front of?)

Cammie appears out of the changing room; she must've had extra training. She gives him an approving look.

“Waiting for me?” she asks, flirty and confident.

“Nope,” he says. She smiles; he's obviously joking.

But he looks around as if the person he wants to see isn't there, and heads off down the sloping field to the parking lot.

Cammie looks outraged. She obviously can't believe he was that rude to her. I wonder how much angrier she'd be if she knew I'd seen that. I sit very still.
Please don't look back.

My phone vibrates with a text, and her head whips around to me. She looks embarrassed but quickly recovers. If she were a cat, she'd be popping her claws out.

“Oh my god, are you sitting here
crying
over the swimming pool?” she asks with an incredulous smile. I grab my bag and scramble for the door Pete left through.

It's undignified to run away from Cammie, but I can't bear the thought of being laughed at. I stumble through the door and run down the muddy slope, picking up speed as I approach the parking lot.

I'm running so fast now that I couldn't stop if I wanted to, which is a real shame, because suddenly a car swings toward me as it pulls out of the lot. I try to jump out of the way but fall onto the hood of the car, sliding all the way across it and landing on my feet on the other side.

I'm OK! I half laugh, half gasp in shock, and look back at the driver. It's Pete. His mouth is hanging open, there's a muddy smear across his hood thanks to Yours Truly's butt, and I think he's going to yell at me. I do the only thing I can think of: I run away.

 

chapter 6

Weeeez, did you get my last email? Have you fallen down a well or have you forgotten about me? I miss you so much. I'm sorry, I don't know what to say. I wish we'd both got in. It's cool here, but there's no one like you. They talk about swimming ALL THE TIME. If
I'm
saying that, think how bad they must be. I'm like—let's just look at a fox in some wellies and chillax guys?! Email me back!

Hxxxxx

I'm being unfair to Hannah. We usually email or text every single day. But I hate hearing about the High Performance Training Camp. I know I'm selfish, but whenever she messages, I feel a jealous, sicky surge in my stomach.

I want to be a better friend than that, so on Saturday morning I write a long email back. I don't tell her how crappy I'm feeling. I don't want her to feel guilty that she's not here, so I keep it all a bit vague and bland.

The weekend passes
so
quickly. How does time move so slowly at school and then whiz past on Saturday and Sunday? I wish I had friends to hang out with. I try not to think about what everyone else is up to or it'll make me feel too sad.

I help Dad in the yard, and Mom offers to take me shopping, but I don't want to bump into girls from school out with my mom. I'd feel like a social reject. Lav's stuck at home too, since she's grounded, so she's reading in her room for most of the weekend and slathering some foul-smelling muck into her hair to “bring out the shine.”

Out from where?

Dad makes her sit in the backyard so she doesn't stink up the house, and she sulks on the patio for about an hour while it “sinks into her follicles.” She and Dad get snappy with each other, and then she says if she had a
decent
allowance, she could just go to the salon, like her friends do.

Ouch. Dad's sensitive about money. I try to give Lav a “shut uuup” look underneath her crusty hair muck, but it's too late. Dad disappears into the shed, and the sounds of talk radio come wafting out.

All too soon I get that Sunday-night feeling, and Lav and I are watching a wildlife documentary in the living room, in which loads of little worms are darting in and out of holes on the seabed.

“Beau Michaels,” Lav says to me unexpectedly.

I frown at her, mystified, until she pokes her tongue out in tentative, jerky little movements.

Ew! I hit her with a pillow. Lav makes kissing sound like a fight between teeth and spit where no one wins.

Mom is watching us with narrowed eyes, so we go back to watching the Beau Michaels worms, stifling our smirks. I wish I were an adult and I could just stay in the house, where I feel safe, instead of having to drag myself to school five days a week.

I'm brooding on this five-out-of-seven ratio when there's a crashing noise from the kitchen. Lav and I jump. The back door has swollen in the heat, so the only way to come through it is dramatically loud and fast. If we had a cat, it would have a flat nose by now.

Dad marches into the living room, brushing cobwebs off his shoulders. I didn't realize how long he'd been out there. He smells like Uncle Vinnie, which is a polite way of saying
drunk
.

It's not polite to Uncle Vinnie, obvs.

“Have you been in the shed all this time?” Lav asks.

“Yes,” he says.

“Doing what?”

“Working.”

She opens her mouth to say “On what?” but he leaps in before she can.

“Well, everything in the house is bloody broken, isn't it? I'm run bloody ragged trying to fix everything because you all live in squalor!” The three of us look around the spotless living room, then at each other. We have no idea what he's talking about.

“Uh, I'm sorry?” says Mom cautiously. “I just find, you know, what with breeding fight dogs in the kitchen and all my drug dealing at the strip joint, housework does get past me.”

I try not to laugh. I know Dad's going through a tough time, but yelling at us won't help. And I
did
give him my bedroom so he could have his own space and I could live squashed between Lav's millions of bras and shoes, so, you know, a thank-you might be nice?

“The lamp in the kitchen was broken!” he says accusingly. “I had to take it apart.”

“Oh, is it fixed? Thanks,” says Lav, to make peace.

There's a pause. “No,” Dad says eventually. “It's in bits now, isn't it? Now I have to put it together again, haven't I?”

He seems to be waiting for something.

“Thank you?” I offer.

He stomps back to the shed.

“Hide your valuables,” Mom advises. “When Granny went into a home, he dismantled the TV and we never got it back together. It's how he copes.”

I scroll around on my phone. Nothing back from Hannah. Good—I don't want to hear any more exciting tales of Training Camp tonight, especially now that the mood in the house has gone so sour.

I feel so tired. I kiss Mom and head up to bed. Through the landing window I can see Dad's shed, a patch of light in the darkness of the yard, where now the bushes have become pitch-black, evil-looking shapes.

In the middle of the evil I can see Dad's silhouette as he sits in his shed, bent intently over whatever he's working on.

Probably peeling apart a blender. It hurts my heart to watch him. He looks vulnerable, and for the first time I realize that he's getting old.

I send Han a message.

X.

She replies immediately.

X in your face.

I do have a friend who cares about me. She's just, you know, living our dreams while I rot in a double block of physics.

 

chapter 7

The next morning I wake up to the sound of Lav stretching and making agonized noises. She's so bad at mornings. I have had to put up with this drama every morning since I quit swimming. I wish Mom would just let her have espresso.

Like she's got anything to complain about!
I
have to have another crappy friendless day, then another, then three more, and then it'll be the weekend and hopefully I can fake my own death or run away or suddenly become eighteen and get a job? PLAN.

Suddenly I hear a screech from downstairs. Lav and I exchange alarmed looks, then swing our legs out of bed and race from our bedroom, pushing to get through the door first. Lav realizes her pajamas are a bit skimpy and doubles back to make herself decent.

Mom is bent over the kitchen counter sifting through a pile of soggy junk mail, peeling something off the back of a takeout pizza menu. I hope
both
my parents haven't gone crazy. Who'll raise me? I still need so much parenting.