B0160A5OPY (A) (3 page)

The rest of the day passes quickly in a confusion of various rooms, different teachers, crowded halls and new classmates. Today, Luke was only in my English and Math classes, but I haven’t had all my subjects yet. Tomorrow I’ll find out if he’s in any of the others. It’s a possibility that makes my stomach clench.

Back at home, I take my vitamins, check my temperature – normal – and then go online. I have a Facebook page on which I never post. I use it to spy on others – it makes a nice change from having everyone stare at me. It takes me a minute or two, but I find Luke’s page. At least, I think it’s his. The profile picture is of a hand reaching out above the blue, rippled surface of a pool, but the face and body are under the water. I click on
timeline
,
about
,
photos
, but strike out. His security must be set to maximum, and I don’t dare send a friend request.

Then I remember
Sink-or-Swim
, the website that we all used to hang out on, when I was still swimming competitively. I haven’t been on it for ages, not since the day I got the scar, so it takes a few tries to get my username and password right. Then I’m in and staring at his profile. His handle is
Not_A.
Not a … what? It was one of the things I wanted to ask him before, but I never got the chance. The photo is a close-up of him staring seriously into the camera. I think it’s different to the one he used to have up. He used to be smiling in his profile pic, I’m sure of it. And there’s a way I can check.

At the bottom of the hall closet, under a jumble of flippers, kickboards, hand paddles and swimming caps, is a large cardboard box, covered with doodles and stickers. I called it my memory box and used to keep little mementos like concert ticket stubs, birthday cards, and notes from friends safely inside. That was when I still had memories I wanted keep. These days, I’d like to have a memory trashcan.

I open the box and just below a couple of photographs of old friends, I find what I’m looking for. The printed swim meet program is puckered and smudged where water once dripped on it – I only kept it because his hand had touched it. Underneath it is my old cellphone, the one with photos taken at meets, and screenshots of his profile on the swimming website. Predictably, its battery is totally dead, so I plug it in to charge, and go back to examining every detail about Luke I can find online.

Under his profile pic on
Sink-or-Swim
is the briefest of bio’s: “Swimmer, son, survivor, cynic”. There’s a feature where you list your favorites. His favorite song:
Pompei
by Bastille (I’ve never heard of it); his favorite movie:
Inception
; food: Mexican; animals: puppies (aww!). Under
personal motto
, he has, “Vivere commune est, sed non commune mereri”. I look it up on Google. It means, “Everybody lives; not everybody deserves to”. Okkaayyy, then.

I check his swimming times in the meets for the past year. Seems like he had a slump for a while there, but his times are improving steadily. Then I click through to the forums, but I can’t find any comments from him on any recent topics. In the archived section, I find an old thread that makes me smile.

Not_A
:           Great race today!

WaterBaby: You were watching? O_0

Not_A:          Watching you? Sure!

WaterBaby: :D

Not_A:          Saw you win the 100m Butterfly – nice one! Personal best time?

WaterBaby: Yeah, but didn’t break the record. L

Not_A:          Yet … 

WaterBaby: :D :D

Not_A:          Gotta go. Mom’s calling dinner-time, and she freaks out if we’re late to the table. See you at the meet on the 17th?

WaterBaby: Definitely.

Not_A:          J J

Not_A:          Bye (Water)baby.

WaterBaby: See you later.

I sigh and check the phone, but the battery’s only at 2%. Perhaps Luke is on Twitter. I sign on, seek and find. His handle is @LukeSkyWater, the bio is the same as on
Sink-or-Swim
, the photo the same as from Facebook. It’s a puzzling picture. Is it the hand of someone waving, or drowning?

I scan his tweet-stream. It seems he doesn’t tweet often, but there’s one from today:

That moment when you can’t believe what you’re seeing. #Disgusted #Angry

Have I just been sub-tweeted?

Is he talking about me?

This is ridiculous. To distract myself, I close the social sites and check out Sienna’s alternative school blog. It’s hilarious. I wish my mom was here tonight to see it. It’s exactly her kind of thing – clever and witty and edgy. There was nothing like this at my previous school.

Memories threaten, but I push them back and down, breathe deeply three times and force myself to concentrate on the screen in front of me. There are sketched caricatures of the teachers, Keith’s Anime cartoons (the one of me in art class is already up), informal news articles and a gallery of photographs of students, teachers and scenes of school life. I examine these carefully. It’s several minutes before I realize that what I’m actually doing is searching for a picture of Luke. I realize I’ve been cyber-stalking him all evening.

Clearly, I’m an idiot. My scars, apparently, are the least of my defects.

5

Luke

She’s here. Here! At West Lake High. In my English class.

Same ruby red hair, freckles and big blue eyes as that last day I saw her, when I almost learned her name. Well, I sure know it now: Sloane Munster.

What I don’t know, is what she’s doing here. Did she know I was at West Lake? Is that why she came? Does she want something from me?

I could tell she recognized me immediately.

She doesn’t look exactly the same as she used to, though. She’s taller and thinner, and there’s a look in her eyes like she expects to be kicked. And of course there’s that scar everyone’s talking about.

That scar!

I don’t even know how to look at her.

6

Back in the water

It’s day two of my life out of the camouflage closet and I get my driver, Ed, to take me to school early. Ed is fiftyish and friendly, an all-round good guy, and he gets well-paid by the trust to take me wherever I need to go. But he nags me too often about when I intend to learn how to drive myself, even volunteers to teach me. I tell him he’s crazy – if I learn to drive then he’ll be out of a job. I tell him that he’s lucky I’m too lazy to learn how to drive. I’m not sure he buys it.

I need to start the things I have resolved to do, before I lose my nerve. And so, today, I have to get back into the swim of things. West Lake High has its own pool – one of the reasons I chose this school – big and deep and, thankfully, heated. At this hour of the morning, as I hoped, it’s also empty. I slip off my sweats, put on my cap and goggles, and dive into the still water. My every splash sounds loudly in the cathedral-like silence. Steam rises off the water, condenses on the insulated roof above and falls back in cold drops onto my face as I swim my twenty lengths of backstroke. It’s good to be back in the water. My arms and legs cleave cleanly through the silky softness, the water hides my face, my goggles fog up, insulating me further from the world beyond my cocoon of movement, and my mind is focused only on the next stroke, the next breath, the next length.

I’ve done my breast-stroke and am deeply in the zone of my freestyle set when there’s an explosion of bubbles and shifting water next to me. In surprise, I breathe in some water through my nose and stop, mid-stroke, coughing and looking around. What must be the entire swim team has arrived for morning training. They are noisily snapping towels at each other and dive-bombing into the water. It’s my cue to leave.

I swim to the side, lift the goggles off my eyes and onto my head and, still coughing, pull myself awkwardly out of the water. Sometimes, like now, my knee sticks and won’t bend properly. I’m like a stranded water creature, clumsily hauling myself onto the brick surround and then scrambling awkwardly to my feet. As I stand, dripping, my eyes follow up the muscled legs, green towel, toned midriff and wide shoulders of the boy who stands in front of me, blocking my way. It’s him, of course, captain of the swim team and sneerer-in-chief. He looks like he looked a year ago, beside a different pool, but he also looks – I don’t know –
more
. I look away from his curled lips and harsh eyes, focus instead on his ripped abs and muscled arms. This is not too much of a hardship and I could probably stand there, dripping wet and feasting my eyes all day, but my gaze is drawn back up to his and a ball of hurt knots tightly in my stomach. His eyes seem more gold than green today, and there is no relenting softness in his look.

“Um, excuse me?” I try to step around him. I’m cooling down rapidly and my skin is tightening all over with goose bumps. I cross my arms over my chest.

“So you still swim?” he asks, making no move to get out of my way.

“Yes.” This confirms it – he does recognize me from before. “Just for fun, I mean. I don’t race anymore. I …”

My voice trails off under his withering glare. It irks me that I have to look up to meet his gaze. Normally it’s a novelty when a guy is taller than me, but right now it would be great to be able to look down on him – literally.

“How nice for you,” he says, and his voice sounds bitter. “That you can still have
fun
.” He makes it sound like a dirty word.

“Look –” I begin, annoyed and determined to challenge him on his rude and inexplicable attitude.

“You have a real
fun
day, now,” he says, ripping the towel off from around his waist.

I flinch and step back, half expecting him to lash out at me with it, but he just flings it aside and steps past me to dive into the pool, his body cutting through the water with hardly a splash.

I release the breath that I’ve been holding onto as if it was my last, and watch him for a few moments, torn between relief, confusion and growing anger, before I head for the changing rooms. I have both English and Math today. Maybe I’ll have a chance to confront him and ask him what his problem is then.

7

Working pairs

The first class of the day – History – is mercifully a Luke-free zone and I happily sit with Sienna. Afterwards, she heads off to Spanish and I’m stuck in a double-period of something called Life Orientation. It’s a stupid subject meant to teach us skills to cope with life. We had something similar at my previous school. Everyone finds it boring, no-one takes it seriously, but we all have to do the work because the grades count. Today, it goes so horribly wrong, it may as well be called Life Disorientation.

First off, His Royal Rudeness is most definitely in this class. He alternates scowling grimly at me with ignoring me completely. Secondly, the hair-teeth-boobs girls are in this class, too, sitting in a group right in front of me. I would have chosen another seat, but this is the only one where I’m behind and out of Luke’s direct line of sight. It’s an important tactical advantage, but it doesn’t stop the death-stares. The girls alternate between flirting with Luke – he is clearly hot property – and coming up with new nicknames for me. They smile and laugh while they do it, so the teacher probably assumes they are being friendly. A dark girl with fine, doll-like features is still rooting for “Scar Monster”.

“We could call her Monster for short. Or just Scar – like in Lion King,” she sniggers.

But the leader of the pack, a blonde-haired, tan-skinned, brown-eyed beauty whose name, if I heard correctly, is Juliet, has a different suggestion.

“How about ‘Scarface’?” she says softly, and looks over her shoulder at me to see my reaction, smiling like a shark before the bite.

It’s genius. And hilarious. I tell them so.

“Those are really clever names,” I say, deadpan. “Original. And side-splittingly funny. You should go into stand-up comedy, definitely.”

They look momentarily confused, but then Juliet whispers something into their midst and they erupt in giggles. Despite my outward cool, my inner furnace must be turned to maximum, because I can feel my face glowing red. The scar feels like it is actually throbbing, though I must be imagining this.

This classroom is located in the center of the school, and has no windows. The back wall is a collage of beautiful photographs – beach sunsets, misty mountains, full moons over desert dunes, perhaps originally from some large calendar – studded with inspirational words:
reach, inspire, forgive, love, dream.
Gag. The side walls are more prosaically decorated with posters urging us to shun the multiple evils of drugs, alcohol, bullying, teenage pregnancy, distracted driving and unsafe sex.

The teacher claps her hands together, calling the class to order. Her name is Mrs. Copeman, but no doubt the girls have another name for her, too. Her dumpy figure and flat, sensible shoes would invite their scorn. I think I’m going to like her – she has a friendly, open face and smiles often as she introduces the new theme.

“This term, we’ll be focusing on pollution.” She ignores the groans and disparaging comments from the students. “And you’ll be doing a two-part practical project” – more complaints – “for which you’ll be working in pairs.”

There are squeals from the group of girls at this and they clutch at each other, partnering up already, although from under her thickly mascaraed lashes, Juliet casts a speculative look at Luke. This makes a change from her usual, faintly surprised expression because although her eyes are a pretty chestnut brown, they do protrude just the slightest bit.

“For the first part of the project, each pair will be assigned a type of pollution that affects our different senses. For example, our sense of sight is affected by visual pollution such as litter and graffiti. Our sense of sound gets hammered with noise pollution from noisy trucks and aircraft, and the jackhammers of road workers. Our taste buds, and our bodies in general, are polluted by food additives and chemicals, and our sense of smell is polluted by smoke, diesel fumes, the smell coming off landfills, and the like. I’ve left out the sense of touch, because it was quite hard coming up with examples, but if anyone wants to do it, just come chat with me. You’ll need to do a theory section which describes your type of pollution, gives examples, and looks at methods of remediation and prevention. Plus I want a practical section with examples of the pollution – photographs, or sound recordings, or whiffs which I could sniff.”