chapter 1
My pillow smells. I should’ve changed the pillowcase weeks ago, but I haven’t, and now it smells like my head. Which I did not realize was so smelly.
I can hear my family moving around downstairs, slamming drawers and clattering bowls. I’m not used to these morning noises because I’d usually be up at five a.m., grab my swim kit, and be training by six. Forty lengths of breaststroke, forty backstroke, forty crawl, ten butterfly, then a quick shower, sleepwalk through school, and be back in the pool by four p.m. YOLO!
But I haven’t swum since the time trials three weeks ago, and now I’m stuck with a surprising number of useless hours. Who knew days were so long? I sometimes used to wonder what I was missing as I pounded out the lengths in the pool. Now I know. No-thing.
Except I’d never met our mailman before. He has a lot of nose hair. That’s it.
My name’s Lou and I am a fifteen-year-old ex-swimmer. I have an older sister, Laverne. Yup, Lou and Lav. We have a brother called Toilet.
That’s a lie. It’s just me, Lav, Mom, and Dad, in a small semidetached house in the most boring town in the world.
So this summer I stopped swimming and I met our postman. And I finally got all that crying done that I’ve been meaning to do for ages, so that’s good, isn’t it? Plus I really explored the concept of Lying in Bed All Day Feeling Nothing but Despair. A summer lived right to the edges.
It’s the first day of school. I’d mark the occasion by wearing a dress, but I don’t own one. In our most private moments Hannah and I have accepted that the only way we’ll find a dress to fit our shoulders is if we go to that cross-dressing shop in town. They’ve got nice stuff in the window; we’ll cut the labels out.
It’s also my first day without Hannah, as she’s already left for the High Performance Training Camp in Dorset. She’ll be there all term. Mom says that now that we’re separated for a bit, I’ll come out of Hannah’s shadow. But she doesn’t understand—I liked it there! I was very happy hanging out in it.
Going back to school would be fine if Hannah hadn’t got through the time trials either. We could face it together, maybe hint that the competition was a big conspiracy. That we were too fast and we’d have threatened international relations at the next Olympics when we smashed everyone out of the water with our awesome times.
“Yeah, well, Russia,” we’d have said, with careful looks around us. “They do not like silver, if you know what I’m saying.” Then we’d have tugged our fedoras down and skulked off to double physics.
Wonder if the other side of my pillow is less smelly? I flip it. No.
But now Hannah has gone to the High Performance Training Camp without me and I won’t see her all term. We’re so far away from each other! She’s in Dorset and I’m in Essex. She’s heading to the Olympics; the most exciting place I’m heading is the bathroom.
Miraculously, it’s free—pretty impressive in a house of four people, three of whom take showers you could time with a calendar.
I’m still using that special harsh shampoo for swimmers, the stuff that strips the chlorine out of your hair. Money is a bit tight at the moment, so Mom won’t chuck it. I have to use it all up first, and we seem to have found a never-ending bottle. I soap my head and reflect that it really doesn’t help that the smell reminds me of my old life.
I step out of the shower, fold a towel dress around me (the only kind I fit in, because it’s sleeveless), and scuff my feet along the hallway. The carpet is worn in patches, so I’m careful not to catch my toe on a snagged thread. No one needs to start their day hopping and screaming.
I open my clothes drawer and drag out some jeans and a T-shirt—I don’t have any “nice” clothes. Since I was eleven I’ve been caught up in some desperate, endless growth spurt. There’s no point buying decent clothes, because they probably won’t fit in a month’s time. I’m five ten and still growing.
It’s fine; if I ever get a boyfriend, I can carry him when he’s tired.
I stab a wide-toothed comb gently into my hair because I don’t have time to cut it out if it gets tangled. My hair doesn’t grow down; it goes out, like Hannah’s. We don’t look like the princess in a fairy tale. We look like the enchanted vines that covered her castle for a hundred years.
It was always comforting to have a best friend who looked as different as I do. And we never minded, because we had swimming. We had a Thing. Now my Thing is gone and so has my friend.
I can’t delay this much longer. I’m going to have to eat some breakfast and then … gah … school. I swing around the end of the banister and can’t help smiling when I catch sight of my family.
The kitchen is too small for the four of us—we only fit in there if everyone stays very still. If you actually want to move, then elbows will get bumped and cereal will get tipped down backs. You know your house is cramped when you can start making a sandwich and end up in a food fight.
Dad is cooking (carefully), Mom’s reading a book, and Laverne is troweling makeup onto her ridiculously beautiful face. They are such a good-looking family; they look like they’re in an ad. They don’t need a Thing. Everyone’s just grateful they get to look at them.
I’m proud of them, but I wish I didn’t look adopted.
Mom is half Indonesian, all curves and shiny brown hair and skin, while Dad looks like a doctor on a TV show. Good chin, nice teeth. Admittedly, he has a bit of a belly these days, but he just holds his breath for photos. Laverne is sixteen, with glossy black hair, actual boobs, and a tattoo that Mom and Dad don’t know about.
Nature made her and then, a year later, took the same ingredients and made me. It’s baffling. Good thing they didn’t have a third child; it would probably have a face like a knee.
“Morning…” I sigh at the room, and they mumble back sleepy responses. Dad slides a brick of scrambled egg onto my plate as I sit down. Mom subtly slides Lav’s makeup bag away from her.
“Enough, Laverne.”
“A little more highlighter and blush and I’m done, I swear.”
Mom keeps reading as she drops the makeup bag into a drawer next to her. Lav looks mutinous, but she’s still got her mascara wand, so she makes good use of it before Mom reunites it with the bottle.
The mood in the kitchen is a little, well, moody. Lav’s grounded because she was texting a boy late at night. I never have any boys to text, regardless of the time of day.
I poke up a forkful of egg and stare at it. Eyes down, I say, “Um. Caaaan I…”
“No,” Mom says.
“You don’t even know what I was going to say!”
Mom imitates my voice with annoying accuracy. “Can I not go to school today or maybe ever, can I just lie and get a job instead and we’ll tell everyone at school that I changed my name, had plastic surgery, and made it onto Team Great Britain after all?”
Damn. Spot on.
Laverne finishes applying her thirty-second coat of mascara and leans toward me as if she’s going to impart the secret of immortality.
Expectations low, I lean toward her.
“It’s going to be OK at school,” she says.
“Really?”
“Yes. Because no one cares about your swimming. Only you think it’s a big deal.”
“It is a big deal.”
“Shut up, I’m trying to help you. I swear, if anyone even mentions swimming—which they won’t—and you tell them what happened, they’ll say, ‘Huh.’ And they won’t ever think of it again. It’s boring. No one cares. Amelia Bond from eleventh grade? She had her big hairy face mole removed over the summer. That is interesting.”
I’m unconvinced but not willing to have an argument about it. Lav’s wrong; it’s not true that no one cares. Hannah cares. Hannah understands that swimming is extremely important. But thinking about Hannah feels like poking a blister, so I make myself stop.
Dad slings the frying pan into the sink. He does all the cooking. Mom’s specialty dish is food poisoning.
“You girls ready to leave for school in ten?”
“Shotgun!”
“Lav! You always sit in the front!”
“Yes. Because I always call shotgun. Please stop me if this confuses you.”
“Fine. Infinity shotgun!”
“You can’t call infinity shotgun—everyone knows that,” says Mom. “Now off you go.”
“Are you home tonight, Mom?” I ask.
“Uh, no, I have a…”
“Daaa-ate,” we all chorus.
“So go on, what’s his name?” Lav asks.
Mom hesitates.
“It’s OK,” says Dad kindly. “If you don’t know it, you don’t have to pretend.”
“You can check his wallet when he goes to the bathroom,” Lav suggests.
“Though if he takes it with him, he’s possibly not coming back,” I finish.
Mom gives out three death stares and returns to her book.
Yeah, date. So it’s a little odd in this house.
Mom and Dad divorced when I was little but are the nicest divorced couple. They never fight and they get along really well. I’m not sure why they divorced, but I don’t want to ask in case the answer involves sex and I’ll never stop being sick.
Dad lost his job last year and he had to move in with us until he finds a new one. It’s taking a lot longer than he thought it would. Sometimes when he leaves his email open, I see all the rejections in his in-box.
It’s not ideal. Lav and I have to share a room, but we don’t say anything because we don’t want to hurt his feelings. I worry about him. He gets up early every morning, like he’s still got a job, and dresses in a suit and then just … I don’t know … waits for the day to pass until we come home.
It’s like having a professionally dressed but depressed dog.
Between me and him, this house hasn’t been much fun this summer. No wonder Lav and Mom are dating like men are off to war.
We call goodbye to Mom and trudge out to the car. Lav forces me into the back, which is not easy. Three-door cars are such a lie; you can’t call it three doors unless you see the trunk as an acceptable way to enter a car.
Laverne fiddles with the radio until she finds a pirate station. It sounds like people shouting in a cramped space. As if she doesn’t get enough of that at home.
“Oh, Lav, you’re so alternative. I cannot get my head around how nonmainstream you are.” I sigh from behind my knees. “Move your seat forward.”
Lav squeezes the lever and slowly pushes her seat back as far as it goes, crushing me into an even tighter S shape.
“It’s garage, idiot.”
“Is that the name of the music or just where they are? Come on, Lav, seat forward!”
“Laverne!” says Dad. “Move the seat forward or you can walk the rest of the way. Do you want to walk in those shoes? Can you walk in those shoes?”
I peer around to see what Dad’s talking about. She’s wearing black, studded, chunky boots—it looks like she’s got weapons on her feet.
“Yes, I can! Not very far, or fast, or…”
“I don’t know why you do that to your feet,” Dad sighs.
“You don’t get me, Mark,” she sighs back dramatically.
“Dad!” he corrects her.
“No, Lav, everyone gets you,” I say, defending him. “You’re so instantly gettable that if you were an exam question, everyone would be happy to see you. And that’s the only time they would be happy to see you, ha ha ha—ow! Legs legs legs!”
As Dad approaches the school gates, I can see a tall boy with long hair loitering. Lav slumps in the seat.
“Drive, drive, drive!” she hisses at Dad.
“What?” he asks, but drives past the school gates.
“Ah…” Lav sighs.
“Was that Beau Michaels waiting for you?” I say.
“Yes, and shut up. Dad, can you drop us at the back entrance, please?”
“Wait.” Dad is puzzled. “Someone named their son Beau and that was allowed to happen?”
“Daaa-aad.” Lav rolls her eyes.
“Like, no one was arrested? They were just allowed to do that to an innocent child?” he asks.
“You’re not funny,” Lav tells him firmly.
Dad circles a mini traffic circle and heads back to the school entrance.
“No, no, no!” Lav slumps down in her seat again. “I mean you’re hilarious, Dad! Really, very witty!”
“I thought so,” he agrees serenely, and we sail past the entrance again, poor Beau Michaels watching us with the dawning realization that all is not well in his love life.
Dad pulls up at the back entrance to school. Lav hops out and flips her seat forward, and I unfold myself into a normal shape. Well, normal for me.
“Come on, LouLou,” says Dad.
I pick at some dry skin on my lip and look down. Maybe Dad will get bored of waiting and just let me sit quietly in the back of the car for a few years. Eventually I’ll be old enough to shuffle forward and share the driving.
Lav leans down at my window.
“I swear,” she says, “this isn’t a big deal unless you make it a big deal. You nearly got to the Olympics. That’s the closest anyone I know in this crappy little town has ever got to achieving anything! No offense, Dad.”
“No, that’s fine,” he murmurs.
“So please, just don’t even mention it. Now the school day begins, and you do not know me.”
She wobbles away on her monstrous shoes. She looks like a baby gazelle. I can’t imagine how dumb I look when I clump along behind her. Gazelle and the mammoth, off on their adventures.
That thought makes me even sadder, so I push it aside and give Dad a brave smile. My dry lip splits and bleeds.
“It’s going to be a good day,” he promises.
“OK,” I mumble through blood and a semiclean tissue I found in the door handle. I clamber out of the car and follow Lav at the agreed-upon distance of six feet.
Copyright © 2016 by Nat Luurtsema
