I hear Evan leave when I’m in my room pulling on a clean pair of pajama pants—I don’t see the point of wearing real clothes since I never leave the house. Slap slap goes his screen door and boom boom go his footsteps on the stairs outside. I pull back my curtains and watch him go.
It’s the first week of April, but today will be Evan’s first day of school. Everything will be new, but enough of it will be the same. Because it’s still high school. And high school doesn’t change that much from one place to another. Evan will go to a classroom. He will sit in a desk that faces a whiteboard. A teacher will stand at a podium and tell him things that are supposed to sound smart. Evan will write them down in a notebook covered in graffiti doodles. The girls at school will like him; I’m sure of it. The pretty girls will call dibs and drag him off to the quad at lunchtime to watch them eat apples and sip Diet Coke. I know this because I used to be one of those girls.
I think about these things.
I watch a soap opera.
I eat a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.
I complete two online lessons.
I study Rolle’s theorem.
I e-mail an analysis of colors in The Great Gatsby to my English teacher.
I wait for Brenda.
I wait for one p.m.
*
At noon, I know Brenda is coming soon. It is because of this that I feel zingy electricity in my veins. I know she’s coming and I have to open the door to let her in.
I have to talk. I have to tell.
Maybe a shower will help.
I duck my head under the hot water and let it soak through to my skull. My hair suctions itself to my ears, locking the noise out. I like being underwater where it’s only me. Sounds and the world are far away.
I’ve spent a lot of time underwater because I used to be on my high school swim team. I swam every weekday, even in the off-season, from three until four thirty p.m., in the twenty-five-yard lanes of the Pacific Palms High School pool. I swam with the same three friends I’d met on youth squad when I was eleven and my dad first received orders to a base near Pacific Palms.
My mom was newly pregnant with Ben so we’d hoped my dad’s transfer meant he would be home for a while. But we’d barely gotten settled when he was called up for his third tour in Afghanistan. So he returned to combat and my mom and I committed to making the best of Pacific Palms.
I got close to my swim team friends, and by the time we got to high school, we’d become an inseparable foursome. Chelsea was brilliant and beautiful in that blond SoCal way that made boys stutter when they talked to her. Brianna swam the fifty-yard freestyle faster than any other girl in the history of our high school. And my best friend, Sage, was wise beyond her years, poised to perfection on Model UN and talking about things other sixteen-year-olds didn’t even know existed.
I was a little of all of that. But after October fifteenth, after that day, Pacific Palms High School shut down. My friends and I had to go to different schools so construction workers could get busy changing the parts of PPHS that would haunt us forever. The administration split up students based on a set of neighborhood boundaries they’d come up with. The four of us didn’t live close enough to go to the same place, so we drifted as things continued to change.
Brianna got a boyfriend.
I started online high school.
Chelsea stopped calling.
And Sage moved away before she was even supposed to start at her new school.
But at our old school, I imagined the bright blue championship banners still hanging from the rungs of the metal fence that ran around the outdoor pool deck. I didn’t know if they were still there, but I wanted them to be. Because my name was on one of them. I held a record. I was a long-distance swimmer. I was someone who could go on and on forever, steady and even, then finish hard to pull off the win.
Now my whole life is a race. Every minute leading to the next. Every day feeding into another. It’s a constant crossing of the finish line. It’s like playing a fast song slow.
Chelsea and Brianna don’t understand that. They tried. They’d come over, but we’d only end up sitting and staring at the television.
“Come with us to the party,” Brianna would beg. “There are going to be so many cute boys.”
“So many,” Chelsea would echo.
I’d curl up tighter on the couch, tucking my slippered feet underneath me. “I don’t care about cute boys or parties right now. But don’t let me stop you from enjoying them.”
“It’s not the same without you,” Chelsea would whine.
Sage would call from her new house on the weekends. More often than not, she’d sound distant and sad and in search of solutions. “So you quit school?” she’d ask. “Is it easier?”
“A little,” I’d say.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
*
Brenda knocks her knuckles against my door at 12:57 p.m. I want those three minutes before one p.m. to myself. But she’s here. So I breathe deep. I breathe long. And I open the door. Brenda smiles, and I can see the gap between her top two teeth that makes her look like a little kid. I know how old she is because I once asked her to tell me.
“If it really matters, I’m twenty-nine,” she said. “But why do you want to know?”