Note: This is my first time trying an OC. I don't know where it will go and if anyone will even read it but I hope its okay. If anything at all seems Mary-Suish, pleeeease tell me!
I had practiced swimming for ages, but I knew I was missing something. That was why I was stood in the empty swimming baths looking down at the water below. I shivered in my swimsuit. I had just about mastered the technique of the actual stroke, but I was afraid of diving. And that was the fear I had to conquer.
I was trying to bottle up some courage to do it, but as I looked down I realised that I was scared as hell. I hated diving. I loved swimming, I was pretty good at swimming, but I had never dived in my life. I still sometimes had troubles jumping in ever since that time I broke my ankle when I accidentally jumped in too shallow. I should have gone deeper as I got taller, but I was just so scared of jumping in, diving in, anything.
My swimming instructor had started to try to teach me but abandoned it once I proved that I would probably never be able to dive. He just gave up and said that he couldn't teach me anymore. Now I was stuck without an instructor. The news that I would no longer take lessons would be too much for my parents, which was why they thought I had a lesson now.
"Breathe, Teal," I murmured to myself. Teal is my name. Teal means a sort of blue colour, which fits, because I am a swimmer. A swimmer who can't dive. What a laugh Kaitlyn would have over that if I still lived in England.
Yeah, I did live in England, then Mum said we had to move to Japan. I'd taken Japanese lessons because my grandma is Japanese and my family dates back centuries of Japanese relatives. My mum was born in London by complete accident. My grandma was due to leave back to Japan to have the baby but it came a week early. So my mum was born in England and my grandma went crazy.
After Mum had me, she knew English and Japanese, so she taught me English first. Then she taught me what she could of Japanese and then I had Japanese lessons to finish off. It was hard. I couldn't draw the symbols so it was difficult to write. It was hard enough with my dyslexia. Then I had to learn a whole new alphabet.
Nowadays at school, I slack off in Literature because it's way too hard. But the school is learning English and it's too easy. All my so-called friends struggle to spell in English, and I have to spend the whole lesson writing lines and lines of English sentences. I wish I could just skip out on school completely. I don't have any real friends who I actually like, no boyfriend...
Then one day something happened. I saw a poster saying 'join the swim team'. There was a swim team? But I couldn't dive...maybe I could learn...I checked the writing again and gasped. A swim team! The school had a swim team! I almost jumped for joy. I loved swimming. This would be perfect. Except for the relays they'd have and competitions, where I'd have to dive into the water...
My face fell again. If I joined the team, I didn't want to let them down. So I had to learn how to dive. Now.