She had held it together all the way home, hovering between rage and resignation. She hadn't known how to feel and at the same time she felt everything, all at once. It was overwhelming, it was scary and it had brought her back to the start. She was standing in front of her pool, staring into the blue. The water reflecting over her bare arms, her sweater was lying by the chairs, where she had thrown it as soon as she got home. As soon as she felt safe enough to unravel; safe enough to cry.
Paige still felt rage, but it was a different kind than the one she had felt when she saw them kiss. It wasn't directed at anyone else but herself. She was angry over being right and not trusting her instincts, over feeling relief when the other shoe finally dropped even though it meant she was miserable and finally, she was angry over not handling things better. She had been a coward and texted Emily, choosing to pretend that it never happened, like so many things between them.
She stripped down to her underwear before jumping into the pool. It was still early and she didn't want to face her parents. She didn't need them to see how crushed she was after they had teased her minutes earlier regarding her plans for the night. She wanted to drown, she wanted to feel safe, she wanted to be numb to the world outside of her backyard and her only escape was the water. In here she knew who she was. Outside, when she wasn't floating, diving, swimming or struggling against her opponents; she was awkward Paige McCullers. A girl full of insecurities and unaware of how to navigate the world with limbs that felt too big and clumsy for such a delicate soul.
Closing her eyes she tried to ignore the rest of the world but her one perfect spot had been tainted with images of her. She couldn't stop thinking about Emily and because of that her mind drifted back to what she had seen. She turned their names over, Emily and Nate. Nate and Emily. The two of them were kissing like some romantic comedy where the male lead finally gets the girl. Except he shouldn't have gotten her girl, yet he had. In the end Nate was free to kiss Emily and the other girl hadn't stopped him the way she had stopped Paige when everyone believed Maya had run away. It stung. To be rejected again and again for someone else. Paige thought before that she could move beyond being a placeholder for Maya. But how do you compete with a dead girl? How do you compete with her blood coursing through his veins, burning for Emily the way Maya did?
Paige tilted her head back until the water engulfed her. She let her tears mix in with the chlorinated water as she stared up at the blurry stars above her. They sloppily shined down on her, distorted by the water. Her nose broke the surface and she breathed in, filling her lungs up with air once again. Paige wondered if other people hated being proven right. She had known all along what was about to happen, she had seen the attraction between them building. Before she had thought it was one sided and told herself to let it go. But she couldn't and the night of Jenna's party it was so undeniable that Emily was fighting against herself when it came to Nate. She should have left the party after Emily told her she was too busy for friends… or rather, too busy for her. Instead she drank and made a mess of things between Emily and herself, the way she always did.
And now she had watched the ending to that horror movie, the one she had predicted already. It was devastating because she wasn't surprised the way she anticipated to be. It wasn't a revelation but a conclusion. And even though she had predicted this all along, the pain she felt took her by surprise. It wasn't because she felt angry at being betrayed, it was because she realized that she had felt so undeserving of Emily's love from the beginning that she was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Paige was relieved that it had finally happened and she kept crying because it was a horrible feeling, getting what you expected.
Paige cried until her eyes burned from the chlorine and her tears mixing together in the dark. She cried until her loneliness was so unbearable that it threatened to drown her in a way that even with all her years as a swimmer she would never find the edge to make it outside. She cried until there was no more water for tears left in her body.