Flip Turn
Chapter Two: Not Guilty!
He had been hoping that no one would remember. Or, if they did, he'd at least been hoping that they wouldn't notice.
It was a stupid thing to wish for, really. Wally had noticed right after warm-up, and the energetic waving plus the loud demands to know if he was okay and if he had "any cool scars," meant that he most definitely remembered. Vic was going to answer—though he wasn't really sure what he was going to answer with, because there was no way to sum up the past year into something you could yell across a pool deck—but the last thing he wanted to do was get on the new coach's bad side. And it seemed like it wouldn't be too hard to get on his bad side.
Coach Bruce. Vic had seen this guy on television. He remembered watching the Olympics last year while he was in the hospital, trying not to think about the huge bed and the tubes in his arm and that pointless monitor that always managed to set off a really annoying alarm at least once every hour…
They were supposed to be doing starts, though from the looks of some of the kids in Vic's lane, they weren't exactly aware of this. Coach Bruce had explained it—twice, and more irritably the second time—but he'd used too many big words and nobody in his lane (or the lane next to it) but Karen Beecher knew what was going on. Fortunately, she was first.
"First group, step up." Coach Bruce was writing something on his clipboard, pausing to ask a few of the kids to tell him their names.
Karen and a short boy with dark hair stepped onto the blocks. The other four lanes remained empty.
"Step up," Coach Bruce repeated. The tone got the other four kids up there. "Take your mark." Luckily, he was looking at his stopwatch so he didn't see that at least four out of the six swimmers didn't know what that meant. Karen knew. One foot on the edge of the block, one foot behind her, she crouched down to touch the edge lightly, head up and focused on the other end of the pool.
Two of the other kids saw what she was doing and mirrored it. The dark-haired boy clearly already knew. The other two just stood there, shuffling uncomfortably with their hands useless at their sides.
The whistle meant go. It took the other four at least a few seconds to figure this out. Vic felt himself take a step towards the blocks, almost without realizing it, mouth forming around an explanation, but stopped himself at the last moment and just watched.
They'd been told to swim freestyle. Four of them were swimming everything but freestyle. Vic was a little worried about the boy in lane two—he'd pushed his way to the front of the first empty lane he could get his hands on, saying something about going first—who didn't seem like he was going to make it to the other end. Looking closer, Vic recognized him as the kid who'd interrupted at the very beginning, Gar. There were always one or two on the team who weren't exactly strong swimmers, and Vic kept his eyes on them because the coach couldn't always watch everyone. He was pretty sure he'd be watching Gar this year.
Karen touched the wall a split second behind the boy with dark hair and she looked over in disbelief, thick curls trying to find their way out of her ponytail as she shook the water out of her ears. As she climbed neatly out of the pool, ignoring the ladder, she said something to the boy that Vic couldn't hear from twenty-five meters away. The rest of the kids had a long way to go. Coach Bruce glanced at his stopwatch in frustration.
A gentle prodding at his shoulder turned Vic's attention back to his own lane, and he looked down at an inhumanly tiny girl in a bright pink bikini. Her blonde hair was in two pigtails, which had been pulled back meticulously around her goggles with precision that was almost clinical. Her eyes were hidden by the goggles that she'd yet to remove, the careful way she held her head indicating that she was afraid to mess up her hair.
"Excuse me," said the girl. "But what are we doing?"
"Trials," said Vic, indicating Coach Bruce and his stopwatch. "He's timing us to see how fast we are right now. To see what he's working with."
The girl bit her lip. "Will we be in trouble if we're guilty?"
"Guilty?" Vic echoed uncertainly.
"If it's like a trial and we're guilty, will we be in trouble?" The girl's speech was getting faster, real fear wedged between the words.
The word had to run through his brain for a few seconds before realization hit him and he laughed. "No, no, not that kind of trial. It just means that he wants to see how fast you are."
"I'm not fast," said the girl, picking at the strap of her bikini and avoiding his eyes. "It's not my fault, though; I've never been on a swim team before, so he can't get mad!"
"He won't be mad," Vic assured her, though he wasn't entirely confident of this himself. Coach Bruce did, indeed, look pretty aggravated as Gar finally found his way to the other end of the pool, tried without success to get out and finally had to use the ladder.
"Next group, step up." Coach Bruce reset his stopwatch and started asking for names.
"Terra," said the blonde girl when it was her turn, twisting her body around as if she was trying to see what he was writing about her. "I'm only six!" she added suddenly, holding up six fingers.
"Take your mark."
Terra turned her head to face Vic, her frantic expression easy enough to read even with the pink goggles over her eyes. "Oh no, I forgot to ask about—"
The whistle cut her off, and when she saw what the other kids were doing she followed suit, half-jumping, half-falling into the water with a loud splash that sounded painful.
Terra wasn't awful: her kick looked kind of funny to Vic and he was pretty sure you weren't supposed to stir up enough water to coat the sides of the pool, but she was having fun, at least after awhile. Maybe she'd forgotten about trials and being guilty and being only six. She finished third, right in front of the girl in the lane next to her, who had long, red hair that floated freely in the water without any attempt at restraining it. Terra waited for the other girl to get out of the pool before they walked back towards the blocks together, with Terra slowing to whisper something in her ear that made the girl laugh. Grinning when her eyes fell on Vic, Terra flashed him a thumbs-up sign.
"Next group up." And there was nobody in front of Vic to step up. This was the part he'd been dreading.
The starting block felt dormant and alien under his feet, something that had once been a source of familiarity and comfort but no longer—and the memory of what it used to be made everything even worse. Vic tried to breathe deeply but something was pressing on his lungs, something like a snake that would squeeze the life out of him, would make him fail exactly as much as he expected to. Once you got trapped in this kind of thinking, you were about to prove yourself right: Vic knew this, had listened to his father say it more times than he could remember, and yet he couldn't shake it, couldn't pull himself out of whatever…hopelessness he'd spiraled into.
"Take your mark."
Vic dropped his head and tried to turn his brain off, wishing that it too was a mechanical device like the pins in his legs, something that the doctor could cut into and maneuver at will. The water felt strange as he entered it, and it didn't stop feeling strange until he'd climbed out, cringing because he could sense Coach Bruce's disapproving stare on his back when he used the ladder—but Vic couldn't get out of the pool the right way; it hurt when he tried. If he'd been Terra, he would have made sure that everybody knew exactly why, but he wasn't "only six," he was ten, and you didn't do things like that when you were ten. Besides, looking for special privileges wasn't the way to get on the coach's good side. If there was a way.
The rest of practice passed without incident, Vic swimming several more trials and wishing that he didn't have to keep getting out at the ladder, wishing that his dive wasn't clumsy and uneven, wishing that his breaststroke kick was legal—because it wasn't, he could feel that it wasn't, oh god—and hoping that helping Terra and Gar and the other new kids would somehow make up for all of it.
The girl with the red hair had announced that her name was Starfire ("Actually, it is something else that you would not be able to say, but Starfire is what it means.") and that all the places she'd been swimming had been nothing like this one. Vic tried to explain about swim teams and chlorine and lane ropes but she seemed more interested in asking Terra where she'd gotten the butterfly clip that was currently keeping her long bangs from falling out of her pigtails ("I'm growing them out 'cos I don't like them anymore.").
Vic was glad when practice was over and he could finally sneak away and try to find his way out of the pool without finding anyone who knew him. He didn't want to talk about trials.
"Vic!"
He turned reluctantly to see Wally running at him full speed with only a haphazard glance towards the lifeguard stand to see if he was asking to be punished. "Hey, Vic!" Not even slightly out of breath, red hair clinging to the sides of his face, Wally continued without waiting for an answer. "Sorry we couldn't talk earlier—somebody must of put mud in the new coach's coffee or somethin', 'cos man."
"He's not that bad," said Vic with a non-committal shrug.
"Yeah right, try hideous." Wally ripped his goggles off his head, throwing them in the air and catching them behind his back. "Really, if you weren't here this year, I dunno what I'd do. It was bad enough without you last summer, even when we had Coach Babs who was actually nice, but evil coach of doom plus no Vic equals zero fun."
Vic forced a smile. "At least I'm here. Though I think you're definitely great at making your own fun, when you need to."
"So you're okay now? Was it cool? Even better than when I got stitches that one time?"
It was the last thing from cool, and Vic failed to stop the shiver that ran through him as the questions sent him back to a late night at the end of May and a red sports car crossing the solid yellow line, and shattered glass, and blood, and screaming, and everything fading to black and waking up a week later with a tube up his nose—
"It was alright," said Vic, steadying himself. "They put pins in my legs and the doctor says they can't come out yet, maybe not ever, because it was a comminuted fracture and they said that mine became really complicated—"
"You have stuff inside your legs?" Wally's mouth fell open and stayed open. "Like, metal things? Would you set off a metal detector, do you think?"
"I'm not sure." Vic shrugged. "I've never tried it. I can ask my mom, maybe."
"This is the greatest! You're like, a robot or something—like a cyborg!"
Vic thought that he wouldn't have liked the words if they'd come from anyone else but Wally, but the smile was so genuine that he couldn't be upset. "Not really. It's not like I have superpowers or anything."
Wally giggled. "Yeah, sure: whatever, Cyborg."
"I've started something, haven't I?" he muttered, but Wally didn't hear him because he was too busy yelling something about buying Vic a soda.