Flip Turn

Chapter Six: That S-Word Thingie

"So Robin, what happened to the right side of the lane, huh?"

Robin looked up irritably. "What are you talking about?"

"You said we were supposed to be on the right side of the lane," said Wally. "But you totally swim right down the middle at meets." His forehead wrinkled, blue eyes narrowing slightly. "And when we race in practice, too, actually."

Some people didn't even try to understand. "No, you swim on the right side of the lane when there are other people in it—didn't you hear what I said the first day?"

"Yup, I know, that's me, Mr. Safety Hazard." In one fluid movement, Wally climbed onto the fourth starting block, looking down at Robin in a pretty good imitation of that look that grownups gave him when they thought he'd done something cute. "So it's okay to be a safety hazard at swim meets?"

"No!" Robin had to turn his head way up to look at Wally; he wished he'd come down. "There's nothing wrong with—Wally, don't spin like that!"

But Wally wasn't listening, just twirling around on the starting block with his hands over his ears and a huge grin on his face. "Sorry, I can't hear you, but I think I could close my eyes and do this if I wanted to…"

"Wally, get off the block."

The spinning halted, his head jerking around a split second before he managed to make himself stop moving. Robin followed the motion, even though he already knew who'd said that. Bruce didn't look happy. At all.

In fact, he hadn't been happy for a few days. Robin could always tell when something was bothering him. It was hard to notice if you didn't know him, but every move he made was tense, so totally focused on something that it made you want to apologize for not being important enough. Last night, Bruce had been checking Robin's algebra and the way he'd held the pencil…yeah, there was definitely something bothering him.

Wally's eyes turned upward, so slight that most people would have missed it—of course, Bruce didn't, but he just told Wally to get down right now and that he had to swim double warm-up. Laughing, Wally waved at everyone on the pool deck and jumped off the block, pushing off the bottom of the pool and not coming up to breathe until he was at least halfway to the other end. Well, jumping right off into the water obviously wasn't what he was supposed to do, but technically Bruce did say to swim warm-up and…Wally was really good at getting out of things. "Technically" was one of his favorite words. Robin didn't think he really knew what "technically" meant.

Robin was also pretty sure that Wally didn't have any questions about what side of the lane to swim on. He'd just said that to be annoying. It had worked.

Robin spent warm-up wondering how he could have ever lost to somebody who spun around on the starting block. For once, he was alone on the side of the pool while everyone else swam—usually, Wally would be right behind him, but not this time. At least that was something. There was no one to talk to—not like Robin wasted time on talking, or anything—so he decided to put his goggles back on and watch people. This way, nobody could see your eyes, so you could stare at them without being rude. And Robin liked to watch. He had a really good memory and always saw the details that nobody else noticed.

So it didn't take him long to notice Raven, being dragged over to a table near the water by a lady who was probably her mother. Especially because she was yelling. Loudly.

Her mother stopped walking, bent to cup Raven's face in her hands. "Raven. We're just going to watch."

Raven shook her head violently, wrenching away. "I don't believe you! You're going to make me swim and I don't want to!"

"You've made that pretty clear," said her mother, forehead wrinkling and eyes tired. "You don't have to swim, but you do have to watch."

"But—"

She sat Raven in a chair near the backstroke flags (you were supposed to count how many strokes it took to get from the flags to the wall, so you wouldn't hit your head) and started asking her what strokes everyone was doing, kept asking until Raven finally answered, voice emotionless and stubborn.

The last time Robin had seen Raven, Bruce was pulling her out of the pool and she was screaming her head off. He didn't know what the problem was, didn't have time to find out before Gar almost drowned and then Raven screaming didn't seem so important anymore. Thinking back, he could remember Bruce making a phone call and then going out to talk to someone in a silver car, and not coming back for awhile, and then Raven didn't come back for five days.

He'd only asked once, in the car on the way home, and Bruce had said that it wasn't any of Robin's business and that he was not going to mention it again. Of course, what it mostly looked like to Robin was that Raven had thrown a temper tantrum because she didn't want to be underwater. Which was just stupid. Robin had learned how to swim when he was two. And now he could swim all the way across the pool underwater without even breathing.

He was so busy thinking (Robin did that a lot) that he almost didn't hear when Bruce said that everybody needed to go down to the shallow end. In the next lane, Gar groaned. "We spent forever trying to get back here and now you're gonna make us go across again?"

"Yes," said Bruce. "Everyone to the other end, please."

Terra scrunched her face up like she'd bitten into a lemon. "Can we walk?"

"No, you can swim."

Sighing loudly, Terra turned to Gar and pointed down the lane with a fingernail coated in chipped, blue polish. "You go in front of me."

One lap was easy. Robin switched from freestyle to butterfly halfway through.

When everyone had finally found the other end of the pool—everyone but Gar, who got to the flags and decided to hold the lane rope instead of actually swimming—Bruce held up a handful of blue index cards that he seemed to pull out of nowhere. "Who knows what these are?"

They were DQ cards, of course, but Robin didn't answer. He was only supposed to answer if no one else could say. That was the rules.

"They are blue index cards!" Starfire chirped, and Robin jumped because she was a lot closer than he'd been expecting. Five minutes ago, she'd been in lane six, but now she was in his lane. Starfire did that a lot, switching for no real reason, gliding under the lane rope too quick for anybody to catch her.

Bruce paused for a moment. "Yes, but what are they for?"

Starfire shrugged. "That was not part of the question."

"Looks like those cards that they give you before you swim, the ones you give to the timers," Karen supplied, resting her goggles on her forehead to get a better look, brown eyes squinting into the sunlight as soon as she took them off. "Why do you have them?"

"Because if your card is in my hand, you were disqualified at the last meet," said Bruce. Everyone screamed. It took awhile to make them stop.

Hands in her mouth, Terra lowered herself down into the water up to her neck. She leaned over to Robin, chin resting on the lane rope. "I didn't know he saw that," she muttered, voice soaked in horror.

"He sees everything," said Robin. It was kind of true. You couldn't lie to Bruce. Robin never lied anymore, anyway, but he'd stopped a long time ago because it just wasn't worth getting in extra trouble; he always found out. In about three seconds.

"So it seems that we have a problem with non-simultaneous breaststroke kick." Bruce pretended to scan the cards in his hand, but he wasn't really reading them; his eyes were focused on the pool. Besides, he probably had them memorized. Lots of people thought that Bruce was just a good swimmer and nothing else, since that was all he ever talked about around most people, but Robin knew that he was really a genius. A psychic genius.

Gar's eyes got huge. "Si—mol—us…who?"

"It's what your kick isn't, dummy," Kitten drawled. She reached over to splash Gar, who squeaked out a protest and swabbed desperately at his eyes.

"Stop that!" Starfire splashed her back.

"That's enough." Everybody stopped, because you always stopped when Bruce wanted you to. "Simultaneous means that something happens at the same time. We had some problems last week with remembering what this means. Which strokes require a simultaneous kick?"

"Legs at the same time, right?" Out of nowhere, Raven edged slowly closer to the water—she'd dragged her chair down here when everyone had gone to the shallow end. Stopping at the steps to clutch the metal bar as if she was trying to hide behind it, Raven wrinkled her forehead and continued cautiously, "Umm, breaststroke and butterfly."

Bruce didn't seem surprised, but it was hard to tell. "Exactly."

Sitting on the side of the deck, a girl with dark hair pulled into a long braid studied her feet carefully, moving them up and down together, then snapped her head around with a surprised expression on her face. "Oh-ooh! It's not like freestyle!"

"And Jade, maybe you can tell us which direction your toes should be pointed in breaststroke."

The girl with the braid's gaze flitted from Bruce to her toes and back again. Finally, she let her feet fall into the water with a big splash, shaking her head. "I have no idea."

"I know! I know!" Terra had completely forgotten about Bruce seeing the DQ cards. Pigtails bobbed up and down as she jumped off the bottom of the pool, high enough that she almost got her whole chest out of the water. Stopping for a deep breath, she pointed her fingers away from each other and grinned. "Out! Like this!" She looked like a really tiny traffic director.

"Out, like, out of the water? How do we do that?" Gesturing helplessly at Terra's fingers, Jade turned her feet in several different directions, but none of them were the right one.

"Are you stupid?" Kitten sneered.

"I'm a green belt and you'd better shut up or I'm going to break your arm."

Vic slid under the lane rope to help her, seeming only a little bit afraid of the threat, standing in a way that sort of blocked Jade's view of Kitten. "Nah, out like you're trying to kick the sides of the pool. This way…" He seemed to realize something, then turned to look hesitantly up at Bruce. "Umm, can I show her?"

"You can show everyone," said Bruce. "Stop at the fifteen meter mark. If you can't see Vic, get where you can see."

Starfire wriggled around Robin to dive under two lanes, swimming until she was practically close enough to Vic to poke him in the eye. But Robin could see just fine, so he didn't move. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Raven turning her toes out, almost secretly, forehead wrinkled in concentration.

Vic was pretty good at showing everybody—he was a lot better than he was at the beginning, at least, when one of his knees turned the wrong way, but he'd fixed it. Robin had seen him swimming laps almost every day after practice (he always had to stay late waiting for Bruce) and sometimes he was still working on his kick even after Robin had gone home. He'd never said anything about it, but anyway, now it was better.

"So, where do you point your toes in breaststroke?" Bruce asked after Vic swam back to the wall.

"Out!" Terra bounced her fingers back and forth again, but this time they were a little too careless to really tell what direction they were pointing. Her smile could light at least six Christmas trees, though.

"Is Terra the only one who knows?"

"Out!"

"And not out of the water, either!" Jade punctuated.

"Last question," said Bruce. He had a serious expression but it was his fake-serious look. "What kind of kick do you use for breaststroke?"

Everyone was silent for a long time. Robin wondered if this was one of those times when he would have to answer. "Umm, is this that big, long, S-word thingie?" Gar asked uncertainly, twirling his goggles around his finger and scowling as they fell off. He grabbed for them, missed, and had to go underwater because by then they were all the way at the bottom of the pool.

"I think it might just be the big, long, S-word thingie," Bruce said in the fake-serious voice.

"It is soomultemeus!" Starfire nodded sagely.

"Not quite."

Robin knew what it was, of course. He'd seen it in the rule book so many times that it was practically tattooed on his brain. But he let the others try to guess it because he was only supposed to answer if nobody else knew.

He'd opened his mouth to say it when someone else said it for him. "Simultaneous." Still hiding behind the metal bar, Raven took a half-step back when Bruce turned to look at her but then her shoulders relaxed when he smiled.

"Could you say that a little louder, Raven? I don't think Kitten could hear you over in lane one."

"Si—simultaneous," she repeated, not really louder but a lot less afraid.

"I was so gonna say that," muttered Gar.

"You were so not," said Kitten, turning up her nose and crossing her arms over her chest.

Wally grinned and pointed at the steps. "Raven's a genius!"

"And does anyone remember the word now?" asked Bruce. The fake-serious look was completely gone; he wasn't even pretending to be serious anymore. Before this summer, he'd hardly ever been like this, but for some reason he seemed to smile a lot more at the pool.

"Yep, simultaneous! At the same time and not like freestyle!"

Bruce raised an eyebrow. "Anyone besides Jade?"

"Simultaneous!"

"Alright, let's see how much you remember. We're going to do six 25s breaststroke…"

Listening to the set with one ear, Robin moved closer to the steps until the lane rope stopped him. Raven was backing towards her chair now, cheeks slightly flushed, huge, purple t-shirt sliding off her shoulder. It kind of matched her eyes.

Robin thought about it for about two seconds before he promised himself that he'd keep listening with at least one of his ears, and anyway he'd done so many sets for Bruce that he could understand them in his sleep, so he quickly ducked under two lane ropes until he was right next to Raven, one foot leaned onto the lowest step.

"Did you quit?" he asked.

She nodded, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her hands around them.

"How come?"

Raven looked down at the pool deck, trying to pretend she was very interested in a green caterpillar crawling along a crack. "I don't want to swim."

"It looked like you just didn't want to go underwater," Robin said quietly.

"I don't want to do that, either." She lowered her chin a bit more until it was resting on her knees.

Robin pulled his goggles through the water absently. "Are you scared?"

"I don't want to," said Raven. As if somebody had poked her with a needle, she jumped out of her chair onto the deck to scoop up the caterpillar, which had crawled into a big puddle and couldn't get out. Its little legs were churning the air uselessly until Raven snatched it up, biting her lip, watching as it righted itself and started to wriggle up her arm. She looked back at Robin. "He was gonna drown."

"Caterpillars should be smart enough not to crawl into puddles if they can't swim."

"But he was gonna drown."

That didn't have anything to do with what Robin had said, and he really wished that people would just make sense when they talked but there was something about the way Raven held her arm so still as she shuffled over to the fence, kneeling down to let the caterpillar crawl into the grass and watching until she couldn't see it anymore. Something about it made Robin just nod and say, "Okay. You should come back; Starfire will be sad if she finds out somebody quit."

Then Bruce had finally explained everything to the others and he was gesturing sharply to lane four and sending Robin a look, one that meant if Robin didn't want to have a talk to go with it, he'd better get in the right lane and start swimming. Robin didn't like talks—they always ended with him in his room staring up at the ceiling and wishing he hadn't made Bruce so disappointed—so he dove under the water and was back in his lane and halfway to the flags in a single breath.