Flip Turn

Chapter Seven: Aerodynamically Impossible

Starfire liked her new name better. Before the summer, she'd been Koriand'r, back when she lived across the huge ocean, but now she was Starfire. Her daddy called her by her new name, but sometimes her mommy used the old, usually when she was in big trouble. She'd say it really fast, like she was spitting it out of her mouth as fast as she could, and her eyebrows would knit together and then Starfire knew she was about to be sent to her room. For about forever. Sometimes even an hour.

But Starfire didn't get in trouble a lot. Most people told her that this was because she was a good little girl, but she knew better. It was only because she was very, very good at getting out of trouble. She didn't really know how she did it, but it worked, and she hardly ever had to actually try. Trouble just melted away like the orange popsicles that the man in the white, musical truck brought to the pool every Friday afternoon. Before the summer, she'd never seen anything like it; there were a lot of things here that she'd never seen before. Most of the cars that Starfire had seen were brown and boring and didn't bring ice cream.

The ground burned her feet as she hopped across the parking lot, trying to jump from one shady spot to the next, but there just weren't enough and the safety of the water was so far away. It would be much easier if she could fly. Starfire grinned and decided to try it. She held her arms out, telling her brain to forget about the stinging, sizzling pavement, bent her knees and jumped as hard as she could, aiming for a cloud that had caught her eye just above the highest tree.

"What in the world are you doing?"

She crashed down to the pavement before Robin finished speaking, keeping her balance easily. "Trying to fly," she said, shifting her weight rapidly from one foot to the other so she wouldn't have to put one down for too long.

He narrowed his eyes. "You can't fly, though."

"I can if I try hard enough," said Starfire.

"It's aerodynamically impossible!"

She stared back at him, crossing her arms and shrugging. "I do not know what that means so it does not—doesn't—matter," she annunciated slowly. Her daddy said that she had to work on her talking, because they talked a different way across the huge ocean and she needed to learn since this was her new home now. Sometimes, people shortened words to make them easier to say. Starfire had done that in her old home, too, but now she had to learn it this way. It was funny how it took her even longer to say something that was supposed to make the words shorter.

"But you can't just say something doesn't matter just because you don't know—"

"Yes I can," said Starfire. "I could fly if I wanted to; I just don't have the time to practice."

"You can't fly!"

"My daddy says I can do anything I put my mind to." It was getting way too hot for Starfire to be standing there just talking, and her feet were probably about to burn off, so she started walking away from Robin, as fast as she could to get to the shade right inside the pool gate. Robin followed, saying a lot of stuff with really big words that didn't really matter to Starfire; she was perfectly able to find out what they meant if she wanted to, but as long as they weren't interesting, there was no point.

And anyway, it was time for swim practice.

Starfire already knew how to swim, and some of her cousins had thought that she was trying to learn how when she told them about the swim team—but that wasn't right. Swim team was one of the funniest things that Starfire had ever heard of, but it was also one of the most fun, so that was okay. Almost as fun as roller coasters. Well, actually, nowhere near as fun as roller coasters, but still pretty fun. She'd met about a million new friends and they were all really nice, even the ones who acted like they weren't.

Swim team was funny because it was all about a bunch of people trying to learn things about swimming when they already knew how to swim. Also, the water was boxed up in concrete with stuff in it that cleaned all of the diseases out; Vic had told her because she'd asked him on the first day why the water smelled funny. Starfire was used to swimming in rivers and ponds, where the water was free and sometimes fast and had rocks and sand at the bottom—but never stuff that smelled funny. People on the swim team were also way too careful about keeping things neat. Her mommy liked things neat, and made Starfire clean her room every Sunday, but that was just pointless. At swim team, you had to be in the right lane all the time, swimming the exact right way, and you couldn't even change when you wanted to, and if you didn't follow every single one of the rules exactly right, you got DQ'd, which basically meant you didn't get one of the neat ribbons that were lots of different colors (Starfire's favorite one was purple).

But that was okay. She had been DQ'd before, and she didn't mind because everybody cheered for her when she climbed out of the water. Besides, she got a blue index card, which was almost as nice as a purple ribbon. Even though she had to give it back later.

The only thing was, Coach Bruce didn't really like it much (when you were on the swim team, you had to have a grownup teach you stuff, even if you already knew how to swim). He also didn't really like it when Starfire didn't listen to him enough (she tried, but the butterflies on the fence were so much more important than listening, red and orange and her daddy had said that this kind was called Painted Lady…). So Starfire reluctantly turned her head back to what he was saying, something about ears and feet and streamline and then he wanted Kitten to come show everybody how to dive.

Kitten tightened her ponytail and pushed her way past Starfire, giving her an ugly look as she went. She shouldn't get to be the one to show everyone; she splashed people too much and said mean things to Gar. But that definitely didn't stop her from walking all the way up to the edge of the pool, like a queen, until her toes hung over the side of the pool, right in the middle of the center lane. And in a single, sharp movement, she had pushed up and out with her legs, arms coming up tight around her ears, body arching like she was trying to grab herself a little piece of the sky and take it down into the water with her as she entered it smoothly with just a tiny splash.

Seconds later, her head poked up through the surface. "How was that?" She squeezed the water from her ponytail and grinned up at the crowd of kids.

"Great job, Kitten," said Coach Bruce. "Don't use the ladder, please," he added, and she fell back into the water and swam around to the side.

Behind her, she felt Gar let his breath out in a giant puff of air. "I don't think I could do that in a hundred zillion years."

"Me neither," Terra squeaked, shrinking back behind the first starting block and biting her nails.

"You don't have to." Coach Bruce interrupted a few other kids who were saying how it was way too hard. "You probably won't learn to dive like that for a very long time; we're just going to work on the basics today."

"Good, because I think I can wait until I'm seven to learn how to dive like that," said Terra, skirting around the block and hesitantly stepping forward. "…Or eight. Or twenty-four."

Coach Bruce kind of halfway-laughed, except Starfire didn't see what was funny about wanting to wait until you were seven (she was already seven, but if she'd wanted to wait until she was eight, she could). "We'll see," he said. "In the meantime, who wants to be first?"

Most of the kids took a few steps away from him. Starfire didn't move, raising her hand. "I can!"

"Umm, what if we already know how to dive?" Vic asked. He was older than most of the others, not a lot older—he wasn't even as old as her big sister, Komand'r—but he'd been on the swim team for a few years so he knew a lot.

"If you already know, then you can practice when it's your turn," said Coach Bruce. "Those who already know how to dive will be doing something else later."

Starfire couldn't wait to find out what 'something else' was. But right now, she wanted to dive, because it looked so much like flying when Kitten did it, so she raised her hand a little higher. "I can go first now, really!"

He had her sit right on the edge of the deck with her feet in the water—she didn't really want to sit, because she wanted to dive like Kitten, but she didn't say anything.

"Do you remember how to streamline?" He didn't look quite as big when he was sitting next to her.

She put her arms up to squeeze her ears, one palm on top of the other, and nodded—it was really hard to nod when your hands were over your head like that.

"And do you remember what I said about your hands?"

Whoops. Maybe she shouldn't have spent so much time watching the butterflies. "Umm…not really."

He sighed, but when she smiled up at him the tired look went away. "Your hands need to go in the water first—even before your head—and try to keep your ears covered."

Starfire put her hands down and used them to cover her ears. "Like this?"

"No," he laughed, taking her hands and putting them back like she'd had them before. "Keep them covered with your arms."

"Oh-oh, okay!"

"Alright, now I'm going to count to three, and then you're going to fall in the water and I'm going to help, okay?"

She narrowed her eyes at him, wrinkling her nose. "I think you mean that you're gonna push me in."

Coach Bruce looked a little surprised. "It's not that—"

"Oh, it's fine, I like being pushed in!" Starfire giggled.

"You do?" Jade interrupted from the side of the pool, staring at her intently and seeming somewhere between scared and amazed.

"I think she likes everything," said Vic.

Starfire felt Coach Bruce's hands on her shoulders—they practically covered her whole back. "Ready?"

"Yup!" She squeezed the sides of her face with her arms, so hard that she was kind of afraid that maybe her head would crack open like the eggs her daddy cooked for breakfast.

"One, two, th—"

Starfire didn't hear the rest because there was water in her ears. She tried so hard to keep her hands together, pretended that they were super glued—and they did stay together, she realized. She wasn't sure if it was a good dive but at least there was that.

Surfacing, she took in a deep breath and yelled, "Did I do it?"

From his perch on the starting block, Wally nodded vigorously. "Totally; you were almost as good as I was when I first tried it!"

Starfire swam back to the side of the pool—she remembered not to use the ladder—feeling powerful and important, and it had kind of been like flying, when she tried to remember how it'd felt before she'd hit the water. "Can we do that again, please?"

Coach Bruce smiled down at her as she pulled herself up, one of his hands resting on the block. "Let's make sure everyone else gets a turn first, okay? Terra, why don't you try it?"

Terra made a sound that sounded kind of like a scared kitten and hid behind Gar's starting block.

It took awhile for everybody to get a turn—some of them didn't really want turns, it seemed like, but if it looked like they were scared, Wally started chanting their names really loud, and after that it was hard to just say you weren't going to do it. Even the ones who thought something bad would happen ended up being okay: well, one of Terra's pigtails came undone, and then her clip sunk to the bottom of the pool and Coach Bruce had to get it back, but everything was fine besides that. The only one who really refused to try was Raven, who kept saying she'd quit except her mommy kept making her come to practice to watch. Sometimes, like now, she'd put her feet in the water, but she'd get really mad if anyone splashed her.

Starfire sat down next to her, tapping her on the shoulder. "You really d—don't want to try?"

"No," said Raven, scooting away from the edge as if she expected it to bite her. After a few seconds, her eyes turned back to Starfire, who'd been waiting patiently, and there was a brightness that she'd never seen on Raven before. "…But Terra's hair looks really funny."

"We should fix it!"

"…I guess we could. If she doesn't mind."

They'd waved Terra over and had gotten her to sit still in front of them when Coach Bruce said that everyone who knew how to dive needed to line up behind lane one. But they didn't know how to dive so they just stayed there and watched the bigger kids line up—actually, some of them weren't big, some of them were Starfire's age and Robin was so little that he kind of looked six, but for some reason, they seemed bigger because they knew how.

And then, Coach Bruce was definitely holding a hula hoop. It was probably the weirdest thing Starfire had ever seen in her life. Including the time Komand'r got her hair stuck in the front door.

"Is that what I think it is?" asked Raven slowly, leaning over to whisper in her ear.

Terra turned around, yelping when she yanked her hair out of Starfire's grasp. Rubbing her head, she nodded. "Uh huh, and at least it's not pink 'cos that would be just too weird."

"I like pink," said Starfire. "But I like purple better. Could it maybe be pink and purple?"

Raven laughed. Starfire had never seen her do that, ever.

Vic found the words to ask what the whole team had probably been thinking. "Err, coach? What are you going to do with that?"

"I think the better question would be, what are you going to do with it?" said Coach Bruce. Raising his voice to speak to everyone, he continued, "Diving isn't passive; you don't just fall into the water right underneath the blocks. You need to use your legs to push yourself up and out, towards the other end of the pool. We're not diving down." He pointed to the bottom of the pool directly under the first starting block. "When do we ever swim a race down there?"

"Never?" guessed Gar, who'd found his way over to where Starfire was sitting.

"Exactly, so we're never going to aim down there when we dive."

Wally wrinkled his forehead, hands on the starting block—he was in front of the line. "That's great an' all, but what does that have to do with a hula hoop?"

"I mentioned aiming—we're going to give you something to aim for. You're going to dive…through this." He indicated the little green circle.

"No way!"

"Like, you're gonna put it in the air?"

"This is like some kinda circus or something…"

Coach Bruce held up a hand. "That's enough. You can complain about it after you've proven that it won't help you dive better. But until then, Wally, you're first."

Wally stepped onto the block, fighting back giggles. "I just go through it, right?"

A nod answered him, the hoop held right in the middle of the lane at a height that nobody could possibly get through. "Whenever you're ready."

Blue goggles came down over his eyes and he took a breath with such force that Starfire could hear him all the way from where she was sitting, then he was off the block and in the air, higher than even Kitten had gone when she'd shown them—and somehow, he got through, though just barely and the way he entered the water looked a little clumsy.

And that—that really looked like flying. Starfire felt the smile stretch all the way up to her ears.

"Woah," said Wally when he surfaced. "That was…actually kind of awesome."

"I want to do it!" Kitten pushed her way in front of Vic, who stepped aside and let her without a word.

"Me, too!" said Gar from his seat. "Just…when I'm seven."

"Yeah," Terra agreed. "Seven."

Some of the kids loved the hoop, and some of them were scared of it—Karen almost refused to go, but Vic convinced her. But Robin didn't seem to care one way or the other. He was one of the last to go, and just stood there waiting like he'd done it a million times before. Actually, maybe he had. Robin lived with Coach Bruce, he'd said so, but he wasn't his daddy. Robin wouldn't say why he didn't live with his real parents. Starfire had tried to ask once, but he'd told her that he had to go get some water, even though he'd had a full water bottle sitting right next to him.

Coach Bruce held the hoop a little bit higher for him. His dive was better than Kitten's and he didn't splash at all.

When they had finished diving, they were supposed to climb out of the pool from the side, right next to where Starfire was sitting (except for Vic because he'd had an operation and was allowed to use the ladder). She clapped for them when they got out, but she didn't clap for Robin: hands on her hips, she turned her head up to stick her tongue out.

"So there!" she pronounced, wrinkling her nose.

He pulled his goggles off and blinked at her. "What are you talking about?"

"You said that people could not fly because…because of…because of the dynamics of the air, and you were wrong!"

"I was not! When did you see a flying person while I wasn't looking?"

Starfire pointed straight back at him. "You just did."