Flip Turn

Chapter Eight: Shark

"But I'll die!"

"You're not going to die."

"…But I'll die!"

Vic sighed, trying to think of something to say that would make Terra come out from under her towel. She'd pulled it over her head, hands holding it in place tightly at her chin, face hidden so only her nose poked out a little bit. "Terra, didn't you already know you were going to be swimming IM tonight?"

The towel nodded slightly. "But I thought that maybe if I asked real nicely Coach Bruce wouldn't make me do it…"

"It doesn't work that way," he said. His father said that a lot. You couldn't just decide you didn't want to go to school, didn't want to take medicine when you were sick, didn't want to come inside when it got dark—it doesn't work that way. "He can't just take you out of the event."

"Why can't he, though? I don't want to do it! I'll die!"

"He can't 'cos it takes a lot of time to plan swim meets and it's really complicated, and it would mess everything up. And you're not going to die." Vic wasn't exactly sure how it would mess everything up, but he knew that it would.

The towel made a little sobbing noise. "But—it's—it's so—" A small hand grabbed the rusty fence, steadying herself. "…Long."

"It's only four laps; not that long. C'mon, at least take the towel off your head. Nobody can even hear you like that."

Reluctantly, she shrugged the towel off, pink fabric falling in a puddle at her feet, and then Terra was staring up at him. She still had the ribbons in her hair that she'd arrived with, except one was coming untied and trying to find its way to the ground. "I hate swim meets," she said miserably, crossing her arms, narrowing her eyes as if it was all Vic's fault.

"You liked swim meets last week."

"Because I never had to swim hard things! This is way too hard and it's not fair—I'm not even seven!"

It might not have been, actually, but a lot of things weren't fair and Vic thought that getting used to it now would be the best thing for Terra. After three meets of getting worse times than he'd had since he was seven, Vic had learned a lot about things that weren't fair. He offered Terra the bottle of water that he'd found forgotten at her feet. "Drink half of that, okay?"

"I'm not thirsty though."

"You can't wait till you're thirsty; that means you already didn't drink enough," said Vic.

Terra rolled her eyes but took a few tentative sips from the bottle, except she stopped when Karen tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to wave at her, expression squeezed into some kind of fake enthusiasm that didn't fit. "Hi! Can you make Coach Bruce tell them that I don't have to swim IM?"

Karen paused for a moment, then smiled and shook her head. "Actually, I was just coming over here to make sure that you knew that it was almost time for you to go."

"But…I'll die!"

"No, worry wart, you're not gonna die," Karen sighed. "I think you should probably put your cap on, though."

Terra wrinkled her nose, reluctantly undoing her ribbons. "Eww, I hate that thing: it's too tight and it pulls my hair and it must be too small because I can't get it over my head…"

Reaching into Terra's swim bag, which was wide open with most of her stuff falling out of it, Karen fished out a bright purple cap, stretching it with both hands as if she was really trying to figure out if it was too small. "Looks okay to me." She presented one corner of the cap to Terra, who held it cautiously. "Here, I'll help you. Hang onto it real tight, bend down and put it next to your forehead."

"But…"

"One, two, three!" Karen stretched the cap over Terra's head, almost too fast to see how she did it, but she did a good job; there were only a few pieces of hair sticking out in the back. Vic was kind of glad that he was a boy and had short hair so he wouldn't have to worry about that.

Biting her lip, Terra shifted from one foot to the other, hand clutching for the fence again before she took a deep breath. "You really, really swear that nothing bad's gonna happen to me if I do it?"

Karen nodded. "Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye."

"Oww, that would hurt!"

"So I guess you know I'm telling the truth, then," said Karen. She started twirling her goggles around one of her fingers.

"Can you come with me?" Terra's shoulders slumped against the fence in a way that couldn't ever be comfortable.

"No, but I can," said Vic. "She's not doing IM tonight. But I am, and Robin and I think Jade, too."

Terra breathed a heavy sigh. "Oh, good, I was scared that I was the only girl."

Before either of them could say anything to that, Terra's name was called, and her eyes got really round for a moment, and Vic thought that she still wanted to hide under her towel for a while longer, but then she zipped up her bag, kicked it closer to the fence, and followed the Clerk of Course to the benches. She turned her head sharply when she was halfway there, yelling back at them, "Please come sit with me real soon, okay, Vic?"

"I'll be there as soon as I can," he said, trying to keep his voice as calm as he could.

As soon as he said it, somebody on the blocks false started, one of the big kids doing short free, and Terra cringed at the sound of the gun, holding her ears. She just stood there for a few seconds, refusing to move, and Vic thought that he'd have to go convince her to go sit on the benches when Terra finally saw Jade and the fear melted away as she grabbed onto her arm and started telling a story about the lifeguard stand. Vic let out the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"Think she can do it?" Karen asked him once Terra was too far away to hear.

Vic shrugged. "I think if we don't tell her she can't, she just might."

He used to like IM, but now he didn't. Up until now, he'd gotten lucky and hadn't had to swim it; probably, it had always been a matter of time. Either that, or Coach Bruce was waiting for him to get the breaststroke kick again. He'd said that everyone had to swim it, at least once, if they were able. Coach Babs had never made anyone swim something they didn't want to do, but Vic had always done it because not many people were good at IM, and you didn't have to be fast to be good, as long as you didn't get tired. But now that he was ten, you did have to be fast, and he was almost positive that he wasn't fast enough.

And Terra was right. It was a long way.

IM was short for 'individual medley,' not that thing on the computer that Jade had thought it was at first. Four lengths of the pool, one for each stroke, and you had to do all of it in the right order or you'd be disqualified. The first time he'd done it, Vic had messed up and did breaststroke after butterfly. He tried not to think about that.

"Hi, I'm Wally and I'm eight, what's your name and why are you wearing a cap if you're a boy?"

Vic looked up, the familiar voice bringing him out of his thoughts. Wally was poking the boy sitting next to him with his index card, not listening at all to the lady who told him to sit down right now. The boy wasn't answering, looking down at his card as if it was a really good book he couldn't stop reading, not even long enough to reply. So Wally poked him again, this time in the middle of his forehead where latex met skin.

The boy shrugged. "Garth, and I wear it so I'll go faster."

"But it makes you look funny!"

"I don't mind," said Garth politely, though he turned back to his index card and didn't look up again.

Terra's bench was called to stand behind the blocks, and she cast a brief look at Vic before getting up, eyebrows pulled together like she was at the doctor expecting to get a shot. Vic tried to look encouraging and didn't know if it worked, exactly. Then she turned, mumbling under her breath, "Butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle…butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle…"

"Wally, sit down, now, we're gonna get in trouble," said Robin from the end of the bench. He looked more than a little bit upset by the fact that he was at the end of the bench. The faster times were in the middle.

"I'm never in trouble," he returned, but then he did sit down, leaning over Garth's shoulder to read his card. A second later, he was pointing a disbelieving finger at Garth. "Okay, there is no way that's really your time."

Garth just shrugged again. "If you don't believe it, I guess you'll find out soon if it really is or not."

Vic stopped listening to them around the time that Wally started wondering if he could jump over the fence, focusing on Terra's heat when the starter told them to step up. She did, after a glance to either side of her to make sure that everyone else was getting up. At the beep, she did a clumsy half-dive into the water, more falling off the block headfirst than an actual dive, but considering that she'd just learned last week, it was really good.

Her race took a long time. Most of the eight and unders took awhile to finish the IM, but Jade was a lot faster than Terra and when she got to her last lap, Vic was worried that she wouldn't be able to keep going, because she held the side of the pool gasping for breath for several seconds before she forced herself to turn around. When she finished, the timer in her lane had to pull her out of the pool, and as soon as he let her go she flopped down onto the deck, hands pressed into the concrete and shoulders heaving. She didn't get up for awhile, not even when the next heat was called to step up. Wally kept gesturing at Garth's lane and trying to get him to wave, but Garth wouldn't look at him. Vic couldn't decide if Robin looked embarrassed, nervous, or both. He didn't have time to decide, because a split second later, Robin was in the water, along with the rest of his heat.

It turned out that it really was Garth's time. Whatever it was.

Garth swam like a normal person would breathe, as if it would be harder for him to not swim than it was to swim. The only person that Vic had seen even come close was Wally, but it was pretty clear that even he wasn't going to beat Garth. It was insane. He must have been swimming since he was a baby…maybe even since he was born. Maybe he'd been born underwater or something. It sure looked like it. Vic was starting to be glad that he wasn't eight anymore, just for today; at least this way he didn't have to race a shark.

He actually wasn't all that far ahead of the others; Vic counted about five seconds between him and Wally, with Robin touching the wall a second after that. Wally jerked his head to Garth's lane, yanking his goggles off his head and just staring like he didn't believe it, but Garth just climbed out of the pool and didn't look back, gathering up his towel and flinging it over his shoulder. He did stop to talk to the other coach, though, a taller lady with red hair like Starfire's. She did most of the talking, and Garth did most of the polite nodding. But that was okay, because Wally was doing more than enough talking to make up for it.

"And I mean, it's like he has gills or something, you know like how a fish can breathe underwater?"

"I know what gills are, Wally." Robin didn't look happy. Though, for once, Wally didn't look exactly thrilled, either.

"It's not fair, if you're that fast they should make you swim with the nine and tens, or even the big kids, yeah, he shouldn't be allowed to race people who don't happen to be fish…oh, good luck, Vic!" Wally waved at him briefly before he took a deep breath and went right back to listing all the reasons why it wasn't fair. "No, go this way, we are not talking to coach right now, he'll just have to get over it—Robin, come on, it's not like we did anything bad!"

Vic sighed as he stepped onto the block. Things just didn't work that way: Garth beat them because he was faster, and Wally would have to accept it. Except, right now Vic mostly just wished that at least some of the good luck that Wally had wished for him could be real. He was going to need it. They'd combined his heat with the girls, and he'd seen Karen swim enough to know that girls were just as good at swimming as boys were…but Vic still didn't want to lose to girls.

A loud voice rose over the crowd. "Go, Cyborg!"

"Be quiet, Wally…"

After that, Vic couldn't think about anything but swimming.

The water seemed hotter than it'd been earlier, even though that made no sense because it was much later in the day now—and he pushed down the panic that it was too hot, that it would make him slow. Shoved it away to some corner of his mind that hopefully wouldn't stop him from getting his arms out of the water all the way, again and again and it was so hard, he couldn't kick very well because of his legs and he'd lost a lot of muscle and by some miracle he'd made it to the wall except, oh god, there were three more laps… Stop it. Just swim.

At least the butterfly was over, and he could finally breathe a little bit on backstroke, and once he'd started the third lap he kept seeing Wally cheering for him out of the corner of his eye every time he surfaced—but that just made him sicker, so he found a spot at the other end and stared hard at it, pretended that the little black cross at the other end of the lane was the only thing that existed in the universe. And when it was finally time to swim freestyle, Vic knew exactly how Terra must have felt, because it took every bit of will left in him to force his fingers to let go of that wall, force his head to drop back underwater and his arms to work again.

After an eternity that somehow also took no time at all, he was gasping for breath as he held tight to that final wall, rough and real under his shaking hand. He didn't let himself stay there, though, even if his body wanted to stop working and go to sleep for at least three days. Vic hauled himself out of the water—you only got pulled out if you were tiny and scared and six, like Terra—managing to find his voice so he could ask what his time was.

"2:08.59."

He took a breath. He'd been faster than two minutes before, but he'd also been slower—he'd been seven, but at least it was something. At least it was five seconds faster than when his mom had timed him last Saturday.

At least he wasn't DQd.

He picked up his towel and went over to talk to Coach Bruce.

"Your breaststroke kick looked much better." The words held a measure of distraction, but not much, since Vic had figured out that Coach Bruce was able to focus on a lot of different things at once.

Vic nodded. "Thanks, I've been practicing."

"I noticed. It's paid off." He glanced at his heat sheet for half a second. "Your next event is long free, right?"

Vic nodded. "What kind of time do you want me to get?"

Coach Bruce put down his heat sheet, stopped watching the older girls swimming IM and turned his full attention on Vic. It was a little overwhelming. "The kind that involves you doing the best that you can. That was a good swim, Vic." He paused, then continued seriously, "Don't worry so much."

And it was kind of hard to worry when Vic looked over at the other team's coach. Or, more specifically, at the little girl behind her in a blue dress—really little, probably about four—who was braiding her hair, mouth halfway open in concentration, eyes narrowed and focused.

"I'm gonna make you beautiful, Coach Ivy."

Coach Ivy smirked, passing the girl a hair clip when she held out her tiny hand. "That's wonderful, Kole. Is that your brother in lane two?"

Kole nodded, though she didn't take her eyes off the coach's hair.

Vic had started to head back to his seat when Coach Bruce touched his elbow. "Can you please tell Robin that I want to see him?"

"Sure," said Vic, frowning despite himself. He really hoped that Coach Bruce didn't want to yell at him about losing to Garth. He didn't think that was what it was, but Robin was already so obsessed with winning and…it just wouldn't be good. At all.

When he got back to the tent, Wally jumped on him. Literally.

"Oh my god, that was amazing, you sure showed all those girls—I can't believe they even let them swim with you, but it didn't matter 'cos you kicked their butts anyway—"

"Umm…Wally…I need that shoulder for the long free."

He let him go, laughing. "Whoopsie, sorry. Robin, wasn't that awesome?"

Robin looked up from the book he was reading. "It was pretty good."

Vic almost didn't say it, the words stuck in his throat until he forced them out because he had agreed to it, and he didn't really think it would be bad… "Oh yeah, Robin, coach said you were supposed to come talk to him."

He'd dropped the book before Vic got the whole sentence out, eyes immediately clouding over as he got up from his chair. "I'll be back in a minute," he muttered, pushing past Vic and Wally, not even acknowledging Starfire when she came running up to him holding something clutched between two hands. It made Vic feel cold. He really hoped that saying it hadn't been a bad idea.

Vic let Starfire show him the daddy longlegs spider that she'd found, nodding as it crawled up her arm and she said that she was going to name it Silkie, and Terra stood behind her moaning about how disgusting it was. He heard himself explaining to her what the spiders ate and why they were good spiders that wouldn't hurt people, but his mind was in the pool, except it wasn't the older girls he was racing, it was Garth, the quiet human shark, and he was nothing but a failure who couldn't even do the one thing he was supposed to do…

Shuddering, Vic shot his hand out to pull Silkie out of Terra's hair.