Flip Turn

Chapter Eighteen: Just Gonna Swim

"Wally, I'm stuck!"

He looked up to find about a mountain of hair hanging over the top of the slide. Frightened, blue eyes stared down at him, the hair still a little bit green at the tips from last week, one of Terra's hands reaching down to him as if he were really tall enough to just jump up and bring her back down.

"You don't look that stuck to me," he observed, stepping onto one of the wooden benches to get a better look.

Terra shook her head, which shook the other pigtail free (the first had fallen out a long time ago, when they'd found the swings). "I am, though! It's too high and I can't get down!"

"What's wrong with the slide?" He pointed to the red tube attached to the platform that Terra was clinging to. It was kind of fun: the playground was way better than the one that had been here since two years ago, which had been all rusty with three out of the four swings broken. Then they'd put this one up, and it was way better. Wally wasn't really sure why they had a playground outside of the pool, but he figured it was to be nice so people would have something to do, since waiting to swim took at least forever.

Terra followed his finger, shuddered, and quickly turned back to him. "It's too high, and I don't want to go inside the tunnel."

He sighed. "If I do it with you, will you go?"

"Maybe." Terra pulled on her hair.

She almost hadn't finished saying the word before Wally had jumped off the bench and started climbing up to the slide, taking the steps three at a time, because he could probably find his way around here while he was sleepwalking. He pulled himself onto the platform with one hand, reaching with the other to take hold of Terra's before she could yank it away like she probably wanted to.

"'Kay, so now will you go?"

"I didn't say I promised!" she wailed, face wrinkling up when she looked into the slide. "You don't even know if it'll let us out at the bottom, or some place else!"

"Yeah, right. Where else would it go?"

"China," Terra sniffed. "Or that place where Starfire's from. But I don't want to go there, either, because she doesn't live there anymore, and it would be lonely."

"You're really weird," said Wally, leading her over to the edge of the tube. "I promise that the slide goes to the right place, okay? And even if it doesn't, I'm going with you, so you won't be lonely anyway." He crawled inside the tube, keeping himself from going all the way down with his feet.

Terra didn't look so sure, but she slowly sank down to sit behind him, hands grabbing both of his shoulders and squeezing, and it really kind of hurt—sometimes, girls were stronger than you'd think—but he didn't say anything. "Okay," she said. "I guess we can go now."

Wally counted to three, felt Terra's hand squeeze harder on the last number, and then they were sliding down, down in the weird, red light, over the hot plastic that made his hair stick up, until the slide spit them out into sunlight and cedar chips, Terra struggling to get around behind him and onto the solid ground.

He grinned at her, lazily getting up and picking some of the cedar chips out of his shirt. "I told ya it wasn't scary—you wanna go again?"

"No!"

Wally sighed. "Well, you wanna go watch the big kids? They're swimming breaststroke now…"

Terra's big eyes got bigger. "No!" she said again. "I hate that pool; yesterday was bad enough!"

Championships had been yesterday, and Terra hadn't liked it very much. Last Tuesday, they'd gone to the big, indoor pool for warm-ups and she'd tried to hide in the locker room—and she'd gotten away with it, too, until one of the big girls pulled her out by the arm. She said the pool was huge, loud, and scary—and that she hated the freezing water, and that it wasn't even worth it that she was going to get a medal for swimming the IM. The only reason she was here today was because her daddy was working at the meet.

Today was Classics. If you were pretty fast at something you did Championships, but if you were really fast at something you did Classics instead. Wally had been to Championships once, when he was five (it was in the short free, and Coach Babs had said that he was too little to do it, but he told her he was going to do it anyway—and he had been right), but now he was too fast for that.

Wally tried to think of something that they could do away from the pool. "Well…do you wanna go bother Robin?"

"…Sure!"

They wandered down a small hill the hugged the parking lot, trying to step around the big sticks that had fallen from the oak trees. Wally didn't look at the giant, wooden board behind the building: it just said what event they were on, and he already knew that because he knew everything about Classics. The pool was inside, and everybody who was swimming had to wait outside, but as long as you could remember the order of the events, you would know when you needed to go to the Clerk of Course. It wasn't like regular swim meets; nobody called your name. You were supposed to be bigger and smarter at Classics.

Their team was sitting under one of the first tents with the rest of their division, the grass underneath them covered by a blue, plastic tarp. Not many people were there because there were never that many, but Vic was, and Robin, along with some older girls that Wally knew pretty well. Once, he'd snuck up on Marissa, the one with the curly, brown hair, and put a spider on her shoulder. Then she'd said she was going to kill his dog, but Wally had just laughed because he didn't even have a dog.

Terra walked quietly behind Robin's chair, bare feet making crinkled indentations in the tarp, carefully so they didn't make any noise, her grin anticipating and full. Then, she reached both her hands around and covered Robin's eyes with them, shouting, "Guess who!"

He breathed in sharply, shoulders jerking away from Terra, and almost fell out of his chair, which was really funny until Wally remembered that it was almost always impossible to surprise Robin.

Terra didn't let go of him, though. "C'mon, you're supposed to guess," she pleaded, hanging over his chair to keep him from turning around and looking.

Robin's breathing was fast and shallow, and the way he tried to get it back to normal didn't seem to fit. "You're Terra, and I hope you know that that's a really immature game."

She stared blankly at him for a second, then shook her head as if she were shaking the thought away. "What are you swimming? Is it really long? Do they make you swim for longer at Classics, maybe?"

"Longer, like, more laps?" Robin asked, forehead wrinkling, and the voice sounded calmer but he really wasn't, not at all. "No, it's the same. I'm swimming—umm—short free, IM, and fly." Robin never forgot things. And he never had to stop and think about them, either. And he never said 'umm.'

"Butterfly is so hard," Terra breathed. "I don't know how I went all the way down the pool yesterday—I don't think I would have been able to if I didn't do that thing that Coach Bruce said about keeping your arms in front of you as long as you can. Even then, I don't like it."

"Fly's the best," said Wally, letting himself fall to the ground next to Vic, propping his feet up with the first thing he saw—Vic's cooler. "You'll like it next year when you get bigger."

Terra shook her head. "I don't think I'll like butterfly even when I'm a hundred."

"You might," said Vic. "When you did it yesterday, it was really good."

Smiling, Terra dropped her eyes to the side and played with the hem of her skirt.

"Wally, what happened to your hair?" Vic pointed, eyes bright.

He shrugged, trying to flatten it out, but the weird, fuzzy sensation didn't go away. "Slides always do it, but I don't know why."

"It's the static. The electrons get pulled away from your hair, and it makes it more negative, so it sticks up," Robin muttered mechanically, sinking back further against his seat, shifting fitfully and staring hard at the events written on his arm.

They'd already done the short free. It was kind of bad that Robin had had to swim it, too. He didn't like to race Robin anymore, because he'd get mad no matter what happened: if Robin lost, he'd stop talking for hours and go sit by himself, and if he won, he'd stop talking to Wally for hours and say that he'd just gone slowly on purpose. Wally wasn't sure which was worse, but this time he'd been half a second faster than Robin. Well, actually, it was three-tenths of a second, as Robin had said angrily when they read the results printed on the bulletin board, but it was the same thing. He'd been faster than Wally at Divisionals, but he was a lot happier there—and people always swam better when they were happy.

And now, Robin looked sick, even when (or maybe because) he was talking about static-stuff, kind of like he was maybe going to throw up, and that would be really gross, so Wally needed to make him get better, fast.

He poked Vic in the knee. "I need to tell you a secret. C'mere."

"But we have to sw—"

"In a minute, Cyborg, now c'mere!"

Vic sighed and followed him away from the tent and towards the parking lot. The asphalt would be way too hot to step on, so Wally stayed in the grass, stopping just short of a little anthill.

"This had better be a really, really important secret, Wally," said Vic, tone filled with warning. "I'm not missing my event."

Wally nodded. "It is, but it's not really a secret. Robin's sick. We need to get coach."

A flicker of fear crossed Vic's face. It was too small for anybody else to notice, but Wally looked closer than most people. "But he's really busy, and he probably doesn't have time for—"

He rolled his eyes. "Coach always has time. You just don't believe me when I say that he does. And Robin is sick, because he always starts talking about stuff like 'lectrons when he's sick. Now, do you want to come with me, or should I just tell him?"

Vic sighed, but it was one of those playful-defeated sighs, and the way he gently turned his eyes up to the sky meant that he knew he'd lost. "I think it's electrons, and I'm pretty sure this counts as none of our business, just so you know. Kind of like the last time you made me tell Coach Bruce about what happened to Robin at the swim meet."

Already starting up the hill, Wally turned and began walking backwards, mostly so Vic wouldn't get hurt trying to keep up—sometimes he went too fast, and Vic couldn't run very fast anymore. "You know what your problem is? You stay in your own business too much. If you'd spend more time in other people's business, I think everybody would be a lot happier."

"Well—I mean—maybe you should spend more time out of other people's business!"

Wally raised an eyebrow, pausing in mid-step. "Now I know why you never fight with people. You kind of stink at it."

"Wally, don't stand on the benches!"

He looked down at Robin and rolled his eyes, stepping from one bench to the other and back again: they were close enough together that it was mostly easy. "You're not normal, you know that?" he accused.

Coach Bruce hadn't been too busy. Wally had known that he wouldn't be. Not many people from each team went to Classics, so most of the coaches ended up with not much to do—except, Wally's coach obviously wasn't going to walk around talking to his friends like the others did. He didn't think that Coach Bruce really had any friends, probably.

But Robin had gotten better after they made Coach Bruce go talk to him. Even though he had to ask Robin twice to go talk, because he'd tried to pretend he was reading. Wally didn't know what they said, since he wasn't allowed to follow, but afterwards Robin wasn't stammering anymore, or forgetting things, and he'd lost that look in his eyes that meant he'd rather hide under his chair than swim.

"Maybe not, but you're definitely not allowed to do that," said Robin, who hadn't moved from where he was supposed to be.

"I don't have to listen—"

"Wally, don't stand on the benches." The Clerk of Course looked over her clipboard disapprovingly, head poked between the thick strips of plastic that covered the door between the pool and outside.

He sighed as loudly as he could and jumped down to the concrete—it didn't even hurt his feet. Then, he smiled straight at the Clerk of Course until she raised an eyebrow, said that she'd be checking back to make sure he wasn't "misbehaving," and disappeared back through the milky plastic.

Wally never misbehaved. He just made things more fun.

The boy in the center of the bench was familiar; he was wearing the same really shiny cap that he'd worn when they'd raced Coach Ivy's team. And Garth was probably going to beat everybody in pretty much the same way that he'd done it before.

"Hi," said Wally. "Remember me?"

Garth blinked at him. "Yeah," he said, eyes narrowing slightly, but not in a mean way. "You didn't like my swim cap."

"I said it was weird—I never said I didn't like it. You gonna win?"

"Maybe," Garth shrugged.

"You gonna break the record? Like, break it into little pieces?"

"Maybe," he repeated, dark eyes focused on the rusty diving board hanging over the deep end. "Mostly I'm just gonna swim."

It was kind of hard to talk to Garth. He didn't say much, and what he did say was just obvious, because everybody was going to swim. Wally didn't like it when he couldn't talk to anybody, but Robin wouldn't talk to him, and he'd tried talking to Joey, who was on the very end of the heat in front of them, but Wally didn't know how to talk with his hands yet. Last year, they'd been in first grade together, and he'd decided to learn, but so far he just knew how to say hello and stuff. He looked up at the high rafters stuck into the ceiling and wished that he was nine so he could swim with Vic.

The pool was really different from all the other pools that Wally had ever been in—this one was special, indoors and saturated with the smell of chlorine, so much that it had made Terra's eyes turn pink yesterday. It was long, really long, except somebody always put a metal bridge halfway down the lanes, all the way across, so they only had to swim as far as usual. The bridge was hollow underneath so the water flowed freely, and when he was five he'd worried that he could get stuck in there. When the summer was over, some really important, really fast teams practiced here. He kind of wanted to swim with them someday.

But he liked the locker rooms the best; when he was six, he'd found a roach in there, and it was still alive and everything. Nobody had wanted to touch it except for Vic, and after that they were best friends.

There were eight lanes in this pool, not six, so it seemed like Robin was a lot farther away when they went to step behind the blocks. Wally watched the first heat of boys swim, spinning around to look at the wall behind him every time somebody finished. That was something else different about this pool: the times were printed on a big machine stuck to the wall, huge and yellow, and if you were DQ'd, everybody would know it because the machine would say. Joey got fifth place, which was pretty good, but Wally was faster than any of the boys in the first heat.

"You did good," he said as Joey walked by him. "Your backstroke was a lot better than the guy who won."

Joey didn't say anything, of course, because Joey hadn't talked since he was six—and hadn't talked about the angry scar that ran crooked from his left ear to the base of his throat—but he did smile. It wasn't quite as good as Wally's getting-out-of-trouble smile, but maybe he could teach him later.

Then Wally had to step onto the blocks, and he couldn't think about much else but the way the dark material coating the platform felt like sandpaper on the bottoms of his feet, the black cross painted at the bottom of the pool in each lane, the way the ripples from the previous race slowly faded as if they were going to sleep…

And the way Wally was absolutely not going to sleep when the tone and the flash of light like a picture being taken sent him off the starting block and into the water.

IM was hard, but Wally knew how to swim it. Some of the big kids tried to tell him to just think really hard about finishing the race, about touching each wall one after the other, but that wasn't the right way to do it. Wally thought about everything but the race, not letting the tiredness catch him as he wondered how they got the giant bridge in the middle of the pool, why they had a diving board here if nobody ever used it, what the people swimming on the other side of the bridge were doing…everything but the race.

He didn't need to think about it. The directions were written on his brain like the events written on his arm, in permanent marker, and it was easy and perfect and right when he touched the final wall, hand diving deeper than it would in a regular pool because he had to touch the black pad with the yellow cross, the mat that hung over the rim of each lane that would stop the big machine on the wall from counting out the seconds.

Wally grabbed one side of the handle under the block, the one that people used for backstroke, pulling himself halfway out of the water so he could see his time. And then he felt his smile spread straight up to his ears, maybe even farther than that, because nobody had beaten Garth but Wally's time was good. And Robin had gotten second place, but Wally had taken off three seconds, so he couldn't even say that he'd gone slow on purpose.

Besides, Wally didn't really care. He just wanted a different color medal, and he already had a bunch of red ones, so white would be even better.

Getting out of the pool was almost harder than swimming the race—the water level was so far below the deck, and you had to put your feet on the rim and then get out, and sometimes that still didn't work. Garth didn't move until he'd shaken Wally's hand formally, but once that was done he didn't have any trouble climbing out. Actually, Robin didn't, either. He was probably used to this type of pool, Wally suddenly realized.

Wally searched the small set of bleachers for Coach Bruce, though it only took two seconds to find him because he was bigger than everybody else. He snatched his towel off the back of the white chair, slinging it over his shoulder as he yelled out, "Hi! I got third!"

"You also cut three seconds, which is fantastic," Coach Bruce said as he wrote something down on his heat sheet.

The thick rope that kept the swimmers from bothering the coaches (not like it would stop Wally if he'd really wanted to) felt slippery as he ran his fingers across it, walking towards the exit because he wanted to make sure Robin wasn't mad. He had to sidestep Kara, the big girl he'd met when they'd raced Coach Clark's team; she was kneeling next to a shivering little girl, trying to dry her with two towels.

"Yeah, I'm a fantastic safety hazard!" he called back to Coach Bruce.

He could have sworn that he saw Coach Bruce laughing, but it might have just been his eyes getting messed up from stepping back into the sunlight.