Swimmers

by Amy Bright

  S W I M M E R S

  A m y B r i g h t

  For my Mom and Dad, Robin and Glenn

  D E C E M B E R

  O n t h e B u s

  The bus went over a bump in the road, making me fumble for my backpack. I leaned over the aisle to hand Poppy a can of Coke. She swatted it away.

  "I’m not thirsty," she said, shoving her hands into her pockets.

  "Suit yourself."

  I handed it to Lee instead. She cracked the top and Coke fizzed out all over her hand. I shrugged a sorry. It’s not my fault the bus driver was hitting all the major bumps. Minor potholes between here and Victoria shaking up the soda.

  We were on a Greyhound bus, skinny and metallic, on our way from Alberta to British Columbia. Poppy shouldn’t be on this trip but she was—twelve and pissed off. I had a stab of panic in my chest just thinking about what it meant that she was here. Lee, seventeen like me, sat beside her, sophisticated ponytail swinging like a metronome.

  Outside the window was a blur of coulee, prairie, coulee. Tall grass. Flat highway. It was going to take one whole day to get home. Twenty-seven hours sitting on a bus, and then a ferry ride, still on the bus, and then one more spurt into the city.

  Three months ago, when I did this trip in reverse—Victoria to Lethbridge—it had taken only half of that. Fourteen hours. That’s how fast Mom and Dad wanted me out of Victoria and moving in with Aunt Lynne in this tiny Alberta city I’d never even been to before. Dad drove me to Lethbridge at the beginning of the fall. Early September, shorts and T-shirt weather, and us trapped in his tiny car with the windows rolled up tight. Sans flip-flops, swimsuits, and beach towels. Now it was almost Christmas and I was going back.

  I hadn’t been on a bus that first time. I rode shotgun in Dad’s Ford Focus, the engine a little pissed about all of the mountain passes it had to make it through.

  Dad as a travel buddy was a whole lot different from Lee and Poppy. Poppy was sitting in the seat opposite, listening to the music on my iPhone. I hoped she didn’t find the Fuck Yeah songs. I kept forgetting she wasn’t even in high school, not even close.

  In an unbelievable turn of events, Lee was holding my hand. We were sweating hard between our palms, half because I didn’t think either of us was expecting this, and half because the bus driver had the heat cranked. Poppy checked out our hands between the seats. I tried to remember what, if anything, I’d told her about Lee while we sat at that big table in her Mom’s kitchen being homeschooled. Probably nothing. Hopefully nothing.

  "Hey, Pops," I said, because she was side-eyeing the hell out of us. "How are you doing for snacks?"

  Her left eyebrow jerked halfway up her forehead.

  "Snacks?" she asked, making fun of the way I’d said it.

  "Yeah," I said. "Snacks."

  "I’m okay," she said. She could make her voice sound so small. Maybe it was her on-the-bus voice, lowered a few decibels out in public company. She didn’t sound that way in real life. I had spent the last three months with her, and I still didn’t get how she could stick herself to me like glue, but no one else. She was even a little suspicious of Lee.

  Watching them get on the bus together that morning had given me major secondhand embarrassment. The two of them standing in an aisle, two seats to the left, two to the right, trying to figure out where to sit. They ended up on opposite sides, Poppy on the right window, Lee on the left. It was my job to play musical chairs between them. But that tension was good. It gave me something else to think about besides Niall. He was on a repeating loop on the inside of my head. The reason I was going home.

  I kept hearing this stupid song in my head. Something that was big on the radio that summer when me and Niall really started hanging, a catchy indie hit. I’d snag myself on a snippet of that song and I’d go right back to thinking about Niall again. What we were going to find when we got to Victoria.

  "That music okay?" I asked Poppy. "It’s not too poppy for you?" I smiled at my joke.

  "Yeah," she said. "It’s fine. And I’ve heard that one before. Probably about a million times."

  "It never gets old," I said.

  "Trust me," Poppy said. "It does."

  I don’t know why it felt good to have her along for the ride, but it did. We were like a professional wrestling tag team, high-fiving support back and forth to each other. Right now we were up against the ropes. But we still had time to make a comeback. The BC border was still miles away. The island even farther.

  "I think we can stop to get something to eat later," I said. We hadn’t had time to grab breakfast. Poppy had been waiting for me on her front steps at 8 AM. Her mom had left early and had no clue that Poppy was gone. I was scared about that. I’d taken Poppy with us without telling anyone.

  I asked Lee if she had raided the minibar last night, but she kindly reminded me that run-down motels do not have much on offer. Zip and zilch. She’d stayed at one down the street from Aunt Lynne’s house, so that we could all leave together on the bus the next morning.

  "Me and my Dad stopped at a Subway when we were a couple of hours away from Aunt Lynne’s house," I said. "I think it was in Banff. We’re stopping there next. If I’m not mistaken," I added, twirling my invisible moustache because the real one wasn’t in yet. I wanted to crack Poppy up. Make her less mad at me. Try to worry less about what was going to happen when her mom figured out she was gone.

  "Hey, Pops," I said, trying one more time. "You okay?"

  "I’m fine."

  "She’s okay," Lee said and gave my hand a little squeeze. Lee had come to Alberta to bring me back home. No one else knew I was coming. When we talked on the phone, me in Lethbridge, my parents in Victoria, I wasn’t allowed to ask about Niall. I wasn’t allowed to ask if they’d been to the hospital. I wasn’t allowed to ask if they’d heard anything. We just talked about Aunt Lynne and me and how we were doing.

  Fine, fine, fine.

  M A R C H

  Bzzzzzzz. "Hunter Ryan to the office, please. Hunter Ryan."

  The first day I heard my name on the intercom, I noticed it slid in between Hailey Pearlman and her arms all cut up from these safety scissors she stole from art class, and Nolan Leder with his Dad’s new girlfriend, who had the son who handed out black eyes before breakfast. I knew things had gotten pretty bad, because the only way you got to talk to Penner was if you had a referral. I was going through everybody I could think of on my slow walk to the office, trying to figure out who had pointed the finger. Teachers, parents, students. Anyone could’ve said something.

  Mr. Penner might have taught high school psychology but that didn’t make him a psychologist. There were a grand total of zero diplomas hanging up in his office. Still, the school board thought it was a good idea to set him up in a room by the atrium once a week on Fridays. All day you would hear the intercom calling kids to the office to talk to Penner about some bullshit reason why they couldn’t get to class on time in the mornings.

  I shuffle-stepped into Penner’s office while the secretary was watering the potted plants. She spritzed them with a spray bottle. Short, short, long.

  "Hunter," Penner said. He was balding on top. You had to hand it to him for not letting the hair he did have grow into a ratty ponytail. He kept it neatly cut. His nose looked like it had come out of the prosthetics department for The Hobbit, and his gums showed too much when he smiled. For a guy who stuck out as much as that, it was the first time I could remember ever seeing him at Douglas High, just another one of Victoria, BC’s ordinary public high schools.

  "One of your teachers recommended I see you," he said.

  "Just the one?" I asked.

  Penner shuffled a few papers on his desk. "Your name has been brought to my attention a few times."

  At the time, I would’ve be
t you it was Saunders or Kesler, Math and Bio, respectively. They hated my guts. But I found out later it was Saunders and Kesler, all my other teachers, and a couple of friends who had put the word out that I needed help. The whole school was out for me.

  "So, what do I have to do?" I asked him.

  "Well, we’ll meet here for half an hour every Friday and talk. Get a sense of what’s going on in your life. I just want to know what’s going through your head."

  Half an hour was nothing for Penner. He used the session to introduce himself. I learned he didn’t have a lot going on outside of the school. He was a retired guy, called back in to talk to students and look like he was being useful. That first session, he told me I’d do the talking. The way he saw it, I was a big set of wooden doors just waiting to open. At the end of the half-hour, he smiled and shook my hand.

  Nolan walked into Penner’s office when I was leaving. He was staring at the ground with his face all beat up and those bruises aging badly. I had seen his stepbrother around. He was six foot two. Nolan didn’t have a chance.

  One night that week, my sister Bridget stayed after dinner. She sat on the couch and watched TV with Mom and Dad. At the end of the night, she went upstairs and fell asleep in her old bedroom, even though she had an apartment downtown. She sold used books at the bookstore two streets away from her place, the famous one that was always getting written up about in the newspaper. I didn’t know why she’d want to be home, sharing a bathroom with yours truly.

  Her bedroom door was closed tight in the morning, and I heard her hair dryer on high while she got ready for work. I didn’t want to meet her down in the kitchen and hang around while we waited for the toaster to pop. Instead, I grabbed my backpack and went outside, and there was my stomach growling away, telling me to get back in there and grab a bowl of cereal, cover blown before I even left the house.

  The cement was grayer than gray. It rained all night and, surprise, high school started first period at the crack of dawn. It was only a ten-minute walk from our house to Douglas High School. There was no way to finagle a ride out of Mom and Dad when school was just around the corner.

  The school sat in the middle of a square lot of land. It was treeless around the building and the school was on one level, low to the ground. I was early. The halls were empty and I could’ve missed the rush, but I shoved myself into the bathroom anyway and carved out a wide buffer.

  The door was missing from one of the two stalls in the bathroom. I picked the other one, the one with the busted lock, sat on the toilet and held the door in place with my foot. No one used the bathrooms behind the gym. I knew that because me and Niall had used this bathroom to smoke weed in the afternoon last semester, in between Social and Math. Niall would prop open the window and push the screen. Niall was a goddamn tree, he was so tall. We’d smoke his neatly rolled joints close to the window, me sitting on the edge of the sink and Niall leaning against the wall.

  No one talked about Niall anymore. He wasn’t at school, which meant people stopped thinking about him. Think about how hard it is to try to continuously remember everyone you’ve ever known. To care enough to keep them as more than just a snapshot in your head.

  Niall had dark hair and eyes and his clothes hung loose and ill-fitting. He had a nose that you noticed the way you do when you see two people kiss in the movies, when they slide side by side instead of crashing into each other. The big Niall thing, the one that kept him golden even when everyone started turning on him, was that he was like no one else. Try finding that in someone you know. You always look at a person and then compare them to what you know about everyone around you. You couldn’t do that with Niall.

  Sometimes that was hard on him. Sometimes he just wanted to be like everyone else.

  One night last year, he came over for dinner and he was on something, his eyes all big and planet-like. Dad had been stirring something on the stove before he came over. We were talking about him. Me telling them he was my friend from school, Bridget making fun of me.

  "Got a boyfriend, Hunter?" Bridget asked, raising her eyebrows.

  "Get lost."

  "Is that why he’s coming over for dinner?" Mom asked, and I glared a hole right in the side of Bridget’s head.

  "No, Mom."

  "Right," Bridget said, hip-checking me into the counter. "Because he’s got a girlfriend. Lee." She drew out the eeeee’s.

  "Lee’s not my girlfriend," I said, feeling my face turn red.

  "She is so," Bridget said.

  Dad just stirred the pot in an easy, even way. He wore a lot of plaid shirts and jeans, and Mom ran around on errands in some of those shirts, oversized and swimming.

  I leaned on the counter and drank a glass of water. Mom and Bridget made the conversation a one-two punch.

  "Have you met him?" Bridget asked Mom.

  "Who?"

  "Neil."

  "Niall," I said.

  "Yeah, Niall. Have you met him?" Bridget asked.

  "Not yet," Mom said.

  "Dude," Bridget turned to me, "think about how much that hurts his feelings. Don’t keep your boyfriend a secret."

  "He is not. My boyfriend."

  "Bridget," Dad said. "We don’t know all of your friends."

  "Yeah, you do, Dad."

  When Niall got there, I thought I was the only one who could tell that he had this eye thing going on. The entire time I knew him, he was always on something. He didn’t like the way things were when they weren’t blurred around the edges, stretched out and slow.

  I didn’t blame him. Niall and his family, it hadn’t been easy for them.

  I answered the door alone. For a few seconds, it was just the two of us on the porch. The outside lights were all on. Niall’s eyes filled his face, and I was mad at him for doing that with my family around.

  "It’s okay. I’m fine," he told me.

  He answered their questions at dinner. Every single thing they threw at him. I kept busy by looking around the table. The placemats were the striped ones, four long lines ending in corners. The lights on, the dark outside, the chairs all used up.

  After dinner, we went into the living room. Bridget turned on the TV but went to her bedroom almost immediately after. Mom and Dad sat on the couch, Dad with his magazine and Mom with her laptop. Me and Niall sat on the floor and watched whatever was on. Niall swayed back and forth. Twice he was lucky the edge of the couch kept him from falling over.

  Living in Victoria made you really familiar with the ocean. Out on the beach, I was always looking at the way the moon reflected on its surface, that big yellow globe staring right back at me from the water. I used to look at that and know there was no way I was going to strain my neck and look up into the sky to see the real thing. Not when it was staring up at me from the water.

  I guess what I’m saying is that Niall was that full moon, the real sky moon. Not some reflection. And you made a point of looking up.

  Sitting in the bathroom stall, lock all busted up, I wished I had some weed to take the edge off of first period, but that was Niall being gone and me too much of a loser to find someone else to smoke up with. I kicked at the door. With my foot back on the floor, there was nothing to hold it open and it folded inward, open to the rest of the empty bathroom.

  I checked myself out in the mirror before I went to class. Bridge had been using my shower when I woke up, so I skipped having one of my own. My hair was all greasy, but it was dark enough that you couldn’t tell. What do I know? Of course you could tell. You look around a high school and you know exactly who isn’t showering and who doesn’t wash their clothes and who has to skip breakfast in the morning.

  There was a zit on my chin, small enough that if I left it alone, it would go away by itself. Bridge used to freak me out about them. "Pop it or it’ll seriously just lurk around forever," she always told me. I knew I wasn’t going to turn out to be one of those guys that all the girls want. I knew when that magical period of growing out of bad looks and baby fat was ove
r. I was on the other side and knew what I was stuck with. I gave myself a look, eyebrows raised, and headed to Kesler’s class.

  Penner, who pretended to be cool with me at first, had gone into psych mode by our second meeting.

  "I’ve been up-front about this, Hunter," Penner said. "This is only going to work if you talk to me."

  "Penner," I said, "what is it exactly that you want me to tell you?"

  He looked at his paper, like maybe the answer was written there, the point of our half-hour Fridays.

  "Okay, let’s try this, Hunter." I smiled and cringed, trying to help him notice his pattern of first-name-basis. "Why don’t you tell me a little about your family?"

  "Sure," I said. It was always the easy stuff first. "My mom teaches yoga downtown and Dad’s a lawyer. They’re pretty lax about his hours. He’s home a lot. Bridget’s my sister."

  "And?" Penner asked. "Where’s your descriptive sentence about her?"

  "Bridge is Bridge," I said.

  Penner laughed. Thought I was funny as shit.

  "You’ve got a good family. I remember your sister. She was smart."

  "Yeah, well, you never had to live with her."

  Penner looked down at his papers to check and see where we were going next.

  "How about your friends? Who do you hang around with outside of school?"

  He clammed me up pretty good with that one. It was weird when old people used hang as a verb. He had his hands folded together and resting under his chin, waiting for some more of my comedy gold. If I told him the truth, I knew I’d be seeing him for a while. He just had to take one look around the school to see that I wasn’t hanging around with anyone. I shot for the middle.

  "I guess I hung out with Niall Black."

  Penner looked at me in a whole new light. There he was, finally figuring out why I was here.

  "You were friends?"

  "Kind of," I told him.

  Niall had been in high school with me since Grade 9, but I didn’t notice him until the first day of Grade 10. I noticed him because, one day in class, he looked like he was dying. Of all those long-term diseases that make people just waste away, it looked like Niall had gotten the shit end of at least five of them.