Girl Out of Water

by Nat Luurtsema

  I realize I haven’t thought about swimming in about an hour and a half, which is a new record for me. I feel quite encouraged. Maybe I am going to cheer up and get normal.

  A month ago I wouldn’t have believed this was possible. It’s like when I had the norovirus and puked for hours until I felt like a deflated balloon. It was impossible to imagine things getting better.

  However, there’s still a long list of Things That Are Rubbish About Lou Brown’s Life. And the latest item is: I’m not about to get a day off school cos Mum craftily stowed our school bags in the boot this morning.

  She pulls up at the school gates and looks back at me.

  “How is it, honestly?” she asks. Lav is fixing her make-up in the sun visor mirror.

  “It’s not terrible,” I tell her. “It’s just not what I thought I’d be doing.”

  Mum nods. “I understand, Lou,” she says and I feel an unfair stab of temper.

  “Pfft. Do you?” I snark.

  She raises an eyebrow at me and rolls her eyes in Dad’s direction. Oh, right. I doubt anyone imagines they’ll be flatmates with their ex-husband. I smile a sorry at her.

  I kiss them both and slide out of the car, followed by Lav, and now we’re strangers again for the rest of the day. Although, surprisingly, she walks alongside me until we’re halfway across the yard before nudging me goodbye with her elbow and peeling off to sit with some friends. It’s not much, but it feels sweet.

  8

  As I walk into school I can hear the bell ringing for the beginning of afternoon lessons. I check my timetable. Come on, PE … please, please, PE. The only lesson I don’t find completely baffling.

  Unless there’s a new class called Lying Down and Having a Bit of a Rest.

  It’s biology. Gutted.

  I get there first and sit on a tall stool at the back. This is the best desk in the classroom – nearest the window, furthest from the teacher, good view of the tadpoles. Prime real estate! Someone will have to sit next to me.

  You’d think.

  Everyone enters in gaggles of twos and threes and sit somewhere they can all be together. Melia comes in and I smile at her. But Cammie is right behind her. She spots me and mutters, “Tragic,” loudly enough for me to hear. The two girls with them laugh. Melia doesn’t laugh but she doesn’t return my smile, either.

  Biology actually passes quite quickly, as I spend the whole class thinking about my hatred of Cammie, which is strong and healthy. I get lost in daydreams of how happy I’d be if she got horrendous acne.

  As we leave biology I overhear Melia and her friends talking. Apparently they’ve got a swimming match tonight, so the whole team is leaving straight after school in the minibus.

  Interesting.

  At the end of school I watch the team congregate in the car park. Debs counts them all off and they stick their sports bags and packed dinners in the boot.

  It brings back memories of cheese rolls that always tasted of petrol fumes.

  I grab Lav and ask her to tell Dad I’ll walk home as I’ll be a bit late.

  “Shall I tell him you’ve got detention?” she asks.

  “Yeah. He won’t believe it, but go on.”

  I’ve never been in trouble at school. I don’t think some of my teachers could pick me out of a line-up.

  I put my hand in my bag and feel something silky. Excellent.

  Everyone races past, keen to get out of school ASAP. If I was a teacher I’d be a bit hurt by how desperate my pupils are to leave. It’s like they’re fleeing a fire.

  I walk against the tide, feeling a little thrill. I’m looking forward to this.

  The swimming pool seems deserted, but I’m not risking it. I check all the changing rooms, even the toilets. With the exception of the occasional staff member wandering around, I have the whole place to myself.

  My swimming costume is a little tighter than it used to be. I poke my stomach; I suspect that’s the culprit. But as Mum always says when Lav complains about her weight: “Some people don’t have arms or legs! OK?”

  Can’t really argue with that.

  I stride towards the swimming pool and I’m about to dive in when I notice that Pete, Roman and his brother are loitering in the field again. They’re kicking a football around and Pete is smoking.

  If I had to name the person I find least relaxing to be around, I’d say Pete and Cammie are currently fighting for the top spot. But this is more my pool than theirs so I’m determined to ignore them. They’ll get bored and go away soon.

  I dive in from the side and it feels amazing. I swim a length and feel the muscles in my ribs stretching. Then I lie on my back in a starfish shape and scull gently, small movements of my hands but just enough to spin me in a slow circle.

  I take a deep breath and let it out bit by bit as I sink to the bottom of the pool, where I start somersaulting slowly, forwards then backwards. I can feel the air in my nose – enough pressure to stop water shooting up my nose but not enough to lose any bubbles.

  I don’t know what this is that I’m doing at the bottom of the pool but I’ve always been good at it. It’s a useless trick, really, only good for making people think you’ve drowned. (If you need that skill regularly, then your life is more depressing than mine and I tip my hat to you.)

  I start to feel an ache in my ribs and I surface slowly with my eyes closed. Mmmm. So relaxing.

  I open my eyes.

  Roman, Small Roman and Pete are all standing on the side of the pool looking down on me. In both ways, I sense.

  The silence hangs. I say weakly, “No outdoor shoes.”

  “What?” says Roman.

  “Nothing.”

  Small Roman definitely heard – he’s, like, three feet closer to me than the other two.

  “What were you doing down there?” asks Roman.

  “Uh…”

  Really, are we going to have a chat like this? I never usually feel naked in a swimming costume, but suddenly I do. I don’t get out of the pool. I bob around, a little talking, floating idiot head.

  I realize I need to give Roman more of an answer than “uh”.

  “Just floating around, really – somersaults and stuff.”

  “You a swimmer?” asks Pete.

  I hesitate. “Used to be. Don’t do it any more.”

  They all nod, and Small Roman smiles at me. They have no idea what a massive big deal it was for me to say that.

  “Do you swim?” I ask. They don’t, of course, or I’d know them. But still, Operation: Make Friends is going surprising well here, let’s not derail it.

  “No, we’re dancers,” says Small Roman. Pete rolls his eyes.

  “What?” protests Small Roman good-humouredly. “We still are!”

  “What’s this?” I ask. (Lav taught me the trick of talking to boys: not too many words. It looks keen. Treat everything you say like a tweet – 140 characters or less.)

  “OK, so for years we’ve been like this dance … uh…”

  “Troupe?” I suggest.

  “Collective,” Pete corrects me.

  Small Roman goes on. “And we just tried out for Britain’s Hidden Talent but didn’t even make it through to try-outs.”

  “I thought everyone tried out in front of the judges?” I ask.

  “No,” says Small Roman. “They’re holding public auditions once a week for the next few months. We did the first one and got nowhere. You only get on TV if you’re talented or mental. The people in the middle, who are just deluded and a bit pathetic, get sent home.”

  He looks so sad my heart breaks a bit and I scoop the water around me to fill the silence, which makes me spin in a small circle. “I’m sorry,” I say sincerely, once I’m facing him again.

  “Apparently people are ‘over’ dance collectives now there’s been like a million of them on TV,” explains Roman, scuffing his shoe along the floor tiles. “They said Gabe would appeal to young girls, but it didn’t help.”

  “Uh huh,” I say, sneaking
a glance at Small Roman. Who I guess is called Gabe and would be appealing if I wasn’t looking straight up his nose. My neck hurts.

  “So we thought maybe something to do with swimming?” Gabe continues.

  “Can you swim?” I ask.

  It seems a reasonable question, unless they want to appear on TV wearing armbands.

  “Everyone can swim,” scoffs Pete.

  I’m about to argue with him on that, but Gabe jumps in. “We were playing football outside and…”

  “We thought you’d drowned,” says Roman in a way that makes me feel a bit daft.

  “But when we came in, we saw you doing that amazing underwater acrobatics,” says Gabe. “It’s cool.”

  Roman and Pete nod, and I feel a bit giddy with neckache and compliments.

  “So … teach us that?” asks Roman.

  “I don’t want to be on TV,” I lie. I do, I totally do, but holding my gold Olympic swimming medal and smiling modestly and tearfully at the cameras, not prancing about in front of booing weirdos.

  “Not you,” says Roman bluntly. “You could train us.”

  “In … what, though? What is this?”

  At this they all look extremely uncomfortable. They glance at each other, and I take the opportunity to stretch my neck down.

  Aargh aargh aarghhh. The pain is so intense I see spots of light. By the time I look up again I think my eyes must be bulging like a squeezed hamster. (I imagine. I’ve never squeezed a hamster, though Hannah did once when we were eight and I didn’t stop her.)

  (Before you get all judgy, Mr Nibbles went on to live a full and happy life. For nine more days.)

  “I guess it’s kind of like … synchronized swimming,” says Roman with an effort, and they all look like they’re sucking a lemon. I try not to laugh. Poor boys, it must be so hard being cool all the time, eh?

  “There was a synchronized swimming team from around here who got through last week’s audition,” says Gabe.

  “But they were all girls and really hot,” Pete remarks, suddenly enthusiastic.

  “So hot,” adds Roman, entirely unnecessarily in my opinion.

  Good for them. I smooth my wet hair behind my ears before I realize how that looks. Insecuuuure!

  “So, you want me to train you?” I ask, getting back to the point. Because although it is lovely to talk to boys about “hot” girls, I am getting very cold.

  “Yeah. We can’t pay you, though, we’re broke,” says Pete. From where I’m floating I’m exactly eye-level with his £150 Nike trainers and I allow myself a sceptical face.

  “But we’ll say hi to you at school,” says Roman.

  I stop treading water and sink a bit. I keep my chin underwater. My eyes feel very hot.

  “Maaate,” Gabe says to him quietly. Somehow that just makes me feel worse.

  I can feel myself blushing. I swim away from them and hoist myself out of the pool on the other side. I can hear murmuring behind me. I know they’re discussing if I’m upset (YES) or maybe even crying. (NO. That is water from the pool on my face. Yes, all of it.)

  I may be a social outcast (fine, I am) but I don’t deserve this: it’s mean, and I’ve had a gutful of people being mean. I wanted to come and swim without Cammie and her bitchy mates and instead I run into the male versions.

  Plus, in my mind I’m already telling Hannah this story later and I want to tell her how I left in a haughty silence, so that is what I do.

  9

  Brilliant dramatic exit, Lou. Except … in the changing room I realize I didn’t bring a towel with me so I have to dab myself dry with toilet roll. Twenty-five minutes later, picking damp tissue clumps off my legs, I head out of the sports centre.

  Why is everything so hard? I want one thing to go right. Please, just one thing. I kick the door open, and it doesn’t bounce back and smash me in the face and knock all my teeth out. This is a start, though I was looking for more, tbh.

  I look around. You have to be careful when you walk home alone. It’s starting to get dark. I check my watch. I really didn’t mean to be this late.

  I’ve never stayed out late and lied about where I was before. I was hardly boozing at a bus stop, but still, I’m impressed by my new rebellious behaviour. For a newbie I’ve really committed to it; in fact I’ve done overtime!

  Typical dweeb – Lav’ll love that.

  When I get in, Mum and Lav are crashed out in front of the TV. They look up at me and from their faces I guess it’s obvious I had a bit of a cry as I jogged. I scoop some tears out of my ear.

  “How’s my goldfish?” asks Mum, patting the sofa beside her. She doesn’t realize what she’s just called me – my nickname from all the gold medals I used to bring home. (Not because I once pooed in the pool on a holiday to Spain when I was five, despite what Lavender may say.)

  I sit beside Mum, slide down and put my head on her shoulder. When I stretch out my aching legs, they reach past Mum’s feet. She nudges them with her knees. “Leggy cow,” she tuts. That’s nice.

  We watch TV for a little while. Funnily enough it’s Britain’s Hidden Talent. I’ve never really paid attention to it before. The stage is huge, the contestants look tiny – I’d be terrified if that was me. There are lights zig-zagging all over it, and playing in the background is the sort of music that gets you excited in the pit of your stomach. It seems a little less bizarre now that three of the coolest boys I know would be into it.

  A hefty man wearing only gold underpants prances onto the stage. Nope: still bizarre.

  I can see it would be cool to be on that stage if you were doing something impressive, though swimming underwater wouldn’t have been my first thought. How would you even get a swimming pool up there?

  Boys, I think with an amused weariness. Like I’ve got any idea about boys.

  “There’s pasta in the kitchen,” says Mum and I go and help myself.

  “How was school?” she shouts through to me.

  “Yeah. Hmm. How was your date last night?”

  “Yeah. Hmm. Oh, that reminds me. Mark!”

  “Yeah?” Dad shouts from upstairs. I roll my eyes. Mum never thinks that three people in three different rooms is a reason not to chat.

  “You know Laura, who I work with?”

  “No, but OK?”

  “She asked me if you were single!”

  Pause.

  “And if I’d give her your number so she could call you.”

  That’s so complicated. See, even old people need Facebook.

  There’s a silence from upstairs. Then he shouts down, “Is Laura that pretty redhead?”

  Mum and Dad are a bit frosty with each other for the rest of the night. Lav and I make our excuses early and head to bed, where I tell Hannah what happened today at the pool – which is really lengthy by text. She texts back immediately.

  Hey, at least you’re talking to boys, right?

  Always the optimist.

  There are some dots on my screen; she’s still typing.

  Are you annoyed at them?

  Yes, I reply honestly.

  So … technically, you’re having BOY TROUBLE.

  Ooh. That’s one way of looking at it. I imagine myself at school tomorrow, looking weary, knocking back a coffee and saying to a passing sixth former, “Men! Am I right?”

  Next morning, Dad drops us off early, probably trying to get back into Mum’s good books. As we’re leaving, she tells him he should keep an eye out for our geography teacher, the pretty redhead. Zing.

  “Good luck with your job interview today,” I say as I get out of the car and give him a kiss. Lav gives him a fist bump.

  Poor Dad, I wish I could do his interviews for him. I’d be terrible at them. He’s a project manager and I can’t even manage my socks into pairs, but I want to protect him from any more rejection.

  I jog up the front steps of the school, past kids enjoying the sunshine before they go in. I look up and catch Gabe’s eye. Of course, he’s my sister’s year. I don’t know wh
y I’ve never seen him at school before, though.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “OK,” I say.

  Yes, I know. “Hi” is the word I was looking for. No one replies to “hi” with “OK”.

  Except this social moron.

  I carry on up the steps past Gabe, pushing my Boy Trouble from my mind, and head to my form room. First lesson is English – let’s see how little I know about that subject.

  I can read and write, so it could be worse. And actually I read quite a lot over the summer because I had nothing else to do, so this lesson isn’t too bad. Which is nice, as Mr Peters is our English teacher and I’m glad that he can see there’s more to me than crying on the floor covered in tampons.

  At lunchtime, I attempt to chat in the canteen queue with a girl I recognize from my form. “Oh great, macaroni cheese!” I say. Come on, how could this go wrong?

  She gives me a startled look. “It’s basically nothing but carbs and fat, you know that, right?”

  “Well,” I say, feeling we’ve headed in a direction I hadn’t expected, “you need some carbohydrates and fat to live.”

  “No, you don’t,” she tells me firmly. “I’ve got an app for that.”

  So she’s not going to be my new friend. I think we both feel that. I find an empty table near the bins to eat alone. I act like my bread roll is fascinating: Oh, so it’s bread all the way round? I never knew.

  After a few minutes a girl in the year above approaches me and loiters by my table, looking effortlessly cool. She has a tan and is wearing loads of delicate little necklaces and bracelets that jingle when she moves.

  She stands, jingling.

  I sit, holding my bread roll.

  “Hey,” she says, like it’s a bit of an effort.

  I try to seem even less fussed. Well, if that’s the game we’re playing! Maybe I’ll fall asleep mid-sentence.

  She holds a piece of paper out towards me, subtly, between two fingers as if she’s working undercover.

  I stare at it. Why is she passing me a note? She raises her sculpted eyebrows at me like I’m being weird. I’m not being weird! You’re being weird! I take the note off her and she drifts away.

  I’m tempted to put the note in the bin and forget about it, but Lav says I have to be less suspicious of people at school – some of them might be nice. I say, pelt me with tampons once, shame on you. Pelt me twice, shame on me. (Pelt me three times, and this is why we’re banned from Boots.)