by Kobe Bryant
I nod. Look around. Hate myself for my weakness.
“What does your mother think of you being here?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I manage.
“Maybe I should call her.”
“Why?”
“It’s a big commitment. Us working together. She should have some input on the process.”
“I’m sure it’s fine. It’s not like she doesn’t know about the commitment.”
“That’s exactly why I should call her.”
“She’s already paid for my membership,” I offer. “She knows what I’m doing.”
“Oh, so you’re a club member now?” he asks.
“I will be,” I say. “I just have to pay up at the clubhouse. I’m actually going to go do that right now.”
“So how’d you get in this morning?”
I freeze, thinking of the car stashed in the woods, the climb over the chain-link fence, but there’s nothing distant about the coach’s gaze right now. His brown eyes are sharp, focused, and knowing. The only response I’m able to give is a sheepish shrug.
“Uh-huh.” His lips twitch as he turns away from me and back to his computer screen. “Practice is at six tonight. You find a legal way of showing up and I’ll tell security to forget about what happened last night.”
“Are you serious?”
“Always.”
Backing out of his office, I turn and walk away with my heart pounding and a grin spreading across my face. I don’t understand what it is that just happened. Not really. But I’m also not sure that it matters.
I’m coming back tonight.
25.
“Well, don’t you look pleased with yourself.” Adam Fitzmaurice jumps in front of me, blocking my path, right as I step outside the aquatic center and start heading for the clubhouse.
“How’s that?” I stop. Adam looks completely different in street clothes. His hair’s styled and he’s wearing a collared shirt with pleated shorts and Sperrys, of all things. Somehow the effect on him is less rich-kid jock than church-group prude.
“You look like the cat that ate the goddamn canary.” He says this like it’s some big insult or something.
“Were you waiting for me?” I ask slyly, because it’s totally clear he was.
Adam shrugs, pushes his black hair back off his forehead, and I just stare at him. He’s older, barely, but we’re the same height, same build, and we have the same sun-worn peeling skin. Yet he’s the one who reeks of insecurity. It’s practically wafting off him.
“How’s your lip?” I venture.
“How’s your stomach?”
“It’s fine.”
“Shouldn’t eat before you swim.”
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
The staring and the awkwardness between us stretches into uncomfortable territory. A woodpecker hammers at a tree above us and finally, Adam gives in and scrabbles for the high road. “How’d you like that practice?”
“It was okay.”
“Just okay?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You coming back later? I saw you talking with Coach M.”
“What if I am?”
“I’ll assume that’s a yes.” Adam cocks his head. “You always this secretive about shit no one cares about?”
“You always ask questions about shit you don’t care about?”
He gives a long sigh. “The guys didn’t like you, you know.”
“I know.”
“They think you bought your way onto this team. Or that Coach M feels sorry for you. But that’s not true, is it? I watched you today. You can’t follow directions for shit, but you can swim.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Well, I’m glad.”
This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I grab for the opening offered. “Hey, can I ask you a question about the team? Or like, a few questions? This is all new to me.”
“Sure,” he says.
“Okay, first off, how much do you weigh?”
“One-eighty.”
“And you’re what, six-two?”
“Yup. Same as you, right?”
He’s right, but I ignore this. “What other training are you doing?”
“Other than what Coach Marks has us doing?”
“Yeah.”
Adam shakes his head. “Nothing. We do a total of nine practices in the water. And we hit the weight room at the club at least three times a week.”
“Nine? That’s it?”
“Quality over quantity. You can check it out on the website when you get access. Everything’s on there.”
“What about your nutrition, then? Do you see someone? Follow a plan?”
“You’ve got a lot of questions.”
“There’s a lot I want to know.”
Adam considers this. “Give me your phone.”
“What?”
“I’ll give you my nutritionist’s contact info. I see her twice a month. Coach M usually refers people to her, but seeing as you’ll be sticking around, I can save him the hassle. I’ll also send you the link to the info she’s shared with me. It’ll get you started until you can get in to see her.”
I hand the phone over, screen unlocked. “Thanks, Adam.”
“Call me Fitz.” Adam—Fitz—types the info into my contacts and he’s more relaxed now. His cheeks are flush, his dark hair’s sticking up in a funny way, and a hint of a smile’s dancing around his lips. He enjoys this, I realize, and the impression I get is that Fitz likes taking on this kind of mentor role. I guess I could be grateful, but there’s an implication of hierarchy in this dynamic that I’m not eager to play into.
“You know, Gus,” he begins, handing my phone back, and I steel myself because I know what’s coming.
“Yeah?” I say.
“I’m real sorry about Danny.”
And there it is. The elephant that’s always in the room no matter how hard I try to shove its shitty ass outside. In response, I narrow my eyes. Lift my chin. “Are you?”
“Yeah. Of course. What happened . . . it was awful.”
“Why?” I ask, as a thread of darkness begins to bore its way through me. “Why was it so awful?”
“What do you mean why?”
“I mean, without him here, isn’t that better for you?”
Fitz’s eyes go wide. “No. God. I looked up to Danny. He was awesome. I was at the Reno sectionals last spring, you know, as an alternate. I watched him swim that day and it was hard. For so many years, I’ve wanted to be like him. I mean, I still do. He’ll always be one of my heroes.”
Well, this makes me laugh. I can’t help myself.
But Fitz is hurt—the wounded giver. “What’s so goddamn funny?”
“Nothing’s funny,” I say, and the darkness inside me bores deeper still. “It’s just sad, listening to you grovel over a dead guy. My brother was a loser. And a total asshole on top of that. Which means if you liked him so damn much, you’re either an idiot or you’re an asshole, too.”
26.
No good deed goes unpunished. This is how I think of Thursday afternoons and the fact that I have to spend every one of mine in a group therapy session over at the medical center in Walnut Creek. Not that I know what I’m being punished for, exactly, but it must be something pretty bad if it means being trapped in a room where other people are constantly talking about the horrible things that have happened to them.
Call me crazy or whatever, but I don’t get what’s supposed to be helpful about this. My personal theory is that whoever came up with the idea of a “grief group” was someone who hated talking about death and decided that if openly grieving people were forced to attend a special group where they had to listen to each other, then maybe everyone would keep their mouths
shut in the first place. This is where punishment theory comes from, although that’s not how the county social worker tried to sell it to me.
“Talking to someone after a traumatic event like this is important,” she said during our one and only face-to-face meeting, in the living room of my mother’s house. “Even if you feel okay now, symptoms can appear that disrupt your life later on. Like a delayed reaction.”
“But I did talk to someone,” I told her. “A counselor at my school. She didn’t help me at all.”
“Well, that counselor was worried about you.”
“How do you know?”
“It was in her report.”
I spent all of ten minutes with that counselor. I can’t believe she wrote a report. “But isn’t that illegal? Her telling you what I said? I’m supposed to have privacy or whatever.”
“Not when there are safety concerns, Gus. You know that.”
“What safety concerns?”
The social worker pressed her lips together. “Your mood and your reported panic attacks. Your lack of social support. Your refusal to talk about anything relating to your brother. Your own history, with . . .” She glanced at my arms and didn’t say the rest but didn’t have to.
My cheeks blazed. “That was a long time ago.”
“Not that long.”
“Well, it will be someday.”
An unconvincing argument, and she won out in the end because going to therapy was never my choice to begin with. That’s how everything goes when you’re a teenager. Adults like to pander and pretend you have some say in your own life, but that just means it’s your fault if any bad shit goes down. They’ll take credit for the rest. Anyway, after that meeting, my mother was instructed in no uncertain terms to enroll me in some sort of mental health treatment for at least three months. She was allowed to choose something through her own insurance, a private care provider, or a program run through county services—whatever she felt was best.
What she chose was the cheapest and easiest option—a referral that came through my primary care doctor that I had to set up on my own. I was authorized for group treatment, which felt like low effort on the part of the insurance company. But I wasn’t surprised. Best has never been a word my mother’s chosen to associate with me.
Why would this be any different?
27.
Walking into the med center’s teen therapy room, with its shitty furniture, depressing posters, and tacky fluorescent lighting, I’m filled with the same low-grade nausea I always feel in this place. There are eight group members, including me, and what we supposedly have in common is someone in our immediate family dying in the last year in a traumatic manner. Traumatic is a subjective term, but trust me when I say everyone here qualifies. The stories I’ve had to listen to within these walls are gutting.
Anyway, rules are rules. I join the circle and take a seat. The group facilitator is this guy named Marco, who looks to be only a few years older than we are. He’s a graduate student, which tells you how little value anyone places on the emotional well-being of traumatized teens. It’s not like we’re getting the field’s best and brightest.
Like always, Marco starts off the session with a weekly check-in, and it’s not long before my head is throbbing. This is the predictable result of being exposed to an endless recitation of vivid dreams and scarring memories of murdered fathers, cancer-struck mothers, drowned siblings, a cousin lost in a hunting accident, and a twin who dropped dead during cheerleading practice. The most disturbing story, however, is the one recounted by a fourteen-year-old girl who lost her mother and baby sister at an air show. Her family was sitting on bleachers in the warm Nevada sunshine when an antique plane fell out of the sky right in front of them. Apparently, it hit the landing strip and exploded, sending burning shrapnel spinning through the crowd with the force of a guillotine. The girl says that sound is what she remembers most and by this point—four weeks into our twelve-week group—it’s safe to say it haunts each and every one of us.
“And, Gus?” Marco asks. “How’s your week been?”
“Okay, I guess.” Then, because I have to say something, “I’m swimming again. I swam today, in fact. A real workout.”
“What made it real?”
I think about this. “I puked afterward.”
“Gross.” Air Show Girl, who’s sitting across from me, makes a face.
“Sorry,” I tell her, although I’m not.
“Wasn’t your brother a swimmer?” she asks, playing with her hair. “Like, a really accomplished one?”
“He wanted to be.”
“Oh, stop. He was. He was going to the Olympics. I saw a feature about him on CNN. He was really driven. Broke all kinds of youth records.”
I fold my arms. “Not that driven.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, my brother came close to qualifying for the US National Team last year. That’s true. He was hoping to swim in the Olympics one day and a lot of people thought he would. I might’ve been one of them. But—look. I’ll tell you what it takes to make the team and what he did to get there, and you decide if he was driven or not.”
A hush comes over the room and Marco nods, gesturing for me to keep going. He’s never heard me talk this much and even I don’t know why I’m doing it. But I am.
I sit up in my chair. “Okay, the selection process for the US Olympic team is easy enough to understand in principle. The Olympic Trials are held ahead of the Games, and whoever swims fastest on that particular day is selected. That’s it. No taking other results into account. Or previous experience. Glory goes to the winner, full stop.
“But to get to the Trials in the first place? Well, to do that, you have to swim under a set qualifying time. And not only do you have to swim a qualifying time, but you have to do it at a designated qualifying event, usually one of the premier national showdowns. And in order to swim in those events, guess what? You have to qualify, which means you’ve swum well enough and consistently enough on the regional circuit to be ranked at a level where you’re allowed to compete nationally. And to get to the regional circuit and be ranked appropriately, you have to be good enough to be selected for an elite developmental team that has the means and interest to invest in you, as well as the vision to take you all the way to the top. That’s to say nothing of all the years and competition and money it takes to join one of those teams.
“Oh, and one other thing: while the Olympic Trials are held every four years, the US National Team roster is set every year—these are the swimmers who train with the national coach and represent the US out on the international circuit. It’s similar to the Olympic qualifier, except that there are usually a handful of events that are designated for consideration. Any swimmer fast enough to get on the circuit has a shot, and that’s what Danny was aiming for when he qualified for the Reno sectionals in April.”
“Did he go?” Air Show Girl asks.
“Yeah. But before that, he left his longtime coach in Lafayette to swim for UCLA, with their coaches.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. This is one of the bigger mysteries surrounding Danny. If he’d made the national team, he wouldn’t have been swimming on the college circuit anyway, so the shift was abrupt. And somewhat unprecedented. “He must’ve thought he’d do better there. And he did, actually. He was favored heavily to make the national team. I didn’t get to watch him compete, but my mom went, and I don’t really know what happened. My sense is that Danny knew he’d fucked up a good thing by leaving his coach and he let that get to him. After all, if you fuck up one thing, who’s to say you won’t fuck up more?”
The girl frowns. “But you said he was swimming better.”
“He was. Until he wasn’t. My brother got out there on that stage he’d spent his whole life chasing and he choked. Came in fifth in both his events, wel
l over his best times. After, he acted like it didn’t matter, like winning wasn’t the goal and just being there was enough. All that humble shit people say but never mean. Then a month later, well, you know . . .”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be.”
“Well, I am.”
“Well, I’m not.”
Air Show Girl bites her lip, and there’s anger in the way she’s looking at me. Or else disgust. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” I tell her. “I absolutely mean it and no one ever believes me. But I’m sick to death of everyone saying my brother was a hero just because he was good at swimming. Ultimately, it didn’t matter to anyone but him. It’s not like it’s some noble calling requiring endless selflessness and sacrifice.”
“You don’t think it’s a sacrifice to give up things you want?”
“Not when it’s for your own gain. Not when what you want is for everyone to see you win and to be recognized for that. That’s not sacrifice. It’s ego. It’s arrogance. I mean, look what happened when Danny lost. He chose to die rather than live with his failure and left all this bullshit for the rest of us to deal with.” I glare around the room. “What’s more selfish than that?”
28.
I was barely seven when I realized my brother was going to be a champion. This memory is as vivid and visceral as any other. Danny, who was nine, was already swimming competitively. He’d moved up from the local rec league to a bigger swim team that trained in Orinda and on the weekend traveled for meets that were as far away as Santa Cruz and Sacramento.
Usually, I stayed home while Danny swam. He’d go off with our mother—sometimes overnight—while Darien looked after me. My sister was sixteen at this point, and if she wasn’t happy about having her baby brother around, she did it for the gas money and rarely complained. For the most part, I didn’t mind tagging along with her and her friends. They were feral creatures, preferring to stay outside and gather in open spaces like Briones Park, with its thousands of acres of wooded trails and secluded hillside. Once there, they’d drink beer and smoke weed and play acoustic guitar and no one cared at all what I did. Roaming, ever restless, I tried climbing every mountain I found, scaling red rock and clay and soaring to terrifying heights until my sister hollered at me to get my ass back down. I never wanted to stop; there had to be something higher, something worth reaching. I was sure of it.