CHAPTER ONE

Someone was saying my name.

I opened one eye and couldn’t focus. Light—I could see light. And shapes—human figures. I opened the other eye and blinked, a big effort, like opening and shutting a very heavy garage door.

“She’s still not breathing.”

It was Miss P’s voice. Her words made perfect sense now—someone couldn’t breathe. Sunlight slanted through a huge, empty place, an abandoned arena with rows of empty seats. My head shifted to one side. High above the loftiest row of seats a green EXIT caught my gaze and held it. People kept getting in the way, tense onlookers, staring in my direction.

I wanted to tell everyone that I was all right. If I wasn’t breathing why wasn’t I gasping and thrashing—flopping, like a fish? Why was I blinking my eyes peacefully if there was such an emergency?

Why wasn’t I afraid?

Okay, I couldn’t breathe. I was lying in a lukewarm puddle, pool water, the smell of chlorine all around. I would say something to make them all feel better in a moment, I promised myself. I would lift my hand, crook my knees.

Miss P turned my head and her fingers worked into my mouth, following the instructions she had taught us but which we had never had to use. Check for obstructions. She took a deep breath. The pleasant warm flavor on my lips was the wild-cherry-flavored lip balm Miss P used, a nervous habit wherever she went, using up tubes of the stuff. I made a gagging sound.

I struggled to sit up, but hands forced me back. I took a ragged gulp of air. A loud, breathy howl, in and out. Air was shrieking in and out of me, and I couldn’t get enough.

I coughed hard, and I inhaled again, an ugly noise. “Good, Bonnie, you’re doing fine,” said Miss P.

I let myself relax back down again to the concrete surface. I was doing fine. I felt uneasily pleased at the compliment, even though I knew. I knew this was a kind of lie, the sort of thing you say when someone isn’t doing so well.

Jesus, what happened? A metal door wrenched open and footsteps approached, slap slap slap, fast, to where I was lying, my hands outstretched. The concrete was hard under my elbows, and the swimming pool sloshed in the distance, the filter valves gurgling. I drew breath and exhaled, just to show I could keep this up.

“Bonnie, everything’s going to be all right,” said another familiar voice, panting, bending over me. “I called 911,” Denise added in a different tone, addressing the onlookers. Then, as though I couldn’t hear, “I thought she was dead.”

Denise looked odd, as people do when you see them sideways or upside down, her eyebrows underneath her eyes, her tight bathing cap giving her forehead a long wrinkle, one of the reasons I hate wearing one.

Miss Petrossian’s eyes peered down into me. I felt naked. A swimsuit isn’t much more than a second skin, no extra padding, nothing. I opened my mouth to speak and my body jerked, a shocking spasm, like when you drift asleep and wake with a start. I felt my head roll to one side, independent of my will, a large, bony jack-o’-lantern. Warm fluid spilled from my lips.

“That’s good!” said Miss Petrossian.

This was probably the first time I had ever been praised for throwing up. My embarrassment sharpened, but I couldn’t help thinking, Hey, it was easy.

“Don’t move,” Miss Petrossian was saying. I struggled, but Miss P held me down again. “Don’t,” she insisted. I struggled, knocking her arms away with my hands. I sat upright. I was one of those dolls you can snap into different positions, but always dummylike, fake.

“You had an accident,” Miss P was saying, her hands on my shoulders so I couldn’t climb to my feet. My swimsuit was clammy on me now, a ridge digging into my spine where the straps crisscrossed.

Accident—I associated the word with cars, fender-benders, bad traffic. And with toilet training. I remembered my mother hating it when a friend’s toddler had an “accident” in the car. I gave Denise a look, asking her without talking. “You hit your head,” she said.

I must have over-rotated entering the water. I did a reverse two-and-a-half somersault, and screwed up on the rip, the entry. The judges would have scored me 4.0 or 4.5 at best, a really bad score, despite a respectable difficulty factor.

No judges today, though. This was training, rep after rep.

I do it every day.

The near silence was wonderful but spooky, the soft slopping sound a pool makes when it breaks over the edge of the pool, guttering in the filter valves. “You were practicing your tucks,” Miss P said. “You hit your head on the platform.”

I tried to play it through my own mental video, how I was on maybe my twentieth dive of the day, leaping, stretching out. I couldn’t remember it.

Fractured skull, I thought. A hematoma in my brain, far from the centers of speech and memory, but close to where the nerves from the spine secrete themselves in the skull.

My swimsuit was icy, everyone standing too close. I hate constriction and never wear goggles, even for laps, preferring bloodshot eyes to the sensation of a strap around my head.

I wanted to call out for everyone to back off, give me some room. It was only Denise and Miss P and a few others, the spring-board divers, and a few wannabes, people in gym shorts. Just a few tanned loiterers and the guy with the video camera, one of Miss P’s assistants.

I worked the puzzle logically. This wasn’t the quarter finals—there weren’t enough people here. This wasn’t the invitationals. We must have been practicing, a routine weekday afternoon. I reassured myself that I might throw up again—it was something I knew I could do.

When men in Day-Glo yellow raincoats and black rubber boots swung through the metal door I didn’t associate them with me. There must be a blaze somewhere, I thought, being patient with Miss P, giving her a grateful smile. She pressed a rolled-up towel against the back of my head hurting something back there, a gash.

A woman in a yellow plastic vest stenciled OFD swung a suitcase down beside me. She unfastened a strap. She got a red tank out of the canvas bag, the white-lettered 0₂ Pack sagging inward, the taste of rubber filling my mouth, and an empty, neutral wind, not at all refreshing or pleasant. I shook my head, but she pressed in with the rubber mask. I had seen athletes on TV sucking oxygen like it was pure, crisp mountain air, and here it was just so much neutral gas. I can quit diving. I don’t have to do it anymore.

I put the thought out of my head. Miss P was giving the paramedics a rundown, pointing up at the ten-meter platform. And I could see the emergency crew gawk up at the platform, thirty-three feet up, stainless steel rails gleaming, and then look down at me. I felt a little pride mixed in with my self-consciousness. I could see in their eyes that they wouldn’t like to take flight off a diving platform taller than a third-story balcony.

I put my fingers to my forehead. I was a mess, blood all over my front, only you couldn’t see it against the black nylon-and-Lycra-blend swimsuit. I was going to have some awful injury, a big shaved place on my head, and bruising. Or worse. My face would be blue and swollen when my dad got back from his honeymoon in Maui. His new wife, a person I had never actually met, would look at me and feel that she had to be especially kind, and stifle her shock—she had not heard that I was disfigured.