CHAPTER SIX

A couple of days later, Rowan came with me to watch the dive video. I was a little surprised, and pleased, because I still wasn’t used to the fact that he seemed to like my company. As we walked up Lincoln Avenue toward the academy, he put one arm around me like he expected me to collapse on the sidewalk.

“What are you missing out on today?” I asked. I sounded sure of myself, but around Rowan I felt like a songbird, full of small talk. The codeine made me feel like I was walking through wet cement. Part of the problem might have been lack of sleep. Mom was always checking on me, pretending not to be worried, making sure my bedroom window was closed, offering me an extra pillow.

Rowan has a way of looking into you and seeing what’s there. Gray eyes, a touch bluer than mine. He has a great hook shot, but decided he wants to concentrate on acoustical physics and meteorology. He doesn’t know if he will be a sound engineer or a weatherman, but I can talk about medicine with him and he follows my line of thought. “We’ve been recording a saw-whet owl,” he said. “There’s one living in a cypress near Pescadero, off Highway One. Four nights in a row,” he added. That explained the sounds of surf I had heard on the hospital phone.

He stayed right next to me, close, especially when a crack in the sidewalk made its way toward us, and when we passed a gardener buzz sawing a juniper into submission, I thought Rowan would scoop me into his arms and carry me. I dug an elbow into him and he loosened his grip. I marched ahead for a while, all the way up the hill in the June sun.

We reached the stairs down to the multi-terraced campus, and I held on to the rail. I had a dazzling three-second pain in my head.

Pain on, pain off, like a blinking red warning. Aside from a scraped knee now and then, I had never been injured before in my life. Dr. Breen had cautioned me to expect double vision, but on the fourth day after my accident, the day before Dad was due back from Napili Bay with his bride, I knew I had to hide the way I felt or I would be hospitalized.

I took the stairs two at a time, with a show of my usual spirit, but by the time I was heading down the open-air corridor, past the bougainvillea trellis, the world was swinging in slow, nauseating circles.

Lloyd-Fairhill is a prep school, privately endowed by rich graduates. Our school doesn’t have a workaday PE department with an asphalt basketball court. It has a Jacuzzi room, and a sauna, and an arena for the swimming/diving/water polo teams with a THX sound system so you could hear your name spoken from all directions at once as you tugged your swimsuit straight. The problem with the school was that the campus was too small for all the art galleries and faculty lounges crammed into it. Softballs were always damaging the solar energy panels on the math wing, and when barn swallows built their nests over the cafeteria, you had to duck under their fluttering, swooping wings on your way to get a bowl of vegetarian chowder.

I had attended the Oakland Public Schools, but my mom had switched me to private schools partly so I could compete in water sports, and partly so I could get an education good enough to shoehorn me into a pre-med program when I got to college. It wasn’t a snap decision, but Mom finally had heard enough of my descriptions of what went on in the OPS classrooms. I had an eighth-grade history teacher who taught us that the U.S. government salted the clouds over the Atlantic so all the rain would fall at sea, causing Ethiopians to die of drought. When she heard about this, Mom decided it was time to send me to an improved environment.

I would be a junior in September. After two years at Lloyd-Fairhill, I still felt awkward among kids who ate fresh-baked croissants for breakfast. My mother wrote out a check to the academy every month without a word of complaint. She was always off delivering bromeliads to model homes in Blackhawk and Pinole, and when my dad wasn’t too busy sorting out his clients’ lives there was a monthly check from him. We couldn’t make it without the extra cash from Dad.

The doors of the academy are all painted a dazzling blue, and they are wired to a security system. Police arrested two guys over Christmas vacation for peering through the rhododendron and just thinking—merely considering—jimmying the computer lab door.

Miss P answered my knock, and I was glad to see Denise there, perched on her chair with her chin on her knees. She gave me a smile, but didn’t go so far as to say good morning—she saw the look in my eyes.

“You don’t want to see this,” said Denise. Denise is pretty, and the dives she performs are pretty, too. She makes up for it with her mouth, always saying something no one wants to hear—something that usually happens to be true—with an accent like a gangster. Her dad arranged it so she works out with a series of personal trainers, all women, after a former tennis pro made a pass at her over Easter vacation.

“Let’s get it over with,” I said.

“You’re sure?” asked Miss P, holding the remote like a space-age weapon you had to handle with great care. She has a way of crooking her head around from person to person, getting reassurance from everyone.

“We can put this off,” said Miss P.

“Let’s do it now.”

“You heard her,” said Denise.

Miss P got up and put the remote on top of the television. “Convince me,” she said, and the nervous, spare person was gone.

“I can’t put this off forever,” I said.

“Why not?” said Miss P. She found a tube of lip balm, pulled off the cap, and applied some to her lips. “No law says if you injure yourself you have to watch the video.”

“James Cagney never went to any of his own movies,” said Rowan.

“That example doesn’t apply,” I said. Rowan’s family has a massive collection of black-and-white movies in video boxes, and his dad writes articles on sound effects in films.

“It makes me sick to look at it,” said Denise. Her father is a former third-string quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, and her family runs a chain of lobster and sirloin restaurants. They are warm-hearted, open people who tell each other to shut up as though this were a form of courtesy. None of them speaks in complex sentences, telling each other to pass the butter, pass the parmesan without a single thank you.

On the wall above the bell schedule was a glossy photo of me doing a forward flying two-and-a-half somersault off the tower. I found it a little hard to believe that this was a picture of me, that I had been that good. “Please,” I said.

My friendship with Denise was often a matter of deciding which of us was stronger. She shrugged and made a show of turning away to look at a fire extinguisher.

Miss P shrank to a resigned, agreeable person. She sat beside me and pushed the fleshy buttons of the remote, and caused a jittery, streaky fast-forward to appear on the screen. A couple of the other swim team members leaped through their reverses, their half-twists, but only Denise and I practiced off the tower at the other end of the pool.

There we were, running through our reps, maybe ten dives each. Miss P stabbed the remote with her forefinger, let my image in the screen waddle jerkily to the platform, a silent-movie stuttering quality to the male figures rearranging themselves on the seats in the distance. The images slowed, settled into real time. I couldn’t help appraising myself the way a diving judge does, because your dive starts the moment you toe your way out onto that cold, wet sharkskin-gritty surface of the tower.

My short blond hair pulled back, my tan, my small bust, my broad shoulders—I looked like a human being designed by God for water.

Miss P stopped it before I left the edge, rewound it. I watched again as my screen self turned halfway up the ascent to say something to someone. Smiling, but not casual. I was intent, at one point absentmindedly pulling the seat of my swimsuit. Like many swimmers and divers, I bought my swimsuits a size too tight.

At first I thought it had to be the wrong tape—even when I saw the whole dive.

Rewind, I wanted to say. At the same I wanted to close my eyes. Miss P was determined, now. If I wanted to watch she would let me, again and again. The VCR whined. I light-footed my way up the tower.

But there was nothing wrong, nothing you could see playing the tape real-time. I leaped, got good altitude on my stretch, a 9.5 beginning, and then I curled, somersaulted and it all looked okay, all the way down into the water. My entry was so-so, actually, but not terrible. If you didn’t notice what Miss P did next you would expect me to haul myself dripping out of the pool to pad over to the steps and climb up all over again.

She leaped to her feet and made a front dive off poolside. She strong-armed her way to the bottom where the shifting water obliterated what was down there, the shimmering of the water defracting me into a shapeless figure Miss P pulled from the bottom, scissor kicking to the surface.

“What did I tell you,” said Denise.