CHAPTER NINE

Swimming arenas are a wash of noise, reverberating whistles, shouted encouragement. Some divers wear earplugs to escape the surreal murmur of the crowd. Even a huge place fills with the smell of the lifeless water.

I kept busy on the bench, handing out the blue Speedo WaterShed towels we use instead of terry cloth, but I hated meeting Miss P’s eyes. The wound in my scalp tingled, itched. The Watershed towels are rubbery and specially treated—one wipe and you’re dry. We still use regular cloth towels as a hood—to sit under if you don’t want people to see your face.

Charlotte Witt, an academy senior with seasons of competitive experience, led the field after the preliminary round, doing a front dive layout with a difficulty rating of only 1.2, a springboard dive. Charlotte was a very good diver, but this late in her high school career she was developing too much of a figure and too much of a concentration problem.

“You don’t have to do this,” Miss P said, leaning close to me. “You can go in and take a rest.”

I waved her away.

“You look rotten,” said Denise. I felt like telling her that if I had done so badly on my difficulty-zero dives I would keep my mouth shut. Denise and I liked to run or swim laps together, and she laughed at the same books I do, where the author proves space aliens built the Great Pyramids and invented Oreos. Sometimes I wished she had chronic laryngitis.

I had to go into the locker room and lie down on a bench. Even in there I could hear the endless babble, a cavern of faceless voices beyond the metal doors.

Dad had called just before I left to catch the bus, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I hadn’t gotten medical clearance. I had never even mentioned my injury. I conned myself into half believing I didn’t want to cause him any worry. I knew he was proud of me for earning a write-up in the Chronicle, “Prep Platform Promise,” although they had not run the picture the paper had spent an hour getting from various angles, me in midair. Dad wished me luck, and then, putting on his confidential voice, he said, “You were real good with Cindy.”

I had been sitting on my bed, one shoe off, one shoe on, glad to hear his voice at last, and yet I couldn’t help bridling a little at his phrasing. “Of course I was good,” I said, serving the word back to him.

“We’ll take the boat out this weekend,” he said.

Cindy had told me, in complete seriousness, that it was all right to have a painted still life with fruit on a plate in the dining room. She had read it in a magazine. I listened for some sign in Dad’s voice of what he might see in Cindy, wondering at the power sex has over people. And Cindy wasn’t even terribly pretty—she was all right, in a tepid, Bo-Peep way but didn’t have the kind of looks Mom has when she really tries.

“We’ll go out and see if any whales are migrating,” he was saying.

Dad has no idea when whales migrate, what they eat, or whether or not they poop in the water. But I was grateful for the effort he was making. “I bet the boat has barnacles all over it,” I said, so pleased at the idea of going out on the bay that I couldn’t express it.

A company called Marine Core power-vacuumed Queen Athena’s hull, and Dad himself called me from the motor yacht sometimes, using the boat as a weekend office. I don’t think he took it out more than three times a year, but it was his pride. His only hobby was caring for the Queen, rubbing tung oil on the teak finishing, experimenting with brass polish and chemicals that killed mildew.

Lying on a locker room bench is not reassuring. The benches are slatted wood and narrow, and it is easy to have the illusion that you are ten thousand feet up on a plank, one move and you plummet. I kept telling one of the dentist-wife moms that I was all right, every time she bustled in to check.

I had to pull the earphones off my head. I was listening to one of Miss P’s favorites, a tape on concentrating your mind. Waves crash, and wind blows through grasses, and it sounds a lot like the recordings Rowan and his parents make, except that a man’s voice tells you to imagine things. I would hear a discordant female voice saying my name, and I would have to stir myself from My Own Private Landscape and tell a woman who probably couldn’t even swim that I was down-stressing.

“You sure?” she would say each time, lipstick and frosted hair.

I wasn’t light-headed, and I wasn’t seeing double. I wanted to turn the volume all the way up, high enough to damage my ears, so I wouldn’t have to hear the endless, lapping sounds of the dives. And my own nagging inner voice: If I couldn’t even stand to watch, what was going to happen when Dr. Breen said I was cleared to dive?

After the day’s competition, we ate at a Chinese restaurant near the state capitol, Denise and I sharing a baked fish that arrived looking like a dragon, mouth agape, roasted eyeballs staring. Denise asked the waiter to take off the head so she wouldn’t have to look at it. Her dad calls her “Princess,” and had Bausch & Lomb custom design prescription goggles so she could have 20/20 vision underwater.

Miss P said it was okay to open the fortune cookies, and if the fortune was bad it would come true only if we ate some of the cookie. She laughed, but she looked tired, more weary than a coach should, with one day of elimination over and plenty of scoring to come.

I hunted around among the cracked-open cookies. The fortunes were on little paper tabs that scatter and soak up spilled tea. There were two kinds of fortunes: You are outgoing and have many friends, the blazing compliment. You will make a fortune and travel widely, the golden lie.

If I worked in a cookie factory I would write fortunes that would help improve the world. Three incredibly delightful things will happen to you if you recycle aluminum for a year. I opened a new cookie, read the little white slip, and handed it to Miss P across the table. It told her she won respect wherever she went.

She read it and smiled thank you.

“You were okay,” I told Denise that night, kicking my feet to loosen the strait-jacket covers. Okay can mean a lot of different things. The hamburgers are okay can mean: Take these away, no one can eat them.

“I was shit,” she said. She was watching television, aiming the remote but not using it.

We were in the Holiday Inn, right beside the Interstate 80 Alternate. You could walk under the freeway and visit Old Town, shops where they sold raspberry ropes and licorice chews, and the shop clerks wore derby hats. Tourists licked pistachio nut and pumpkin sherbet ice cream cones, but we were forbidden what Miss P called glop, so after a quick peek at the postcard racks we had scurried back to the inn, safe and snug by curfew.

“It just wasn’t your best day,” I conceded gently.

Denise snapped off the television and gave me a steady look. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot. The goggles make her look like a frog; she leaves them at home. She thinks the bathing cap she wears makes her look like a classic diver from the fifties. “Be honest with me, Bonnie,” she said.

My voice is all springtime and daisies compared with Denise’s gangster contralto. I didn’t really want to be frank with her—she wasn’t as calm as she looked. “Okay.”

“I’ve never had a worse day, right?”

Sometimes you just don’t want to cause that little extra bit of pain.

“I was that bad,” she said. So bad you can’t even express it.

But Denise’s dives hadn’t been shockingly terrible—just a matter of awkward timing. And no poise—she had lost her calm, bunching her jaw, diving like someone smashing through a cinderblock wall. “I’ve seen a lot worse,” I said.

“You’re telling me everything I need to know,” she said.

“I didn’t say a single negative.”

“Thank you, Bonnie,” she said, running her fingers through her dark hair.

“I didn’t say anything!”

I wished Miss P had gotten the kind of fortune she deserved: Good news will arrive from an unexpected quarter.