The Bully Claims Insanity So I Brought Mine

The first thing I remember about the day I fell is the smell of chlorine and someone's strawberry lip gloss. It was a Thursday in early October, and the air over the outdoor pool had that thin, chemical bite that made my eyes water before I even stepped onto the deck. I was sixteen, a junior at Hollingsworth Academy, and I had made a mistake that fall. I had beaten Delia Voss in the two-hundred freestyle at the regional qualifier. It wasn't supposed to happen. Delia was the girl whose family had a wing named after them at the hospital, whose mother sat on the board of the arts foundation, whose face belonged on the recruitment posters taped to the glass doors of the athletic center. She had been the fastest girl in our class since we were nine years old. I was the scholarship kid, the one who worked the desk at the YMCA on weekends and still showed up to practice with my hair smelling like cheap bar soap. Winning was the worst thing I could have done. I stood on the tiles after the race, dripping, and Delia climbed out of the next lane and looked at me for a long second. Then she smiled and said, "Congratulations, Emma." She said it loud enough for the coach to hear. That was the thing about Delia. She never did anything in private. The next two weeks were a slow campaign. First, someone changed the combination lock on my locker. I had to break it off with bolt cutters from the maintenance closet. Then my suit went missing from the drying rack, and I found it in the dumpster behind the cafeteria, cut along the side seam. Then the rumors started: that I had cheated, that Coach Reyes had pulled strings for me because my mother cleaned house for one of the trustees. I heard the words "charity case" in the hallway more than once. I heard them from people who had learned them from Delia, even if they never heard her say them. That is how a bully works when her family has money. Nobody ever sees her do anything. A lock changes, a suit turns up in a dumpster, a rumor arrives thirdhand, and every hand that did any of it belongs to someone else. I told myself it would burn out. That was what girls like me were supposed to do. We were supposed to hold still and wait for the weather to pass. The night before the fall, I sat on the edge of my bed and wrote a note. I didn't write it to anyone. I wrote it because writing things down was the only way I knew how to keep them from eating me from the inside. I wrote that I was tired, that the water was the only place I felt like a person, that some nights I thought about walking into the lake behind the Wexler dorms and not coming back. I folded the note and put it in the back of my Latin notebook, and then I got scared and tore it into four pieces and threw it in the trash. The next morning, my best friend since fifth grade, Sadie Moran, came by my dorm room and sat on my bed while I brushed my teeth. She was the kind of friend who knew where I kept everything. She picked up my Latin notebook, flipped through it, laughed at my terrible translation of Ovid, and put it back. She was the only person who had seen the pieces of that note in the trash can. She was the one who would later swear under oath that I had handed it to her. The fall happened at practice on a Friday afternoon when the pool was crowded and no one was watching the far end. I was warming up in lane six, doing slow laps, and then Delia came up the ladder behind me, dripped across the tiles, and said something I still can't quite hear in memory. Whatever it was, it didn't matter. What mattered was that in the next instant, the maintenance door swung open and a bucket of water, with a mop still in it, tipped across the tiles, and Delia was in front of me, and I went down. I remember the c***k. I remember the cold. I remember thinking, bizarrely, that the tiles needed washing because there were footprints everywhere. Then there was blood on my face and voices above me, and someone was shouting my name, Emma, Emma, and I couldn't tell if it was Sadie or the coach or the paramedic, and then the ceiling of the county hospital went by, tile after tile after tile, and I was in the place I would stay for eight days. I broke my left wrist in three places. I fractured my left kneecap. I bit through my lower lip. The doctors said I was lucky. The doctors said I would swim again, probably, in six months, maybe nine. But the person lying in that bed wasn't thinking about swimming. I kept my eyes shut because people say more when they think you're asleep. My mother and Sadie and Delia's attorney stood in a triangle by the window of my room on the sixth day, and I heard every word.