Surviving High School

brittle at her touch, collapsing into dust.
    Ben wasn’t hers anymore. He could do what he wanted—and he could have any girl he wanted. It was only a matter of time before her fantasy would become reality and the final, intact piece of her heart would break for good.
    It was all gone. All of it. The only course of action seemed clear. She would resign herself to misery, just like she had before the year started. There was only one thing left: winning.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    Quals for Junior Nationals took place at Spartan Academy, an all-boys prep school thirty minutes from Twin Branches that boasted the best swimming facilities in the state. Modeled on prestigious East Coast prep schools, Spartan Academy was built of imported red brick covered with ivy. Everything about it seemed expensive and old.
    The swimming facilities themselves, however, were brand-new and state-of-the-art. Four Olympic-size pools sat side by side, all housed within an enormous glass shell that included a retractable roof and walls for warmer seasons.
    As the Twin Branches swim team entered the building, Emily looked across the room to see a half dozen other squads stretching and gossiping. Many of the girls pointed to her and Dominique, the clear favorites.
    Quals was composed of several heats for each stroke and distance, with eight swimmers participating in every round. The top two finishers from each race would then advance to the finals, and the top two from those races would receive invitations to the Junior Nationals in two weeks. If all went as planned, Dominique and Emily would represent California in most of those races.
    That wasn’t to say that there wouldn’t be competition. Girls like Mira Syzbalski from Monarch Prep, who, aptly, specialized in butterfly, stood a chance of unseating them in a given race. If they wanted to qualify, Dominique and Emily would need to bring their A games.
    And right now, Emily was about as far off her game as she could get. Raccoon-eyed from lack of sleep, she could barely walk a straight line much less swim one.
    Her first race was the 50-meter freestyle, thankfully a short event that she excelled in. Even better, Dominique had been placed in a different heat. They wouldn’t see each other until the finals, provided they both got there.
    As Emily got up on her block, her father, dressed in his usual gray suit, approached and looked up and down the lanes.
    “No one you really need to worry about in this heat,” he said. “Julia Weiss over in lane three has posted a few decent times, but nothing close to yours, and there are a couple of girls I’ve never seen swim, but we would have heard about it if anyone was close to your level.”
    Emily nodded, and without a word to her dad, she adjusted her position on the block. For the first time she couldremember, though, the grain of the plastic against her feet felt unfamiliar, and the world seemed to pulse with light. She knelt down and stood up, trying to loosen her muscles, but instead she felt a strange rushing sensation, as if all the blood had suddenly drained from her.
    “Hey,” said the girl from the next lane over. “Are you okay?”
    It was the last thing Emily heard before she fell forward into the pool.
    The next thing Emily knew, she was underwater. She looked up to see the other girls staring down at her. Maybe it would be better just to stay here—at least that way she could avoid the embarrassment of facing them. Was there anyone above the water who even cared if she swam back up?
    She floated there, motionless, weighing her options—and then someone splashed down into the water, wrapped his arms around her, and dragged her to the surface. It wasn’t until he’d pulled her up to the edge of the pool that she realized it was her father.
    “Are you okay?” he asked.
    “Yeah. I must have—slipped.”
    His gray suit had gone black with the wet. He looked less intimidating now, with his suit soaked and clinging to his puffy body—like an overgrown child wearing his father’s clothes. He emptied his pockets to reveal a soaked wallet and a shorted-out cell.
    “You could have—” He looked around him at thegathering crowd of concerned swimmers and parents. He straightened his wet tie. “You could have been disqualified! A few seconds later, and the judges would have counted that as a false start.”
    So that was it. For a few seconds, Emily had seen true fear in her father’s eyes—fear that he’d lose another daughter.