Surviving High School

rest of the day in constant alert mode. Now she had three people to avoid at all costs: Nick, Dominique—and Ben Kale. Not that she would hate to see him again, but the thought of running into him in the hall and having him ask about her “injured” hand filled her with enough embarrassment to send a shiver down her back.
    At least her classes didn’t seem too hard—that was, until she got to her last one of the day: Honors History, where the teacher, Mr. McBride, gleefully handed out thick “supplementary” textbooks to the entire class. Mr. McBride was a tall, wiry man, towering over the students. He was Ping-Pong–ball bald, but he made up for it with two extremely bushy eyebrows whose gray hairs seemed to stick out as far as a cat’s whiskers.
    “Technically, the administration has deemed this textbook too difficult for first-year students,” he said, pacing the room and slamming the books down one by one on the students’ desks. “They even went so far as to ban the library from passing them out to Twin Branches students. Luckily, I have a friend at a used bookstore who picked me up my own personal set for pennies on the dollar. But be warned! There are no replacement copies. Lose your book, and I dock you a letter grade. Worse than that, though, you won’t have a book to read. Get the message? Hold on to this book as if your very life depends on it! In many ways, it does.”
    Mr. McBride got to Emily’s desk and slammed her textbook down. Her heart skipped several beats as he glowered down at her and said, “Welcome to Honors History.” Then heturned on one foot, took two monumental steps toward his dry-erase board, and shouted, “Lesson one: the Fertile Crescent!”
    Emily took a deep breath, trying to slow her heartbeat. Why hadn’t she just taken regular classes with Kimi? Emily carefully opened the book, trying to make sure she didn’t so much as bend a page.
    It wasn’t until after school, when she’d changed into her swim gear and walked into the gym housing the indoor pool, that the tension drained from Emily’s body and she felt at peace. The deep chlorine scent of the water filled the air, and the tight fabric of her swimsuit hugged her like a long-lost sister.
    She got up on one of the blocks and stared down the length of the pool. Official practices during the fall semester were on Mondays and Thursdays. Right now, the rest of the girls on the team would be in their living rooms, snacking and watching MTV or texting their friends about which guys had gotten cuter over the summer. The gym was empty, the water perfectly smooth. Emily felt like a mermaid returning home: Over the past few years, she had probably spent as much time in the water as out of it.
    The smooth grain of the white block tickled the undersides of her feet as she rocked slightly back and forth, readying her body for the wet shock of the water. She leaned forward and bent her knees to get into the forward-start position.
    She imagined the announcer’s voice echoing through the gym: “Three… Two… One…” And then the horn.
    Emily dove forward, slicing through the water. She came up a third of the way down the lane and reached forward with both hands, pulling her head up for air. She did the breaststroke down the length of the pool, touched the wall with both hands, and pushed off again, kicking once underwater, the way Sara had shown her.
    Sara’s nickname had been “the Machine,” and it fit her well: Her mechanics were perfect. She’d shown Emily how to look for the overhead flags when she did the backstroke to gauge how long she had until she hit the wall and the way to breathe on every other stroke in freestyle to maximize her oxygen flow.
    Their father had liked Sara’s nickname. “Girls don’t win gold medals,” he’d say. “Machines do.” And when Emily would ask to go to the mall with Kimi, her dad would remind her of it, telling her, “Just ask any swimmer who’s ever stood on the podium how many parties she’s gone to, what her favorite stand at the food court is, how many boyfriends she’s had. She’ll look at you like you’re nuts. Those are things you do when you’re too old to win anymore.”
    Emily went back and forth for several laps at 75 percent effort and kept swimming well beyond the length of an actual race. As she felt the cool water slide over her skin, the stresses of the day—the bad picture, the confrontation with Dominique, learning that she shared no classes