4. The Team Trip #2
Maren nods. They both duck under the water for a moment. The cold shoots over her hair and scalp and then clasps the back of her neck in a way the pool never quite can. It is wilder here. The water keeps its own clock. She surfaces. Reese counts them down. “Three. Two. One. GO!!”
The world narrows. Maren slides forward, and the lake becomes a long, patient muscle beneath her.
She catches the water, holds it, and moves through.
Her mind clicks into the familiar sequence.
Hand. Forearm. Pull. Breath. Kick. Sight.
The buoy lifts, sinks, and lifts again. She does not hear much beyond her own inhale and the muted slap of her palm entering.
The cold that had been a bite turns into a clean hum in her limbs.
For six strokes, Reese is next to her. Maren cannot see her, but she feels the energy, a heat that is not temperature.
On the seventh stroke, Reese’s splash is a staggered rhythm to her right.
On the tenth, it is a bit behind. Maren keeps her head low.
She holds the line. She is not thinking about two days ago, or the ice or the bench.
She has a one-track mind, and currently, its only intention is to cut through the water at a slight angle because of the wind drift she knows how to correct for it.
She does not need to be first. She needs to finish.
The lake swells under her ribs and lifts her and then drops her into a soft hollow.
The buoy is closer now, glossy and stupidly cheerful.
She reaches, and the water feels heavier, which she appreciates because it gives her something to push against. Once.
Twice. The rope line brushes her knuckles, and the buoy creaks against its ring.
She touches first.
She turns in the water, lungs burning in a good way that means her body did a thing it knows how to do. Reese is not there. The space where Reese should be is a set of fading ripples and a soft, lazy circle of foam.
Maren treads water, confusion pushing against her.
She looks back towards the shore. There is movement halfway between the beach and the buoy.
An arm lifts high and drops in a wide dramatic arc.
Reese. She is swimming, but her stroke is a little messy, and she is going in the wrong direction. She is heading back to the shore.
Maren starts toward her, steady but not frantic. Reese looks up, coughs water and then plants her feet where the lake bed rises. When Maren reaches her, Reese straightens, coughs again, and throws both hands in the air like a showman.
“Shark,” she announces to anyone who will listen. Which turns out to be everyone. The kids at the shoreline stop mid-shriek. Coach Hensley shields his eyes with a hand to look out at them. “Huge! Terrifying. I was brave and turned around,” Reese exclaims.
The lake does not laugh, but the team does.
It comes in a wave from shore to water, bubbling, ridiculous, and affectionate.
Someone hoots. Someone else splashes like a toddler.
Reese gives an exaggerated shiver and wades toward the safe half depth, face tipped toward the sky like she is letting the sun dry her embarrassment.
Maren moves beside her. Close enough to see how Reese’s mouth fights not to twitch.
Close enough to see the pulse in Reese’s neck bump a little too fast. The joke covers a thing, but the cover is thin.
If Maren had not been looking, she would have missed it.
The quick flinch in Reese’s eyes when the lake went from friendly to big.
The fraction of a second where her breath hitch had nothing to do with cold.
“Brave is a word,” Maren says softly. “So is honest.” She says even softer.
“I am always honest,” Reese says, and there is pride in it, the kind that keeps a person upright. Then her smile slips. “Except when I am not.”
They stand, water at their hips, and let the lake lift and set them like loose corks. The orange buoy tilts in the corner of Maren’s vision and then rights itself again. That small resilience feels like information.
“What did you see?” Maren asks.
Reese bites her bottom lip. “A log,” she says. “Probably. The slick kind that shoots up out of nowhere and pretends to be a dorsal fin if you squint and want to be dramatic.” She tries to laugh and manages half of one. “The lake is not a pool. The bottom is not a line painted in friendly blue.”
Maren looks at the surface. It is so simple for her.
The motions are instinct for her at this point.
But not for Reese, beneath that is more.
Cold that changes in pockets. Drafts that move sideways.
A joke that hides a scare that is not funny at all.
She thinks of the way Reese launches off the diving board, fearless, flicking the air with her toes like she owns the height.
She thinks of the ways water is not air.
“We could go in together,” Maren says. “Slow. Not all the way to the buoy.”
Reese looks at her, startled and grateful, and too stubborn to say yes. “You already won,” she says. “You don’t have to shepherd me like a newborn duck.”
“I like ducks,” Maren says. “They are very efficient.”
Reese snorts. “Of course you like efficient birds.”
They do not go back out right away. They walk small pieces of the shoreline instead.
Reese walks the slick rocks and pretends to be a detective looking for clues.
Maren points out where wave patterns split around larger stones.
They talk about nothing in particular. The sky opens and closes over them with thin clouds.
A motorboat purrs out far beyond the buoys.
The wind shuffles the water into a set of tiny marching rows of waves.
Coach blows a shorter whistle and calls for partner drills inside the buoy line.
“Float and breathe. Thirty count on your back, eyes on the sky. If you tense, you sink.” Reese glances at Maren like the words are for her.
They lie back, side-by-side. The water cups their ears, and the world turns soft and far away.
Maren names shapes in the clouds because it steadies her brain.
Reese listens, chest rising smoother with each count.
At twenty-nine, she laughs, quiet and surprised, that this might be a thing she can learn.
When they are done floating, they push to deeper water again.
This time it feels like a choice, not a dare.
Reese counts off on her fingers like a little kid.
One. Two. Three. They sink and rise together.
Maren matches Reese’s pace without making it obvious.
She keeps her breath slow and her eyes soft.
She talks about how to sight on a fixed point on the shore rather than on the buoy.
She talks about how to trust the lake to hold you and not to fight the up and down with panic.
They touch the nearest buoy together. Reese gives it a shove that sends it wobbling. She grins wider now, less bravado in it, more light. “Thank you,” she says, her voice almost a whisper.
“For what?
“For not making it a thing when it was a thing,” Reese says. “For not calling me out.”
“I wouldn’t do that. Believe it or not, I get freaked out over weird things too.” Maren states with plain honesty.
Reese flicks water at her, then flinches when a scrap of a weed touches her ankle. “Ugh! Nature is rude.”
Coach corrals everyone in for one last team drill before food.
They form a human buoy chain holding hands, perpendicular to the shore.
The line wobbles and rights itself and wobbles again, a clumsy centipede in neon suits.
Someone starts a chant that is not quite in rhythm.
Laughter keeps breaking it apart. Maren feels the tug and give of the chain and thinks about the small ways that balance will always return.
They stay in the water until the cold begins to draw their energy down to a thin thread.
Coach Hensley calls them in with a whistle that snaps clean through the air.
The team groans, relieved, and disappointed all at once.
There is towel chaos. There is the sting of air on wet skin.
There are sandwiches that taste like dry cardboard and something sweet somebody baked the night before.
A parent volunteer sets up the fire ring with practiced grace.
Coach checks his watch and raises his voice.
“About an hour and a half left of s’mores and stories, then we police our trash and pack the vans.
We will be out of the lot before curfew. ”
Reese wraps herself in a towel that doesn’t match her normal bright and pink themes.
It is orange with faded suns that have lost their faces.
She sits on the sand and tips her head forward so the bun collapses.
Wet hair spills over her shoulders in thick ropes.
She combs it with her fingers and grimaces at the knots.
Maren sits beside her. Her own hair lies in obedient lines. She watches some ants work on a crumb next to her. They carry it under a leaf with single-minded attention. She gets that.
“Did you swim laps in your head when you were benched?” Reese asks around a bite of her sandwich.
Maren stares at the ant leaf. “Yes.”
“Did it help?”
“No,” Maren says. She picks a long grass blade and knots it. “It hurt. It was like having an itch I could not reach. My brain ran the math without my body following.”
Reese rests her chin on her news and studies her. “You can just say it sucked.”
“It sucked,” Maren says. The word feels good. Simple. True.