59
Sasha
I run barefoot across the snow-covered deck, Lillian right behind me. The cold burning my feet and then gone as I throw my body into the steam rising off the deep end of Cyprus’s swimming pool, a shallow cutting dive with water rushing around my face. In the warmth, my feet are on fire.
I open my eyes underwater.
Lillian dives deeper than me and pulls a few strokes to take her deeper still. Now she’s curving upward to take a breath. She said she hates swimwear, swore off buying it a long time ago. She’s still wearing her baggy black jeans and a long black T-shirt billowing weightless around her.
Quinn hits the water, all cannonball and bubbles swarming. He’s wearing a two-piece like me — his light gray and high compression, mine less on the compression and more on the bright stripes.
Cyprus is last in, dressed in a statement of asymmetry and fluorescence. She throws a large inflatable in above me and slips into the water with more dignity than some of us.
Everywhere I move in the water, I feel like I glimmer. Like my skin is sparkling with life. Like I’ve arrived home in my body now that I’ve exhaled the rigid gender I got handed without consideration.
Lillian curates the music while Quinn and I string up an unseasonable pool volleyball net. Her selection’s surprisingly summery in a seventies new wave sort of way. The water’s warm, and even the air above it if you stay toward the middle of the pool. Quinn and Lillian keep saying it must be costing a fortune to have it open in December. It hadn’t even occurred to me.
Cyprus texts her older sisters to bring us drinks, waiting to see which one will respond. Victoria (law school, spectacular manicures, suit jacket aficionado) comes outside in a bathrobe with a tray of margaritas. We nestle the glasses in the snow beside the pool. Victoria throws snowballs at Katherine’s window until she joins us, and we all play something approximating volleyball. And nobody’s bothered that my swimsuit covers part of my chest because it feels right.
There’s a few big sing-alongs after Victoria usurps the music selection for pop songs. Lillian says she’ll wait it out at the bottom of the pool, but she winds up singing too. It’s not something she can really resist.
Chart-topping music flickering by, a rainbow beach ball overhead. I’ve hit so many of them back into the audience at festivals. It was only a matter of time before an Admirer song came on. An older one, the lead single from our second album.
“Turn it up!”
yells Cyprus, because even with Augustus on trial and Alexander nowhere to be found, a great hook is a great hook and this song was written by an army of the best in the business, even if the people singing it were kids at the time.
Live, there are parts of this song I never sing. I just hold my microphone out to the audience and let them carry the load.
Tonight, I don’t let a word slip by. I take all of my own parts amidst the other voices and Victoria’s persistent tonelessness. I want to understand what it felt like to have these songs at the backbeat of my youth without the burden of creation. I imagine this song is just a song, that I don’t remember the pressure of making it in a studio when I was fourteen and everyone was treating me like I was far older or far younger. Forget that my helmet hid a lot of tears when I was out of the isolation booth between takes.
Sometimes, having cried helped me sound older.
Tonight, I pretend I don’t know my unspoken stories. I sing along. A great hook is a great hook. You know it when you find yourself humming your own songs.
At the edge of the pool, Cyprus takes over the music, and the era shifts back to before Admirer had broken into the mainstream. Before we became the whole damn river.
Lillian and I are the last ones to leave the water.
For Cyprus’s sisters, it’s back to studying and keeping up with their incredibly high standards.
Cyprus goes inside to make snacks, and Quinn follows not long after with plans of using the fireplace because no matter how warm it is in the water, there’s no way to get out without freezing again.
Quinn’s goal is to cook some type of food over the fire indoors.
It’s a good thing Cyprus is in there with him.
“Too cold to leave?”
asks Lillian. She’s balancing on her tiptoes, holding her chin up to keep her face out of the water.
“Too warm in here,”
I say, treading slowly, farther out.
“I’ll give you motivation. I’ve got a present for you. Come on.”
She breaks into sloppy front crawl, hacking her way to the edge and leaving me no time to ask why she got me a present.