14. Final Practice
Final Practice
Maren wakes up to her phone going off. Jules and Ava have started a group text asking how “important” today’s practice really is. Maren can’t help thinking that all practices are important, but she plays along.
“I guess it’s not that big of a practice. Why, what’s up?” She texts back.
Her phone sits on the nightstand for a good ten minutes before it buzzes again.
“Good. We’ll see you soon.”
Maren’s stomach drops. God, what do these two have up their sleeve? She hops out of bed and heads for the coffee maker. While the pot sputters, she tries to send a few follow-up messages, but no one replies.
These girls text me before six a.m. and now don’t want to talk? What have I gotten into? she thinks slowly, stirring cream into her coffee.
By the time she pulls into the parking lot, the sun is just lifting over the roof line. A few extra cars are parked near the entrance. Sliding into her usual spot beside Coach Hensley’s ancient Jeep, she frowns. Something about the morning feels off.
The moment she opens the door to the pool area, sound hits her like a wave — sharp and hard.
A Bluetooth speaker near the diving well fights for its life, music echoing off the tile until it’s mostly static.
The air is hot, heavy with chlorine. She crosses to Hensley’s office and flips on the ceiling fans, hoping to clear the haze.
Looking through the office window, she freezes. The lane lines are gone. The pool stretches wide and open, no boundaries, just a shimmer of blue. She taps Coach Hensley on the shoulder and points toward the water.
“What’s that about?” She asks.
“The seniors showed up early,” he says, half-smiling. “Said you texted them and told them to pull the lines. I just did what I was told.”
Maren lets out a full belly laugh.
“Hey Coach, you do know you’re still in charge, right? And we never trust the seniors, you taught me that.”
Still grinning, she grabs her laptop and notes, heading for the bleachers. If nothing else, maybe she can get a little work done before whatever this is kicks off.
Maren sets her coffee down on the bleacher beside her and flips open the laptop. The screen lights her face in a pale blue. She settles into the familiar rhythm of data and tabs. The smell of chlorine mixes with the faint scent of the vanilla coffee creamer still clinging to her hand.
For a few minutes, it is quiet. Just the low hum of the ceiling fans and the occasional echo of water shifting in the pool. Either the speaker down by the diving well had died, or someone had turned off the playlist. The calm is returning for Maren.
She opens the attendance sheet for the season. It is color-coded, cross-referenced, neat in the way she finds satisfying. A few cells are still highlighted from last night’s updates. She scrolls absently, checks notes, and clicks boxes.
Then she sees it.
One tab, still tucked between ‘Practice Schedules’ and ‘Rosters—2020.’ Reese Callahan.
She should have deleted it years ago. The file is ancient, built from her co-captain days when she still logged every diver stat by hand.
Reese’s scores, her meet notes, even the one line where Maren had written ‘always smiles before a dive’ into the comment column.
She even tracked most of Reese’s college career from afar.
Maren hesitates. The cursor hovers over the tab’s tiny ‘x.’ She could close it right now, clean and simple. Just be done.
But she doesn’t.
Instead, she opens it. The sheet loads, slow with age.
Old numbers fill the screen, dive difficulties, scores, margins, fragments of another life. The last entry is dated years ago now.
Maren’s chest tightens just a little. She scrolls to the bottom and adds a single note: Still proud of you.
Her fingers linger over the keyboard, then backspace the words until the cell is blank again.
Before she can think too hard about it, a door slams open across the pool deck. The echo bounces through the air.
Voices, Shouting, Laughter.
Then the music starts again. It’s too loud, too bright, and rolling down the deck like thunder.
Maren glances up, blinking against the sudden blur of motion. Dozens of swimmers and alumni flood through the doors, with water guns and towels flying. Led by Ava and Jules, Maren shakes her head. She should have known.
Her laptop screen catches the reflection of it, streaks of blue and white in the soft light, before she pushes the screen halfway down.
The noise swells, filling the entire pool until it is impossible to think.
Music, laughter, the slap of bare feet on the tile. Someone cranks the volume higher, and the bass rattles the bleachers.
A whistle shrieks, followed by a splash that soaks the deck right in front of Maren. Someone yells “Cannon Ball” and takes a running leap from the deck to the pool, fully clothed. The air fills with droplets and laughter, humid and bright.
Maren stands, coffee long forgotten. “Oh my god,” she says to no one.
Jules waves from across the pool, half-hidden behind a group of alumni. Her grin is feral. “Sorry, not sorry!” she yells, cupping her hands around her mouth.
Maren blinks, trying to process the chaos.
Warm-ups tied around their heads like bandannas, swim caps and goggles snapped like rubber bands, someone holding a kickboard above their head like a trophy.
Another senior tosses a handful of glitter confetti into the air, which immediately sticks to the damp floor.
Coach Hensley steps out of his office, taking off his whistle, and he tosses it back towards his desk. “You all lost your minds?” he shouts over the music.
The team roars back: “LAST SPLASH!!!”
He tries to look stern, but he is laughing too hard already.
Maren shakes her head, water dripping from her sleeves. “You knew about this, didn’t you?” she yells at him.
“I had a feeling,” he says, his grin giving him away. “Never trust seniors when they show up early for practice.”
Another splash hits, harder this time. She looks down just in time to see her notes on the bleacher bleeding together, ink running into thin blue threads. Her laptop sits half closed, but the puddle is inching closer.
She scoops everything higher onto the bench, half-laughing, half-exasperated. “You people are ridiculous,” she says, but her voice gets swallowed by the sound of the pool.
Then she sees her.
Reese stands at the edge of the diving well, hair pulled back, skin glowing under the sun beaming in from the windows. She’s in shorts and a faded team hoodie that looks at least two sizes too big for her. One of Maren’s old ones, from their senior year.
Their eyes meet across the deck.
For a heartbeat, everything else drops away. All the shouting, the laughter, even the thud of the music. It’s just the shimmer of light bouncing off the water between them currently.
Reese grins, slow and certain, and mouths You ready?
Maren barely has time to shake her head before Reese takes off running.
She dodges two swimmers, plants one foot on the edge, and launches herself into the pool. The splash erupts like thunder, and the entire deck screams.
Water sprays across the bleachers. Maren throws an arm over her face, laughing despite herself.
Reese surfaces, hair slicked back, grin wide. “Come on, Clarke!” She yells. “You’re not gonna make me do this alone!?!”
Maren laughs harder, the sound catching somewhere between disbelief and joy. “You’re insane!”
“Probably! Get in here anyway!”
Jules and Ava start chanting her name from inside the pool, and within seconds, the rest of the team joins in. The chant builds until it vibrates in her chest.
Maren. Maren. Maren.
She glances towards Hensley. He shrugs, drenched, smiling like a man who has given up trying to fight the tide.
Maren looks down at the pool. The water rolls and glitters, wild and alive. Her reflection is fractured, part light, part shadow, part something she can’t quite make out.”
She kicks off her shoes.
“Fine,” she says, mostly to herself.
The deck is slick beneath her bare feet. She takes a step, then another, until the world is nothing but light and noise.
Reese’s hand reaches up from the water, palm open, waiting.
Maren takes it.
The moment she does, balance disappears.
The pool rushes up to meet them both.
Cold wraps around her like fabric. The noise from above disappears in an instant, muffled to a low hum. It’s like the whole world has gone underwater with her.
Bubbles rise past her ears, scattering light. The blue here feels endless, shifting and alive, the surface above bending into sheets of glass.
Her hand is still in Reese’s. Warm against the water. Steady.
Maren opens her eyes. The sting hits first, then the blur fades. She can see Reese beside her, body loose, hair fanning behind her like something out of The Little Mermaid.
They move without thinking, legs kick in rhythm, bodies turning together through the water. It’s not training. Not control. It is something else entirely.
This used to be the only place I felt steady.
For a second, the moment feels exactly like the end of every relay she has ever swum. That breathless push, that silent count, the red of the lane line meaning almost there.
She can almost hear it. The whistle. The echo. Reese’s final shout before the touch.
Her lungs ache.
Maren tilts her head, watching Reese drift just ahead of her. Every detail slows. The reach of her hand, the twist of her wrist, the curve of her nail breaking through the surface above.
You always did go first, she thinks.
The light fractures again, cutting gold across the blue. For a heartbeat, the pattern looks exactly like a sunrise over the lake. The one from years ago, when everything between them was still becoming something.
She feels it pull at her, that familiar need to stay suspended here. Between inhale and exhale, between then and now.
But the ache in her chest grows sharper.
She kicks upward, breaking the surface with a rush of sound.
Air fills her lungs like it’s the first time they have worked all morning.
The world comes back to her in fragments. The roar of voices. The echo of the music. The slap of water against the tile.
Reese breaks the surface beside her, laughing, wiping water from her face.
Maren blinks through the spray, smiling before she realizes it.
For the first time in a long time, she didn’t reach for control. She just floats.
For a few seconds, she just floats.
Then the static in her brain finds her again.
Laughter crashes down around them, mixed with splashing and someone trying to start a cannonball contest. A wave slaps against her shoulder and rolls toward the gutter.
Maren wipes water from her face, blinking through the blur.
Her laptop sits where she left it, on the highest bench, screen half-open like a mouth mid-word.
The puddle has reached it. The splash has dropped water along the keyboard, then slips between the keys.
A faint flicker flashes behind the screen.
“Oh no,” she says, voice swallowed by the noise.
Reese swims closer, still laughing.
“What?”
Maren points toward the bench. “My laptop.”
Reese tilts her head, squinting. “Is it—”
A spark pops, soft but clear, even over the music. The screen stops glowing.
Maren groans, pressing a hand over her face. “Perfect.”
Reese’s grin widens. “Guess that’s one spreadsheet you can’t fix.”
Maren laughs because she can’t help it. It bubbles up bright and raw. “You are impossible.”
“Probably,” Reese says, still treading water. “But admit it, that thing had it coming.”
Maren shakes her head, hair plastered to her cheeks. “That thing had seasons of data in it.”
Reese floats backward, spreading her arms. “Then maybe it’s time for a clean slate.”
The words hit harder than a joke should. Maren looks back at the laptop, the thin wisp of smoke curling from one corner before it dies out. She exhales, slow and deep.
“Maybe,” she says quietly.
Around them, the commotion starts to settle. The music cuts for a moment, leaving only the sound of dripping water and distant laughter. The surface ripples smooth again.
Reese is still there, steadily beside her.
Maren glances at her one more time, the faint smile returning. “You’re still insane.”
Reese shrugs. “You love it.”
Maren doesn’t answer. She just shakes her head and lets the water carry her toward the wall.
By the time Maren reaches the wall, the chaos has thinned. A few swimmers still linger in the water, floating on their backs, laughing softly. Others sit on the edge, legs dangling, trading stories that dissolve into the hum of the fans.
Coach Hensley has given up pretending to scold anyone. He stands with a towel slung over his shoulders, shoes in hand, grinning like a man who remembers exactly why he stayed all these years.
Maren pulls herself up onto the deck, sitting on the edge of the gutter. The water drips from her hair in slow, steady lines. Her laptop sits dark and ruined on the bleacher, a faint reflection of gold light still glinting off its surface.
Reese climbs out beside her, quiet now, leaning back on her elbows on the deck. For a long moment, neither of them speaks.
The pool is calm again, the surface smooth and shining.
“It was a good last practice,” Reese says softly.
Maren nods, watching the ripples fade. “Yeah,” she says. “It really was.”