(a short story)

Swallowed

I am a girl like other girls, but Kaye swims faster than any of us. She is 2.5 seconds faster than me. In swimming, that’s a lot. In the breaststroke that’s like winning by a mile. I was never the fastest on our team, but before Kaye came I never felt shame either. She makes everyone feel it because even when she beats us, she won’t look at us. Coach Roberts screams out her times––spit flying, fists to heaven like we’re supposed to care––while Kaye just searches the tile with her pool-water eyes. And then, all Miss Gracie Grace, she slides out, chin in the air like it hurt her to beat us by so little.

After practice, the other girls gather around her talking. They want to touch her towel and look at the way she flips her braids when she takes off her swim-cap and how she unwinds the honey-colored strands from around her neck and she is just staring past them at nothing. They are still asking her questions about where she is from and how come she swims so fast.

I can see that she has no idea how she does it. But I know. Those 2.5 seconds are just in her genes. I mean, God, her father coaches boy’s varsity at the high school. Her brother even trained for the Olympics, so she isn’t even the fastest in her family. But how genes work is something I learned about in school, when those other girls weren’t listening, when they were talking about curling their hair. I figure that in my genes there might be some sicknesses, like cancer, and all the stuff that made my mom divorce my dad.

Another thing. Kaye may be the fastest swimmer on our team, but she is the slowest at getting dressed. In our locker room, which is too tiny for us and smells like bleach and sweat, she is still unwinding her God-damn hair while the rest of us are putting on our socks. I have never seen Kaye naked. On a swim team, that is, like, impossible. That is like she has something to hide. The rest of us have grown up swimming together. We know that Eleanor’s titties are getting big. That Greta got a hickey over the summer and now we know what a hickey is. And that even though she hides it with a towel, Priscilla has hair “down there”. The rest of us are still little girls under our suits. At least that’s what my mother says, while she watches us climb on the bus out of town for our meets. She says, “Stay away from strangers and men.” That’s the way my mother thinks. I look in the mirror to see if I do too––if worry is in the genes. I have her eyes, so is her being afraid in me too?

Kaye has seen me naked. She has seen me when my bathing suit was wrapped in a funny position halfway on my butt and halfway at my knees, and I feel like I am going to trip trying to peel it off. She was standing there when my suit’s strap snapped ‘cause I was trying to break my personal record (which is still 2.5 seconds slower than hers). She has seen me right out of the shower trying to keep my bare-feet off the floor. And I can’t help it; I always have to wash the pool off me because I can’t stand the smell of chlorine on my skin when we drive home at night and everyone is asleep. And when I wore a bra for the first time, the one that Mom gave me, and all the other girls laughed, Kaye was there too. And all this time that my own body is twisting and falling and slipping and growing, she is sitting there slowly undoing her braids and swimming 2.5 seconds faster than me.

Carrie told me she saw Kaye naked once. She said Kaye has a big black on mole on her butt and a big red scar and that is what she is trying to hide. But I don’t believe Carrie, because she is always saying she’s seen things no one’s ever seen. That she’s been places we’ve never been. That she’s done things the rest of us don’t even know about yet. She is a liar. But Kaye is something else.

My personal goal for the year 2006 is to see Kaye naked. To be so slow undressing, to be so much slower than her, that I can see what she wants to hide. This will be hard to do without her getting suspicious. She wears her suit under her clothes before practice and afterwards she sometimes wears it still wet under her jeans. But at some point even Kaye must take it off. In the bathroom stall. Hidden behind shower curtains. At home. I don’t know. After meets, Coach Robbins is always saying, “Someone, go get Kaye out from the locker room so we can leave.” But she is always dressed by the time you get there. Still, I figure that next week will be my big chance. I figure that if I move slowly enough after our Fresno meet, slower than even her, Kaye will have to undress in front of me.

I will see the blue suit she wears buckle up around her belly, while she tries to slip it off, and all the slow graceful ways she moves out of the water will do her no good as she tries to remove the tight straps from her shoulders. Maybe she will even have to ask me for help like I have to ask Carrie sometimes. And when Kaye Graves does this, I will still be fully clothed and she will finally look at me and I will have my suit on, and my hips will be wrapped with a towel. My bathing cap will be glued to my head. And God, I hope, I will for some reason even be wearing shoes so that nothing of me is exposed to her or the germs on the wet and stinking floor. Because when Kaye Graves needs me, and her suit is finally a wet rag laying at her feet, she will stand before me, naked, looking little and afraid.

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