Despite my not-crush on Landon, my cheeks go red on reflex—as though the sound of his voice triggers something Pavlovian in the blood vessels in my face. I turn toward it and see him standing on the edge of the pool deck, somehow still tan from the summer despite it being the middle of October. He’s filled out a bit since last season too, and judging from the diameter of the eyes of the sophomore girls hanging out on the bleachers, I’m not the only one who’s noticed.

“We’re fine,” I call back. “The dive team was just leaving.”

Jack snorts.

“What’s the holdup, Ethan?” Landon asks.

I don’t have to be looking at Jack to feel his eye roll. I push myself through the water to get closer to the wall, my mom’s voice unhelpful in my ears: Anything we can do to make them feel more at ease.

The problem is, Landon’s at ease just about everywhere he goes. He doesn’t need any help.

I am struggling to think of something clever to say, something that will make some kind of lasting impression, but by the time I hit the wall, I’ve got nothing. How is it I can fire off a stupid text to a guy I literally call Wolf without thinking twice, but when I’m actually confronted with a human being I know, my brain decides to take a hike?

I’m rescued from stammering something dumb when I see Ethan push himself out of the water.

“Hey, sorry—are you guys supposed to have the pool right now?” Ethan asks.

“I mean, it’s all yours, man,” says Landon. “My internship’s got me beat. I’ll take a nap if it’s all the same to you.”

It’s probably my cue to laugh—the sophomore girls sure don’t miss the opportunity—but I’m too thrown off to do anything but get back out of the pool, hyperaware both of my authority being more undermined by the second, and of the fact that I’m pretty sure I have a slight wedgie. For something we do half naked, swimming really is just about the least sexy sport there is.

“Our coach said we needed to put in more laps this year to strengthen up in the preseason,” says Ethan, half to Landon and half to me. He at least has the decency to look apologetic for it. “Cross-training, and all.”

“Where is your coach?” I ask.

“Well, he said he was visiting his mom for the week, but he definitely just posted an Instagram story from Cáncun,” says Ethan with a shrug.

By now Coach Martin has emerged from the lobby of the gym, where she’s been talking to the parents of the new members of the team about the weekend swim meet schedule. She takes one look at all of us in various states of half wet on the pool deck and doesn’t bother holding in her sigh, or asking where the dive coach is. Sightings of Coach Thompkins are so rare that he’s become something of a myth anyway. Considering what a hot mess the dive team is the first few weeks of every season, I guess I can’t blame them for trying to get their shit together without him.

She pulls me and Ethan aside. “I have no idea when Thompkins is going to be back, so in the meantime, we need to work out a schedule. Can you guys meet after practice and figure out who’s going to use the lanes and when?”

“We’ve never shared the lanes before,” I protest.

Coach Martin offers me another one of her trademark I don’t know what to tell you faces. “Technically the school budget for the pool rental times is for both teams, so we can’t tell them no. Work it out.”

Ethan nods, and we make plans to meet up at the coffee shop across the street once practice is over. Already I can feel the seismic shift of trying to adjust my schedule to compensate for it—if I spend twenty minutes with Ethan that means twenty fewer minutes for AP Calc homework, which means it will eat into the time I’ll undoubtedly be answering Taffy’s texts, which means I probably won’t even get to work on my college apps tonight, which, in turn, means I probably won’t be texting Wolf back anytime this century.

I shake the last thought out of my head before I hit the water again. Of all the priorities I’m sinking under right now, banter with some guy I don’t even know should be the absolute last.

Pepper

Two hours later I feel like my entire body has been whipped. I practice often enough in the off-season that it’s not too much of a shock getting into the swing of things, but nobody’s self-directed workouts can reach even half the intensity of Coach Martin’s. I barely have the energy to drag myself over to the coffee shop, let alone run ridiculous negotiations for a pool we shouldn’t be sharing in the first place.

Even if it weren’t for that, the city just makes me nervous in general. I’ve carved myself a little world here in a neat seven-block radius: the apartment, the school, the pool across the street, the bodega where I get my bagels, the drugstore, the good pizza place and the better taco place, and the salon where my mom gets her blowouts. I don’t like leaving my orbit. I know, on a rational level, this part of the city is on a grid, and in the age of smartphones it’s impossible to get lost. But everything is so cramped here, so dense—I hate that I can turn one corner and see an entire world I don’t recognize, have to navigate a street with a completely different mood than the one a few steps away. I hate that I feel like I have to be a different person to match. Some people can weave in and out of these streets like chameleons, but four years have passed, and I still feel like the same kid who rolled up here in a U-Haul wearing cowboy boots—stubborn and unchanged.