THENEWYORKER,M AY13, 2019 57
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TYPOGRAPHY BY NICO SCHWEIZER
O KLEIN
S
ara came into the blaze late, the
boys already leaping froglike across
the deck, the girls gone bald in
silicone caps. In the afternoon sunlight
the pool was harsh; she’d left it only this
morning in the soft plum dawn.
The other team was lined up around
the eastern gutter, doing its cheer, a slow
solemn clapping that built into synco-
pated yips and the pounding of feet on
metal. The noise made pocks of confu-
sion across the surface of the water.
The diving coach turned to see her
coming across the wet deck. You’re late,
he yelled over the other team’s noise, but
he looked relieved. She shrugged, and
took off her anorak to begin her stretch-
ing, but he grabbed her hand and lifted
it to examine the bloodied knuckles.
Brawler, he said. The other girls told me
what happened and I didn’t think they’d
let you out. She took her hand away. She
didn’t tell him that they had not in fact
let her out; that when the detention aide
had fallen asleep she’d opened a window
silently at the back of the room, pushed
her backpack out, swung her body over
the lip, pulled the window shut with one
hand, and hung on the exterior sill for
a moment before falling into the fresh
pine mulch ten feet below. It was not
nearly as soft as water.
The more nervous or showoffy of
the divers climbed and dived, climbed
and dived, like good little penguins, but
she stayed on the deck loosening up and
watching the first races, giving a small
jump each time the buzzer cracked and
the swimmers leaped off the blocks. She
loved the churn and the separation of
bodies as the slower swimmers fell be-
hind the swifter. Sometimes they let her
swim a sprint relay: she was wickedly
fast, but in races she forgot to breathe
and couldn’t go farther than fifty me-
tres before having to stop. Also, she was
no longer a swimmer, not for a year,
since she had been discovered to be
brushing the boys’ junk in their Speedos
with her hand as they swam by in the
next lane at practice. Most of the boys
hadn’t complained, some had even
slowed down as they passed, but it took
only one whiner, and then she was forced
to switch to diving, which was where
she should have been all along anyway.
There was a coldness on her shoul-
der that slid down her chest, the coach
quietly giving her a lime sports drink.
She drank it down in one draught; it
was a hot day and she had walked all
the way from the school. Need a snack?
he said softly, and though she hadn’t yet
eaten today she said no, because hun-
ger made her feel cleaner. The other
girls didn’t like the coach because he
wore such short shorts that when he sat
in his rusty chair to watch them dive
his purplish balls spilled out the leg hole.
She liked him, though. He was kind to
her, fed her, kept the other girls off her
back, which of course made them like
her even less. She didn’t care. The other
girls barely mattered.
At last the waves in the lap pool
smoothed out and it was time for the
diving. She didn’t watch the other div-
ers; she didn’t need to. She just breathed
and imagined herself held gently within
each of her dives.
And then they called her name and
she stood slowly and came to the lad-
der. As she climbed, the person she was,
that skinny slinking girl with the bad
skin and teeth, fell away. Her nerves
clenched inward and there rose up an
internal hum that blocked out the voices
of the people in the stands and the water
lipping at the gutters and the sun itself,
and, at last, her own body. At the top
she was a pinprick in nothing. She edged
backward to the end of the springboard
and all of her muscles bunched, ready,
buzzing; she raised her arms and gave
two giant jumps, then breathed out with
the third and lifted herself into the broad
air, and there was the delicious pause at
the top as she was already in the first
backward somersault, so perfect she
could stay floating here forever; and even
this was not nearly as beautiful as the
next part, the falling into the second
somersault, which shattered the world
into a billion bright and jagged shards
flung outward from her spinning body.
Now her hands knifed into the water,
her body threading after, and there was
no splash, she could feel the downward
gulp of the water. She gathered herself
for a moment under the blue, then sur-
faced. The coach was in midair, leaping;
and then noise returned, her teammates,
the other divers, the adults in the stands
shouting, and they were shouting for
her. She pulled her body up and away
from the pool. And it was then that she
felt the sting on the back of her neck,
the fine rip in the skin where it had just
brushed the board, and before the judges
saw it and disqualified her she touched
it quickly with her split and bloodied
knuckles to hide the fact that it was this
newer wound that bled a watery red
stripe down her back.
I
t was twilight and the boy was dream-
ing of smooth gray shifting shapes
that emerged out of the fog and dis-
solved to nothing again. He blinked and
saw Sara standing on the other side of
the glass door just before she opened it,
first sliding her hand in and holding the
strand of bells hanging from the frame,
then bringing the rest of her body si-
lently inside. Her pale face was a ques-
tion. He looked at the office and turned
back to give her a nod. Then she went
quickly to the freezer in the rear of the
store and put two frozen dinners into
her backpack, and was already at the
front, leaning her wet hair into the ice-
cream cooler, when the boy’s mother
came rushing out of the back, talking
at him, telling him in her language to
keep his eye on this thieving sneaky lit-
tle bitch. Yes, Mother, he said to her.
Sara came up out of the ice-cream case
with a mango Popsicle and flushed
cheeks, and put two quarters near the
register, sliding them to the boy. He
looked at her hand, the tape with its
browning spots of blood, curling at the
edges from the wet of the pool. He had
heard about the fight, the boy in fifth
period, her swift snapping. You win? he
said. She looked at her hand also and
said quietly, Always. He said, No, not
the fight, I meant the diving. That’s
what I meant, too, she said and half
smiled, then waved the Popsicle at the
woman, who quivered beside her son,
and went into the twilight again.
She walked up the street, her steps
growing slower as she came closer to
home. There were no basements in this
town with its fragile bedrock, but the
apartment block was built into a hill,
and she lived in the cheapest unit, which
was half underground. She entered the
linoleum-floored front hall of the build-
ing, turned the corner, and went down
the stairwell toward her door. During
construction, someone had had the idea
to filter the hallway light into her dim
living room through a series of four col-
ored windows above the bannister, and
so as the girl descended she could look
Fiction Groff Brawler 05_13_19.L [Print]_9452025.indd 57 5/2/19 11:18 AM
