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She needed the chlorine to lift the scent of berries and infidelity off her freckled skin.  Hell, she wanted it to set her skin aflame and burn the freckles off, too, if it could.  They were her dad’s freckles; almost exact replicas, if not a little darker due to their time under summer sun.  It’d been an average summer; a kind summer full of waking up and going back to sleep just because she could and getting lost in the world just three blocks down, around the corner.  I guess I finally looked around the wrong corner.  This corner consisted of a girl—yes, girl, for her body and foolish confidence couldn’t suggest more than twenty-five—with skin a shade too dark for her snowy hair and eyes so sharp they betrayed her childlike voice lying sprawled on the bathroom floor, feigning defenselessness.  Inviting her father—taunting her father with her fake breasts, sliver of a waist and legs so narrow they were unnerving.  This girl didn’t have a problem exposing herself in this way.  So didn’t her father, she would discover.  Her father, who’d come to every one of her dance recitals before swimming became her passion, even though she had two left feet.  Her father, whose limbs were intertwined with those of a stranger, whose fingers spilled through this stranger’s hair like they never did his own wife’s, whose body was hungry for what was between this stranger’s legs.  She’d stopped watching then.  Before it happened.   She’d thrown on a pair of headphones and turned the volume to its limit, letting sound fill her mind and shove the memory of her dad with another woman into a dark crevice.

He’s cheating on you, mom.  Dad’s cheating on you.  For some reason, her mouth was willing to say anything but those few words in the presence of her mother.  What’s for dinner?  How was work?  Do you wanna go see that chick flick that’s coming out on Friday? But never cheat, cheating, he’s cheating.  Dad’s cheating.  I saw them.

And so she went on this way, arguing with herself always, letting her mom feel the two of them were getting closer when in truth they were further than they’d ever been.  Every morning and every night, she would breathe in the scent of her father’s mistress when she brushed her teeth and took a shower.  Wash it all off.  But it never really came off.  Her skin would be raw and her hands would reek of the disinfectant she’d used on every surface of the bathroom, and the smell would still be there, coloring the air putrid.  It was there this morning, so strong it clogged her throat and irritated her stomach enough so that she found herself leaning over the toilet, acid spilling from her lips.  That’s it.

She finds her mother in the kitchen, doing this unimportant thing and that.  She lets the words “I saw dad cheating” spill from her lips.  They are acid, too.  And more and more spill, because her mother doesn’t believe her and she has to justify herself.  Her mother keeps shaking her head, disappointment painted over her soft features, unyielding; her mother tells her to stop seeking attention, stop making up lies—you have a tendency to lie, dear.  Suddenly, there are no words left in her stomach.  No words left inside her at all.  She is empty, and all she wants is to be free of these two people who’ve hurt her so much.  Thanks, Mom.  Thanks, Dad.

It is a strange sensation, her thoughts finally hushed, the girl’s locker room silent if not for the buzz of the lights.  The whole school silent.  No one to judge her.  Her dad cheated.  Her mom’s in denial.

She faces a mirror, but her eyes are unfocused.  She lets them distort her mother’s eyes and her father’s nose into something indefinable.  Tears spill over her sun kissed cheeks.  She laughs nervously at the fact that she’s crying at school.  It’s something she’s never done before.
_

She throws herself into the water, forgetting about tucking her chin and pushing herself forward with her arms and all that nonsense.  She neglects freestyle, breaststroke, even backstroke—her favorite stroke up until now, because it let her breathe.  But she didn’t want to breathe freely.  She wanted to fight for every breath, to exhaust herself to the point of unfeeling.   Butterfly it is.

She can tell after fifty meters that it is working.  Her mind is becoming numb, centered only on the undulation of the stroke.  She might be crying still, but the pool water will hide her tears.

After five hundred meters, her body breaks.  Her limbs are next to lifeless and she is trembling as she tediously makes her way to the shallow end.  She throws her arms over the railing of the gutter and invites sharp air into her lungs.  It takes all she has to hold herself up; her body just feels so heavy.

The five minute warning bell rings, and she can’t tell whether or not it sounds quiet because the pool has a faulty intercom or because she is so removed from herself.  She doesn’t care for it.  She doesn’t care for school.  Not today.

But then, the sound of something crashing.  No, not crashing; popping.   A small explosion.  Like a gunshot.  She finds herself laughing sardonically.  Can this day get any worse?

When her senses return to her, however, she is outright frightened.  More shots resonate, sending jolts through her body.  She runs through who she’d truly miss—her parents (no matter what), her best friends (Lenna the most), the annoying kid who sits by her in calculus, the boy with the good looks, the boy with the pretty eyes, that girl who laughed when she slipped in the hallway freshman year—anyone who’s ever smiled at her.  Her mind takes its time flipping through their faces.  She even thinks about what class she’d be the saddest about missing that day.  It’d have to be AP Psychology.

Human survival instinct: fight or flight.

Run.  You have to run now.

She raises herself onto the pool deck, bruising her joints.  She makes plans to throw a towel on, take her bags and drive away once she gets into the locker room.  She won’t drive home.  No.  She’ll drive somewhere nice, like the mall or the art museum.

Footsteps.  Footsteps in the adjacent hallway.  Nobody’s allowed in the pool hallway during school hours.

Hide.

She slips into the corner of the diving well and dons the water like a blanket.  This way, there will be no sound.  It’s her best hope, seventeen feet deep and complete with black tiles that dim the water.  She propels herself downward, her movements long and smooth.  She is careful not to waste her energy, her breath.  Her feet brush tile, and with a final sweep of her arms she sits firmly on the bottom of the pool.

She knows better than to relax, to loosen her stomach and let escape precious oxygen.  She knows also not to panic, for panic will tighten her body more than it needs to be.  She must be removed; careless, even in a situation like this.  It is second to sleeping, aside from her buckled abdominals and sculling arms.

Nightmarish thoughts interrupt her silence.  Each one steals a little bit more of her breath.  She pushes them tentatively away, but they keep coming back, worse each time.  Was that the door opening?  Please let this shooter not notice the ripples in the pool.  Aren’t people who do stuff like this unstable?  Unstable people don’t notice things like ripples in the water, right?  What if he notices?  What if it’s a she?  But girls don’t usually do stuff like this.  What if he—or she—kills me?  Will it hurt?  Will I get shot in the stomach and bleed to death, in this pool?  Will I be on my back when he shoots me and unable to flip over?  Will I drown?  And humming repeatedly beneath all of this, a cacophony of Is he in here? and Maybe he just walked by without ever coming in.

Before she knows it, she is caught in a whirlwind of worry and ringing ears and bubbles escaping from her nostrils.  She wills the bubbles to die before they reach the surface.  She just needs more time, more oxygen—more will.  The longest she’s ever held her breath was two minutes and nineteen seconds.  How long has it been since she took her last breath?  More than two minutes and nineteen seconds?  Less?  Twenty seconds?

Stop  thinking  stop thinkingstopthinking.


There is almost no air left.  No time.  More time.  Her nails dig into her thighs with such desperation that they themselves ache.  Crimson rises in frail, wispy designs.  Was it a stupid thing to do?  Would her blood give her away, or did scratching herself grant her the few seconds that separate her from being safe and her being at gunpoint?  But time is up.  Her body has realized how close it is to drowning and is now struggling to break the surface of what is suffocating it.  The surface ripples look haunting under the pool lights.

It is so easy.  The water just lets her break through it.  For a fleeting moment, all that exists is air and yearning:  her body aching for air, air satisfying her body.

Numbness spreads over her face, making it difficult for her to control her expression.  She can barely keep her eyes open.

She sees him, and at first she doesn’t remember the danger he imposes.  Then, she sees his gun.  It’s pointed at her.

“Are you going to kill me?” she sneers, reckless in her desperation.

“I don’t know,” the gunman answers, returning her tone.  She pauses to let everything come back into clarity.  She takes in the sight of a boy she recognizes.  A boy she’d known since sixth grade and never much liked.  A boy who took every opportunity to show off and who thought being a misogynist was cool.  A boy who, apparently, took every bit of cruelty—justified or not—toward him to heart.

She stares at him blankly, fear escaping her.  Instead, she contemplates whether her heart beats fast out of fear or because she deprived it of oxygen.  It couldn’t be the first one.  She doesn’t feel scared at all.  Just weary.

He stares at her with glassy eyes, the gun eerily still in his hands.  A handgun.  Typical.  Just shoot me already, you coward. His gaze flickers down and back up again, like he’s made a decision.

“Get out of the pool,” he orders.  His voice is smoother than she’d ever heard it before.

“Why?” she hears herself asking.

“Do it, or I’ll kill you.”  Still that smooth, flat voice.  It reintroduces fear to her.

“Oh-Okay.”

She makes her way deliberately out of the pool, eyes fixed on his index finger on the trigger.  “Are there more shooters?” she murmurs apprehensively.

There is a flash of his old self when he spits “Of course there are!  Do you think I’m an idiot?!”  Even with her life in his hands, he still wants to prove himself.

“W-What are you gonna do to me?”

He takes his time approaching her.  He places the muzzle of his gun on her left temple.  How unfamiliar the sensation is is enough to drive her insane.  “We’re gonna have some fun.”

Her heart is the only part of her that isn’t rigid when he tears hungrily at her swimsuit; as he unbuckles his pants and pulls down his boxers once he has stripped her of it.  His lips fall hard and malicious on her lips.  His body takes her prisoner, its heat enough to make her explode.  He explores her simply to torment her.  She would fight if not for the gun pointed to her head.  She would fight.

At last, he takes what he has come for.  What is not his.  The force of the muzzle leaves her head and is replaced by another force, this time to her side.  It is a much stronger force, a force that meets her side repeatedly and makes her call out in pain each time.  She manages to flip herself over between blows.  She now feels them in her stomach, her breasts.  Each one drives her further into a daze.  Just stop.  Be done with me.

He eventually finishes, leaving her to exhale shakily and cry with the ache of inhaling.

“You’re a stupid whore.”  His voice sounds distant.  There is the whine of a door opening and a loud click as it is swung shut.

She lies there and doesn’t dare do anything but breathe—not even feel.  No cold, no remorse for being mean to him, no anger toward her father betraying her.  Nothing.
_

“The lockdown has ended.  I repeat, the lockdown has ended.  If you are not injured, please make your way out the main entrance.  Your families are waiting.  If you are not injured but tending to an injured person, please remain with him or her.  Professionals will come find you.  If you are injured…”

The sound wakes her.  She didn’t notice she was sleeping.

Everything feels automatic as she forces herself upright and stumbles into the girl’s locker room.  She gets dressed but doesn’t notice herself bending to get into her clothes.  She wanders into the hallway and forgets where she’s going.  She sees a group of students and follows them, indifferent, for once, to what they might think of her.  It wasn’t that she was fearless; she simply didn’t know what fear was anymore.  She didn’t how anything was supposed to feel anymore.

Isn’t this what you wanted?

Her parents seek her out once she is under sunlight again.  Their expressions, a mix of anguish and relief, hold no meaning to her.  Their arms are spread, welcoming her.  She should fall into them.  She does, but she can barely muster any affection.  They could be strangers.
_

The evening sky is dusty.  She searches for stars to take her mind off of feeling guilty, confused, stricken.  She’d gradually become more herself since the car ride back from school.  It was a silent car ride.  She’s thankful for it.  The problem is, she doesn’t want to be herself.  This new Hailey was someone much different than the Hailey this morning.  Someone much scarier to face.

During dinner, her mom had asked her if she wanted to talk about it.

“No.”

She will never tell her parents what happened; will never let them see the bruises.  Besides, the news said the shooters had all committed suicide.  What good will come out of accusing a dead person of rape?  As for the news, she’d stopped watching the minute they began naming casualties.  She didn’t want to hear them.

In spite of this, she couldn’t help but wonder what they’d say if she did tell them what Dustin had done to her.

You have a tendency to lie, dear.
_

School is set to resume the coming Monday.  She spends Friday and the weekend in bed, listening to her favorite three songs on repeat.  She eats her meals at the wrong hours, food suddenly grey to her and flavor not registering as she tersely chews and swallows.   She turns away by some newfound instinct when her parents offer her a hug, and her behavior isn’t questioned.  She doesn’t bother worrying about why her parents don’t care.

Monday is a peculiar day; one of those days that don’t really happen at all.  Until it happens, that is.  It is twelve fifteen Monday morning when you drift to sleep, feeling it is still Sunday.  When you wake up Monday morning, it feels like you’ve already lived the day through your dreams and that the fifteen hours that await you are just an afterthought.

On Monday, she brushes her teeth in the kitchen sink and takes a five minute shower.  Her breakfast is swallowed before her mother has the chance to realize how odd she’s acting.

She drives to school, loathing the scent of her car.  She’d much rather be walking.  There’s something inappropriate about driving to school.

Nothing is much different when she enters the building.  The same kids hang out in the same places, talk about the same things.  Granted, it is a bit quieter, but it is a tense quiet.  This quiet won’t last.

Pretending to be okay proves a simple task.  Smiles are familiar to her face and not hard to muster when needed.  Raising her eyebrows when she answered people distracted from her sullen eyes.  When asked if she was alright, I’m tired, that’s all.

As the day progresses, she begins to get lost in the hush of the students.  There is a pallid beauty in weary silence.  She loses herself to it.  Lets it numb her ears, her heart.

Though, there were holes in this silence.  There is no longer a boy who sits by her in calculus.  Lenna’s smile is strained, her verdant eyes resistant to their former light.  Lenna had lost someone, she was sure.  She makes a note to talk to her after school, ignoring the voice in her head that pleads for her not to.  Nobody died.  Everything’s okay.  Everything—

Memorial services are announced through the intercom at the start of third period.  All except a few of the names listed are alien to her.  Alex Hansen, Elizabeth Riley, Linda McCormick.  Their names slide through the intercom like ghosts.  Empty shells.  She hates that she knows—knew—them; hates that she ever cared for them.  Mostly, she is angry that hearing their names is all it takes to collapse the composure she’s held on to since Thursday.  Lenna’s hand finds hers, and the conversation they’d left for after school is had right there.

I miss them.
Me too.
There’s something I can’t tell you.
I’ll never be ashamed of what you aren’t ready to say to me.
_

In the course of a week, she starts to see the tragedy through a broader lens.  The shooting had hit the student body like an S wave, leaving some shaken and missing others entirely.  Or so it seemed.  All talk stopped at the core of the matter:  the shooters themselves.

As hard as she tried to fight the fact, things had changed.  The boy who every girl sought, the one who was so sure of himself it irritated her, had lost himself.  His face was twisted with age and his eyes looked worn.  She wanted to scream at him to pick his ego back up and carry on like before.  She could bear him being a jerk, but not this.  Alex Hansen had been his best friend.

And then there were the monsters.  The glossy-eyed girls who swarmed him and fed off his grief, taking full advantage of his vulnerability.  The kids who spent their days craving sympathy and had none in a time like this.  They were all monsters.  Was she a monster, too, for not wanting to know if other girls had been lucky (meaning alive) in the way that she had?

As for her own emotions, she’s learned to let the bad ones pass and to hold on with all she’s got to the good ones.  Mostly, she’s gotten used having to put effort into being happy; having her chest feel drained at the end of the day.  The color of her bruises are draining as well.
_

Lenna can feel the changes in herself, but time and understanding have diminished them.  But the changes in Hailey, they’re too obvious—too hard to hide—to be disregarded.  Hailey no longer looks in the mirror.  She buys the exact same salad and plain fries for lunch every day and the corners of her smile are too tight.  She is too perfect in the presence of her parents.  She quit the swim team.

“If you don’t want to swim, you can still dive, you know.”

“No.” A little too loudly.  “I need some space.  Swimming isn’t my life.  It isn’t.”
_

Friday, May 7.

She sits a little too straight, a little too frail.  The muscle she’d built from swimming had left her months ago.  Good.  Nothing to tie her bones to that pool.  To beside the diving well.

“Hailey and Haiden.”  She looks at her biology teacher like she’s betrayed her.  She is barely holding a B in her class, and she pairs her up with Haiden for the end of the year project.  She would probably have to do all the work, because Haiden never did anything.  Worse, Haiden is a head case.  She would be tempted to fix Haiden—to make his responsibilities her own, because his life made her grateful for hers.  Then again, there is a chance the rumors aren’t true.  Maybe Haiden wasn’t an orphan who was kicked around by abusive foster parents his whole life, his biological sister being his only companion through it all.  Maybe his sister didn’t get shot that fateful Thursday and he didn’t try to kill himself out of guilt for her death.

She didn’t count on it.

She scoots beside him and offers him a soft smile.  “I’m Hailey.  But you probably already know.  Because she just called our names.  And we’ve been in the same class for a while, so…” it surprises her that she is nervous, even more so that it’s a warm nervous, not the bitter one she’s all too familiar with.  It’s just Haiden.

“I’m Haiden,” he says through a nervous laugh.  His voice doesn’t fit him.  It is too fluid.  Too beautiful.  His eyes are her favorite grey; the color of the sky after a storm.  “So, when do you want to get together to work?”

“How about after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays?”

“Okay, cool.”

He shows up every Tuesday and Thursday without fail.  She was wrong about him—wrong to think he wasn’t smart and wrong to look down on the turtlenecks and elastic waist pants he wore.  Wrong to think they couldn’t be friends.

Above all, she was wrong to think he couldn't touch her.  She thought she'd flinch during that first embrace, but her body, just as it did that day at the pool, surprised her.
_

“I can’t.  Believe.  We’re done.”

“I know.”

“With.”

“A week left.”

They lie on the floor of her living room upon construction paper scraps and glue, their arms outstretched and eyes wide.  They laugh hysterically.  She hasn’t laughed this easy in a long time.

“Do you think we’ll get an A?” he asks.

“We better, with all the annotating we did.”

“Yeah.”  He turns to face her, memorizes how pretty she is when her eyes aren’t grim.  It is rare.

She feels him staring and turns onto her side, too.  People misjudge him.  He is gorgeous, inside and out.  It’s just hard to see at first.

Somehow, they’d moved closer to one another.  His lips brush hers, hesitant.  Her lips are welcoming.
_

“Um, Hailey?”

“Yeah?”

He takes a while to look at her before asking, “Do you remember that one time when you were changing in your room and I was waiting in your brother’s room?” Her eyes are brighter now, her smile more of a reflex.

“Yeah, I remember,” she looks at him suspiciously.  The expression looks very cute on her face.

“So, um, I couldn’t help but look around.  And, well, I saw his clothes and I kind of thought they looked cool.  I don’t own a lot of clothes, and the clothes I own are kind of terrible—so-do-you-think-I-could-maybe-wear-them-sometime?” he holds one of the couch pillows in front of him in defense, adding in a sheepish voice, “since he’s in college and all.”

“I thought you’d never ask!” she exclaims, beaming.

Thursday morning, people begin to notice him and her hand held in his.  She has eyes for no one but him, and vice versa.
_

With finals and an A plus biology project behind them (“impressive annotated bib.” scrawled at the top of the rubric), they sit with satisfied smiles on the pool balcony.  They don’t sit for long, for Lenna is preparing to swim.  She thinks briefly back to yesterday.  It was late afternoon and her room was dyed golden by the setting sun.

“Why don’t you ever go swimming anymore?”

“How do you know I swim?” she’d never told him she was a swimmer.  She's still scared to face herself, that day.  A little less scared now that he’s at her side.

“I...may have come to one of the meets.  I heard some of you guys were really fast.  Well, you, Lenna, and Kimberly.”

“Kim’s amazing,” she replies, looking down.

“So why don’t you go anymore?” he presses, concern written all over his face.

“Why did you try to kill yourself?” she shoots back, uneasy.

She doesn’t expect him to answer, but he does.  “It was a stupid idea.  I don’t really know why.  I guess I just thought there was nothing left to love—to live for.  But then I found you.”  The way he looks at her—like she’s a miracle.  It makes her uncomfortable, but in a good way.  What’s so interesting about me?

“That day there was the shooting,” she starts, feeling her insides break down, “I was in the pool.  I-I was swimming.  One of the shooters came in, and,” she looks at him.  He will always be there, no matter what—no matter what she says, “I was raped.”

She’d cried in his arms, letting all the pain escape.  She finally stopped holding her breath.

He is still right by her side.  He didn’t leave.  He would never leave.  She gives him a quick kiss on the cheek before jumping up and screaming for Lenna to swim faster.  “Go, go, go!”

He joins her, and soon everyone is screaming for somebody.  Lenna has twenty five more meters.  As of now, it looks as if she will finish second.  Hailey knows better.  In an instant, Lenna’s stroke is quicker, more efficient.  She glides past the girl ahead of her and finishes first.  Spectators’ heads snap to the timer on the wall.  1:03.  State qualifying breaststroke time.  Hailey cheers until her lungs are sore.
_

She makes her way through a crowd of swimmers, offering congrats here and there, before finally finding Lenna.  The two look at each other, faces radiant.  They hug before freaking out about how excited both of them are for Lenna’s time.

The pool begins to empty.  She and Lenna exchange a final hug.  Lenna eyes Haiden and murmurs so that only she can hear, “Finally ready to tell me?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll wait for you two outside.”
_

She rushes into the girl’s locker room, feeling foolish for being so excited.

“Hello, mirror,” she says aloud.  There’s no one around to hear.  “Hello, reflection.”

On the whole, she looks the same as she did that Thursday morning.  Same fiery hair, same freckled skin, same paintbrush smile.  But something is very different.  Her brown eyes are stronger, angrier.  She’s lived the worst of it.  If there were a next time, she would fight.
_

“Ready?”

“Yea—AH!”  Why did I agree to hold his hand?

It doesn’t feel like she hasn’t been in the water for nine months.  The water is an old friend.  No fear.  Dustin's gone.  Haiden's here.  You're looking right at him.

“How does it feel?”

“Amazing.”  She lets every inch of her skin take in how exquisitely cold it is.

“Here’s the hard part.  Do you think you can do it?” he remarks teasingly.

“I’ll race you there.”  She takes a breath that challenges the limits of her lungs.  Holding herself open to whatever emotions still lingered in the water, she begins her decent to the bottom of the diving well.

Her feet touch the bottom and she looks around for him.  It is darker than she remembers.  She extends an arm, finds his fingers.  They draw closer together.

Their lips brush.

Description

She needed the chlorine to lift the scent of berries and infidelity off her freckled skin.  Hell, she wanted it to set her skin aflame and burn the freckles off, too, if it could.  They were her dad’s freckles; almost exact replicas, if not a little darker due to their time under summer sun.  It’d been an average summer; a kind summer full of waking up and going back to sleep just because she could and getting lost in the world just three blocks down, around the corner.  I guess I finally looked around the wrong corner.  This corner consisted of a girl—yes, girl, for her body and foolish confidence couldn’t suggest more than twenty-five—with skin a shade too dark for her snowy hair and eyes so sharp they betrayed her childlike voice lying sprawled on the bathroom floor, feigning defenselessness.  Inviting her father—taunting her father with her fake breasts, sliver of a waist and legs so narrow they were unnerving.  This girl didn’t have a problem exposing herself in this way.  So didn’t her father, she would discover.  Her father, who’d come to every one of her dance recitals before swimming became her passion, even though she had two left feet.  Her father, whose limbs were intertwined with those of a stranger, whose fingers spilled through this stranger’s hair like they never did his own wife’s, whose body was hungry for what was between this stranger’s legs.  She’d stopped watching then.  Before it happened.   She’d thrown on a pair of headphones and turned the volume to its limit, letting sound fill her mind and shove the memory of her dad with another woman into a dark crevice.

He’s cheating on you, mom.  Dad’s cheating on you.  For some reason, her mouth was willing to say anything but those few words in the presence of her mother.  What’s for dinner?  How was work?  Do you wanna go see that chick flick that’s coming out on Friday? But never cheat, cheating, he’s cheating.  Dad’s cheating.  I saw them.

And so she went on this way, arguing with herself always, letting her mom feel the two of them were getting closer when in truth they were further than they’d ever been.  Every morning and every night, she would breathe in the scent of her father’s mistress when she brushed her teeth and took a shower.  Wash it all off.  But it never really came off.  Her skin would be raw and her hands would reek of the disinfectant she’d used on every surface of the bathroom, and the smell would still be there, coloring the air putrid.  It was there this morning, so strong it clogged her throat and irritated her stomach enough so that she found herself leaning over the toilet, acid spilling from her lips.  That’s it.

She finds her mother in the kitchen, doing this unimportant thing and that.  She lets the words “I saw dad cheating” spill from her lips.  They are acid, too.  And more and more spill, because her mother doesn’t believe her and she has to justify herself.  Her mother keeps shaking her head, disappointment painted over her soft features, unyielding; her mother tells her to stop seeking attention, stop making up lies—you have a tendency to lie, dear.  Suddenly, there are no words left in her stomach.  No words left inside her at all.  She is empty, and all she wants is to be free of these two people who’ve hurt her so much.  Thanks, Mom.  Thanks, Dad.

It is a strange sensation, her thoughts finally hushed, the girl’s locker room silent if not for the buzz of the lights.  The whole school silent.  No one to judge her.  Her dad cheated.  Her mom’s in denial.

She faces a mirror, but her eyes are unfocused.  She lets them distort her mother’s eyes and her father’s nose into something indefinable.  Tears spill over her sun kissed cheeks.  She laughs nervously at the fact that she’s crying at school.  It’s something she’s never done before.
_

She throws herself into the water, forgetting about tucking her chin and pushing herself forward with her arms and all that nonsense.  She neglects freestyle, breaststroke, even backstroke—her favorite stroke up until now, because it let her breathe.  But she didn’t want to breathe freely.  She wanted to fight for every breath, to exhaust herself to the point of unfeeling.   Butterfly it is.

She can tell after fifty meters that it is working.  Her mind is becoming numb, centered only on the undulation of the stroke.  She might be crying still, but the pool water will hide her tears.

After five hundred meters, her body breaks.  Her limbs are next to lifeless and she is trembling as she tediously makes her way to the shallow end.  She throws her arms over the railing of the gutter and invites sharp air into her lungs.  It takes all she has to hold herself up; her body just feels so heavy.

The five minute warning bell rings, and she can’t tell whether or not it sounds quiet because the pool has a faulty intercom or because she is so removed from herself.  She doesn’t care for it.  She doesn’t care for school.  Not today.

But then, the sound of something crashing.  No, not crashing; popping.   A small explosion.  Like a gunshot.  She finds herself laughing sardonically.  Can this day get any worse?

When her senses return to her, however, she is outright frightened.  More shots resonate, sending jolts through her body.  She runs through who she’d truly miss—her parents (no matter what), her best friends (Lenna the most), the annoying kid who sits by her in calculus, the boy with the good looks, the boy with the pretty eyes, that girl who laughed when she slipped in the hallway freshman year—anyone who’s ever smiled at her.  Her mind takes its time flipping through their faces.  She even thinks about what class she’d be the saddest about missing that day.  It’d have to be AP Psychology.

Human survival instinct: fight or flight.

Run.  You have to run now.

She raises herself onto the pool deck, bruising her joints.  She makes plans to throw a towel on, take her bags and drive away once she gets into the locker room.  She won’t drive home.  No.  She’ll drive somewhere nice, like the mall or the art museum.

Footsteps.  Footsteps in the adjacent hallway.  Nobody’s allowed in the pool hallway during school hours.

Hide.

She slips into the corner of the diving well and dons the water like a blanket.  This way, there will be no sound.  It’s her best hope, seventeen feet deep and complete with black tiles that dim the water.  She propels herself downward, her movements long and smooth.  She is careful not to waste her energy, her breath.  Her feet brush tile, and with a final sweep of her arms she sits firmly on the bottom of the pool.

She knows better than to relax, to loosen her stomach and let escape precious oxygen.  She knows also not to panic, for panic will tighten her body more than it needs to be.  She must be removed; careless, even in a situation like this.  It is second to sleeping, aside from her buckled abdominals and sculling arms.

Nightmarish thoughts interrupt her silence.  Each one steals a little bit more of her breath.  She pushes them tentatively away, but they keep coming back, worse each time.  Was that the door opening?  Please let this shooter not notice the ripples in the pool.  Aren’t people who do stuff like this unstable?  Unstable people don’t notice things like ripples in the water, right?  What if he notices?  What if it’s a she?  But girls don’t usually do stuff like this.  What if he—or she—kills me?  Will it hurt?  Will I get shot in the stomach and bleed to death, in this pool?  Will I be on my back when he shoots me and unable to flip over?  Will I drown?  And humming repeatedly beneath all of this, a cacophony of Is he in here? and Maybe he just walked by without ever coming in.

Before she knows it, she is caught in a whirlwind of worry and ringing ears and bubbles escaping from her nostrils.  She wills the bubbles to die before they reach the surface.  She just needs more time, more oxygen—more will.  The longest she’s ever held her breath was two minutes and nineteen seconds.  How long has it been since she took her last breath?  More than two minutes and nineteen seconds?  Less?  Twenty seconds?

Stop  thinking  stop thinkingstopthinking.


There is almost no air left.  No time.  More time.  Her nails dig into her thighs with such desperation that they themselves ache.  Crimson rises in frail, wispy designs.  Was it a stupid thing to do?  Would her blood give her away, or did scratching herself grant her the few seconds that separate her from being safe and her being at gunpoint?  But time is up.  Her body has realized how close it is to drowning and is now struggling to break the surface of what is suffocating it.  The surface ripples look haunting under the pool lights.

It is so easy.  The water just lets her break through it.  For a fleeting moment, all that exists is air and yearning:  her body aching for air, air satisfying her body.

Numbness spreads over her face, making it difficult for her to control her expression.  She can barely keep her eyes open.

She sees him, and at first she doesn’t remember the danger he imposes.  Then, she sees his gun.  It’s pointed at her.

“Are you going to kill me?” she sneers, reckless in her desperation.

“I don’t know,” the gunman answers, returning her tone.  She pauses to let everything come back into clarity.  She takes in the sight of a boy she recognizes.  A boy she’d known since sixth grade and never much liked.  A boy who took every opportunity to show off and who thought being a misogynist was cool.  A boy who, apparently, took every bit of cruelty—justified or not—toward him to heart.

She stares at him blankly, fear escaping her.  Instead, she contemplates whether her heart beats fast out of fear or because she deprived it of oxygen.  It couldn’t be the first one.  She doesn’t feel scared at all.  Just weary.

He stares at her with glassy eyes, the gun eerily still in his hands.  A handgun.  Typical.  Just shoot me already, you coward. His gaze flickers down and back up again, like he’s made a decision.

“Get out of the pool,” he orders.  His voice is smoother than she’d ever heard it before.

“Why?” she hears herself asking.

“Do it, or I’ll kill you.”  Still that smooth, flat voice.  It reintroduces fear to her.

“Oh-Okay.”

She makes her way deliberately out of the pool, eyes fixed on his index finger on the trigger.  “Are there more shooters?” she murmurs apprehensively.

There is a flash of his old self when he spits “Of course there are!  Do you think I’m an idiot?!”  Even with her life in his hands, he still wants to prove himself.

“W-What are you gonna do to me?”

He takes his time approaching her.  He places the muzzle of his gun on her left temple.  How unfamiliar the sensation is is enough to drive her insane.  “We’re gonna have some fun.”

Her heart is the only part of her that isn’t rigid when he tears hungrily at her swimsuit; as he unbuckles his pants and pulls down his boxers once he has stripped her of it.  His lips fall hard and malicious on her lips.  His body takes her prisoner, its heat enough to make her explode.  He explores her simply to torment her.  She would fight if not for the gun pointed to her head.  She would fight.

At last, he takes what he has come for.  What is not his.  The force of the muzzle leaves her head and is replaced by another force, this time to her side.  It is a much stronger force, a force that meets her side repeatedly and makes her call out in pain each time.  She manages to flip herself over between blows.  She now feels them in her stomach, her breasts.  Each one drives her further into a daze.  Just stop.  Be done with me.

He eventually finishes, leaving her to exhale shakily and cry with the ache of inhaling.

“You’re a stupid whore.”  His voice sounds distant.  There is the whine of a door opening and a loud click as it is swung shut.

She lies there and doesn’t dare do anything but breathe—not even feel.  No cold, no remorse for being mean to him, no anger toward her father betraying her.  Nothing.
_

“The lockdown has ended.  I repeat, the lockdown has ended.  If you are not injured, please make your way out the main entrance.  Your families are waiting.  If you are not injured but tending to an injured person, please remain with him or her.  Professionals will come find you.  If you are injured…”

The sound wakes her.  She didn’t notice she was sleeping.

Everything feels automatic as she forces herself upright and stumbles into the girl’s locker room.  She gets dressed but doesn’t notice herself bending to get into her clothes.  She wanders into the hallway and forgets where she’s going.  She sees a group of students and follows them, indifferent, for once, to what they might think of her.  It wasn’t that she was fearless; she simply didn’t know what fear was anymore.  She didn’t how anything was supposed to feel anymore.

Isn’t this what you wanted?

Her parents seek her out once she is under sunlight again.  Their expressions, a mix of anguish and relief, hold no meaning to her.  Their arms are spread, welcoming her.  She should fall into them.  She does, but she can barely muster any affection.  They could be strangers.
_

The evening sky is dusty.  She searches for stars to take her mind off of feeling guilty, confused, stricken.  She’d gradually become more herself since the car ride back from school.  It was a silent car ride.  She’s thankful for it.  The problem is, she doesn’t want to be herself.  This new Hailey was someone much different than the Hailey this morning.  Someone much scarier to face.

During dinner, her mom had asked her if she wanted to talk about it.

“No.”

She will never tell her parents what happened; will never let them see the bruises.  Besides, the news said the shooters had all committed suicide.  What good will come out of accusing a dead person of rape?  As for the news, she’d stopped watching the minute they began naming casualties.  She didn’t want to hear them.

In spite of this, she couldn’t help but wonder what they’d say if she did tell them what Dustin had done to her.

You have a tendency to lie, dear.
_

School is set to resume the coming Monday.  She spends Friday and the weekend in bed, listening to her favorite three songs on repeat.  She eats her meals at the wrong hours, food suddenly grey to her and flavor not registering as she tersely chews and swallows.   She turns away by some newfound instinct when her parents offer her a hug, and her behavior isn’t questioned.  She doesn’t bother worrying about why her parents don’t care.

Monday is a peculiar day; one of those days that don’t really happen at all.  Until it happens, that is.  It is twelve fifteen Monday morning when you drift to sleep, feeling it is still Sunday.  When you wake up Monday morning, it feels like you’ve already lived the day through your dreams and that the fifteen hours that await you are just an afterthought.

On Monday, she brushes her teeth in the kitchen sink and takes a five minute shower.  Her breakfast is swallowed before her mother has the chance to realize how odd she’s acting.

She drives to school, loathing the scent of her car.  She’d much rather be walking.  There’s something inappropriate about driving to school.

Nothing is much different when she enters the building.  The same kids hang out in the same places, talk about the same things.  Granted, it is a bit quieter, but it is a tense quiet.  This quiet won’t last.

Pretending to be okay proves a simple task.  Smiles are familiar to her face and not hard to muster when needed.  Raising her eyebrows when she answered people distracted from her sullen eyes.  When asked if she was alright, I’m tired, that’s all.

As the day progresses, she begins to get lost in the hush of the students.  There is a pallid beauty in weary silence.  She loses herself to it.  Lets it numb her ears, her heart.

Though, there were holes in this silence.  There is no longer a boy who sits by her in calculus.  Lenna’s smile is strained, her verdant eyes resistant to their former light.  Lenna had lost someone, she was sure.  She makes a note to talk to her after school, ignoring the voice in her head that pleads for her not to.  Nobody died.  Everything’s okay.  Everything—

Memorial services are announced through the intercom at the start of third period.  All except a few of the names listed are alien to her.  Alex Hansen, Elizabeth Riley, Linda McCormick.  Their names slide through the intercom like ghosts.  Empty shells.  She hates that she knows—knew—them; hates that she ever cared for them.  Mostly, she is angry that hearing their names is all it takes to collapse the composure she’s held on to since Thursday.  Lenna’s hand finds hers, and the conversation they’d left for after school is had right there.

I miss them.
Me too.
There’s something I can’t tell you.
I’ll never be ashamed of what you aren’t ready to say to me.
_

In the course of a week, she starts to see the tragedy through a broader lens.  The shooting had hit the student body like an S wave, leaving some shaken and missing others entirely.  Or so it seemed.  All talk stopped at the core of the matter:  the shooters themselves.

As hard as she tried to fight the fact, things had changed.  The boy who every girl sought, the one who was so sure of himself it irritated her, had lost himself.  His face was twisted with age and his eyes looked worn.  She wanted to scream at him to pick his ego back up and carry on like before.  She could bear him being a jerk, but not this.  Alex Hansen had been his best friend.

And then there were the monsters.  The glossy-eyed girls who swarmed him and fed off his grief, taking full advantage of his vulnerability.  The kids who spent their days craving sympathy and had none in a time like this.  They were all monsters.  Was she a monster, too, for not wanting to know if other girls had been lucky (meaning alive) in the way that she had?

As for her own emotions, she’s learned to let the bad ones pass and to hold on with all she’s got to the good ones.  Mostly, she’s gotten used having to put effort into being happy; having her chest feel drained at the end of the day.  The color of her bruises are draining as well.
_

Lenna can feel the changes in herself, but time and understanding have diminished them.  But the changes in Hailey, they’re too obvious—too hard to hide—to be disregarded.  Hailey no longer looks in the mirror.  She buys the exact same salad and plain fries for lunch every day and the corners of her smile are too tight.  She is too perfect in the presence of her parents.  She quit the swim team.

“If you don’t want to swim, you can still dive, you know.”

“No.” A little too loudly.  “I need some space.  Swimming isn’t my life.  It isn’t.”
_

Friday, May 7.

She sits a little too straight, a little too frail.  The muscle she’d built from swimming had left her months ago.  Good.  Nothing to tie her bones to that pool.  To beside the diving well.

“Hailey and Haiden.”  She looks at her biology teacher like she’s betrayed her.  She is barely holding a B in her class, and she pairs her up with Haiden for the end of the year project.  She would probably have to do all the work, because Haiden never did anything.  Worse, Haiden is a head case.  She would be tempted to fix Haiden—to make his responsibilities her own, because his life made her grateful for hers.  Then again, there is a chance the rumors aren’t true.  Maybe Haiden wasn’t an orphan who was kicked around by abusive foster parents his whole life, his biological sister being his only companion through it all.  Maybe his sister didn’t get shot that fateful Thursday and he didn’t try to kill himself out of guilt for her death.

She didn’t count on it.

She scoots beside him and offers him a soft smile.  “I’m Hailey.  But you probably already know.  Because she just called our names.  And we’ve been in the same class for a while, so…” it surprises her that she is nervous, even more so that it’s a warm nervous, not the bitter one she’s all too familiar with.  It’s just Haiden.

“I’m Haiden,” he says through a nervous laugh.  His voice doesn’t fit him.  It is too fluid.  Too beautiful.  His eyes are her favorite grey; the color of the sky after a storm.  “So, when do you want to get together to work?”

“How about after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays?”

“Okay, cool.”

He shows up every Tuesday and Thursday without fail.  She was wrong about him—wrong to think he wasn’t smart and wrong to look down on the turtlenecks and elastic waist pants he wore.  Wrong to think they couldn’t be friends.

Above all, she was wrong to think he couldn't touch her.  She thought she'd flinch during that first embrace, but her body, just as it did that day at the pool, surprised her.
_

“I can’t.  Believe.  We’re done.”

“I know.”

“With.”

“A week left.”

They lie on the floor of her living room upon construction paper scraps and glue, their arms outstretched and eyes wide.  They laugh hysterically.  She hasn’t laughed this easy in a long time.

“Do you think we’ll get an A?” he asks.

“We better, with all the annotating we did.”

“Yeah.”  He turns to face her, memorizes how pretty she is when her eyes aren’t grim.  It is rare.

She feels him staring and turns onto her side, too.  People misjudge him.  He is gorgeous, inside and out.  It’s just hard to see at first.

Somehow, they’d moved closer to one another.  His lips brush hers, hesitant.  Her lips are welcoming.
_

“Um, Hailey?”

“Yeah?”

He takes a while to look at her before asking, “Do you remember that one time when you were changing in your room and I was waiting in your brother’s room?” Her eyes are brighter now, her smile more of a reflex.

“Yeah, I remember,” she looks at him suspiciously.  The expression looks very cute on her face.

“So, um, I couldn’t help but look around.  And, well, I saw his clothes and I kind of thought they looked cool.  I don’t own a lot of clothes, and the clothes I own are kind of terrible—so-do-you-think-I-could-maybe-wear-them-sometime?” he holds one of the couch pillows in front of him in defense, adding in a sheepish voice, “since he’s in college and all.”

“I thought you’d never ask!” she exclaims, beaming.

Thursday morning, people begin to notice him and her hand held in his.  She has eyes for no one but him, and vice versa.
_

With finals and an A plus biology project behind them (“impressive annotated bib.” scrawled at the top of the rubric), they sit with satisfied smiles on the pool balcony.  They don’t sit for long, for Lenna is preparing to swim.  She thinks briefly back to yesterday.  It was late afternoon and her room was dyed golden by the setting sun.

“Why don’t you ever go swimming anymore?”

“How do you know I swim?” she’d never told him she was a swimmer.  She's still scared to face herself, that day.  A little less scared now that he’s at her side.

“I...may have come to one of the meets.  I heard some of you guys were really fast.  Well, you, Lenna, and Kimberly.”

“Kim’s amazing,” she replies, looking down.

“So why don’t you go anymore?” he presses, concern written all over his face.

“Why did you try to kill yourself?” she shoots back, uneasy.

She doesn’t expect him to answer, but he does.  “It was a stupid idea.  I don’t really know why.  I guess I just thought there was nothing left to love—to live for.  But then I found you.”  The way he looks at her—like she’s a miracle.  It makes her uncomfortable, but in a good way.  What’s so interesting about me?

“That day there was the shooting,” she starts, feeling her insides break down, “I was in the pool.  I-I was swimming.  One of the shooters came in, and,” she looks at him.  He will always be there, no matter what—no matter what she says, “I was raped.”

She’d cried in his arms, letting all the pain escape.  She finally stopped holding her breath.

He is still right by her side.  He didn’t leave.  He would never leave.  She gives him a quick kiss on the cheek before jumping up and screaming for Lenna to swim faster.  “Go, go, go!”

He joins her, and soon everyone is screaming for somebody.  Lenna has twenty five more meters.  As of now, it looks as if she will finish second.  Hailey knows better.  In an instant, Lenna’s stroke is quicker, more efficient.  She glides past the girl ahead of her and finishes first.  Spectators’ heads snap to the timer on the wall.  1:03.  State qualifying breaststroke time.  Hailey cheers until her lungs are sore.
_

She makes her way through a crowd of swimmers, offering congrats here and there, before finally finding Lenna.  The two look at each other, faces radiant.  They hug before freaking out about how excited both of them are for Lenna’s time.

The pool begins to empty.  She and Lenna exchange a final hug.  Lenna eyes Haiden and murmurs so that only she can hear, “Finally ready to tell me?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll wait for you two outside.”
_

She rushes into the girl’s locker room, feeling foolish for being so excited.

“Hello, mirror,” she says aloud.  There’s no one around to hear.  “Hello, reflection.”

On the whole, she looks the same as she did that Thursday morning.  Same fiery hair, same freckled skin, same paintbrush smile.  But something is very different.  Her brown eyes are stronger, angrier.  She’s lived the worst of it.  If there were a next time, she would fight.
_

“Ready?”

“Yea—AH!”  Why did I agree to hold his hand?

It doesn’t feel like she hasn’t been in the water for nine months.  The water is an old friend.  No fear.  Dustin's gone.  Haiden's here.  You're looking right at him.

“How does it feel?”

“Amazing.”  She lets every inch of her skin take in how exquisitely cold it is.

“Here’s the hard part.  Do you think you can do it?” he remarks teasingly.

“I’ll race you there.”  She takes a breath that challenges the limits of her lungs.  Holding herself open to whatever emotions still lingered in the water, she begins her decent to the bottom of the diving well.

Her feet touch the bottom and she looks around for him.  It is darker than she remembers.  She extends an arm, finds his fingers.  They draw closer together.

Their lips brush.