But that is exactly where I am at the precise time, at the precise place, all of the bravado from this morning leaked out of me like a balloon.
I haven’t thought about the high dive since freshman year. It’s a symptom of a larger problem, maybe: if I’m not immediately good at something, I drop it. As a kid I took piano classes for a month, ballet classes for a year, even soccer for one ill-fated practice that ended with me hauling ass across the field and leaping into my dad’s arms when the ball came within five feet of me. I’m a perfectionist, through and through, and even at five, I had no interest in embarrassing myself.
Swimming is something I’m good at, something I don’t even remember having to learn. It’s probably why I stuck with it so long, even when there were other, more impressive things I could have put on my resume. But diving …
I didn’t have to try it to know I was terrible at it. There is nothing intuitive about leaping that high up from the ground, in twisting your body into ridiculous shapes, in praying you time it down to the split second so you end up slipping into the water instead of face-planting into it. And having a front-row seat to the dive team’s practice sessions means I have seen plenty of face-planting in my day.
Jack is waiting at the top of the high dive, grinning down at me.
“How’s the weather down there, Pep?” he asks, shifting his weight on the board so it creaks up and down and up and down. Just watching him is enough to make me nauseous.
I glance over my shoulder to make sure most of our teammates have headed into the locker room. Pooja pauses at the door and shoots me a look, but I wave her off.
“Okay,” I mutter. “Let’s get this over with.”
Jack laughs. “It’s really not that scary.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re so tall, the world is like your high dive.”
“It’s not like you’re exactly short.”
My heart is in my throat. I swear to god he’s tilting on purpose, walking right up to the edge like he’s daring the slightest gust of wind to topple him.
“No, but I clearly have a much stronger respect for gravity than you.”
“Then just pretend it’s the deli’s Twitter account. We all know you don’t have any respect for that,” he says cheekily.
Before I can respond, he straightens up and propels himself toward the water, contorting his body so fast, I could blink and miss it. In fact, this might be one of the first times I haven’t missed it. The dive team makes me so nervous that as a general rule I try not to look at them during practice or meets, in constant fear of watching one of them belly flop or smack their heads on the board.
But I couldn’t look away from him if I wanted to. It’s mesmerizing, like his body isn’t his own for those brief few seconds. I’m used to Jack being all in motion at once, all foot-tapping six-foot-something of him. But I’m not used to motion like this: smooth, seamless, practiced. He projects himself off the board and somersaults in the air and twists and then glides into the water with an almost soundless kind of grace.
I forget to breathe until he’s poking his head out of the pool, shaking his hair out of his face.
“Your turn.”
My jaw drops.
“You don’t have to do anything fancy. Just jump.” He mimes it to me, treading water as he holds a flat palm up and pretends his finger is me, leaping off of it.
I’m still replaying Jack’s dive over and over, reeling from it. I always thought it would be so scary to watch, but it was exhilarating. So fluid and over so fast, I didn’t even have a chance to be worried something would go wrong.
That confidence does not, however, extend to my own abilities. “Yeah. Yep. Sure.”
“Five-year-olds jump off this board, Pep.”
“Five-year-olds don’t understand mortality.”
“Y’know, the longer you wait, the worse it’s gonna get.”
He’s right, of course. He swims over to the edge of the pool, and I inch to the ladder, propping my arms on it and taking a deep breath before hoisting myself up a few rungs.
“How’d you even learn to do that, anyway?”
Jack’s voice calls up from the bottom of the ladder. “You’re stalling.”
I climb up another rung to satisfy him, but I’m genuinely curious. “How does a person just like—know that they can do that? And not die?”
“I mean, same way you got fast at swimming, I guess. Practice.”
My palms are so sweaty, I can’t stop myself from imagining what would happen if I slipped right now, just went splat on the pool deck. It seems kind of stupid that it’s full concrete down there. Shouldn’t there at least be some kind of padding around the high dive?
“Seriously though.”
“Well—I don’t know. We did a lot of silly little-kid dives. Then my mom would take us to a trampoline place downtown, where we’d practice flips and stuff.”
“And instead of joining Cirque du Soleil and becoming their latest freaky twin act, you decided to slum it here?”
“As flattered as I am in your faith in us, I’m not that good of a diver. I’ve eaten it more times than I can count.”
I shut my eyes for a moment, just before I reach the top. “Don’t tell me that.”
“Pep. You’re gonna be fine.”
There isn’t a trace of mockery in his voice, not even the usual light teasing. The words are so steady that for a moment, I feel like I’m on the ground again, instead of way too many feet away from it.
“In fact, I think you’re gonna like it.”
I open my eyes again and ease myself to the top. The board is thick, but it’s still slick with water from the dive team’s practice. I pinch my toes to feel the roughness of it underfoot, to convince myself I’m not going to slip.
“I feel like I’m walking a plank.” My voice sounds breathy in my ears. “Like Wendy in Peter Pan.”
“Just imagine whatever weird dessert you’re going to make based on this experience,” he says. “High Dive Cream Pie.”
“Acrophobia Apple Crisp.”
Jack lets out a sharp laugh. It echoes across the pool deck, reminds me how far down he is and how far up I am. “There you go.”
I teeter to the edge and glance down. The pool is empty. It’s just cold enough now that the usual gym regulars who take over the pool after Stone Hall clears out of the lanes have taken to more winter-appropriate exercises, and the stillness of the pool gives it an eerie quality, like the water isn’t really there.
“Hey,” says Jack.
I want to turn to look down at him, but I don’t trust myself to do it without losing my balance and teetering right off.
“You don’t actually have to do this.”
The only thing more stubborn than my fear might be my pride. But I feel something in my chest loosen, a little bit of the terror ease out of my bones.
“We made a bet,” I protest, still staring down at the water.
His voice is so quiet that if there were anyone else around, I wouldn’t be able to hear it. “Yeah, well. I won’t think any less of you if you break it.”
It’s so still, I can’t hear anything but my own breathing and the thud thud thud of my heart between my ears. The fear crackles through me like a second skin, like it’s tightening my bones. I blink once, and then again, and start to turn to come back down.
“Pepper?”
Then, all at once, it isn’t fear. At least, not the kind of fear I know, that I can put a name to. It’s not just the high dive—it’s watching the sun rise as I polish off the sixth draft of an essay. It’s lying to the face of an admissions officer about what I want to do with my life because I have no idea. It’s the beat of silence on the phone when I’m talking to Paige, and Mom comes up, and neither of us knows what to say without making the other one mad. It’s the thousands of miles and winding roads that stand in the way of Pepper now and Pepper then, and I’m not even sure who either of them is anymore.
Suddenly this seems so silly. So conquerable. One stupid, ridiculous, fleeting thing that is nothing compared to the rest of it, to the questions I’ve been avoiding for years.
I let out a yelp and jump.
My stomach drops before I do. I crush my eyes shut, and then it’s just air, air and infinity, like I’m falling forever. My breath swoops up into my throat and hovers in my lungs until my body is just one breath, buoyed in midair, falling, falling, falling—
I hit the water all at once, feetfirst, the thunk of it shocking but not at all painful. I let myself float down for just a moment, my eyes flying open. It’s the same pool I’ve shoved my head into a thousand times, but it’s different to me now, like the light is brighter where it’s refracting off the edges, like I’ve made my own current.
I pop up with a gasp, ripping off my goggles. Jack is crouching at the pool edge, staring down at me.
“Holy shit.”
Jack’s face cracks into a grin, and I get it now. That look in Jack’s eyes when he pops out of the water after a dive, the look he’s giving me right now. The shine in them, the rush.
“Now try it with your eyes open.”
Not on your life, I want to tell him, but then he’s holding his arm out to help me out of the pool, seizing my hand in his and pulling me up, and there’s this unfamiliar surge in me. Not like I’ve been hit by lightning, but I am the lightning.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah. I’m gonna go again.”
A smirk curls on his face. “Atta girl.”
And I do. It’s slow-moving, and I’m terrible at it, but I climb up again, and Jack climbs up right behind me, waiting at the edge of the board for me to jump again. It’s every bit as thrilling the second time as it is the first, watching the world swoop around me, letting myself go, and knowing there’s something down below to catch me.
Jack lets out a whoop when I surface again, then promptly launches himself into a backflip, pretzeling and then streamlining himself into the water at the very last second.
“Show off,” I gasp when he surfaces.
“Takes one to know one.” He pushes his hair back again, splashing me in the process. I pull my cap off, throw it on the pool deck, and whip my hair right back at him. It gets directly in his eyes, and he winces.
“Oh, sor—pfft!”
I’m not ready for him to push what feels like a straight-up wave of water at me until I’m practically inhaling it. I let out a squeal, the kind of giddy, ridiculous noise I didn’t think I was capable of making beyond the days of Velcro shoes and ice cream–stained T-shirts, and splash him right back. When it becomes evident his splash game is far stronger and more practiced than mine, I reach forward like I did during water polo and put a hand on his head to dunk him—only this time he’s anticipating it, and presses his hand down on top of mine, holding it to his head so I go down with him.
For a few moments, we’re just a tangle of legs and arms underwater, grabbing at elbows and hands, pushing water at each other. We’re both laughing and snorting like idiots when we break the surface, and I launch myself away from him, doing a full butterfly kick on my back like a mermaid so he gets the maximum splash. He pitches forward and chases me down the pool length, but in this, at least, he’s no match for me—I can swim circles around him, and he knows it.
Still, I find myself slowing down just a hair, long enough for him to catch up—or at least that’s the amount of time I think I’m giving him, until he swims under me and I yelp like I just spotted a great white shark.
He pops back up out of the water with a shameless grin.
“You ass.” I push my palm to his shoulder.
He leans his shoulder into my hand, lowering himself so he’s at the same height. “What, you thought you were the top-dog swimmer around here?”
“Please.” I roll my eyes. “In a real race, you couldn’t take me.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I would crush you.”
“So crush me.”
It’s shallow enough we’re both standing, and Jack’s smirk is so close to mine, I’m breathing into his face, staring right into the flecks of brown in his eyes and the water streaming past them. The water feels like it’s lapping up behind me, nudging me closer to him. My head tilts upward, the challenge in Jack’s gaze softening and giving way to something else, and just like that, something is washed away—there is nothing between us but the charge I’ve been ignoring for weeks, bare and uninsulated, like something inevitable.
“There you are.”
I’m so alarmed to hear another voice cutting through the air that I jump, backward and away from Jack. The pool water sloshes around us and makes it all too evident what was about to happen, more evident than it was in the moments before it almost did.
My head swivels to see Landon on the pool deck, who, despite all appearances, looks oblivious to what he just interrupted.
I look at Landon, and then back at Jack, not sure which one of us he’s addressing. But Jack’s looking down at the water. A flush of embarrassment itches at my collarbone, works its way up my neck—did I misread things? Why won’t he look me in the eye?
“I was hanging back outside the locker rooms—I realized I don’t have your number,” Landon calls over the water.
I blink. “My number?”
“Yeah. So I can tell you where to meet up tomorrow?”
Senior Skip Day. It all comes rushing back to me in one fell swoop, one that feels almost like an inversion of jumping off the high dive, like something is crawling back into me instead of out of me. The pact Wolf and I made to meet up tomorrow. Hanging out with Landon. Two things I’m almost certain will be one and the same.
Two things I’m not sure if I want to be one and the same.
“Right. Uh…”
I doubt if there’s ever been a moment in my life more awkward than shouting my number across the pool as Landon types it into his phone, but then, directly following it, there is—the moment I look over at Jack and he looks at me, and there’s something so wobbly and uncertain in his gaze that I almost want to apologize and I’m not even sure why.
It’s over as fast as it happens. Jack flicks the water and sends a tiny drop in my direction.
“So you and Landon, huh?”
“We’re just—it’s for Senior Skip Day. Well, afterward. You know how everyone always ends up at the park after school lets out for real.”
Jack raises his eyebrows the way he does when he’s about to challenge me. “Well, it always starts that way, at least.”
I wrinkle my nose. “It’s not a date.” Is it?
“But you want it to be?”
“I…”
It’s not an answer because I don’t have one—but Jack seems to take it as one anyway. He shrugs, the gesture not quite matching his tone when he says, “I didn’t realize you guys were even friends.”
“Well, we text,” I hedge.
“You text?”
I don’t even know what makes me say it. Maybe it’s because he looks so genuinely perplexed. And why wouldn’t he? I suppose I’m not the kind of girl a guy like Landon would casually text—as far as social circles go, we’re in entirely different galaxies.
So I’m flustered and embarrassed, and before I can think through the ramifications, my stupid brain finds some way to justify it to him: “On Weazel.”
The surprise splits Jack’s face, widening his eyes, freezing the rest of him in place. I’m expecting him to ask for details—how we started chatting one-on-one, or when it was the app outed our identities to each other—but instead, he says, “I thought you said you weren’t on it.”
“I’m—barely. I’m not—anyway. It’s just a group thing. You’ll be there too, right? I’m pretty sure everyone is—”
“I have a shift to work,” says Jack, turning his back to me and taking a few quick strokes over to the edge of the pool.
“Jack.”
He pauses, his hand on the deck. I’m ramrod still, trying to think of something to say to make him stay, to bring two minutes ago back. Two minutes ago seems a lot more precious to me now that it’s gone.
But all I can think of to say is, “The bake sale. We need to figure out which time block we’re using so we can book it with Rucker.”
Jack’s shoulders give way to a sigh. “Let’s say Monday. Then everyone has the weekend to bake.”
“Right. Smart.” I bite my lip. Think of something else. But Jack is already pulling himself out of the water, turning and giving me a close-lipped smile and a tight wave before heading into the locker room and leaving me treading water alone in the pool with a disappointment I can’t name.
