Borrowed - Chapter 1: Cut

Cut

Rowan

The ten-meter platform at Halvorsen Natatorium rose thirty-three feet over the water, and by 6:04 on the last Tuesday in August, every inch of it belonged to me.

Beneath my feet the diving well sat flat and green-black, sixteen feet down, a pane of glass nobody had shattered yet. Coach Petrakis ran morning sessions with the bubbler off. Still water tells you the truth, he liked to say, which was a lie all by itself. Still water told you the entry was clean right until it opened up and swallowed your knees.

Glass covered the east wall from deck to rafters. Beyond it spread the faculty lot, the practice turf, the corrugated hump of the old hockey rink everyone called the Annex, and past all that a grey strip of lake catching the first light. The building smelled the way it did every morning at six. Chlorine sharp enough to sting the back of your throat. Wet rubber from the deck mats. Somebody's coffee steaming in a paper cup on the bleachers.

"Lindqvist." Petrakis's voice climbed thin and flat from the deck. "Inward two-and-a-half. Hips over the edge, not behind it. You've been leaving them behind since July."

I put my back to the water and walked my heels out until only air held them.

Toes on concrete. Calves locked. The grit of the platform dug into the balls of my feet, and a drop of water ran off my hair, down my neck, under the waistband of my suit. Six other divers stood on the deck below, dripping, arms crossed against the cold. Cody Marsh had his chin up. He wanted me to miss. Cody always wanted me to miss, the way some people want the last slice of pizza: no malice, only appetite.

Arms up.

The board doesn't care. My father's voice, not mine. He'd said it before every meet since I was nine years old. The board doesn't care how you slept or who's watching. It only asks if you'll go.

I went.

Arms down. Knees soft. Hips up and over the edge, over, not behind. Fold. Hands to shins. The world went into the blender: ceiling, glass, water, ceiling, glass. One. Two. The half. Open. Kick the legs long. Find the water with my eyes and keep them there. Hands flat, palm over knuckles. Arms locked over my ears.

Rip.

A clean entry sounds like paper tearing in another room. No splash. No slap. Just that small rough whisper, and then the cold closing over my head like a door.

I stayed under an extra second. Bubbles streamed past my face. The bottom of the well glowed pale blue under the underwater lights, and I hung there with my lungs tight and my heart slamming. My ears rang with what felt close to laughter.

That one was perfect. I'd waited fourteen months for that one.

I kicked up and broke the surface, already grinning, already turning toward the deck for Petrakis's score.

Nobody was looking at me.

All six of them stood in a knot around the coach's chair. Petrakis held his phone at arm's length, the way he held everything he didn't trust. Cody's jaw had gone slack. One of the freshmen, Dominic, kept rubbing the back of his own neck, over and over, as if the skin there had started to burn.

Nobody had watched the best dive of my life.

* * *

They read the email aloud in the locker room because Petrakis couldn't get through it.

He tried. He stood in the doorway between the showers and the benches, sixty-one years old with grey stubble and an Olympic Trials towel around his neck that he'd owned longer than any of us had been alive. He opened his mouth. Shut it. Handed the phone to Cody.

Cody read it like a ransom note.

"'Dear student-athletes. Due to sustained budgetary pressure and following a comprehensive review of program sustainability, the Department of Athletics will discontinue men's diving, effective immediately.'" His voice snagged on immediately. He cleared his throat and kept going. "'Halvorsen Natatorium will close for structural assessment and facility repurposing. Draining will begin this week. All athletic scholarships will be honored through the end of the fall semester. The department is grateful for your…'" He stopped. "Grateful. They're grateful."

"Keep reading," somebody said.

"'This decision is part of a broader review of non-revenue programs, including the spirit program, and does not reflect…'" Cody lowered the phone. "The spirit program. They put us in the same sentence as the cheerleaders."

He turned and punched the locker.

The metal folded under his knuckles with a sound like a car door. The whole row shivered. Dominic flinched so hard his flip-flop skidded on the wet tile. Cody shook his hand out, knuckles split and beading red, and stared at the dent as if the locker had swung first.

I sat on the bench with my towel in my lap and dried the same patch of my forearm. Over and over. The skin went pink, then hot. The chlorine was drying on me in a tight film, pulling at the corners of my eyes. Goosebumps crawled up my thighs. My suit was still wet, and the cold had worked its way into the hollow behind my sternum and refused to leave.

"Draining," I said. "This week."

"Facility repurposing." Cody spat the words out. "You know what that means? Volleyball. Or a weight room for the football team. Some booster's going to put his name on the wall and they'll pour concrete in the well."

"They can't pour concrete in a…"

"They can do whatever they want, Lindqvist. They already did."

Nobody had an answer to that. The showers dripped. Somewhere in the ceiling, a fan rattled on a loose bolt.

Petrakis crossed the room and stopped in front of me. Up close he smelled of coffee and chlorine and old cotton. He didn't put a hand on my shoulder. He'd never been that kind of coach.

"That was your dive," he said quietly. "This morning. That one."

My throat closed. I nodded at the floor.

"Keep your keycard," he said. "They won't deactivate them until Friday. Facilities is slow." He waited until I lifted my head. "Go up once more, if you want. Before the water's gone."

* * *

My father called while I stood in the hallway next to the trophy case, my hair still wet, my backpack hanging from one shoulder.

Brass and faded ribbon held the history of Carver State Diving inside that case. A conference banner from 1988. A photo of Petrakis at twenty-three, all hair and shoulders. And on the second shelf, me during freshman year, frozen mid-pike above a regional final, the scar on my chin still pink from where the board had slapped it four years earlier.

The screen said DAD. I let it ring twice.

"Ro." Erik Lindqvist skipped the hello. Erik Lindqvist had spent eleven seasons as a minor-league goalie and still spoke as though each sentence were a puck he needed to clear. "You see the email?"

"I was in the water when it came."

"Bad timing."

"It was a good dive."

A pause, brief and impatient. Behind him, a sharpening wheel whined, steel hissing on stone. He was at the shop. Lindqvist Skate & Sharpen, Two Harbors, Minnesota, open seven days a week since 2009.

"Listen," he said. "I already talked to Brandt."

"Who?"

"Superior State. Head diving coach. They've got a scholarship slot opening in January, some kid going pro in triathlon or whatever the hell. Brandt saw your regionals tape. He wants you." The wheel cut off. Nothing on the line but breath. "You transfer by December first, you're on their board for spring season. You don't lose a year."

"You talked to him already."

"Somebody had to."

I pressed my forehead against the glass of the trophy case. It felt cool and faintly greasy, smudged with fingerprints from visiting high schoolers. Freshman me hung there in the photo, folded in half in the air, eyes squeezed shut.

"Dad…"

"Don't waste the fall. Keep your inwards sharp. Find a pool. The Y, the high school, whatever." Steel hissed on stone again. "You hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Good kid." And he was gone, the way he always ended a call, mid-breath, with no goodbye.

I lowered the phone.

My shoulders dropped half an inch. Then another half. My lungs filled all the way down to the bottom for the first time since, I couldn't place it. Since the summer. Since high school. My neck rolled loose on its own, and the ache that lived between my shoulder blades, the one I'd carried so long I'd stopped hearing it, faded out.

I stood motionless in the empty hallway and waited for the grief to come back.

It came. It was real. But it came second.

I touched the scar on my chin. Fifteen years old, Duluth regionals, my toe caught the platform on a back two-and-a-half and the concrete opened my chin to the bone. Blood in the water, spreading pink in pale-blue light. My father had come down out of the stands and held a towel against my face himself. He hadn't taken me to the medic. He'd walked me to the ladder.

Get back up there before it gets in your head.

I'd gone back up. I'd stuck the next dive. He'd bought me a cheeseburger on the drive home, the radio playing a hockey game, and never mentioned the blood again.

On the second shelf, the boy in the photograph kept his eyes shut.

I left before anyone could see my face.

* * *

Fenwick Hall, room 4C, smelled of instant ramen and the lemon cleaner Dev used on his keyboard. That was it.

Dev Kapoor sat cross-legged in his gaming chair with his headset pushed back onto his neck. On his monitor a paused mech hung mid-explosion. On my desk sat a paper plate holding a sandwich: two slices of white bread, a translucent sheet of turkey, and roughly half a bottle of yellow mustard.

"I made you lunch," Dev said. "It's mostly mustard. I panicked."

"Thanks."

"You don't have to eat it. I wanted to do a thing with my hands."

I sat on my bed. The mattress squeaked. Under the window, the radiator knocked twice, paused, and knocked three times. It knocked in August. It knocked in every month, a pipe somewhere upstream ticking like a clock that had lost its hands. We'd stopped reporting it in October of freshman year.

Across the room, propped against the closet door, stood the mirror Dev had bought at a yard sale on Elm Street for four dollars. It was full-length, oak-framed, with a hairline crack across the bottom corner. For the room's feng shui, he'd claimed. Mostly he used it to check his posture during long raids.

I didn't look at it. I could see myself in it from the corner of my eye anyway: a pale blur on a navy comforter, wet hair standing up in white-blond spikes, shoulders curled forward around nothing.

"So," Dev said.

"So."

"How bad?"

"Program's cut. Pool's getting drained. Scholarship runs out in December." I picked at the edge of the paper plate. "My dad already found me a new school."

Dev's eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. "Already? It's been, like, four hours."

"Superior State. Transfer by December first."

"Wow." He rotated slowly in his chair, one full revolution, which he did when he didn't want to say the obvious thing. "Is that what you want?"

"They've got a ten-meter and a good coach and a spot."

"That's not what I asked."

The radiator knocked. Twice. Pause. Three.

My phone buzzed against my thigh. A text, from Imani Brooks, who sat beside me in freshman stats and had spent a whole semester sliding me her notes in exchange for my calculator.

heard about diving. im so sorry ro

lunch thursday? i'll pay

(i won't pay)

I huffed something close to a laugh through my nose. Dev clocked it and swiveled back to his mech with a satisfied little grunt. Mission accomplished.

I set the sandwich on the windowsill, where the gulls would find it, and lay back on the bed with my forearm over my eyes. The ceiling tile above me had a water stain shaped like Lake Superior. That stain had hung over my bed for a year. Today it looked more like a hand, open, fingers spread, waiting for something to drop into it.

* * *

At 11:12 that night I swiped my keycard at the natatorium's side door and the lock clicked green.

The building had gone dark except for the red exit signs and the floodlights spilling through the east glass from the practice turf. The air sat thick and warm and wrong. The pumps were running. I heard them before I saw anything, a low grinding groan deep in the walls, like something big turning over in its sleep.

The water was leaving.

From the deck I could see the scum line already: a grey stripe on the tile two feet down from the gutter, where the surface had stood since the building opened in 1971. The well looked deeper with less in it. The underwater lights still burned, turning what was left a sick, glowing blue.

I climbed.

Rung after rung, cold steel under my palms. Three-meter. Five. Seven-and-a-half. My calves burned, as always on the last stretch, and the air got warmer and thicker the higher I went, every breath tasting of chlorine and dust. At the top I stepped onto the concrete and walked to the front edge and sat, legs over, the way Petrakis had threatened to suspend me for at least once a season.

Thirty-three feet down, the drain roared.

Somewhere near the top of the tower, a vent panel had been propped open since the air conditioning died in July. Night air came through it, cooler, smelling of cut grass and the lake. And through it, carried on that air, came a voice.

"Five, six, seven, eight…"

I turned my head.

Across the faculty lot, the practice turf glowed white under four tall floodlights. Twenty-odd figures in shorts and practice tees moved on it, bright as moths. Crimson bows. A portable speaker thumping something with too much bass. Most of them stood in clusters of four, and as I watched, one cluster dipped, all of them together, knees bending like a single animal, and then threw.

A girl went up.

She rose out of their hands in one smooth surge, the way water rises when you pull a cork from deep under it. At the top, two hands caught her foot and locked out overhead, and there she stood, one foot planted in her bases' palms, arms snapped into a high V, ponytail swinging, every line of her body pulled toward the floodlights.

She held it. One count. Two. Three.

My hands had come open on my knees. I hadn't told them to.

She was opening early on the way up. Her shoulders lagged a beat behind her hips, the same mistake I'd made on inwards all summer, the mistake Petrakis had shouted at me about from the deck that morning. Hips over, not behind. From thirty-three feet up and three hundred feet away I could see it as plainly as a bad entry. If she brought her chest with her, if she stopped waiting for the top to find her and went to meet it…

"Down," the voice called. "Cradle."

The girl dropped, folded, and fell back into a cradle of arms. Caught. Held. Set down on her feet on the turf as if she weighed nothing.

The voice belonged to the smallest of the bases. I couldn't see her face from that distance. Only her stance, wide and planted, rooted into the turf like the post of a dock. Dark curls pulled into a high ponytail under a bow. Hands on her hips. She didn't move while the others moved. Everything else on that field moved around her.

"Again," she said. Not loud. It carried anyway. "Hips square. Again."

They went again.

The pumps groaned below me. The water kept leaving, an inch at a time, and the grey line on the tile grew wider, and the whole drained-out cavern of the well breathed warm, sour air up past my bare ankles.

My phone lit up on the concrete beside me.

From: Coach M. Brandt, Superior State Diving

Rowan, your father passed along your number. Looking forward to talking this week. Let's get you on our board by the new year.

I turned the phone face down.

Across the lot, the girl went up again. This time her chest came with her hips. She hit the top already open, already high, and locked there, arms flung wide in the floodlight. On the turf, the small base laughed, one bright startled bark of a laugh, and the sound came through the vent and hit me square in the ribs.

"Yes," she shouted. "That. That's it. Again!"

I was on my feet.

My knees had straightened without permission. I stood at the front edge of the ten-meter platform in the dark, toes over the lip, above a pool emptying itself under me, and my arms had risen on their own into a high V, wrists stiff, fingers wide, mirroring a stranger.

I lowered them fast. My face burned. Nobody could see me up here. Nobody had ever seen me up here. Only the dive and the score and the splash or the lack of one.

"Five, six, seven, eight," the voice counted.

And under my breath, before I could stop it, I counted with her.