“Hey,” I said softly, and she perked up, her eyes rounding as if she couldn’t believe I was right in front of her. “You want to be my partner?”
With arched eyebrows, she nodded. I smiled and found a medicine ball. I squatted, holding the ball out in front of me, sprung up, and gently passed the six-pound ball.
“What’s your name?” I asked as she caught it.
“Taylor.”
She followed my lead and tossed the ball back. I could feel the loneliness emanating from her. Come to think of it, if she was the girl I recognized from the morning session, she’d had a magenta cap and walked onto the deck with her head down amidst the cliques lingering on the bulkhead. While I coached the first half of the practice, many of the kids were smiling, chatting, and she was the quiet girl in lane two toward the back of the line. I had to stop her once to tighten her streamline. She’d given me a thin smile and a nod and continued without saying anything.
“Nice to meet you, Taylor. I’m Quinn.”
She gave me a half-smile, catching the ball. “I know. I watched you during the Olympics.”
“Oh yeah? What event do you swim?”
“The 50-free and the 100.” She paused. “And fly now, I guess,” she said with a quick eye roll.
I laughed. “You guess?”
“Yeah, my coach is pushing me to do it.”
“And you don’t like it?”
She shrugged. “It’s hard. I only ever swam it in practice or the IM. I don’t really like it. I like the 50 and 100-free better.”
“I don’t really like fly either. But I have lots of respect for those who can do it. You must be a badass if your coach wants you to swim fly.”
She shook her head. “No way.”
“Way. Only the most badass swimmers swim fly. It’s a fact.”
We took a break when David called. The next set of twenty throws was overhead. After our water break, Taylor started the first toss. I figured I would keep talking to try to keep that smile on her face.
“So, Taylor, where are you from?”
“Kansas City, but I just moved to Palo Alto last fall.”
“How do you like California?”
The sadness crept back on her face. “It’s fine, I guess. It’s hard to make friends in middle school when they’ve all known each other since elementary.”
Kennedy popped in my head and all the moving she’d done in her life. She’d moved when she was seven from the suburbs of Buffalo, moved to New York City right before eighth grade, moved back to Aspen Grove sophomore year, moved to Syracuse for college, moved to Brooklyn after college, and then moved to San Francisco. In the past, she’d mentioned how hard moving was for her when she was a kid, how it had been hard to fit in with her Manhattan school, and how’d she cried when moving to Aspen Grove. Remembering her tales, I felt for Taylor.
“What about your swim team?” I asked, tossing the ball.
She shook her head and threw it back without answering. Now I understood why she was so quiet. The poor girl struggled to make friends in her new city, and a sympathetic pang gnawed at my chest. As someone who felt like an outsider for much of middle school and high school, I felt a sudden connection.
“There are four girls from my new team here, but they seem really close, and…I don’t know.”
“You should talk to them.”
She shook her head. “They’re always together, and they partnered up so quickly.”
“I’m sure they’ll take you in.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. There are four of them, so why would one of them partner with me?”
“If you sit with them at lunch or dinner, introduce yourself, and get to know them, you’ll give them a reason to partner with you.”
She didn’t say anything. I got a sense that she was painfully shy, so walking up to a group of longtime friends was even more daunting.
After dryland, we all set out on a hike on Grizzly Peak Trail, and despite the campers swarming around me, trying to get my attention and asking questions, I made it my mission to push through to Taylor, who hiked near David and the rest of the coaches in the front.
“Hey, friend,” I said when I finally caught up to her after allowing the other campers to take selfies with me.
Her gloomy expression turned bright. “Hi!”
“You’re hiking this trail like a pro. It must be all the badass butterfly skills.”
She laughed. “I’m really not that good at the butterfly. It’s something my new swim coach threw at me.”
“My coach in middle school threw the 200-free at me, and now it’s my event.”
“Yeah, and you’re really good at it.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” Her eyes widened at the sudden softness in my tone. “I really hate the 200.”
She pulled away and let out another laugh. “But you won the gold in it.”
“I still hate it. It’s a horrible event. Is it a sprint? Is it long distance? Who the hell knows? It’s having an identity crisis. But hey, maybe the fly is going to be your new stroke. I bet you’re going to be a future gold medalist.”
“Don’t say that. That means I’ll have to swim the 200-fly, and that’s the worst event in all of swimming.”
“That’s true, but those who swim it are true badasses. My good friend Talia swims the fly, and she’s much cooler than me. Badassery.”
“Talia Papani? I really like her. She’s pretty too.”
“She’s gorgeous and an absolute beast at the fly. And guess what?”
“What?”
“She also hates it. But shh! Don’t tell anyone. That’s our secret.”
“But you guys are so fast and make it look easy.”
“Lots of practicing, Taylor.”
Ever since I let her in on some secrets, talking was easier as we traveled up the hill. She told me how she hoped to go to the Olympics, either Paris or LA, but doubted if she could qualify for Paris as a seventeen-year-old. I informed her that plenty of seventeen-year-olds were in the Olympics, that age didn’t mean anything. She said that at really important meets, she would be so nervous and scared that her times would be bad, and she worried that would always prevent her from going to the Olympics. I told her how I’d missed London by three seconds, how I’d missed a medal in Rio. How every successful person had an arsenal of failure stories.
“You’re going to have bad races, bad meets. Those are inevitable but good,” I said. She seemed confused. “You’re your own worst critic. If you tell yourself you can’t do something in swimming, you won’t be able to do it. Sometimes I forget that too, but it’s really important to ingrain it in your head.”
Her eyebrows furrowed as we marched up a steep incline. “Can I ask you why you didn’t go to the world champs in December?”
I let out a nervous chuckle and scratched the back of my head. How did I explain this to a girl who was filled with so much doubt without scaring her? “I was so tired. I’d been giving a hundred and ten percent for years and realized I hadn’t really lived much outside of the sport. I felt really down, in a rut. I just wanted a break and reevaluate my life.”