Deep End(9)
CHAPTER 5
BY THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I’M STARTING TO SEE THE LAY OF the academic land.
English composition is not impossible (my professor doesn’t care whether my opinions are valid, only that I argue for them with my whole chest). Psychology, not as wishy-washy as I originally thought (there is a method to the madness of human behavior). Computational biology is a piece of cake (even if Dr. Carlsen’s perennial glower is a little unsettling). And then there’s German. A tentacled, homicidal swamp, infested with sharks and tarantulas and sentient currywurst ready to mangle me.
“Aren’t there tutoring programs for people who are . . . less than gifted when it comes to languages?” Barb asks during our weekly call, after I air out my anti-Germanic propaganda speech for thirty minutes of despair.
“Nothing works with my schedule. I should have booked some help sooner.” Like back in the womb. “But I think I’ll be fine.” I got a two out of ten for the first assignment, and a three for the second. Yay for upward trends.
“I’m sure you will, Scar.” After she left Dad, after the battle royal that won her custody of me, after our lives became ours, Barb moved us to St. Louis, where she rules the division of orthopedic surgery like an autocratic nation-state. Her job is incomprehensibly high-stakes, pays her a semi-sickening amount of money, and keeps her so shockingly busy, one of my middle school teachers suspected I was a runaway secretly living on my own.
She is, without question, the reason I want to be a physician. A bit of a cliché, I know, but it didn’t come completely out of left field. I’ve always gravitated toward science, but it wasn’t until I started doing my homework in Barb’s office that I realized how admirable her work is. How she makes a difference. The breadth of her knowledge and the depth of her care.
“Why can’t Dr. Madden or Dr. Davis take care of your patient?” I once whined when she said she wouldn’t be able to come to my meet.
“Because”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“Dr. Madden is an assho—an anus, and Dr. Davis is so spectacularly incompetent, I’m never sure whether he’s rooting for the patient or the disease. Mrs. Reyes has been in pain for a long time. She deserves to be treated by someone who’s not mediocre and will take her seriously. Would you agree?”
I was fourteen at the time, but it made perfect sense. Not only was I proud of how incredibly badass Barb was, but I wanted nothing more than to be a non-mediocre physician who’d take people seriously.
And now, here I am. Daydreaming of liver failure to escape the MCAT.
“By the way,” Barb tells me, “I met Coach Kumar the other day.”
I flinch. He’s my high school coach. “How is he?”
“Good. He sends his love. Asked me about you.”
“And you lied and told him that I’m a twelve-time NCAA champion and Olympic hopeful?”
“I considered that, but then I remembered that there are public records of this stuff. Like, online. A Google search away. ”
I sigh. “Is he mortified? Am I bestowing dishonor upon my old club?”
“What? No. You’re not a white-collar defense attorney on the Sacklers’ payroll, Scarlett. You had a bad injury. Everyone’s rooting for you.”
I cannot wait to disappoint them once again. “How’s the love of my life?”
“Currently occupied with her prescheduled junk licking.”
“Important business.”
“Hang on, I think she wants to talk to you.”
Pipsqueak, the husky-pug mix who was once up on Facebook Marketplace because of “a bad temperament” (falsehoods, slander) and “an unbreakable scooting habit” (yet to be broken), howls her love for me and tries to lick my face over Barb’s phone. I baby-talk at her for fifteen minutes, then leave for practice.
It’s preseason, which means conditioning. Skill refinement. Takeoffs, entries, body positions, rotations, corrections—hours in the gym, the diving well, the weight room, and then more hours at home, in class, in bed, the nagging worry that all this training won’t be enough poking at the back of my skull.
I’m a good athlete. I’ve TiVoed my dives enough times to know that. My body is strong and healthy at last. My mind . . .
My mind hates me, sometimes. Especially when I’m on a platform, ten meters above the rest of my life.
Because ten meters is high, but people don’t realize how high until it takes them over fifty steps to climb a tower. They reach the top, look down, and suddenly get that queasy feeling in their stomach. It’s a three-story building. A whole McMansion, stretching between you and the water. Lots of things can happen in ten meters—including a body accelerating to thirty miles per hour, and the water becoming as difficult to crack as the universe’s hardest eggshell.
On the platform, punishments are swift and merciless. Room for error, nonexistent. A bad dive is not just ungainly and humiliating—a bad dive is the end of an athlete’s career. A bad dive is the last dive.
“The pool closes at eight, but take your time, Vandy,” Coach Sima yells up at me.
I smile, palms flush against the coarse edge, and slowly lift my legs in a headstand. My shoulders, core, thighs, they all ache in that good, clenched way that means control. I linger there, a perfect straight line, just to prove to myself that I’m capable of it. I have what it takes. It’s a relief, seeing the world resized. Liberating how insignificant everyone else looks from here, small and irrelevant.