Phantom Limbs Read Free Page B

down.
    “Come on.” I tapped her knee to get her to look up. “Watch.”
    She opened her eyes and I rubbed my hands together.
    “Good, just stay focused,” I said, hoping to distract her not just from the pain, but from the silence in the pool and the eyes, all the eyes. The last thing we needed was for her to be aware that everyone was staring. There was nothing she hated more.
    She focused on my hands, her stump occasionally jerking.
    I glanced around, and when I did, everyone quickly resumed swimming, pretended they weren’t watching. My eye caught Kiera Shayman’s, and she gave me kind of a sympathetic smile. I looked away, heat creeping to my face. Kiera was a total siren — an hourglass-shaped breaststroker (which led to the predictable locker-room remarks) who, according to Dara, was into me. And even though Dara was at least as clueless as me on these matters, I still blushed redder than a tomato any time Kiera so much as looked my way.
    I patted Dara’s shoulder. “Better?” Her stump seemed to be settling down.
    “What’s gonna happen when you’re not with me?” she asked in a small voice.
    Honestly, I worried about the same thing when she went off to college. Making friends didn’t exactly top her skill set. “You’ll be fine,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. I stood and pulled her up. “Now go swim.”
    She handed me her goggles. Dara manages pretty well on her own, but getting goggles on with one hand? Forget it. I helped her get them on, then put on my own. She stared at me for a minute, then flicked my goggles — a gesture I interpreted as some approximation of “thank you.”
    She turned and went back to swim.
Swish-swish
. Her suit crept slightly up her butt. I fought the odd urge to yank it out for her. I could never quite figure out if I needed to rescue Dara or be rescued from her.
    This conflicted feeling was nothing new. Last year at the winter sports awards banquet, Dara sat next to me, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her trying to cut into a chicken breast with the side of her fork. She pressed so hard, her hand shook with the effort, but the chicken just wouldn’t cut. Then she tried her knife, which didn’t do much better one-handed — it just slid the chicken back and forth on the plate. I didn’t know what to do. Dara would rather starve than ask for help eating, I’m pretty sure. But I was ravenous from practice, and I thought she must be, too. So I cut up my whole piece of chicken and, as smoothly and discreetly as I could, swapped plates with her. No words were exchanged, no eye contact made. I knew I might be in for it later. I could just hear her:
Did I
ask
for help, asshole? Do I
look
helpless
to you?
    But she never said a word about it. You just never knew with her. There were parts of her that were a total mystery to me.
    I got back into the pool and finished my sets. Dara didn’t yell at me any more that morning. There was nothing like a phantom limb incident to turn her spunk dial down to zero.
    “Hey, Shakespeare, is Dara okay?” Shafer asked me in the locker room as he rubbed an Axe stick into his pits.
    Shakespeare.
More than once I’d regretted letting some of my poems be published in the school literary magazine. Another page from the “hindsight” file.
    “Yup.” I hated talking about Dara. For one thing, she wasn’t very open with people, so I didn’t feel like I should be open on her behalf — especially with Shafer, the freestyler on my medley relay team, who was a part-time asshole and a full-time pervert. For another thing, people always had questions about our relationship, and I didn’t always have answers. No, we weren’t going out. No, I wasn’t paying her to be my coach. Were we best friends? Hell if I knew. We were together all the time, and we didn’t really have many other friends. So maybe we were best friends by default. It didn’t really jibe with
my
definition of best friends, which required one part me and