The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,16
colored sneakers, but rather than easing her into the scenery, hers seemed to glow like bright and shameful beacons.
Thalia closed the show three weeks later by squawking, “Fuck-a-poo, birdy!” during bio class every time Mrs. Simon turned her back to write on the board. It earned her yet another suspension, and for the rest of high school, even after her sister had graduated, Laurel was known as “Thalia Gray’s sister, poor thing.”
Away at college, Thalia-free for the first time in her life, Laurel immediately took up with a group of bouncy-ponytail girls, mostly education majors, pretty enough, smart enough, but not too . . . anything. They looked like the pictures that had so entranced Mother in the college brochures. They had an equal and opposing bunch of boys whom they traded around, jocky business-major types, round-faced and cheerful and about as complicated as a bunch of puppies. Not one of them had ever met Thalia, and if Laurel had her way, they never would.
David was twenty and already a grad student at Duke, Big Brain on Campus. He was the star of the math and science hybrid classes, tall and skinny as a pipe cleaner, but cute enough, if he hadn’t been so weird. He had the apartment across the hall from Laurel’s friend Jeannie. Laurel never would have met him if he had lived anywhere else.
He didn’t fit with her set, but when Laurel was a freshman, he kept happening into them. They’d be doing the kind of perfect-snapshot college things that had attracted Laurel to this crowd in the first place: plumping hot dogs on the grill in the apartment complex’s pavilion, sunning on Jeannie’s deck. He’d come up and say hello and then simply stay.
By the time Laurel was a sophomore, he’d grown on her. He was like Jeannie’s bright orange paisley sofa, a strange hand-me-down that became so familiar it seemed like it belonged in the room. He sat through the games with them and paid his share for pizza, watching Laurel and her friends like Mr. Spock watched the humans. He didn’t get a lot of the jokes or know the teams, and he once stood up and started out in the middle of a tight World Series game without saying a word.
“Where’re you going, Lurch?” Jeannie called after him.
Jeannie’s current boyfriend had named him after the silent butler from the Addams Family. David didn’t seem to mind, or maybe he didn’t get it. Laurel minded for him, though. She always called him David.
David pulled his watch out of his pocket, checked it, and said, “PBS has an all-night NOVA marathon starting at nine.”
Jeannie managed to keep a straight face until he closed the door, and then she and her boyfriend both cackled like two of Macbeth’s witches while Laurel said, “Guys. Be nice,” and tried not to be the third.
His quiet presence was such a constant that she hardly noticed him, and he didn’t truly become a person to her until the day he found her weeping in the hallway near his door. She was waiting for Jeannie to come home and let her in so she could cry far away from the fishbowl interest of the girls in her dorm; her boyfriend, Dale, had broken her pink heart that day.
When David saw her sitting in a miserable pile on the floor, he set down his grocery bags and folded his body into an awkward crouch beside her. Laurel had cried all her bones out and was too floppy to worry that she was red-nosed and puffy-eyed in front of a boy. It was, after all, only David Hawthorne.
“I’m having a bad day,” she said.
“I see that. Come in out of the hall,” he said.
He had some white wine in one of his grocery bags. It was the big-bottle kind, but with a real cork, the glass frosted because he’d bought it cold. In his apartment, he had real wineglasses, too, mismatched but pretty. They sat sipping with their backs propped against his futon, and if Jeannie got home, Laurel didn’t hear her.
Laurel spilled out her tale of woe, and he kept his eyes steady on her. She’d never had a boy listen to her blather on about love troubles, but David acted like her every word was interesting and important.
Laurel wound down until she was whispering. David leaned in close to hear, so close that it seemed like he was going to kiss her. She leaned in, too, until she was kissing