Chapter 8: Kiara Finds Out
Bessie woke up with her phone on her chest and the sent text still open on the screen, like she'd been reading it in her sleep. Yes. 11. Bring the gloves. She read it four more times before her alarm went off, and the words hadn't rearranged themselves overnight. Priya Patel was coming Thursday.
She got to the pool early because she couldn't sit still in the room. The athletic center smelled like chlorine and wet concrete at seven in the morning, and the water lay flat and blue and completely indifferent to her life. She changed fast, hid in a stall longer than she needed to, and came out to the deck with her cap already on like armor.
Warmup went fine for eleven minutes. Then Priya climbed into the goal, and Bessie's body stopped taking instructions.
It wasn't even anything Priya did. She just stood there in her suit and her cap, shaking water off her gloves, and when she caught Bessie looking across the pool she didn't look away. She grinned. The gap in her front teeth showed, and one gloved finger rose off the crossbar and pointed at Bessie, and then she settled into the goal like she owned the building.
Bessie swam her sprint set with her heart rate wrong for reasons that had nothing to fitness. She hit the wall on the last fifty half a stroke early. Her arms felt like they belonged to someone else.
"You're off today," her lane mate said, treading water. "You're never off."
"I slept bad."
Nobody believed her. That was the worst part. The team had a collective ear for it, and Bessie could feel the attention shifting toward her the way water shifts when something moves underneath. Priya barked the usual garbage from the goal, louder than usual, and once, when Bessie took a shot that she'd taken a thousand times, Priya saved it, held the ball up, and said, "Where was your head, Chen?" and something in her voice made three separate girls turn around.
Practice ended. Bessie survived it. She peeled her cap off and walked into the locker room with her goggle marks pressed into her face and thought, if I can just get to my locker and get out, and she almost made it.
"Bessie."
Kiara's voice was low enough that it didn't carry past the row of benches. Bessie stopped with her towel half-unfolded. Kiara was sitting on the bench under the second row of lockers, already changed, forearms on her knees, watching her the way she watched an opposing attacker's hips.
"Hey," Bessie said.
"Come sit."
Bessie sat. The bench was cold through her suit. Down the row a shower was running and two freshmen were arguing about a playlist, and their noise made a little wall of privacy, which Kiara had probably calculated.
"You were somewhere else all practice," Kiara said. "You've been somewhere else for a week. And this morning Priya pointed at you and you turned the color of a fire hydrant." She kept her voice under the shower noise. "So I'm going to ask you a question and you can tell me to mind my business."
"Okay," Bessie said, and braced.
"Why wasn't it me?"
The locker room kept going around them. Locker doors, flip-flops on tile, the freshmen laughing at something. Bessie sat very still on the cold bench and thought about the honesty rule, which did not have a jurisdiction listed on it, which had never said it stopped at the dorm door, and which she could feel now the way you feel a hand on the back of your neck.
"You know about it," she said. "You already know something happened, you know Priya knows. So I'm not going to insult you."
"I would never," Kiara said. That was the gossip thing, said flat, and it was true, it had been true for four years.
So Bessie told her. Quietly, eyes on the tile between her feet. The roommates. The Thursdays. The rule about honesty, the audience room, being tied down and edged until she cried while people listened. She left out nothing that mattered and did not once look up, and her face burned the whole time, and Kiara did not interrupt once.
When she finished, the shower down the row had shut off. The silence felt bigger.
"Okay," Kiara said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." Kiara leaned back against the lockers, arms crossed now, and looked at Bessie with an expression she couldn't read at all, which almost never happened. "Two things. First, that's the hottest thing I've ever heard in a locker room, and I've been on teams with some filthy women."
Bessie made a sound that wasn't a word.
"Second." Kiara's voice dropped lower. "I'm not asking this to make it weird. I'm asking because I know you. Why Priya?"
"Because," Bessie said, and the honesty rule pulled it out of her like a hook, "she screams at me across the pool all practice and points at me every time a goal gets past her, and I've thought about her doing that with her gloves on and nobody else around every day since August. Because she's bossy and loud and she already knew about the gloves, Kiara. She asked if she should bring them. She already knew."
"Yeah," Kiara said. "I could've told you she knew."
Bessie's head came up. "What?"
"She talks. In her own way. I think she found out about the Thursdays weeks ago, some noise through a wall, and she's been smirking at you since." Kiara shrugged one shoulder. "I didn't say anything because it was yours to figure out. But don't stand there thinking you surprised her, Chen. Nobody surprises Priya Patel."
Bessie sat with that. Her hands were doing the shaking thing again, the thing they'd done on Leslie's bed two nights ago, and she let Kiara see them because it was simpler than hiding them.
"Kiara," she said. "If I'd texted you instead."
"You didn't." Kiara stood, pulled her bag up onto her shoulder, unhurried. "And I'd have come and sat in that chair with my arms crossed and never told a soul, and you know it." She looked down at Bessie for a second, and her low voice went lower. "But I'm going to say one true thing back, since we're being honest."
"Okay."
"I would've asked to do more than watch."
Then she was walking, flip-flops slapping tile toward the door, and Bessie sat alone on the bench with her towel still half-folded in her lap and Thursday two days away and one more thing now that she was going to have to tell her roommates, under the rule, the moment she got home.