Swim Back to Me Read Online Free

in front of her house and totaled up our pledges. Weekends with my mother often left me feeling weird, and I’d been distracted all week, unable to concentrate in class, burdened by a feeling that time had changed, slowed down: that it was getting slower each day and soon I’d find myself in Social Studies or somewhere staring at a clock with hands that didn’t move. Sitting on the curb next to Sasha, I added a column of numbers, whispered the total to myself, and then forgot it halfway through the next column.
    Sasha’s lips moved as she flipped through the pages on her clipboard. She looked up. “I’m going to have more than you.”
    “What do you mean? We went to the exact same houses.” We’d gone so far as to ask people to split their pledges between the two of us, to make sure we stayed even.
    “I did some other ones,” she said, eyes still on her pledge sheet.
    “When?”
    “When you were with your mom last weekend. My dad drove me to Redwood City and I did some there. You don’t have to freak out, Richard—it’s good, it’s more money for mankind.” She turned to her last page, and I saw her eyes fly down the length of it. “Twenty-eight dollars and seventy cents a mile,” she said. “That’s, let’s see, five hundred and seventy-four dollars I’ll earn tomorrow. How much do you have?”
    I was still reeling from the news she’d just delivered. Why hadn’t she said something earlier? I missed everything when I was with my mother.
    “Well?” she said.
    “I don’t know. I lost count.”
    She reached for my clipboard and within a minute she was on the final page, her head nodding a little with the increasing sum. “Twenty-one even,” she said. “That’s good, that’s four hundred and twenty dollars you’ll earn.” She handed me the clipboard. Then she pounded her thigh. “Shit, put that with mine and it’s just six dollars less than a thousand dollars! We need thirty more cents a mile. We’ve got to get thirty more cents a mile.”
    It was the evening before the Walk, and there wasn’t a house we hadn’t hit in all of Stanford. I said, “Maybe we should just put it in ourselves.”
    “No way. We’re walking, we’re not going to pay, too.”
    “Well, what are we going to do?” Her parents were out—they’d gone to dinner in the city, taking Peter with them—and I knew my father wouldn’t drive us. He was a creature of habit, and it was his habit to spend Friday evenings preparing his lectures for the following week, so he’d have the weekend clear for writing.
    “I know,” she said. “SCRA. Some old person’ll be swimming laps and we’ll hit ’em up and be done with it.”
    SCRA was the Stanford Campus Recreation Association, a little swim and tennis club a few blocks away. When I was younger I’d lived there in the summertime, going from pool to Ping-Pong to tennis for hours at a stretch. At the end of the afternoon I’d ride home with the latest layer of sunburn tightening my face and a damp towel hanging from my shoulders.
    Sasha and I walked down the hill together, the scent of jasmine faint in the evening air. Through the falling light I looked at her, at her unruly hair and long nose. She wore a Mexican blouse, gauzy and decorated at the neckline with tiny blue birds. Look at me, I thought, but she didn’t.
    The SCRA parking lot came into view, and there were a couple of cars in it, an old blue Mercedes and a black Volvo. I recognized the Mercedes and my heart sank a little: it belonged to Harvey Bergman, my father’s closest friend. I didn’t feel like running into him.
    Beyond the parking lot, right up against the back fence, some older teenage boys were gathered at an abandoned bike rack, some of them on the ground, others leaning against the rack or straddling it, their hair long and lank. “Great,” I said, because they were a group I mostly recognized, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who attended the high school we’d go to year after next.