Chapter Four: Dope Queen

Naomi's POV

I left Coach Reyes's office with several hours still standing betweenme and nine o'clock.

For me, hours always feel worse than minutes. At least, minutes force you to move because you know time will soon be up. But hours just make you sit there.

My phone buzzed twice on the walk to my next class. Both texts were from my mom.

Mrs. Delgado came into the shop today asking questions. I handled it. Don't worry about us.

I knew exactly what kind of questions Mrs. Delgado asked. The whole town was asking it.

My mom ran her flower shop out of a converted garage two blocks from Main Street, and half her regulars had probably heard about the incident by now.

I typed back a short reply and put the phone away before I could read anything worse.

By third period I had stopped hearing anything the teachers said. I sat in the back of chemistry, staring at a periodic table I had memorized in tenth grade. That's what it looked like I was doing anyway. Actually, I was thinking about the boathouse.

Someone tapped my shoulder hard enough to jolt me upright.

"Mrs. Delgrave asked you a question, dope queen."

The nickname landed before I even registered who'd said it. A few seats over, someone snorted into their hand.

Mrs. Delgrave stood at the front of the room, chalk still raised, waiting.

"Sorry," I said. "Can you repeat the question?"

She repeated it. I got it wrong, badly wrong; the kind of wrong that had nothing to do with not knowing the material and everything to do with not being able to think straight.

"Guess dope queen doesn't have an answer to everything after all," the same voice said from behind me.

The whole row laughed. A few more voices picked it up from other parts of the room, and for a second the laughter filled the whole space like it belonged there.

I kept my eyes on my notebook until the sound died down on its own.

Ms. Delgrave moved on to someone else without acknowledging any of it, which somehow felt worse than if she'd said something.

I didn't hear another word of that class. I just counted the minutes until the bell.

By the time the final bell rang, I had almost four hours left before I needed to be back in Coach Reyes's office.

I couldn't go home. My mom would take one look at my face and know something was wrong beyond the obvious.

I couldn't sit in the library either. Too many people, too many eyes that flicked toward me and then away.

So I did the only thing that had ever actually calmed me down. I walked back to the athletic complex, to the pool deck itself this time instead of his office down the hall from it.

I didn't plan on swimming. I just wanted to sit on the bleachers where the noise made sense to me.

I heard raised voices before I even got through the door. They sounded sharp and clipped, bouncing off the tile the way sound always did in that building.

Coach Reyes and Octavia stood near the timing table, close together, and I stopped just inside the entrance without meaning to.

Octavia had her finger jabbed toward his chest, stabbing the air between them with every word. The muscles in her neck stood out, tight enough that I could see them from thirty feet away. She looked very pissed at him.

He stood with his arms crossed, unmoving, taking whatever she was throwing at him without flinching once. But I could still feel the anger radiating from him as well.

I'd never seen him like that. Coach Reyes was always the calmest person in any room, the one who lowered his voice when everyone else raised theirs.

Angry, he looked different. Sharper somehow, the line of his jaw catching the overhead lights, and for one humiliating second I felt heat curl low in my stomach. Despite myself, I felt a pulse between my legs. Seeing him angry was doing unwanted things to me.

I looked away before either of them noticed, embarrassed at myself for feeling that way. Now was not the time. Get a grip on yourself Naomi, you have more important things to worry about! I berated myself.

The second they spotted me, their voices dropped low..

I only caught the last broken pieces of it, a few scattered syllables that didn't add up to a sentence by the time they reached me.

Octavia turned away from him mid word, stripped off her sweatshirt, and dove straight into the water without a warmup.

Coach Reyes watched her go under, unmoving, before he noticed me still standing at the top of the bleachers.

His expression shifted the second our eyes met but he didn't say anything. He just walked down the hall to his office, the same one I had sat in hours earlier, and shut the door.

I climbed down and sat at the edge of the pool, feet in the water, watching Octavia swim laps like she was trying to outrun something.

I noticed it immediately that her strokes were wrong. Not dramatically, not in a way most people would notice. But I'd swum beside this girl since we were nine years old. So I knew every version of her stroke there was.

Her butterfly was too tight through the shoulders, her recovery rushed instead of controlled. She was fighting the water instead of moving with it.

She surfaced at the wall a few feet from me, chest heaving, goggles pushed up onto her forehead.

"Your shoulders are collapsing early," I said, before I could stop myself. "You're losing power on the recovery."

She came out od the pool, staring at me like I had just uttered the most offensive words to ever exist.

"Why don't you mind your own business," she said. "I'm not the one who got caught doping."

The words landed harder than anything Sports Director Ashworth had said on that podium, harder even than the classroom laughing at me an hour earlier.

For a second neither of us moved. The pool filter hummed in the silence between us.

"You didn't mean that," I said quietly, because it was easier to believe than the alternative.

Octavia rolled her eyes, hissed through her teeth, and walked away, dripping water as she stormed off. She hadn't even bothered to towel herself.

I sat there for a long moment with my feet still in the water, replaying what she'd said until it stopped making sense.

Octavia had never once been cruel to me. Not in the twelve years I'd known her. Not even when we lost competitions that mattered.

Something was wrong with her, but honestly, I was too tired and too scared about tonight to figure out what.

Coach Reyes's office door opened again. He stepped out onto the deck, phone in hand, not quite looking at me directly.

"Go home," he said. "Eat something. Try to rest if you can."

"I can't rest," I said. "Not with tonight hanging over me."

"I know." His voice was steady, the same voice he used before a race that mattered too much. "Come back here at eight forty five. We'll go together."

I nodded, slowly grabbing my bag off the bleachers. My legs remained unsteady and I feared I could actually collapse anytime now.

"Naomi." He waited until I turned around. "It's going to be fine. I promise you that."

I believed him.