June to July (2 months until the Olympics)
When I get to the pool for morning practice a week before the Qualification Trials, I’m prepared to work my ass off. I am not prepared to find Val sitting beside Andrey on a bench, waiting for me.
I stumble mid-step when I spot her. Her lips twist in amusement; she obviously saw it and is struggling not to openly laugh at me. It takes me a second to recover and to shove the miasma of emotions that well up inside me: hope, elation, longing, and a fair amount of trepidation.
“You’re late,” Andrey says.
I’m not—I checked my phone when I walked in—but there’s no point in arguing. Although for someone who’s always been early, I guess arriving just on time for once is worth noting. But I couldn’t get going this morning; I slept badly last night, and I found a sock in my drawer that didn’t belong to me while I was trying to get dressed.
Yeah, no way am I explaining to Andrey that I wasn’t early for once because I spent ten minutes sitting on the edge of my bed, zoning out while holding one of Brandon’s socks. Pathetic.
Instead of responding, I look silently at Val.
“You’ve been working harder lately, and I’m worried that you’re going to strain something if we’re not careful.” Andrey speaks calmly, like it’s not completely outrageous to have Val sitting next to him again. “So I brought on a physical therapist full-time to help get you to the Olympics in one healthy piece.”
Val smiles sunnily.
“You planned this?”
“I didn’t,” Val says quickly.
“I did.” Andrey folds his arms over his chest. “I have thought for a long time about hiring a physical therapist, but wasn’t sure you would take well to a new person joining the team.” He smirks, and I know he’s thinking about my reaction to Brandon two years ago. “Valerie’s recent certification has offered us a unique opportunity.”
I glance at Val, then back to Andrey. “I don’t understand.”
His eyes are smiling when they meet mine, but his voice is serious. “For as long as I have known you, I’ve believed you would work better on a team than by yourself. But finding the right teammates wasn’t easy. You needed people who would balance you, challenge you, and teach you things that I couldn’t. Like Valerie.” Like Brandon, he doesn’t say, but I hear it nonetheless.
“So you—”
“Now, more than ever, you need your team around you.”
My eyes go wide, and I finally look back over at Val, who is laughing openly now. “It’s good to see you again, Jeremy,” she says.
It’s only been three months, but it feels like a lifetime. “It’s good to see you too,” I manage. Everything feels off-balance. “I . . . I need to go get changed.”
My heart is hammering when I escape to the locker room. Seeing Val is amazing, but it’s not Val I want to see.
“He’s not here.” I didn’t hear Val enter.
“I didn’t think he was.”
“But you hoped he would be. When Andrey was talking about teammates, I could see the hope on your face for a split second.”
There have been times that I was thankful to have a friend like Val, one person in the world who understands me better than I get myself. This is not one of those times.
“Why are you here, Val?”
She laughs again. “I got a job offer. Didn’t you hear Andrey?”
I slide onto the bench, dropping my bag on the seat beside me, and prop my elbows on my knees, rubbing my hands over the back of my neck. “That’s not what I mean.”
I see Val sit on the bench beside me out of the corner of my eye. She doesn’t touch me, but she’s close enough that I can hear her breathing, smell the perfume she’s put on. Before this, Val never wore perfume; we were always in and out of the pool, so there was no point. It’s a tiny, strange thing to notice.
“I’m here because you’re miserable.”
I have no response to that.
Val shifts, swinging a leg over the bench so she’s facing me. “I talked to Brandon a few days ago.”
My body jerks, and my hands find purchase in my hair, tugging hard. The pain is enough to keep me from doing anything ridiculous, like storming out of the room, or turning to Val and begging for every detail.
“When I left in March, everything was amazing between you two. What happened?”
I don’t hesitate to reel off the same line I’ve been repeating to myself. “I made a decision. Becoming an Olympic champion has been my dream since I was a kid, Val. Brandon was a distraction from that, and I needed to find a way to focus on what’s important. I don’t expect you to understand.”
The words are purposefully harsh, but Val doesn’t react at all.
“You’re right, I don’t understand,” she says calmly. “Because I don’t see how being in a relationship with another man is at odds with winning an Olympic medal.”
I saved the voice mail my dad had left me in April. When I feel weak, in the moments late at night when I find myself dialing Brandon’s number, I replay it and remind myself of what’s important.
“I’m going to make my family proud of me,” I say softly.
Val’s apparently been taking lessons from Andrey, because her words are like knives, sharp and merciless. “There’s nothing you can do to make them proud of you, Jeremy. Especially if it means you can’t be proud of yourself.”
Now I can look over at her. “You think I’m not proud of what I’ve accomplished? I have a wall of gold medals. Nationals, World, a dozen other competitions over the years. There’s only one more that I need to complete the set.”
“Then why are you so unhappy?”
Fuck.
“I need to get to the pool.” I cross my arms, glaring. “Andrey is probably waiting.”
“Andrey gave me the morning to work with you one-on-one. He’s not expecting you back until this afternoon for dryland.”
I scoff. “Yeah, okay fine. You’re a physical therapist, not a mental one. Let’s do some stretches.”
Val doesn’t move. “Jeremy, do you even want to keep diving?”
“Of course I do!” Diving is my entire life. It’s all I have, and it’s the only thing that matters.
Except there’s something missing these days. It’s not just the bright grin and sparkling blue eyes the color of a swimming pool that I miss. I glance at Val, and she’s waiting patiently, as though she knows there’s a but coming.
“But I don’t think I love it anymore.”
That’s the kicker. For almost sixteen years I’ve been in love with diving. My dad was in love with my mom, my brothers have fallen in and out of love with dozens of women over the years. And I was in love with the feeling of flying, the thrill of forcing my body to do ballet in midair.
Val is hugging me before I realize that she’s moved, and her strong arms are tight around my shoulders. “Then figure out what you do love, and do that.”
The locker room is warm, and it smells like chlorine, but it’s safe, familiar. As good a place as any for a confession. “I love Brandon,” I say. “I love diving with him. Being challenged by him every day. Shit, Val, he’s so good, it’s insane. Four years from now, it could be him going to the Olympics, striving for a gold medal.”
“Jer.” Val pulls back just far enough to meet my gaze, and she looks a little sad as she speaks. “You know you can love more than one thing. It’s not diving or nothing. It could be diving and something.”
I mentally replace that last word with Brandon, and have to tear my eyes away as they start to burn. “I miss him.”
“Brandon hasn’t dived since he went back to Texas.”
The words don’t process for a second. “Why?”
Val shrugs, still holding me in a tight hug, and her body shifts alongside mine. “That’s not for me to tell you.” She pauses. “You should call him.”
“And tell him what?”
“That you want him to come back, of course.”
The trials go exactly as expected. USA Diving has two spots for the individual ten-meter for both men and women, and I score one of the men’s spots easily. After, I stick around to watch the synchro pair qualify; it’s the team that Brandon and I replaced eighteen months ago, when we were unprepared for the World Series but ready to do our best anyways.
I shake their hands and congratulate them both, and I can see the silent question in their eyes, the glance to my side wondering where my own partner is.
I have a month until Toronto. Four weeks seems like a lot, but suddenly I have a dozen things to do.
The first is to make a phone call.
“Hello?”
I breathe for a second, listening to the voice on the other end of the line.
“Anyone there?” Now he sounds annoyed.
“Sorry, Dad, I’m here.” I swallow around the lump in my throat. “It’s me. Jeremy.”
Now it’s his turn to be silent. “Didn’t expect you to be calling. What’d you need? Money? ’Cause I’m not made of the stuff, no matter what your brothers think.”
I’ve never told him that I have a bank account, that I’ve had one since I was sixteen and started competing in the adult competitions where prize money comes alongside a shiny medal. “No, I don’t need a loan.” The money I’ve won is enough to cover travel expenses, hotels, training gear, and the rest of my university tuition. “I, uh, wanted to tell you the good news.”
He grunts and waits.
There’s a ring in my other hand, the one not holding the phone. I haven’t put it on yet, and I’m not sure that I will. Some of the others had put theirs on right away, but I don’t need a visible signal to prove what I’ve done. The ring is metal, gold colored. There are five circles on it, and they press down into my palm and leave indents behind.
“I’m going to the Olympics. Next month in Toronto. I wanted to let you know, in case you . . .” I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “If you wanted to watch on TV. I’ll be competing over two days.”
“Good for you,” Dad says.
I feel like I could burst. Three words, and my cheeks burn. I’m grinning wide and my heart expands in my chest.
Then he finishes his sentence. “But if you think I’m taking time off to watch your gay swimming thing, you’d better think again.”
My immediate reaction is one of crushing disappointment. His voice is flat, unenthusiastic. He doesn’t care.
“I’m a diver, not a swimmer,” I say, the words rote by now. The world around me slows down, and I can feel every word form on the back of my tongue. “And diving isn’t gay.”
He grunts.
The next sentence comes as though from a different person. I know it’s me speaking, but it’s like I’m separated, out of body, watching myself calmly string words together. “Diving isn’t gay,” I repeat, “but I am.”
There’s a long pause, and it drags on until I pull the phone away from my ear to check that the call is still connected.
Eventually Dad grunts again. “Fuckin’ figures. Always knew you were a fag, right from the start. Bethany might as well have given birth to a daughter.”
The words don’t hurt, but hearing my mother’s name does. I haven’t heard Dad talk about her since I was a kid and too dumb to know better than to ask.
Beneath that, though, is the budding awareness that Dad isn’t actually upset.
“You don’t care?”
“I care plenty. Care that you’re wasting your time on this bullshit, instead of growing up to be a real man. Not surprised, though. Nick’s been saying you were a fag since you were twelve and he caught you staring at the neighbor’s boy.”
I forgot about that. The other boy had been fifteen, and his name was Stephen. He’d been a runner, lean and compact where my brothers were bulky and enormous. I’d never spoken to him, but I used to sit outside in the evenings when he went running, so I could watch him pass by on the street.
Something almost like relief floods through me. Nothing has changed. “I guess— I’ll let you know if I win a medal.”
Dad huffs under his breath. “Don’t bother. Just means I’ll have to hear more about this shit from the guys at work and Isaac’s girlfriend.”
I’ve always assumed Dad would be proud of me if I won a gold. Now, it’s dawning on me that there is no pride, and there’s no crushing disappointment. There’s just the status quo—the way things have always been, and the way things will always be.
He starts making noises about hanging up the phone, so I say good-bye half-heartedly. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, then.”
“Sure.”
As the phone clicks in my ear, I close my eyes, lean my head back, and laugh. It’s not a happy sound, but it’s the only thing I can do to express the weight that’s been lifted off my chest.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been told that to be gay was to be weak. To be a diver was to be weak. To be myself was . . . weak.
And now, being faced with the realization that I will never, ever be strong enough in my father’s eyes, is almost a breath of fresh air in a weird way.
I stare down at the phone in my hand, and absently scroll through the few pictures I’ve taken over the last few years. There aren’t many; for the most part, I only use the camera for practical functions, like snapping pictures of the white board in my kitchen to remind myself of where I need to be during the day, or a screen-grab of a recipe to try in the evening.
But there’s one picture that I took about six months ago. In it, Brandon is looking at something in the distance, completely focused, but his hand is reaching out toward me, as though he’s unable to be without me for even a moment.
“If I’m not diving to make Dad proud, maybe I can make you proud instead,” I say to the screen.
If this were a movie, my phone would ring right now, and it would be Brandon on the other end of the call. But the phone stays silent, and eventually goes dark while I stare at the picture.
Later, when I’m doing my recovery exercises with Val and she’s pushing me into a series of stretches with an elastic band, I say, “I want to make Brandon proud.”
She doesn’t falter; instead, she nods, like what I’ve said is the most natural thing in the world.
“He doesn’t care if you win though,” she points out.
“Yeah, I know.” I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon, rubbing my thumb over the gold Olympic ring that is now tucked safely in my backpack. But thinking about what would make him proud is terrifying.
Because what would make Brandon proud would be if I was true to myself.
“I’m pretty sure I know what I have to do,” I say. “I’m not ready just yet, but I will be soon.”
Val smiles. “Good.” She taps my thigh, signaling me to get back to work. “But, Jer? Maybe do whatever it is for yourself, instead of for someone else.”
I’m silent for the rest of the exercise, thinking about her words.