Well I had to drown myself in the sink or else I’d look foolish. The hockey team, those that saw more ice than bench, anyway, was packed into Max “Guts” Guzowski’s half bath, and I was staring at the toothpasty basin and its long black hairs that could have been his sister Nikki’s if she didn’t take her canister of wet wipes after every mote and lint ball under her eye—which, by the state of Guts’s basement, suffered a woeful case of myopia. But what does it matter whose hairs, when every sink has its designated strands running the congealed ceramic to the drain, like earthworms down an unbreathing nostril?

This is a party. I should lighten up. But I’m not feeling as invincible as I did on the couch, when it was my understandable understanding that the challenge was a joke. But I guess I was drunk, or everyone around me was, for all eleven of us to wind up packed like strings of hamburger meat in this—well, this indoor outhouse. Where the fuck was Nikki with those wipes?

Language, I know. But a man’s last words can be whatever he wants them to be. And man I am, despite being half the size of most guys in a given social situation. These ones, though, were straight up leviathans. Each a wannabe bodybuilder, girdled and screaming as he curls vinyl slabs and drops them like shells on the weight room floor, to the structural jeopardy of the whole sports complex. Bulking and cutting, bulking and cutting and shapeshifting on creatine and whole rotisserie chickens so as to harness the vestigial genetic strength of the dinosaur… I guess I wouldn’t know much about it, except never mind the big bad wolf. Childlock the henhouse—fend off the hockey jock!

I’m not jealous. I’m the opposite of jealous. Athletes are the backbone of the scholastic economy. It’s just getting a little claustrophobic here with so many pecs in one place.

I should stop being so cynical, or one of these days I’ll open my big mouth—the only big thing about me, it would appear—and get myself pressed to death in a pigpile of indignation and body dysmorphia. Besides, my best buddy happens to be one of them—co-captain (the only exception to his otherwise peerless existence). Remi Prescott coupled the looks of an Abercrombie model with the bearing of a fifties-age golden boy. He had the social gall to do good things andget away with it like a total badass. He would chat up the lunch ladies, do the Social Sciences reading, wear salmon shirts and callthem pink! He had a 4.0 GPA and an athletic scholarship to Duke, which would serve him to cook up the cancer vaccine and turn the Middle East into a happy sandbox. Rem was every girl’s fantasy and every parent’s wet dream.

Every best friend’s nightmare.

He was too goddamn bighearted, with this insidious warmth that melted your resentments… only to inflame them when he was gone. Like, when I overheard his prom date gushing to her friends—the slow song came on, and he held me in his arms, and I just felt safe—I had to do some serious sexual introspection because I knew exactly what she was talking about. Remi made you marvel at the actual possibility that someone so casually flawless could exist, let alone spend his time on you. There had to be some reason or neurosis—I’ll meet in the middle, say, bad judgment—that he hadn’t kicked you to the curb yet. Or maybe you were the fixer-upper he dared to notfix, standing back, arms crossed, fascinating in the novelty of a thing with defects. How delightfully foreign the pimples, the concave chest, the gangly awkwardness—and I thought they charged for the freak show!

I met him during preseason sophomore year, a few weeks after his injury. (Rem had made it about two thirds through the Run for Runts, a lucrative, if poorly named, marathon to fund orphanages in Central America; it was November, pouring rain, and he was one of few to even show, let alone shatter records for least ridiculous-looking in runners’ shorts, when he slipped on the fresh paved portion of Oak Street and tore his ACL.) The trainers had recommended he sit out the first half of hockey season, but Coach Murphy hustled for icing, physical therapy, anything short of (or including—who knows in this gaming climate?) oxycodone if it got his star striker back in the rink. As for Rem, he couldn’t bear the prospect of falling out of shape or resting on the sidelines like an ordinary mortal, so he turned to Swim as an alternative conditioning and physical therapy, joining our tryout sessions by mere scheduling coincidence, having no prior experience in competitive aquatics—and fucking walked onto the team.

Could you believe it? Course you could. It was Remi Fucking Prescott.

The real burner was that he was nice. You wanted to hate him, couldn’t nothate him, and then youwere the bad guy.

Girls couldn’t resist him. As if the Swim speedo weren’t enough, he’d talk de Beauvoir, do pharmacy runs, dance his date giddy and give each of the singles a verse so that no one could say he wasn’t the highlight of the evening. When you think about it, he had really been around. Done laps. But no one minded. Call it the Kennedy Effect. They even named him honorary board member of the LGBTQ club, since he was presumably the reason a town small as ours was so sexually progressive. He was catnip for the gays, irresistible for any still closeted.

It was nice—too nice, but nice—that he still hung out with me after preseason. He had made Swim, I didn’t. They cut me last day. That was the end of my aquatics career. I wasn’t going JV again for all the hours I had put into practice and meetings with the coach. It was a pride thing, I swear, I wasn’t jealous. I mean, if anyone were to take my spot, why not let it be Rem? Any defeat to Remi Prescott was an honorable one. Though I don’t know how much of a defeat actually transpired, since I might not have been as good a swimmer as I had thought. Rem was back on the ice within weeks, and, having an open spot in the Swim lineup, Coach asked me—to be the team’s water boy.

Don, he said, how would you like to come to the next meet?

Trying to be cool—I’ve been doing the regimen, Coach, and I cut seconds from my breaststroke if you saw me practicing just then. I can do it again…

Don’t worry about practice or anything. I have a very important job for you…

I wouldn’t be less-than anymore. I should have told him that, and not the wee verbal tantrum of my inner high seas sailor. I’m just lucky that Coach didn’t report me to the principal, though it probably meant he pitied me; and I’m damn well lucky Rem didn’t find out. The swimmer who doesn’t swim, that’s a made-for-TV paradox that, next to the Odyssean epic of Rem’s life, would only emphasize how depressingly one-sided our friendship really was.

Even my name!Don Draperton. The year 2007 taught me irony at a young age. I guess Rem’s extracurricular roster was too busy for TV, otherwise he would have seen how horribly inadequate I was and ditched my ass for someone less second-rate.

And here we were at this party—Can you spot the odd one out?But I knew a good number of people through Rem, so I wasn’t entirely uncomfortable on Guts’s couch if you don’t count the dubiously discolored cushions. I was just feeling the buzz of whatever Jäger-Monster cocktail Rem had poured out—everyone called it Gunk, resembling as it did a cupful of watercolor water—and I’ll admit it was getting cozy with everyone squashed together, shouting snatches of sports stories over each other. I usually stuck to Rem’s elbow at these things and took each awkward social encounter as a lesson for next timeuntil my optimism died and I pretended to be sick so I could go home. But these guys weren’t so exclusive or vapid as the brawn suggested. And some of the girls were flirting with me(?). Maybe they were talking throughme, to get to Rem. I was the lowly associate; I would relay their qualifications for the boss’s consideration. These things had a system, and I’d do well to remember my place.

Still, Jules seemed to be having fun. I didn’t know what was going on, but I was trying that improv thing, Yes, and…and it hadn’t backfired yet.

“What’s your star sign?” she asked me. She had sidled so close, I could smell the weed on her hair.

“Uh…” Yes, and. Something about stars—Yes, and,“…the Little Dipper?”

Her head kicked back, and she loosed an entire vocal run of laughter. “No, stupid. What’s your birthday?”

“April nineteenth,” I said, nursing my shattered eardrum. “How about yours?”

“Woah. I didn’t peg you for an Aries.”

“Aries?” Guzowski coasted up just then, shouting, “Get it, son!” and bumped me on the arm before vanishing again.

“What just happened? What’s Aries?”

“It means deep down you’re a risk-taker. Fiery, magnetic, strong…”

“Sounds like me.” Big swig.

“Way deep down,” she said, circling a prophetic hand in front of my sternum.

“Got it.”

“Waaaaaay down there.”

“You know,” said Rem, head poking out from the sofa, “the Western zodiac is based on the positions of stars as the Greeks saw them. But the thousands of years since has shifted those positions.”

“I’ll shift your positions,” Jules murmured.

“So the real zodiac calendar for our time is the months shifted up one.”

Did all the hockey jocks know star signs? Is that one of those secure-in-your-masculinity things they kept coming out with? First pink shirts, then horoscopes. The future was uncertain.

But Jules had frozen in mild panic. “Up which way? My Sagittarius identity has been integral to my success on the archery team, as well as my feng shui and my general self-fashioning, and I will notbe a fucking goat-fish.”

I was pretty lost, but Remi waved his hand. “Nah, nah, up like December is November. So you’d be a Scorpio.”

“A water sign…” Jules puzzled a moment. I thought the cannabinoids had finally got her, when she broke into a devilish grin. “Scorpions are sexy. And ruthless. And you—”

She pointed at me. Oh God.

“You’re a Pisces! Literally you area Pisces. Are those Jell-O shots?”

And she drifted off. I took another sip of my drink, more mystified than I normally wound up with girls. Maybe it was a sign I should get going…

“Hey, Don D.”

Greta Frieling slid into the empty cushion. Yep, I’d say.

Greta was one of those chill, down-to-earth people who spread serenity like fairy dust wherever they went. With a mellow Just shut upor You know what’s funny…she could pull anyone down to her languorous wavelength. Last person you’d expect on the tennis team, but she could bring the intensity when she wanted. They had cut her midway through freshman preseason; that Friday she needled the senior captain into calling an after-hours death match on the old clay courts. Much of the school turned out to see Greta get her ass handed to her. And it wasn’t easy, watching a decent player and a class favorite sweat, grunt, and scrabble all over the place in point after interminable point. The bleachers squirmed with secondhand embarrassment. But the coach happened to tune into the live stream and, if only for the sheer balls on that kid, let her on the bottom rung of the team ladder.

I always liked Greta, and that sequin dress rode up her hips so that her bare thighs spread against mine as she sat down. Sweating at the hairline, she must have been as uncomfortable as I was in the quag of bodies, but she took it grinning and easy as if at the beach. I thought she would say something conspiratorial or sexy when she brushed up against me and whispered,

“Don’t drink the Gunk.”

Because why would she be sexy with me?

“I was talking to Nikki upstairs, and she’s all upset about her goldfish. Says she can’t find them.” Greta flicked a meaningful glance toward my cup. “I’m just saying, Gunk? Seems a little… fishy.”

I slowly put my cup down on the carpet. “Thanks, Greta.”

With a two-finger salute, she said, “Looking out for my fellow man,” and trained her attention past me. I followed her gaze and deflated a little as I saw Rem regaling the squad with his account of last year’s semifinals—the tooth-and-nail victory in double-OT that had restored Murphy’s faith in God.

“Two minutes left, and I was done for. Like, I thought I would faint, I had never skated that hard in my life.”

Dude, but you were the last one standing. We were all soodead!

Those Easton pricks were one hundred percent juicing.

I didn’t know what to do, I sent you the puck, you always know what to do…

“And I just kept thinking down the ice: This is it.”

This is it.

THIS IS IT!

“This is what we worked for, this is ourwin, not the Easton Dolphins—I mean, dolphins on ice? Come on.”

Oh my God, you literally thought that in the moment.

Lu-hu-huuucid. That’s lucid.

Fuckin’ Dolphins!

But the inhaler, bro!

Yeah, bro. Tell us again how your inhaler got crushed in your hockey bag but you played anyway, scoring the winning goal off a breakaway that would’ve put any ordinary asthmatic into a coma.

Jordan moment! Hashtag Jordan hashtag NBA hashtag WNBA hashtag HotGurlz hashtag…

Athsma isn’t a sickness, dickwad, it’s a condition. Get woke.

Sorry, ’scuse me, sorry guys, has anyone seen my goldfish?

What, Lil Gill-bert’s missing?

We had to flush Lil Gill-bert after someonespilled Pine-Sol in his bowl.

Yeah, sorry Max. It’s just Fanta and Orange Thunder now.

But Mer-Murphy!

We got eyes on Mer-Murphy. He’s in the upstairs tank.

That’s all I needed to hear.

…hashtag WhiteMenCanJumpToo hashtag Openminded hashtag Showerthoughts hashtag DontDropTheSoap hashtag…

Man, what the hell are you drinking?

Isn’t that the question.

“But you just gotta play through it. A few seconds of pain is nothing to the title.”

You mean the semifinals? Or the finals you won them with ease, kissing the State trophy as they hoisted you on their shoulders?

It was a framed photograph in the admissions office.

“And so I wound up, and through the uproar of the crowd I could hear the Dolphins rushing me behind. You guys have no idea how nervous I was, but I was already at the windup, holding my breath—”

“I can hold my breath five minutes!”

Silence.

Oh God. Why did I just say that? Everyone looked a little stunned, too, as if I had crashed their collective memory and yanked the stick out of Rem’s hands.

He has asthma, you dipshit, why the hell would you brag about something like that?I think I’ll be sick now, please.

But Rem lit up. “He really can, guys, he’s an absolute shark!” And, forgetting the semifinals, he went on about my summer deep diving on the Cape, which I had done only twice with the help of a rebreather. But he left that part out, thumping me on the back as if I were some abyssal-zone pioneer.

The guys seemed to scan me for quality assurance, but ultimately they trusted Rem and got really into his story. Like, had he been there, too? Was he still talking about me? Or was it the mysticism of charisma that made me in his words sound…awesome?

Then Max Chen—True Max in the presence of Guzowski—said, “I bet that kind of lung capacity’s good for sprints.”

“Oh, you could definitely learn a thing or two from Don. But I don’t have to tell you that. He’s the smart one here!”

And we were all laughing. God, I had the best best friend. He may have saved me from branding myself a complete asshole. Until Chen followed up, “Let’s see it.”

“Okay, sure,” I said, all the stupider for laughing.

“So you’ll do it.”

“Wait, what now?”

I wasn’t hipster enough to pull off sarcasm, but I thought it went without saying that I wasn’t up to any kind of physical demonstration in front of these guys.

Rem tossed me a raised eyebrow: You up for that? Need an out?

I could feel my molars locking in my signature cringe-smile, the one that, according to the Picture Day photographer, gave me the aspect of a shitting chimpanzee.

I was certainly bullshitting when I laughed, “I know, right?

“That would be something to see, Chen, True Max, but, actually, I don’t know if you guys heard, I dropped Swim a while ago, so I am, as it were, out of shape, and also super wasted, like—” I downed the rest of my Gunk in one swig— “in no condition, as you can see, to… to… and it’s Saturday, so the pool’s closed, except—right, you do have an outdoor pool, isn’t that convenient, but it’s nighttime and hypothermia is real I saw a documentary where this guy in the Andes lost half a foot but I won’t spoil which half how ’bout I just post a link…”

I decided to fill the ensuing silence by folding my empty cup into loud plastic pleats as small as it would go. I was feeling pretty small, the swimmer who wouldn’t swim.

“I can do three minutes,” said Skippy Wood. “Hashtag Merman.”

Shit. Was Skippy Woodbetter than me now?

“Oh, he can do three and a half,” said Rem, nudging me. “Easily.”

So here we were, in our cozy latrine. I stoppered the drain, half doing my warm up breathing, half resigning to a very sad, very boring obituary on the local news tomorrow. Maybe they would do the candle thing at school. All I knew was even if I could pull two hundred and ten seconds out of my ass, I’d stick my face in that sink and get psyched out thinking about the toothpaste-water and my all too susceptible pores and two plus two equals drown victim with a rash.

A Pisces drown victim! I was the fish who wouldn’t swim!And if I went anywhere near those treacherous sink waters, I’d choke like Orange Thunder in the Gunk.

More than nerves, though, I was pretty pissed. Like, did Remi secretly want me to crash and burn for hijacking story time? He was usually sensitive of me in this kind of crowd. He’d be too perceptive not to see how badly my hands shook, how horribly wrong this was going to go, and he’d raise his prodigious palm and call off the challenge. But one look at his face, and I knew he was genuine as ever, so goddamn confident in his own abilities that, caught in the excitement, he must have projected his own athletic prowess onto me. It didn’t occur to him that I would crush my own eggshell mojo before ever I soared to success. Little he knew I was going to die. Come one, come all, to the tragicomedy of a bigmouth’s reckoning: wherein the protagonist is excruciatingly lucid of his own clownery, both actor and spectator to the grand exhumation.

But, Don, even you’re not dumb enough to go through with this.

Who said machismo was a thinker’s game? One thing being second best teaches you is pride. The little you have you can’t help but kindle. You want it so badly sparked into something real and brilliant and undeniable that you’d rather feel the vise-grip of death than the humiliation of watching that prospect of true worthiness peter out.

The sink filled.

This is it.

I looked upon the scummed water, up the nose of the moonfaced kid whose double leaned in the mirror over me—Oh, hiya mate! We’re watching, too!—and to the reflection of Rem’s forehead vying among the throng and eventually shined out of focus by eleven spotlights.

Ah, the media age. Gambols I’ll give for a documentary.

But that was it. They knew they weren’t filming a miracle. They expected failure, the better if laughable. Bring the kids and meet me in the village square, and if you’ve got some tomatoes we can have a proper hanging… I always wondered where those barbarous people had gone. We’d like to think time or technology had killed them off, but the vestigial compulsion to watch and guffaw made us no better.

I had never been ridiculous. Pathetic as a state of being, but ridiculous…It was equally doable, or, rather, consequent of the undoable…and its very impotence, empowering. This New Age philosophy—the pinkness and the Pisces of today’s manhood—lowered shoulder to the expectation of embarrassment and charged headlong toward the inevitable, trading pride for a show of humility that won the day good as any old victory.

Defeat was endearing now, daring: I’m only human, and I’m not afraid to admit it.

You too? I thought I was the only one! Let’s be human together and laurel the day when we triumphed in our faults rather than overcame them.

But it was foul to realize this prematurely. One had to strive until the body gave, suffer the first peals of laughter, then bear good-naturedly the mortification and transcend it in the moment. To know it now and resign to defeat before I even touched water would be insincere—and thatwas irredeemable. They kept frauds in deeper Hell than failures.

“Are we doing this, or what?”

The bodies shifted. “Give him a sec. He’s just getting in the zone.”

Deep breath. I would dunk my face in the water, blow some bubbles for thirty seconds, then come up like a jackass, with those long sink hairs stuck to my face, and laugh it off. That’s how Rem did it, right? His laughter would roll like sea foam over the quag, smoothing over the muck. Much could be learned from the pliancy of water, flooding and seeping, overcoming and diffusing more than it drowned.

I lowered my head to the hush of the voices…

“Woah, guys, orgy much?”

Greta leaned in the doorway, a salt-reddened smile playing her lips.

“Christ, Greta, now he’ll never do it!”

She glanced between the sink and me, eyebrow cocked and quizzical. “There’s been a development with Mer-Murphy.”

“Fuck!” someone cried, pushing through the bodies and thudding upstairs. I knew the team cared for its unofficial mascot, but Jesus…

“Oh,” she added, “and Guts’s parents left a message. They’ll be home in ten.”

The bathroom erupted in confusion and curses. Everybody get out! Wait, wait, everybody get a garbage bag and start cleaning. Nikki, where’s the cleaning stuff? Nikki?! I held fast to the sink, making myself even smaller than usual to avoid the stampede of jocks springing to action.

Then it was just me and Greta, sipping her drink in the doorway. It was mixer, she assured me. She had flushed the rest of the Gunk.

“Good call. And that was clever, about the message.”

“So gullible,” she said, shaking her head. “And they won’t check the machine either. But I had thought that the goldfish thing would’ve gotten more attention first time around.”

“Apparently Mer-Murphy isn’t as big a deal in the off-season.”

Shrugging, she joined me before the sink and unplugged the drain. We watched the water go halfway down, then stop. Must have been the hairs clogging the trap.

Her lip curled. “Bet you’re glad you didn’t go near that.”

“I wasn’t going to,” I said. “I mean, thanks for coming in and breaking it up, but I wasn’t going to drown myself to prove a point. That’s stupid.”

“Exceptionally. You have nothing to prove. No one expects you to be him, you know.”

Every conversation.

Every fucking conversation found its way to Remi. All roads lead to Rem!

“No shit,” I said. “It’s pretty clear I’m not him.”

We both saw what was in the mirror. Hardly the same genus as Remi Prescott.

Greta finished her pepsi and tossed the cup in the sink, where it floated like a dead thing on its side. “Then what are you doing here, huh? You could be at the movies, alone and lonely. Some obscure indie feature that no one else cares about because God forbid anyone be as tortured as you.”

The staredown, that cynical edge in her voice—was she mad at me for something? I combed my mind for anything objectionable and found: my outburst on the couch, my crippling inferiority and social ineptitude, my audacity in coming here at all. Okay, I’d be ruffled if I were one of the high school select stuck babysitting a friend-of-a-friend imbecile. But Greta walked with all kinds of groups. Maybe I had said something to her specifically? Thanks, Greta. That’s all I had said on the couch, right? I couldn’t remember. Maybe it was my eyes. Girls talked about that, what he said with his eyes…I mean, I’d done my best not to ogle, but who of us has truly mastered the dynamic unconscious when faced with thighs like those, so smooth and immediate and teasing to be looked at?

“Listen,” I gulped, “whatever I said, or did, I’m sorry…”

“You’d be sorry if you’d said nothing, Don, since that’s what you always are.”

If she was smiling, then why was she being so mean? What happened to the fellow man?And where the hell did she get off, so righteous? The confusion, the mild panic, the budding anger flushed me under the collar.

“Your problem’s never been Remi. It’s you. You’re a real prick. A cynical, self-pitying, unpleasant prick, and it’s tedious.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and saved it, “did I ask you to fix me?”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry! No one likes solicitors, Don. So quit soliciting approval and do something. It’s no surprise you don’t measure up, given that you never try. Because it’s easier to be the outcast, the high school martyr, than put yourself on the line for something.”

“You know it’s not that easy,” I said quietly, my voice too close to cracking. I wasn’t answering Greta now, I was speaking for myself. “Not all of us were born with silver spoons in our mouths.”

She squawked. “Ha! No one handed me, or even Remi Prescott, a damn thing. It may be good for us, but not easy. We know that it’s one or the other. You can decide to either not care and be comfortable, or work your ass off for something meaningful. What have you ever worked for? Swim?”

Low blow, Greta, and even worse that she said it right as I was about to.

“Until you quit the second you saw bench,” she added, scrunching her nose and affecting a nasal whimper, “because it was compromising. News flash: everyone starts somewhere. Unless you can’t handle the prospect of failure, but that’s part of how it goes—anything less, and you’re not living.”

Her nostrils flared like I’d never seen her, and all I could do was withstand the showdown, quaking in my spurs.

How was the party, Donny Boy?

Well, there’s this girl. After some smooth talking on the sofa, we took things into the bathroom—where she scolded the piss out of me.

I would have punched a wall if the conscious thought of the melodrama and the ensuing injury hadn’t sapped me of the notion. I could only laugh.

Who else could have irritated the cool out of Greta Frieling? It was kind of funny.

“I’m serious, Don. Are you even listening? Do what you want with your life, but—”

“No, I heard you. Just one thing, if I’m going to be more risk-taking… Did you wantme to go through with drowning myself?”

She allowed a slow, sardonic grin. “You’re unbelievable, Draperton. But I’ll fix you yet. I’m going to make you try.” She drew her phone from some covert orifice in her dress and tapped open the Clock app. “Deep breaths,” she said, counting as I worked my lungs. One, two, three…

She pinched my nose shut and started the stopwatch.

I held my breath until my throat seized for air. It wasn’t the same as being underwater, but the internal ache, racking harder my insides every second, brought back some of the rush. Greta watched the seconds accumulate on the screen, allowing me privacy for the dumb grin that stole over my face as I swam phantom laps around her.

She let go when I tapped out. Doubled and panting, I didn’t get a chance to look at the time. When I asked, she chuckled to herself, “Yeah, you don’t want to know, Mister Five Minutes.”

“Ah, come on. I said I was outta shape. And you have to do a few rounds to get anything good. Come on, I can do it again…”

“Oh, you will.”

As long as you do it again, her gloating grin said.

Alright. You made your point, and I’ll sucker for it. Oh-One, Frieling. But I’d get the next one.