Free Sisters of Heart and Snow by Margaret Dilloway Page B

went back to the pool in the evenings to perfect my strokes, ignoring little stabs of pain shooting up to my neck. Ignoring how I’d stopped my periods and how tired I was every day in class. When my blood sugar dropped too much, I drank coffee and ate a banana and a candy bar and pushed myself to go further. I wanted to be number one.
    When I was sixteen, during January of my sophomore year, I dislocated my shoulder during a swim meet. I felt a deep pop, a wrenching sensation, and then the purest pain I’d ever feel, besides childbirth. I sank, my mouth opening in a soundless scream, lifting one arm aloft to get help.
    I’d never again be able to swim at the same level. At that age, it felt like the end of the world. Suddenly I wasn’t Rachel Snow, Winner of Gold Medals. I was just Rachel Snow, average student. A nobody to anybody, especially to my family.
    And so I found comfort in other ways.
    My friends had all been on the swim team. We’d traveled to meets together, spending entire days huddled together on cold pool decks or applying sunblock to each other’s backs on the hot days. Suddenly I had nobody. I could have been manager, somebody who kept score and gathered up goggles and brought out water, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of watching them all do something I could not.
    Killian treated me differently, too. Apparently, swimming was the only thing interesting about me. He had no reason to take me anywhere or even talk to me anymore. But what could I do about it? It’s not like we had the kind of relationship where our family went to the movies together.
    No longer working out every day, I put on weight and needed new clothes. I had to ask Killian for some money. He stopped drinking his Old-Fashioned to look me up and down, how my thighs strained against my Guess denim mini, my stomach pooching over the waistband. A look of plain disgust crossed his face. I shrank inside. “Better stop eating so much,” he grunted. “No boy will like you, the way you’re going.”
    â€œThanks,” I said, in response to the cash he handed me. I’d trained myself not to respond to his barbs now, not the way I had when I was little. When somebody is like him, you expect all kinds of mean things to come out of his mouth. It barely affects you anymore. Or so you think. It’s like swallowing something sharp without realizing it, the object sitting undisturbed until years later, when your insides suddenly begin to bleed.
    I had no idea why Killian Snow was the way he was. He didn’t tell stories about his childhood. I knew he grew up on a cattle ranch in central California that his father had lost in a drunken card game when Killian was sixteen. He had no siblings. Probably his childhood was unhappy. Who knew what had happened to him? All I knew of my father was how he was with us. And of course, in high school, I didn’t spend a second of time wondering why.
    At lunch one day, tired of being alone and deciding I didn’t need any more calories that day, I’d wandered out to the school parking lot. Back then you were still allowed to leave school for lunch, and in the chaos some kids would hang out in their cars in the far corners of the expansive lot and smoke.
    I walked slowly past a truck bed full of these students. “You’re Rachel, right?” a boy with a floppy mop of dark hair said. A clove cigarette stuck out of his mouth. “The swimmer?”
    I inhaled the sweet scent of the smoke and smiled at him. He had blue eyes and dimples and made my heart race like it did right before a meet. I didn’t recognize him from my classes. “Not anymore.”
    He offered me his hand to help me into the truck.
    My mother tried to warn me. I was on my way out one evening, my pockets clinking full of mini booze bottles I’d stolen from my father’s collection, when she materialized before me in her white bathrobe, like a ghost.