Free B0160A5OPY (A) by Joanne Macgregor Page A

I’m Not_A – you’re WaterBaby ?”
    He had an amazing smile – slow and lazy and just the slightest bit lopsided.
    “No. Yes! I mean...” That smile was distracting me, making me stammer and blush, making my brain stutter. “My actual name’s –”
    “Luke! C’mon, quickly – you’re supposed to be on the winner’s podium to get your medal.”
    A coach swept him away while I looked on.
    “See you later, Water Baby,” he called over his shoulder, but he didn’t – not that day at least. Mom had to rush back to the office for an evening meeting, and so we left before the end of the swim meet. All okay, I consoled myself, there were more competitions scheduled before the end of the season and I’d catch him at one of those. Yeah right, so much for that plan.
     
    Many things actually happened after I got the scar, in the time of A.S.
    Pretty much straight away, I was dropped from the regional zone team. I had missed the training camp – I was too busy getting blood transfusions, shivering on a stainless steel table in an operating theatre, trying to eat disgusting hospital food, taking meds for my messed up insides, and weeping. Endlessly weeping for my mother.
    When my body had recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital, when the stitches had been pulled out of my face and inner thigh, and the brace removed from my knee (now held together with a titanium pin), I went back to the water. I could still swim. I was probably still better than most people in the water, but I couldn’t swim well enough to be competitive. I enjoyed being in the water, but I did not race. My knee would never again work as well as it should, and something had gone missing from me – my hunger for the dream, my drive to do much of anything.
    I no longer have a grand ambition for my life. Somehow, I don’t think I’m going to live too long, anyway. And I’m okay with that.
    I did look up my father. To be strictly accurate, the lawyers now administering the trust fund which my mother left me were instructed to trace him, and trace him they did. The search was not easy, apparently, but Bradley, Bradley and Martinez were persistent. They found him on several databases which black-listed bad creditors, and discovered that he had filed for bankruptcy – twice – and was wanted for a string of outstanding debts. Eventually their investigator found him living in the YMCA in Des Moines, Iowa, and a social worker appointed by the state to investigate my circumstances drove me out to meet him.
    I introduced myself to the stranger, shook his hand and immediately felt sullied by the smarmy charm of him, the long, dirty fingernails at the ends of his tobacco-stained fingers, the oily excuses for a lifetime of absence, and the now-identified familiar whiff of alcohol emanating from pores and breath as he leaned over to try embrace his “long-lost daughter”. He was too oblivious of my life, too uncaring about the loss of my mom, way too interested in my trust fund. On the spot, he listed half a dozen opportunities for once-in-a-lifetime investment prospects. On the spot, I decided I would be better off as far away from him as I could get. Bradley, Bradley and Martinez filed for my legal emancipation from him and I was duly “divorced” from my father. It took a restraining order, though, to get him to stay away and stop contacting me.
    The social worker who assessed me told the judge that I was extremely mature for my age and used to caring for myself. The pile of money that Mom left me, her sole heir, meant that I could buy a small unit in the same secure apartment complex in which my aunt Beryl, my mother’s younger sister, lived with her toddler triplets and husband. The court agreed that I could live alone as long as I stayed under the regular supervision of my aunt, and received monthly visits from social services. It worked out well; the triplets kept my aunt perpetually busy and out of my hair, so I was left pretty much