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Every kid in Gloria knows how to swim by the time they start school.
Knowing how to swim doesn't keep you from drowning.
Ben swam competitively for years. He was good at it too, liked it far more than he ever did basketball.
Every few weeks or so, he walks to the Westridge Community Pool a mile from his house. He sits on one of the rusting sun loungers, pulled close to the pool's edge, and just watches the dim lights of nearby houses reflect and refract on the water.
The last truly good memory he has is chasing across the sands of Easter Beach, right behind Mari Esteves, as she plunges into the surf. The sun was rising, they'd all have to scatter soon, back to their homes and beds and wait for summer to be over. He follows her because she's his captain, and she's his friend. He follows her because she's the only other person he'd ever met that loves the water like it's a second skin.
There was - is - beauty in the weightlessness, blinking in the salt. The depths of the ocean are dark and monstrous and he loves it all the more for that fact.
It's exposure therapy, in a way, sitting next to the glimmering water that only moves thanks to clanging filtration machines and the slight breeze that night time in Gloria brings. Nothing like the violent, fathomless movements of the sea. When he breathes in, he smells not salt, but the sharp comfort of chlorine.
He knows he's not exactly okay. He hasn't been since June and maybe before that too. He wants to be himself again, to be normal again. This version of his life where everybody looks at him with pity, where everybody treats him like he's a human-shaped time-bomb, just doesn't cut it.
He wants to be Ben Bishop, Number 27, co-captain of Gloria Heights High's unbeatable basketball team. He wants to be Ben Bishop, who has the 3rd best time on the swim team. He wants to be the Ben Bishop laughing as he dives into the ocean.
He wants to stop having a pit form in his stomach each night when he hears the blare of the foghorns.
He had spent the first 15 years of his life loving the water, which loved him right back, and now, wriggling around on dry-land just doesn't cut it.
He doesn't cut it.
Maybe if he just keeps pushing himself to his limits, he'll get back to who he was again.
He broke before, he can break again, and he could put himself back together again too.
He can do it.