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Seeing Noah Landry swim in person was nothing like watching him on video, where distances were warped and the energy of the spectators, tilting in his direction, blurred into pixelation.
Seeing Noah Landry live was breathtaking.
He was a sleek arrow leaving the starting block. Then he submerged almost soundlessly, and his body turned to a dark torpedo under the surface, rippling halfway down the length of the pool before surfacing a full body length ahead of Nye.
Later we couldn’t remember screaming his name. We couldn’t remember rising to our feet. All we remembered was the feeling of tilting, tipping down as a vast group toward a central thrill, and of certainty: Noah Landry was the best swimmer since Tommy Swift. Along with Coach Vernon, he was resurrecting Jay Steeler’s legacy.
It wasn’t Lucy but Noah Landry we’d been waiting for all along.
After First Meet, the drama with Jalliscoe metastasized.
First a graffitied penis appeared on the statue of Jay Steeler in Byron Park. A few days later someone hacked Jalliscoe’s official Instagramaccount and linked their bio to a pornography website. Spinnaker denied responsibility, but that was no surprise; he simultaneously pinned a description ofself-incriminationto a #badideas thread on the Discord server, which many of us took as a confession.
Jalliscoe hit back with a litany of bad press. Mostly it was the usual bullshit: snide commentary, vague insinuations of cheating, and veiled references to the Faraday case, plus the occasional Looney Tune claiming that the Steelers’ fortune was due to an unholy pact with Satan. Jalliscoe went trawling for old yearbook photos of Coach Vernon with Nina Faraday’s ex-boyfriend, Tommy Swift—as if the fact that Coach Vernon competed under Coach Steeler were proof of a secret conspiracy rather than justification for his hire.
Coach Steeler had been controversial, maybe. He’d had a reputation for inappropriate comments. He’d had a weird sense of humor. Maybe he’d even been a creep. But no one doubted that he’d turned out champion swimmers, or that he’d put Granger on the map.
Still, the infestation of negative press gave the Student Leadership Department leverage to announce new student initiatives. We weren’t surprised to find out that Mrs. Steeler-Cox was milking the rivalry for her own purposes. She couldn’t hear the wordinfractionwithout going full Stalin. A hysteria of new links, SLD tutorials, and updates swept the student portal. We gave permission for so many new abuses of the school’s authority, we wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that rectal exams were being added to the protocol.
Even our parents got embroiled in the controversy. Patti Hargrove, Derek Hargrove’s mom, was cautioned by police after tailing the mother of a Jalliscoe cheerleader home from the Walmart Supercenter and making “threatening gestures” with her carton of eggs; and Peyton Neely’s dad, who worked for the fire department, posted a rant about Jalliscoe that got him cautioned by the union.
The same week, someone supposedly took a dump in a lane of the Wolfe Swimming Club’s Olympic-size pool. Of course, Jalliscoe immediately started pointing fingers. We all agreed it was an act ofabsolute desperation, and to save face. If someone had dropped anchor in Willard County waters, ten to one the asshole was native to town.
A few days after that, three Wolverines broke into Aquatics and tried to steal our mascot, Sean the Shark. We assumed the Wolverines were to blame anyway, since the three vandals were wearing rubber werewolf masks. Of course, the Wolverines insisted it was a frame-up job. The question was whether the Jalliscoe swimmers were stupid enough to disguise themselves in an incriminating costume.
Opinions were divided.
Whoever it was, the Wolverines or someone trying to set them up, only got as far as the display case. The dumbasses might have gotten away with it if they’d had the patience to look for the key in the director’s office. Instead they broke the glass and triggered an alarm that brought security down on Aquatics. We would have paid good money to see Old McVeigh, the night guard, probably oozing the stink of whiskey and hopped up on God knows what he usually snorted, crash through the doors swinging a tire iron and shouting apocalypse and revelation. We would have dropped at least a bill to see McVeigh chase those motherfuckers into the parking lot. We almost felt bad for them.
Almost.
Will Friske suggested we break into the Jalliscoe pool and sub in arsenic for one of the chemical cleaners. Ethan Courtland, a chemistry nerd, pointed out that to have any effect, you would need at least fifty micrograms of arsenic per liter, which was roughly 167 micrograms of arsenic per gallon. Given that the average pool contained six hundred and fifty thousand gallons of water, you were looking at more than ten kilograms of arsenic.
@highasakyle:yeah, that’ll land you on a no-fly list
@spinn_doctor:Please unsubscribe me from this thread
@spinn_doctor:How many times have I explained that private and secure areNotthe same thing??
@spinn_doctor:If anyone wants to talk, find me on Signal
@hannahbanana:sorry to be basic, but what about we just steal the Wolverines mascot?
@badprincess:do wolverines evenKnow how to swim???
@skyediva:maybe that’s why they went after our mascot
@skyediva:Theirs sucks
About a week after First Meet, a fifteen-year-old hit piece about the sheriff’s investigation of the Nina Faraday case resurfaced online. We were certain that another Jalliscoe apologist was to blame, that this was yet another attempt to sully the Sharks’ reputation before the competition season kicked into overdrive.
But this time our enemies hit the jackpot and went viral.
The article featured a photograph of Nina and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Tommy Swift, partying with Jack Vernon. This coupled with Aiden Teller’s recent arrest detonated an explosion of new outrage online, half of it from people who’d never even been to Indiana. According to the internet, Tommy Swift had gotten away with murder. Jack Vernon had helped him. The Sharks, both past and present, were violent sociopaths, coddled by a system that cared only for their wins. Coach Vernon got a flood of anonymous abuse posted to his personal Facebook page and briefly had to go private on Instagram. Even Student Leadership and Mrs. Steeler-Cox got dragged.
We were so consumed by the tension with Jalliscoe, we didn’t even notice that at some point we’d stopped referring to 88 Lily Lane as the Faraday House. Maybe it was because Will Friske’s fake landscaping flyer had resulted in a real landscaping job, and he and his cousin Josh had been working at the Vales’ house for a month, and that’s what he called it: the Vales’ House. Maybe it was because, under the Vales’ stewardship, the house was changing—liberated of its stranglehold of weeds and climbing ivy, exfoliated of its scabrous paint, opened up and turned out and exposed to fresh air and Instagram photography. Maybe it was because of the wicker porch furniture, or the new pastel trim, or the bikes that rarely made it all the way into the garage. Maybe it wasthe reappearance of the yard itself, looking shockingly exposed without its overcoat of weeds, like someone robbed of a toupee. Maybe it was because of the Vales’ bird feeders, or the fairy lights in the apple tree, which surprised us the first time we saw them in one of Lucy’s Instagram stories and thought,Beautiful.
