For a month, therewasno competition.
We were unstoppable, and we loved it.
Noah Landry wasn’t the only one making record times in November. Alec Nye, Ryan Hawthorne, JJ Hammill, and Jeremiah Greene knocked half a second off a state record for the men’s 200-meter relay, and Hammill set a new state record for the 50-meter fly.
But Noah was on a different level. He burned through the state records in five different events and broke two national records in the month of November alone. It was like something in him morphed the second he hit water, a transformation of pure kinetic power. We’d never seen anything like it. Swim meets were always packed, but that fall the crowd swelled with every new record smashed. We could pick out more and more outsiders: recruiters with their baseball hats and pinky rings, deep pockets down from Bloomington, and even farther, with perfect teeth and hair that looked shellacked.
The wordOlympicslingered in the halls like perfume. It infected our consciousness, worked its way into our dreams where we were swimming with sharks or twisting in bands of bright blue ribbons. In November, the dream of seeing Noah Landry qualify for the Olympicsunified us, repairing the rift that had temporarily gutted our Discord of key members. The girls from yearbook, and Topornycky and the gamers, logged back on.
We became used to seeing news crews next to Aquatics, and headlines about the Granger Club Team and Steeler’s legacy uploaded almost daily to the student portal. There were so many links about Noah Landry we couldn’t keep up with them.
He was the best swimmer to come out of Indiana since Mark Spitz. He was a revelation in the pool. He was born for the water.
An Olympian.
Noah Landry was an Olympian in the making.
That’s what everyone was saying.
Meanwhile, the holiday bunting went up along Main Street, and Christmas displays cluttered the storefronts. Downtown Granger was hijacked by Winter Blues: a weeklong, countywide celebration that came toward the tail end of the regular meet season. To us it heralded the approach of the Winters Dance—and after that, championship season. The gigantic plaster shark outside the post office got pinned with its annual fur-trimmed hat and roped with a stranglehold of tree lights. At Woodward, Student Council members wore matching elf hats and pushed holiday cheer and bake sale items on the school between classes. Coach Radner had to carry around a pineapple for an entire week, an inside joke we didn’t really understand, and the Sharks wouldn’t explain.
Noah Landry had just taken down another national record, and Jay Steeler’s younger brother, an Evanston-based city council member and one of the booster fund’s biggest donors, had gone on record with the prediction that Landry would be the best swimmer of his generation. We were high on a record-breaking season and a clear path to sweeping regionals and then states.
The more media coverage Noah’s times attracted, the more the Sharks were compared to the all-star team that had twice swept nationals under Coach Steeler. The parallels between Tommy Swift and Noah Landry were obvious and inescapable. They excelled at all the same events. Tommy still held state records for three events—100-meter butterfly, 50-meter breaststroke, and 200-meter breaststroke—but Noah Landry had already burned through his times in the 50-, 100-, and 200-meter freestyle, and he was closing in on Tommy’s breast and fly times. Both boys even attended the same church, and Pastor Marks, who had presided over Tommy Swift’s funeral service, showed up at half a dozen swim meets.
Maybe because of Coach Vernon’s appointment to the club team, or because of the historic times Noah was clocking, or because of constant references to Tommy’s records in the press, it seemed to us that the Swifts were suddenly everywhere. We picked them out at almost every home meet. We saw them leaving church, clutching one another on the stairs. Riley French saw Mr. Swift scrutinizing salad dressing labels in the IGA. Olivia Howard saw Mrs. Swift maneuvering a cat crate out of the veterinary clinic and murmuring reassurances to the Maine coon hissing inside. We wondered how they felt seeing their son’s name so often used in connection to a new star swimmer.
We wondered how they could tolerate the resurgence of attention around the Faraday case.
Coverage of Coach Vernon was mixed. From the beginning, we saw just as many articles that dragged him for his relationship to Coach Steeler as praised him for it. We attributed the hate to online conspiracists, those wackadoodles who kept pushing theories about Tommy Swift and hypothesizing that the team had covered up his involvement in Nina’s disappearance. It didn’t help that someone had unearthed old photos of Coach Vernon back when he swam with Tommy Swift and, as a result, frequently hung out with Nina. It wasn’t clear to us how close they’d actually been, but one of their Halloween photos blew up online; in it, Tommy had one hand wrapped around Nina’s throat whilepretending to bite her neck. Jack Vernon, dressed like a Viking with a battle-ax stained with fake blood, was laughing. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal except that Nina’s face was purple, and she appeared to be grimacing. We all agreed she was probably just really drunk—we could tell from the unfocused look of her eyes, which were sliding away from the camera—but the internet was whispering about sadism and sociopathy and debating whether or not Tommy’s hand was actually restricting her breathing.
Then there was the yearbook debacle.
The same day that Coach Vernon and Noah Landry appeared on a state news segment, theIndyStarpublished a piece about the murky legalities of booster funds and public school sports using the Sharks’ record and endowment as a case study. We skimmed most of the article but obsessed over its most controversial section: a two-decade-long litany involving current and former members of the swim team, including a few unfortunate sexual innuendos unearthed from the yearbook bios of some of our very best swimmers in the past twenty years.
We didn’t condone the jokes, obviously, especially the year the seniors all kept a public count of the Minnows they’d netted. At the same time, we acknowledged that the decades before ours were backward, and regressive, and still besmirched by the throttling choke hold of the patriarchy. Enlightenment had come belatedly, only with our generation.
We couldn’t fault the past too much for its ignorance.
And we knew it was only an unfortunate coincidence that the same year Nina Faraday disappeared, a trio of club team swimmers—including Jack Vernon and Tommy Swift, two of the team’s stars—had earned a violent nickname in the pool, and their senior yearbook had gone to press withmurdersquadprinted in each of their senior bios. The online uproar about the name was understandable, if totally overblown.
If anything, the moniker was further proof of their innocence.
Senior bios were due at the end of January.
Obviously, they’d had no way of knowing that Nina Faraday would disappear in March.
But the backlash was ferocious. Rumors of drug use among the boys on Coach Vernon’s club team crowded the comment section beneath every article almost as soon as it was posted. Vernon’s mailbox was defaced with penises—twice. Someone keyed Principal Hammill’s new car, although we were undecided about whether one of our swim team rivals or Bailey Lawrence was more likely to blame. (Supposedly JJ Hammill had cheated on Bailey with some suckerfish from Edwards County over Thanksgiving, and the car was his to inherit.)
Still, no one but a rival swimmer would have dreamed of defacing the plaster bust of Jay Steeler that sat just inside Aquatics, the bald chrome of its head worn smooth by half a generation of hands rubbing it down for good luck before swim meets. Yet, horrifyingly, someone had managed to scrawlLiarjust above his eyebrows—a thick, ugly worm of text that janitorial spent God knows how long trying to remove.
Days later, someone called in a bomb threat to the Allentown YMCA just before counties, and everyone was forced to evacuate, including the swimmers doing warm-up laps. We weren’t fooled by the selection of targets. We knew that disrupting our win was the real aim.
After that our server was infiltrated, and then came the scandal of Market Catch.
Market Catch was an online auction sponsored by Student Leadership and the athletics department, ostensibly to raise funds for local youth sports teams. It was also our favorite part of Winter Blues. Bidding was open to the public, and every year the SLD managed to bully, bribe, terrorize, or blackmail roughly three hundred separate donors into posting goods and services to a Market Catch web page that temporarily replaced our student portal online. Offerings were typicallydiverse, ranging from the practical (a new chainsaw from Ace Hardware, a full emergency kit put together by the guys at TM Outdoor) to the edible (venison from Huckabee Farm, a catered Sunday dinner from Ribs & Roast) to the silly and all-out bizarre. That year an “heirloom” taxidermy frog dressed in a top hat was listed for $200. Five yodeling lessons from Mr. Ridges started at ten dollars. We couldn’t believe it when both sold within hours.
Most of what went up for auction didn’t interest us except as fodder for potential memes. But traditionally, members of the swim team volunteered as Balladeers, and each auctioned off a slow dance at the Winters. The Balladeers’ Auction was the single biggest moneymaker—the previous year, the winning bid to secure an Alec Nye dance was more than $1,000—and also its most controversial item. Supposedly any registered student could bid on the Balladeers, provided she was female and had parents wealthy enough to drop serious cash on three and a half minutes of slow, shuffling revolutions and sweaty public palming around a gym floor. In reality it was an oligarchical sham, not to mention completely heteronormative—a nepotistic tool of the elites and the handful of rich Student Council girls who almost always wrangled the top bids from the rest of us.
