Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes Read Online Free PDF

fresh from Pizza Maria’s, and several billion gallons of Coca-Cola. We have ten boys and ten girls on the team, so it’s a nice little party, but there’s very little chance of it getting too intimate after that kind of workout. In my own case, I should say to keep the record straight, Las Vegas bookmakers get migraine headaches even considering the odds.
    â€œYou up for this?” Mark Brittain leads the circle pattern in the lane next to mine, a tribute to Lemry’s genius. Either of us would willingly belly flop from the three-meter board onto pungi sticks dipped in dead animal rot before letting the other outlast us. Brittain can outsprint me any day at a hundred or two hundred yards, but repeat time standards are my game. He might touch ahead of me on the first twenty, but he can’t afford to beat me by far or he’ll waste himself for thestretch. We’re about equal in the butterfly, so he has no advantage there, and though there’s really no doubt he’s a more talented swimmer, he doesn’t have the guts of a man with eight years’ verbal abuse from Sarah Byrnes. I have those guts.
    â€œYeah, I’m up for this,” I say back. “How ’bout you?”
    â€œDon’t know. Been torn down a little lately. I’ll give it my best shot.” A cheap attempt at a psych job. Get me thinking he’s barely holding on at first, and then come after me. Even though the real competition is against the clock, it’s hard to ignore the guy in the next lane when he’s Mark Brittain. Sorry, Mark. This is a hundred hundreds. I own you.
    Ours is a regulation six-lane, twenty-five-yard pool. Ellerby, Brittain, and I lead circle patterns in adjacent lanes so we can see each other—another stroke of Lemry’s genius which seems to keep our competitive juices flowing. My group and Brittain’s have four swimmers each and Ellerby’s and the rest have three. Fastest swimmer goes first, with the others leaving at three-second intervals, swimming on the right, just like on the highway. Pass down the middle, and if you catch the person in front of you on one repeat, you go first on the next.
    The shrill blast of Lemry’s whistle ricochets around the high walls, and the swimmers in Brittain’s lane each drop to one knee, clasp hands, and bow their heads. Brittain leads them in a quick prayer asking God to let each do his or her best. On the far side, Ellerby drops to both knees, throwing his head back as he stretches his arms wide, and loudly begs Jesus to come swim the laps for him. When there’s no answer, he opens one eye to a squint and asks if John the Baptist is home. “Damn,” he says in the face of no response. It’s old stuff and Brittain’s squad doesn’t react. Lemry sighs and shakes her head. Any conflict will keep us going. She knows we’ll need every bit of love and hate we can muster to get through this.
    The first ten repeats go down easy for everyone. At fifteen, the first of six flys, we get a hint of how this will end. Seven people drop out after forty-five—the third fly—six of them boys. The girls would gloat, but by now the idea of using even one calorie for oral communication is unthinkable. At sixty we lose two girls. At sixty-one, when the first of Brittain’s group succumbs, Ellerby breaks the code of silence to ask Brittain’s Lord why he has forsaken them, but after that the only sounds to be heard are the constant churning of the water interrupted by the slap of feet and calves on eachflip turn, the shrill blast of Lemry’s whistle, and the urgent whine of eleven wheezing, oxygen-deprived idiots sucking every last molecule of breathable air out of the chlorine-filled atmosphere.
    At eighty-five, seven of us remain, and I’m holding less than a half-second under my time standard, cursing myself for my one miraculous hundred-yard freestyle during the second meet of the