by Mariah Rigg
First Length
We stand, toes curled around the rough edge of the deck, waiting for Coach King’s whistle. It is 6 a.m. and February on Oʻahu. It is about to rain. Our suits cling to our bodies, wet from the morning water polo practice. Above us, our high school’s gymnasium looms. Ready? Coach King yells. We bet on who will be first to the other side. We spit in our goggles. We laugh, our happiness a performance for Coach King.
When he blows, the best of us leap. The worst of us stutter-step. This hesitation is what kept us from being sprinters, what will keep us from playing collegiate water polo on the mainland after we graduate. Some of us were never taught to dive, so we flop, the water’s slap a sting we have no time to mind. Most of us are ex-swimmers—we cut the water like knives, the only evidence of our entrance ripples that follow the splash of our feet as we dolphin kick, one, two, three, out past the ten-foot line. Ripples from our feet ricochet against the walls of the pool gutters. We surface with a stroke, and the backwash grows to waves.
Second Length
We are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Only two of us are eighteen, and they strut the pool deck like models, one-pieces wedgied up their butts, the triangle of fabric going deeper and deeper as their hips sway. We have haloes pimpled across our foreheads, lips swollen from the cuts of braces after taking a ball or an elbow or a defender’s hand to the face. We have clear skin and horse-sized, miraculously straight teeth. We are all here because of Coach King.
Some of us have known him since we swam the womb. We are cousins, daughters, sisters of girls on water polo teams that he coached in the ’80s and ’90s. We are girls he taught in elementary school PE. We are girls he poached from volleyball, track and field, basketball, swimming. We are girls with potential. We have long arms, smooth legs.
It is early enough that we have already forgotten our last Dirty Dozen. We are convinced, somehow, we will master this one, despite a history of defeat. As we cross the length of the pool, we do not breathe, or we breathe only once, twice if we are in bad shape. We hold no fear for what will happen if all of us do not make it to the opposite side and out of the pool in sixty seconds. We do not think about the consequences of disappointing Coach King.
Third Length
The cold keeps us fast, our form still strong for our third length. We flutter kick, ankles rotated out, big toes caught in constant caress, unmarred by the bunions that will push them in with old age. Sometimes, after practice, Coach King jumps into the pool. He pulls one of us to the penalty zone, where he tells us to hold the gutter as he moves our hips like a metronome, our spine the center position he rests his hand on once we have gotten the hang of kicking. His board shorts tickle our legs. Back in the locker room, the rest of us watch ourselves strip on the mirrored walls, our bodies taut and turning. We grab our white towels and mock the girl behind the goal, but really we wish it were us back in the pool with our hips swinging. In the communal shower, the tile is slippery and cold. We turn the rusted metal knobs and thrust three fingers into the flow—waiting, waiting. When the shower is warm enough, we step beneath.
Fourth Length
We think we are tired now but now is nothing. On the deck, we stand, hands on our hips. We try our best not to bend as we breathe. The first cold drops of rain needle our shoulders. We pull our swim caps into place. Coach King asks you girls want more time? and we say no. We can do this. We are ready.
Coach King recommends a climbing documentary, so we watch it. Coach King tells us the name of his masseuse, so we book an appointment. Coach King says he bodysurfs at Makapuʻu on Sundays, so we go and wear bikinis. We don’t park where the tourists do, in the lot by the showers and bathrooms, but on the street above the lifeguard tower, where we hope Coach King will be. Stubbing our toes in the rocky sand, we descend the hill to the beach. To our right, Makapuʻu Lighthouse rises from the cliffs that form the bay, and we imagine standing on the white sand at night a hundred years ago, the light cutting through the fog of a New Moon to keep ships away. One of our brothers jumped from that cliff, and the Coast Guard spent three days looking for his body. They never found him. His Croakies washed up a week later around the corner on Sandy Beach. The strings of our two-pieces are tight against our toned backs and shoulders. We feel them dig in as we wait for Coach King. We float in Makapuʻu’s water—flat without summer’s swells—our pale stomachs burning in the winter sun. Coach King never comes. Back at the car, when we press our thumbs into the red flesh of our burnt navels, they hold the print for just a second before fading.
Fifth Length
Our arms tire as we swim, swim, swim, across the open pool. We race the clock. We race each other. We are lucky that today is a freestyle day, but sometimes when we practice particularly bad, Coach King punishes us by making us butterfly across the pool, and when this happens we start from the top, start from the top, start from the top, until we cannot feel our arms or legs.
Coach King hires a nutritionist. She comes on a morning when we cannot play water polo because of lightning. As thunder rumbles, she tapes a two-meter stick to the concrete wall that encircles the pool to measure our height. She lines us up under an awning and we step on a scale that she has to tap, tap, tap until it levels at one hundred sixteen pounds, one hundred thirty-two pounds, one hundred sixty-four pounds. Coach King frowns as she writes down our weight. To find our body fat percentage, she pinches us with metal calipers. We bruise down our arms, abs, thighs, and are reminded of our fathers, of the clamps they used to hold down the granite of remodeled kitchen counters, the plywood of tree houses, the two-by-fours of makeshift bed frames. Of the women gagged and bound that we watched in the videos on our fathers’ phones that we found two weeks ago, that we found last Fourth of July, that we found on our mother’s birthday. The nutritionist tells Coach King to tell us to lose ten, fifteen, twenty pounds. We do it together, spending our free periods in the silent section of our school’s library, where we sip and sip and sip our ice water until we are nothing more than cold liquid. Until the sharp scythe of our desire has replaced hunger’s pang.
Sixth Length
We have ten seconds. We have 5, 4, 3, 2—we are jumping.
There are days Coach King asks one of us to meet me in the room beside my office, the room we use for team meetings before and after and between water polo games, where he grades the exercise logs for his day job, teaching the boys at our high school P.E. He tells another one of us come during your lunch break. We show up in skirts just above the knee, tight jeans, shorts that toe the line of our high school’s dress code, frayed halfway up the thigh. He sits on the creaky wood table in the corner and says come close, takes our shooting arm and runs his hands from our wrists to our elbows, from our elbows to our armpits. He raises our arm into an L and says, this is the shape you gotta make to score, then cups our breasts. We watch his dick point through his long khaki pants and up towards the tiled ceiling. If he does not touch us, we wish he would. Back home, we replay his hands tiktocking our hips in the pool, move the ghost of them up our sides and down our legs. We take the wide felted markers from our childhood craft shelf, the brushes from beside our bathroom sinks, the mirrors from our mothers’ vanities, and, laid in our beds, we slide them between our legs. One of us lies on the grass and uses the handle of a rake. We pull the pens out and push them in, pull the handles out and push them in, pull them out and the pressure builds so we push them in and think of Coach King. When we raise our hands, they are red. When we stand, the blood is a circled shock against our flowery sheets.
Seventh Length
The weak of us begin to fall back. These are the girls Coach King snaps up first. He circles us like a dolphin would a school of herring, running up and down the bulkhead that breaks the Olympic-sized swimming pool of our private school in half. His damp hair bounces with each stride. Faster, faster! he yells. We cannot be last. We cannot be the fish who breaks the shoal. If we do not finish the length in sixty seconds, the Dirty Dozen starts again from the beginning.
We know how to work together in the pool—pushing each other to swim faster, tread water for longer, throw the water polo ball further, harder, until we each can whip it across an entire pool length. Outside of water polo practice, we share essay prompts and math notes, spot each other in the weight room when we bench press and squat heavy weights. We sneak off campus during lunch break and drive the monkeypod-lined streets to Mānoa Marketplace, where we order Andy’s sandwiches, peeling multigrain bread off tuna salad as we memorize Coach King’s three-prong folder full of plays. We are friends. More than that, sisters. We tell each other we love each other when we leave the locker room to go home to our families.
As we near the other side, winter’s tradewinds push the backstroke flags hung above us, the pennants flipping like we once flipped ourselves over monkey bars back when we were in fourth grade. The pool’s chlorine water fingers our hair like breeze did when we were ten. Blood drums our ears, the whole world spinning, spinning, spinning.
Eighth Length
We are so hot. We are burning. When we dive into the water, its cold holds no relief. Our arms windmill without pulling anything. We cannot go again. We cannot. If we do, we will burn up or worse, sink.
But the feeling of not finishing is worse than this. It is the wet sand that sucks at our feet as we leave Makapuʻu. It is the crack of our molars as we chew ice cubes to lose weight. We strain ligaments in our shoulders as we push to the other end. We cannot fail Coach King. We cannot fail each other, as we have before. Our calves cramp, they tear as we continue kicking.
Ninth Length
When the last of us gets to the wall, she tries to pull herself up. She froggy kicks and falls. She hits her chin on the edge of the deck, where the rest of us perch, ready for the next whistle’s beep. The deck is slippery from rain, from the pool, from the sweat of our bodies. If she does not get up we will have to start again. We will her to get up, get up, get up, and finally she does, pivoting and diving just as Coach King blows.
Tenth Length
We will do anything to stay on the team.
Eleventh Length
One of us is not here. She will never be here again. A month ago, she took a bottle of pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet and swallowed them by the handful. Her mother found her on the couch, heart barely beating, and though we heard she was in the hospital we did not visit her. We did not speak of her. We did not know how to.
She was Coach King’s favorite. She was captain of the water polo team. She went to his office every lunch break for weeks. We would run into her on the pool deck as she stumbled down the steps—eyes ringed in red, saliva crusted white on her chin. We never asked how she was. We thought we wanted what she had. If we had only told our mothers, perhaps what Coach King’d done in those lunch breaks would not have died with him. Perhaps we would not be telling this story.
She came back only once, but every Dirty Dozen we think she might come again. Might watch us with her dad from the corner of the deck closest to the pool’s gate as her mom goes to our locker room and collects her four swimsuits, her pink goggles, her blue cap with the green polka dots we gave her for her seventeenth birthday. Her memory will haunt us through our teens, through our twenties, to our thirties, where, one day we will see her again, a son wrapped around her knees. And when we wave, she will wave back. She will walk across the playground as if we were seventeen again. As if she has forgiven us for not reporting Coach King. Our children will grow to be best friends. Will be at each other’s weddings. And we will spend all of those years waiting for her accusations, watching our children grow, hoping they will never know what we have known. At our daughters’ swim meet, when we jump at the whistle’s blow, she will be the one to offer an apology.
Twelfth Length
This is it. If we can make this we are done. We dive like broken arrows, splashing the deck, splashing each other, splashing Coach King. Heads down, we barrel to the other side like rocket start in Mario, we blow through the finish line, our heads slamming against the concrete. The whole world sloshes as we pull ourselves up, dazed. The sky is pouring now, drops falling heavy as silver quarters. We taste blood, and are reminded of the marks we left on our sheets. Of the scrubbing we did behind locked bathroom doors so our mothers would not find the stain of our lost innocence, the rust of our blood circling the drain, then fading. We remember Coach King in the back office, his teeth breaking the skin of our lips. How, for the rest of the day we sucked on the wound, a coppery reminder of what we thought was love. We think we can feel the blood running through our sinuses, molten, but it is just the taste of our fillings, of our red blood cells thinning. And though in that moment on the pool deck everything is spotted, everything is spinning, we grin. We are frenzied in our race to high-five Coach King.
Mariah Rigg is a third-generation Samoan-Haole settler who grew up on the illegally-occupied island of Oʻahu. Her work has been published in Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, etc., and has been supported by organizations such as VCCA, MASS MoCA, the Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, and Oregon Literary Arts. In 2023, Mariah’s chapbook, All Hat, No Cattle, was published as part of the Inch series at Bull City Press. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she edits fiction for TriQuarterly and creative nonfiction for Grist, A Journal of the Arts.