The sensations that were moving around in her chest were confusing. Just a moment ago she’d felt full of excitement. She’d been happy and giving it her best in the pool. The relay session wasn’t a real competition and she wasn’t a real athlete. It was just a little fun with her classmates. School itself had been mostly uneventful – so far, the 4th grade hadn’t offered anything remotely interesting. But she loved it when they had gym, art or swim class. Playing around in the water seemed to her, to be what they needed more of on the timetable.

“You let down the whole frigging team!” The woman was bellowing at her while making wide movements with her arms, presumably to signify the magnitude of her disappointment. “Tom had left you such a wide lead and you just threw it away!”

Sara was dripping wet in her pale blue swimming costume. She’d just completed her lap, tagged her team mate and gotten out of the water. She wasn’t cold, as the temperature at the indoor facility was maintained at a comfortable level. She tried to concentrate on the happy sounds of her classmates laughing and cheering a few steps away. The bright lights reflected on the water’s surface to form a beautiful show. She kept her eyes lowered to the coloured tiles at her feet. Beige and blue. She thought those might be the tile colours for all the swimming pools she had ever been in. She briefly wondered if this colour coordination were a strict requirement from the City.

Sara was rudely brought back to the present when the woman all but hissed: “That’s why I never want you on my team! You are useless!” The woman had gone red in the face and her jaw was tightly set. Her grey eyes were trained on Sara and carried a menacing intensity that Sara could make out from the corner of her eye. She wore a tight light blue t-shirt and a pair of loose fitting navy blue shorts. “Woman” was probably the wrong term for her. Tanya was one of a pair of swim instructors they had for swim class and she was just out of high school. Jerry, the other instructor, was a few feet away cheering his team on, oblivious to the spectacle. 

If Sara had had the spine to reply, she would have said that she never wanted to be on Tanya’s team either. Jerry let them have fun. He was cool. But she knew better than to talk back to Tanya. She had on a previous occasion witnessed Tanya berating another girl to the point of tears. Never the boys. Tanya never said anything to the boys and never said anything within the earshot of other adults. It was like being in a jail cell without bars. Sara wondered if Tanya had had a failing career in professional swimming. That might explain her strange behaviour.

Being around Tanya did something to her that she couldn’t really explain. Her chest was tight, her face was hot and her ears were ringing. It was a little difficult to breathe. Her lip started to tremble but she didn’t want her classmates to see her crying. She didn’t want Tanya to see her crying. In that instant, she wanted to be anywhere else.

Maybe she’d tell her mother she was sick the next time there was swim class so she could skip it altogether.