Ashley grew up in central California—not the glamour of LA or the wealth of the Bay Area, but in a modest neighborhood, what she called the armpit of the state. Close to potential, to money, but never there. Her dad left when she was eight. Things got bad, Ashley said, though she didn’t specify what happened, and Mara didn’t ask. But she smiled when she talked about the pool.

It started for convenience. Ashley’s mom needed somewhere to bring her and her sister in the summers, to leave them while she worked at a nursing home, and so each morning she gave them ten dollars and dropped them at the community pool. After the stress of home, it was a balm. The smell of chlorine in the locker room, wet feet on tile. The women around her, chatting and changing, lifting skirts off dry legs, pulling jeans over wet ones. The pool complex was huge. There was a kiddie area, where toddlers in diapers splashed and screamed, and past that a curved, deep pool with cement islands you could climb onto and jump back off again, and beyond it the diving boards and the lap lanes, where the swimmers were serious and fast. Ashley had a favorite cement island, and most of the time it was hers alone, at least until afternoon when other kids poured in from the public day camps. From there she could watch the swimmers, the real swimmers, as long as she wanted. At lunch she bought churros for fifty cents, or corn dogs for a buck fifty, and always waited a dutiful forty minutes before getting back in the water. And as the summers passed, as her sister started tanning instead of playing mermaids, flirting instead of cannonballing, still Ashley watched the swimmers swim.

She was a shy kid. She did not approach them. But one of the swimmers came to her. His name was Jake, and he’d been on the team at Cal. He offered to teach her for free.

Mara wrapped her fist around her microphone, covering it, and lowered her voice. “Was he a creep?”

“What do you mean?”

“A creep. Like, was he into you because you were a little girl.”

“He taught me to swim,” Ashley said. As if that was the answer.

And so each afternoon, Jake taught her to swim. Showed her how to kick from her hips, pushing the water hard. How to keep her body close to the surface. She liked butterfly best—the explosiveness of it, the precision. Leaving ripples, whirlpools, in her wake.

Soon she lived for swimming. That feeling of power in the water. She found workouts online, strength training, low-sugar foods to eat. Her freshman year of high school, she made varsity. By the next season, she was ranked in the state. And it changed things. Not just the swimming, but being a swimmer. How people saw her; how she started to see herself. It gave her a person to be. Someone important, noticed. And everything was easier when she excelled.