One Saturday when he was busy, Mom had made a big thing about taking Annabelle to brunch with her new “friend,” and the friend turned out to be Mitch. There was a make-your-own waffle station at the restaurant, and Mitch made a whipped cream smiley face on Annabelle’s waffle, with blueberries inside the eyes and strawberries for the mouth. And he made Mom laugh so hard she snorted a little bit, and then she covered her whole face with her napkin until he reached over and squeezed her hand.

After they ate, Mom and Annabelle went to their car and Mitch went to his. But before he opened the door, he blew two kisses: one to Mom in the front seat, and one to Annabelle in the back. He’d been doing it ever since.

But Annabelle suddenly realized: She couldn’t even remember how she used to say goodbye to her dad. Before he “dropped out of the picture,” as her mom always put it. Had they hugged? Kissed on the cheek?

Dad had been “in the picture” for way more years than he’d been out of it. They must have said goodbye thousands of times. How did she just not know?

She caught herself biting her bottom lip and heard Mom’s voice in her head saying, “Honey, don’t bite.” A group of older girls she sort of recognized laughed as they walked in from the parking lot.

One of them had driven there, she realized. Some of her new teammates were old enough to drive. She paused inside the gate. It was hard enough to feel like she fit in with the other kids on the middle school team, with all their inside jokes from school and the way they imitated the boarding students from the Academy. How would she possibly fit in with high schoolers?

“Hey, Annabelle!” Doug, the guy at the sign-in desk, said. “The pool’s over there!”

Annabelle forced out a laugh and made herself start moving again. Head up, shoulders back. Carrying herself with confidence, like Mitch would tell her to.

When she came out of the locker room wearing her suit, Connor was joking around with a bunch of other guys and he didn’t notice her. But Kayla waved her over, and then Colette gathered everybody around, and suddenly practice was starting.

Annabelle’s hands shook as she twisted her hair into a bun and stretched her swim cap over it, and it took three tries to get her goggles over her head. But as she pushed off the wall and glided through her first warm-up lap, she was able to block out the whole world each time she put her head underwater. And since she couldn’t hear anything except the muffled splashing of her own arms and legs, she forgot about what it meant that Colette had assigned her to lane 6 with girls going into ninth grade who were okay swimmers but not great, and she forgot how fast the girls in lane 1 were probably swimming, and she even almost forgot that Connor Madison was there, only a few lanes away, with his long arms slicing through the surface of the water.