“You think?” Annabelle asked.

Jeremy shrugged. “Also . . . It’s probably silly—”

Annabelle cut him off. “I’m sure it’s not.”

It couldn’t be, if Jeremy was thinking it. All of Jeremy’s thoughts were smart.

“I was thinking if I showed my dad that I . . .”

But before Jeremy could finish, someone was calling Annabelle’s name, and there was Colette at the side of the pool, holding a red and white lane line.

“Hey, Annabelle! Come help me get set up?”

Annabelle looked back at Jeremy, who was flicking his straw with a fingernail.

“Bananabelle!” Mitch whispered, angling his head toward Colette.

“Sorry,” Annabelle told Jeremy as she stood up.

She’d been apologizing to Jeremy a lot lately. But he shrugged and pointed to his full carton of mozzarella sticks.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Go ahead.”

Over by the pool, Colette handed Annabelle one end of the first lane line, and Annabelle hooked it in on the near side of the pool while Colette went around to the other side to hook the end she still held. Then Annabelle walked around to take one end of the next line from her.

“Did I ever tell you the story of my first college meet?” Colette asked.

“I know you were an all-American,” Annabelle said. Mitch had told her that.

Colette laughed. “Eventually, yeah. But I’m surprised I ever got to race in another meet after my first one.”

She handed Annabelle the end of the next line and raised her voice so Annabelle could hear as she carried it back across the pool.

“It was against Stanford. Big rivalry for Berkeley, where I went. I was the biggest recruit. Pressure was on. And you know what I did?”

“What?”

“Lost my balance off the blocks on the 200-meter free and fell right in the water. Talk about a humiliating DQ. I didn’t even get to swim my race.”

Annabelle was kneeling down to pull the second line straight enough so that she could hook it in, but that made her pause. She’d seen swimmers lose their balance and fall in before, obviously, but it was usually only the least experienced swimmers who did it. Colette had done that when she was a Division I swimmer in college?

“At least you didn’t swim your whole race as hard as you could and convince yourself you’d actually done great,” Annabelle called across the pool. “And somebody else didn’t have to swim her whole leg even though she knew it wouldn’t count.”

Colette came back around toward Annabelle, and she didn’t bother to bring the third lane line with her.

“You did do great,” Colette said. “You swam your heart out on that leg, and you kept pace with a girl who’s three years older than you and twice your size. There wasn’t a single person at that meet who wasn’t impressed watching you.”

Annabelle pictured the way Kayla and Ruby had stood there, barely cheering for Elisa. And the way they’d all tried to make her feel better after the race because they’d felt sorry for her. They definitely hadn’t seemed impressed.