Bubbles by Abby Cooper

Author:Abby Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

20

THE POOL

We went into the pool area and looked around. Aside from a small group of kids and a lady in a fancy swim cap, it was pretty empty.

“So … what now?” Kaya twirled a huge chunk of hair.

“Cannonball?”

We both shot Rafael a look.

“Or we could sit.” He pointed to the edge near the shallow end.

Kaya took a deep breath. “Sitting would be good.”

So we plopped down by the shallow end of the pool, the three of us in a row with me in the middle. I breathed in that weird/awesome Rafael-y smell, feeling like a major creeper. But there was something calming about it. Kaya needed jokes to relax, and I needed to creepily inhale the scent of a boy who probably needed to start wearing deodorant.

I looked at Kaya on my other side. Something was different about her today but I couldn’t figure out what it was, aside from her new online friendship with Viv and her hilarious shoe-tying/going-flying story from after spin class. It wasn’t that. It was something in the way she looked. Her hair was long and flowy like normal, and her braces were still there, still the same light pink color they’d been all week. So what was it?

Aha! I knew what it was. Kaya didn’t have leg hair anymore.

It might have been a weird thing to notice. Maybe it was strange to be looking at my best friend’s legs this closely, or at all. But that’s what was different. I checked her arms, just to make sure. Even in the dim pool lights, I could see the thin black lines sprouting every which way. But there weren’t any on her legs. They looked shinier and smoother than the kitchen table right after we cleaned up from dinner.

I glanced down at my own short, stubby legs. I knew I was shorter than both of them, but my legs were seriously little compared to Kaya’s, which were long and thin and dipped way far down into the pool. Plus, mine had clumps—clumps!—of brownish hair going in every direction. Ew! How had I never noticed this before? My legs were so gross. No wonder Kaya was better at spinning; she didn’t have like a thousand pounds of leg hair weighing her down. And no wonder Rafael was looking at her like she’d been declared an Olympic swimmer. She was turning into a supermodel while I was turning into a grizzly bear.

“Well, this has been some great sitting,” Rafael said after we’d all been quiet for a few minutes. “Cannonball time?”

He was definitely getting antsy, and so was Kaya. Maybe I was, too. But all I knew about what to do next was that it probably shouldn’t be a cannonball if we didn’t want to send Kaya running away screaming.

“Maybe we should practice kicking,” I said. “That’s a pretty important part of swimming.”

“Yeah!” Kaya shot Rafael a humongous grin, like it had been his idea and not mine. I made a face, but no one seemed to notice.

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