Ann Packer - Swim Back to Me

ALSO BY ANN PACKER

Songs Without Words

The Dive from Clausens Pier

Mendocino and Other Stories

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2011 by Ann Packer

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Excerpts from this work were originally published in the following: Molten in Narrative Magazine; Her Firstborn in Before: Short Stories about Pregnancy from Our Top Writers, edited by Emily Franklin and Heather Swain (New York: Overlook Press, 2006); and Things Said or Done in Zoetrope: All-Story.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.: Lyrics from Without a Trace, words and music by David Pirner, copyright 1992 by WB Music Corp. (ASCAP) and LFR Music (ASCAP). All rights administered by WB Music Corp. (Publishing) and Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. (Print). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

Chris Bauermeister, Adam Pfahler, and Blake Schwarzenbach: Lyrics from Save Your Generation and Fireman, lyrics by Blake Schwarzenbach, music by Chris Bauermeister, Adam Pfahler, and Blake Schwarzenbach. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Gorno Music: Lyrics from Add It Up, written by Gordon Gano, copyright 1980 by Gorno Music (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission of Gorno Music (administered by Alan N. Skiena, Esq.).

Hal Leonard Corporation: Lyrics from Swim Back to Me, words and music by Carla Bozulich and Kevin Fitzgerald, copyright 1997 by EMI Virgin Songs, Inc. and Milk Pal Music. All rights for EMI Virgin Songs, Inc. and Milk Pal Music controlled and administered by EMI Virgin Songs, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Lyrics from Tame, words and music by Charles Thompson, copyright 1989 by Rice and Beans Music. All rights controlled and administered by Songs of Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Hal Leonard Corporation and Jessy Greene Publishing: Lyrics from Trashman in Furs, words and music by Carla Bozulich, Bill Tutton, and Jessy Greene, copyright 1997 by EMI Virgin Songs, Inc., Milk Pal Music, and Jessy Greene Publishing. All rights controlled and administered by EMI Virgin Songs, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation and Jessy Greene Publishing.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Packer, Ann, [date]
Swim back to me / Ann Packer. 1st ed.
p. cm.
This is a Borzoi book.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59539-3
I. Title.
PS3616.A33S95 2011
813.6dc22 2010051792

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson

v3.1

To George

S eptember 1972. It was the first week of eighth grade, and I sat alone near the back of the school bus: a short, scrawny honor-roll boy with small hands and big ears. The route home meandered through Los Altos Hills, with its large houses sitting in the shadows of old oak trees and dense groves of eucalyptus. Finally we came down out of the hills and arrived in Stanford, where the last twenty or so of us lived, in houses built close together on land the University leased to its faculty. A couple of stops before mine, a clump of kids rose and moved up the aisle, and thats when I saw her, a new girl sitting up near the front.

To my surprise, she shouldered her backpack at my stop. I waited until she was off the bus and then made my way up the aisle, keeping my eyes away from Bruce Cavanaugh and Tony Halpern, whod been my friends back in elementary school. Down on the bright sidewalk, she was headed in the direction I had to go, and I followed after her, walking slowly so I wouldnt overtake her. She was small-boned like me, with thick red hair spilling halfway down her back and covering part of her backpack, which was decorated with at least a dozen McGovern buttons, rather than the usual one or two. There was even a Nixon button with a giant red X drawn over his ugly face.

She stopped suddenly and turned, and I got my first glimpse of her face: pale and peppered with freckles. Who are you? she said.

Sorry. I was afraid she thought I was following her when I was just heading home.

She came forward and offered me her hand. Hi, SorryIm Sasha. Or maybe I should say Im New. We can call each other Sorry and New, and then when we get to know each other better we can switch to something else. Shy and Weird, maybe.

I had never met anyone who talked like this, and it took me a moment to respond. My names Richard.

She rolled her eyes. I know that. I didnt mean who are you whats your nameI meant who are you who are you. Your name is Richard Appleby and you live around the corner from me, in the house with all the ice plant.

Now I got it: she was part of the family renting the Levines house. Teddy Levine was spending the year at the American Academy in Rome, and the Levine kids were going to go to some Italian school and come back fluent and probably strange. The Jacksons had spent a year in London, and afterward Helen Jackson had been such an oddball her parents had taken her out of public school.

The girls hand was still out, and though Id never shaken hands with another kid before, I held mine out for her, and she pumped it up and down. She had blue-gray eyes with very light lashes, and a long, pointy noise.

Sasha Horowitz, she said. Happy to know you. I was waiting for you to come over, but its just as well we met like thisif youd come over Idve probably been a freak. Plus my parents wouldve co-opted the whole thing. Do your parents do that? Co-opt everything? When I was really little my dad would always try to play with me and my friendshed give us rides on his back like a horse, and hed kind of buck sometimes, and one time a friend of mine fell off and broke her wrist. Her parents were really overprotectiveshe was never allowed to come over again. Still looking at me, Sasha shrugged off her backpack and ran her fingers through her heavy, carrot-colored hair. She gathered it into a thick ponytail and secured it with a rubber band from her wrist. She said, There, thats better. So do you love San Francisco? We had a picnic in Golden Gate Park on Saturday, and we saw a guy on an acid tripmy little brother thought he was in a play. The only thing is, Im expecting to be miserable about missing winter.

Are you from somewhere cold? I said. Did you have snow?

New Haven. And God, yeswe had mountains of it. It was a huge pain in the ass. Do you want to come over? You should, because my motherll ask me to tell her about school otherwise and I really dont feel like talking to her.

She stood there looking at me, waiting for me to answer, and I thought of my mother, in her shabby apartment across the bay in Oakland, where she had lived alone for the last seven months, an exile of her own making. I looked at my watch. In two and a half hours my father would bike home from his office on campus, and after hed had a drink we would sit down to a dinner that Gladys, our new housekeeper, had left us in the oven. Telling him about school was my job, just as asking about it was his.