A Girl's Life Online by Katherine Tarbox Read Free Book Online

works.
    Even though I didn’t really understand leukemia or Rob’s case, I felt there was something serious going on. I wasn’t going to pretend that it was simple like the flu. That night I made it a point to talk to Karen about it. I wanted to be a good friend; however, Karen was insistent upon not talking about Rob. She had already gone over it and over it too many times. She was also tired of having to say everything would be okay, because then it made her question her belief that this was the truth. I told her I would do anything to help her. The best thing I could do, she said, was to wait for her to ask to talk.

    That fall our swim team began extensive underwater training. Practices were like military camp, or perhaps an extended version of pledging for a sorority. We did everything they asked us to do.
    One of the major goals in swimming is to keep the number of breaths you take to a minimum. Breathing slows you down. To train our bodies to need as little air as possible, we did a lot of underwater work. We would sprint freestyle for ten laps, until we were good and exhausted, and then do a flip turn followed by two fifty-yard underwater laps without a breath. If you came up to breathe, they made you do another underwater lap. I would struggle under the water, feeling like I was about to pass out, but refuse to surface. I always made it, but others got into trouble. Once the coaches had to pull a girl out of the water who was so blue they had to revive her.
    We all tried as hard as we could to comply with the coaches’ demands. We did everything they told us to do or else suffered verbal humiliation. Or worse. Worse happened to me on a fairly regular basis when one particular coach—Judy—came up from Florida to put us in line.
    Judy was a demanding, screaming kind of coach. She would sit by the side of the pool with a canister of racquet balls in her hand, waiting to throw them at us. If I was too slow, or took too many breaths, or swam the wrong combination of strokes, she would bean me with one of those balls. Right in the head. At the same time she would yell something like “You idiot! Do the combination!”
    You might think it was strange for the YMCA to allow this, or for a bunch of young girls to accept it, but it happened to almost everyone and after a while it just seemed normal. The chair incident was not normal, though. It happened late on a Friday night. Everyone was tired. I had had a lot of balls hit me that day. Judy was on the side of the pool near me, and she was getting more and more upset with something I was doing wrong. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her pick up a metal folding chair and come toward me.
    â€œKatie Tarbox!” she screamed. “Get your act together now!”
    She then threw the chair into the lane closest to me. I stopped, sort of shocked, and just looked at her. Everyone looked at her.
    â€œGo get the chair off the bottom of the pool,” she said. And that was it. Another girl helped me get the chair up from where it lay, eleven feet down, and no one said anything else. Even my parents. When I told them about it they laughed a little and said it was good the chair didn’t hit me. I think they believed I had done something to deserve what had happened. I know that they thought that Judy, who had been on the national team, was there to help us. She knew what she was doing, and it was all supposed to make us winners.
    It was typical New Canaan. Train. Compete. Succeed. And make it look easy. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, we received every bit of extra help that was available because our parents and coaches could afford to give it to us. The head coach of my team, Mrs. P., was extremely wealthy. Her husband was vice chairman of a huge company and had stock that did incredibly well. She didn’t really coach, but without her—and her husband’s money—we would have been nothing. Mrs. P. paid to