SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

DAY 4.2 (THREE NIGHT'S BEFORE THE WAVE)

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

T

onight was the night before Thanksgiving. I twisted in bed. Endless thoughts about Brett haunted me.

No man was more misunderstood than Brett Stevens. He was the quarterback, the cool guy, the bully, the C student, the inspirer of his team, the son with immense potential according to his mom and the son who was never good enough according to his father. He went to the gym every day during and after school. He ate plain broccoli, flavorless chicken, beef and sour fish cod every day. And that was his diet. He was a meathead and his girlfriend Brenda would beg for love but push him away whenever he wanted to connect more deeply.

I couldn't stop thinking about this morning's funeral gathering. How Travis Gibbs stayed in the pool house sulking in the dark all night. How Brett Stevens went home for the night and wished Travis Gibbs all the best, apologizing again for his mom's passing away.

Travis Gibbs thanked him and apologized that Brett's mom, Mrs. Stevens, who was Mrs. Gibbs's best friend and yoga/shopping/girls-night-out sister, lost her best friend. Brett Stevens looked sad, and mentioned that his mom was not herself the past two nights.

Brett Stevens's mom could not sleep, could not eat, and had hardly talked for the past 72 hours. She was pale and losing weight and Brett Stevens felt bad just to be in the house. Which was sad because, while Brett's sports-professional father was neglectful and disapproving of Brett's lack of work ethic, Brett's mom was his support and backbone to balance his father out. But ever since Mrs. Gibbs's death, Mrs. Stevens was now a ghost in the house, and the big, tough and mighty gym buff Brett Stevens was no longer himself. Jack mentioned to me that Brett Stevens's social media location point was making circles around our town in the dead of nights, meaning that Brett Stevens was driving around restlessly at midnight through the streets in a heated, sad rage.

Brett Stevens gave the façade that everything was fine to his football teammates, to all the girls who admired him, and to all the kids who feared him and kept their distance. But now Brett's feelings were showing, and even I, someone who was never sympathetic toward jocks, was feeling for him. He was under a lot of pressure from his dad, his coaches, his peers and himself. I felt bad for him as I watched him walk home after leaving the Gibbs funeral gathering.

And finally, I'll be frank with you. The reason I'm so sympathetic toward Brett Stevens is because—and I would never confess this to Jack—I used to have the biggest crush on Brett Stevens. Sure, he was a jerk, according to his reputation, but he was a stud. I liked his hair, his clothes, his muscles, his abs—I liked seeing him workout at the gym when I would pass him by, (Jack never went to the gym with me, he just did pushups and ran long distance), and I'll admit, I would stay longer at the gym just to admire Brett's figure as Brett would slowly progress from 30 to 50 to 70 pull-ups at a time. I don't know what it was, but I would salivate and forget all about my relationship with Jack during the entirety of my minutes at the gym—now of course, I would remember Jack the instant I snuck out of the gym unseen by Brett Stevens, and I would remember that Jack was my boyfriend and about how much better it would be to live with a sensitive guy like Jack than a stereotypical bonehead like Brett Stevens. But then again, maybe I was being too hard on Brett, in my mind-- because like I mentioned above, Brett Stevens was the most misunderstood young man in the whole school, and maybe the whole town.

Brett did believe in something though, and that was his future, and becoming the best athlete he could be, and he had a goal to prove his dad wrong for the way Mr. Stevens treated Brett all these years. Brett Stevens had his demons, and I think his biggest demon of all was hiding his demons so well that nobody knew he had them, and that he needed help.

So I considered that opening up a friendship with Brett amid my current company of Jack, George and Travis, wouldn't be such a bad idea. Brett needed real friends now. Brett needed a family, and I was starting to see how his family could naturally mold into a surrogate family of us.

I asked Jack if he thought I should invite Brett and his mom to my family's Thanksgiving dinner. Raising his eyebrows, praising my open-mindedness, Jack said I would just need to ask my parents.