Annie – Eric Angal

September 20, 2025

The sound of raucous cheering coming from the Marine View High School swimming pool can mean only one thing: Annie is winning the race.
        The 500M is a different sort of race because it requires a very exact kind of metering: you cannot go too fast for fear of burning yourself out. But you can’t go too slow, either, or you’ll lose. Everyone is essentially pacing themselves against the girl in the next lane. But all lanes lead, eventually, through some disjointed game of telephone, to Annie. And she paces herself against no one. She knows her own rhythm.
        The 500M is, in Annie’s opinion, the most exacting race. It requires a clinical coldness in analysis. It requires a rather sober understanding of one’s own cardiovascular longevity. You’re in the water for, if you’re fast, around 5 to 5 and a half minutes. That’s a long time to swim quick.
        She’s on her last 100M leg. That’s four laps to-and-from the partition at the end of the pool. The girls of Marine View are on that partition now, a weighted fiberglass swimwall which divides the pool’s deep and shallow ends. It’s certainly not rated for the weight of two dozen high school girls jumping up and down on it hysterically, and it creaks wearily as if in protest.
        ‘Please stop doing that,’ the lifeguard says through his megaphone, but no one pays attention to him. No one can hear him over the din and clamor of the girls gone apeshit on the partition. When heard underwater, their shouting creates a sort of bassy thunder to which Annie can conjecture her own success. In reality, she wishes they would stop. This is her favorite part of the race—she wishes she could enjoy it for what it was.
        She loves the 500M. It creates within her an appreciation of her own perseverance that other races simply don’t have the lifespan to foment. That last 100M is a test of will, and there’s nothing else like it. If it was possible, she would live the entirety of her life in that last 100M just for the sickly thrill of it. That tug-of-war between body and mind. In the corners of her blackened vision, in her lung’s heave, in the lactic acid built up in her shoulders, her legs, she finds a backwards comfort. She is still in control.
        She tries, quite simply, not to breathe. Her coaches have always chastised her for this, this proclivity to hold her air. They say: you’re not doing yourself any good with that, Annie. You’re starving the muscles of oxygen. If you don’t give the muscles fuel then they won’t run like you want them to.
        But they do. They have and will. She makes it so they do. And in the lane next to her, some girl, some faceless and nameless sophomore from Mt. Rainier High School who took the bus here surrounded by a whole menagerie of her viperlike classmates, mean, evil girls, with their little schemes and their whispers and their snide little smiles, their smiles which meant nothing, their politics, who had always made fun of this girl for her braces, her uneven complexion, her height, her lankish figure, this poor girl who’s been a victim of the world her entire life, now realizes something: she has a chance to win.
        She has a chance to win, and the thought exhilarates her, and while keeping pace with Annie (who has a 10” reach disadvantage, against this girl) she thinks to herself about whether she screwed up the math. About whether she was maybe lapped and had forgotten about it. Or if maybe this was all just a cruel dream. But no, she thinks. No, she’s been counting the laps. The nauseating sensation of hope topples her axes for a second while it sinks in that this is really happening.
Annie plans to take a breath just before the flipturn. There’s 19 flipturns total. This is her 17th, which means she’s got 75 meters left. As she approaches the opposite end of the pool, she hears the cheers, the ululations again. She knows this means she’s winning. The other girls know what her best time is because it’s hung up on a marquee board which hangs over the west side of the pool. She’s the only girl on the board. All this must mean she’s getting close to beating that time, if she had to guess. She wonders by how much.
        The girl next to her is starting to tread serious water. She’s still got it in her to eke out a fast 100 and now it’s not even that. She wonders where all this energy came from and determines that maybe it’s because she’s picturing all the girls up in the stands, on the edges of the pool and on the fiberglass partition that bisects it, are cheering for her, now. Maybe they are. She’s close enough to Annie and it’s not like the other girls don’t know that she’s racing because she’s sure they’re talking shit about her, or they were before it became clear she had a puncher’s chance at winning this thing. She imagines these girls chanting her own name. She imagines crawling out onto the block to a throng of cheering ladies who are interested in being her friend.
        She’s never had it that easy. She’s had to work for everything she’s got. She’s always felt ugly, ugly and brace-faced and flat-chested and academically dull, and her complexion is rubicund (which her mother described as cheery, and which her enemies described as resultant from early-onset alcoholism, which made no sense—she’d never even been to a party before) and she wears ill-fitting clothes furnished from a lower-middle-class income, and her childhood was filled with long, friendless walks home from the bus. And then there was her height, which made her taller than boys, which made her feel as though her own body was stretching to escape her, somehow. Her height, which could now, for once, stand to aid her. She’s too awkward for basketball, lacks the hand-eye coordination. But swimming requires a delicate balance between birdishness and power which she seems, for the first time in her life, to have a feel for.
        Annie notices as this girl comes up in her peripherals. She doesn’t have time to look over, doesn’t have any idea who this lady is, didn’t seem to notice her even as they dived off the blocks together. But she sees her now. God, that’s a big girl, she thinks, or maybe it’s just the water.
        Don’t focus on her. Just focus on swimming. There she goes with that breathing thing again. The other side of the pool seems so far away when she takes off for the fresh 25. It’s somewhere close to the middle where she can really, for one or two seconds, hear her own inner monologue during races like this. Not out at the edges, where the partitions rumble with the footwork of her peers, where the shallow interstice between water and foam and air allows for the treble din of shouting, of music to come through. Somewhere in the middle she is the farthest from all of that, and can find a moment of isolation. A solace in the intensity. She is there now. Out of the corner of her eye she looks out into the adjoining lane.
        No, she’s a big girl. A lot bigger than Annie. And swimming like she’s got a gun to her head, Annie thinks. She’s got to step up the pressure. She pushes her legs into overtime and there’s a little mental trick she likes to use where she pretends she’s swimming an entirely different race. Instead of the 500M, it’s the 100M. And instead of having swam for 5 minutes already, instead of being close to dead tired and breathless, she’s fresh. She’s just dived off the block. All the pain and exertion up to this point have been illusory, a product of her mind.
        The tall girl isn’t going to give up. Not when she’s come this close, hell no, why would she. The water churns to foam from their combined effort, their bodies both distortions in the chemical blue. Water reflects the twinkling ceiling luminaires until they resemble giant electric eyes roiling in jubilee. Up top the girls stand barefoot on calcified chewing gum, on the travertine coping, unified in the spectacle and in quiet awe of the competition itself, because when they see Annie they know she is something else entirely. In the water, out of the water, there is something generational about her that you can’t quite put your finger on, but you just know she’s going somewhere not many could follow. The motion of the two girls is simultaneously violent, clipped, and yet also rehearsed and smooth the way only someone who is competent can make it look. Annie and this girl are both competent—more than that. They both possess the sort of power and raw capability you’d only find in a high-level athlete. Now it is very simple, very obvious that these two are the only ones really competing here: and who will win?
The girls timing the lanes all realize the import their thumbs now carry. Scholarships ride on those thumbs, on the quartz mechanisms of the stopwatches they operate. They lean forward in their foldup seats.
        Annie’s philosophy is that it’s mostly mental. Her and the tall girl are now neck and neck in their respective lanes, separated only by the flimsy buoyant orange-and-white dividers. Annie, more than anything, knows she will win. She has complete confidence in herself, unwavering, monomaniacal. It’s just that she has never been humbled in the water. She has been humbled in just about every other arena of life, but never in the water. And she knows that won’t change, cannot change—she will not lose today. Not in front of all of them. Not when she’s about to beat her own record.
        This other girl lives somewhere out in the opposite extreme. She has never won at anything, and therefore has no confidence, but also has nothing to lose. As they come back for The Final 25 Yards, as she flipturns in the foamdappled violence and her feet make contact with the partition and jet her smoothly off into the opposite direction in a stunning feat of inertial opprobrium, her mind is scrambled. She has no rules for her own breathing other than what her coaches had taught her, no special ritual or jedi mindtrick to ease her tortured muscles, to soothe her frayed nerves. She does not even particularly like swimming. The water makes her uncomfortable.
        But she is good at it. No one respects her anyway, though, because of the way she carries herself. Because of the way she looks, she thinks. She can’t hold the eyes of others. The boy she took to Homecoming, she could see the way he looked at the other girls. She thinks: I will never be looked at like that. And she’s mad at herself for being upset about it in the first place, because if there’s anything she knows it’s that a woman is more than her appearance, and it confuses her but also perpetuates in her a hatred shared by all who are not blessed with facial symmetry, with gentle features and supple breasts and perfect skin: a quiet but profound hatred for the beautiful. And Annie, she is beautiful. At any given moment in this girl’s life she would be destined to lose to someone like this. Because this girl believes that in life there are winners and losers, and she’s a textbook loser. Nothing was ever handed to her. This certainly isn’t being handed to her either, she thinks, but she’s so close. If she really wants it she can take it. That’s what it is: it’s taking something. No one else is gonna take it for you! she thinks to herself. But her legs are shaking and she’s sweating with exertion, can feel herself sweating even in the water. She needs to pee and her shoulders are dead tired and her neck hurts and she can’t see well out of her goggles and every racking breath feels like she’s breathing the last oxygen left in the world and there’s no more after it and her lungs burn with the urge to breathe again but she can’t afford to slow down. This is the big difference between her and Annie, is that Annie can and does relish operating in that theatre of pain. She enjoys the slow struggle, the little tortures: it’s where she’s in her element. To her it feels natural. There’s no cool head to keep, it’s not a problem, it’s just a fun challenge. Annie sees this giant and funny-looking bitch crashing forward in the water as the girl accelerates to that final dead sprint and Annie thinks to herself that she knows this woman even though she’s never seen her before. Everyone trying to take, and from her.
        She kicks into high gear. One last breath is going to have to suffice between here and there, and she takes it in quick with one puckered mouth’s corner against the edge of the water, so quick you wouldn’t even see her breathing, in fact—and her coach is now screaming, rosacea-stricken from the sidelines, for her to BREATHE MORE GOD DAMN IT, ANNIE, he doesn’t see that she has, and he’s whiteknuckling the flimsy hollow frame of the foldup chair he’s standing behind looking as though he’s dangerously close to chucking the thing in the water, and she can’t hear him—she’s in the middle of the pool. Locked in that stasis with herself and this other, this cunt who thinks she can win—no, sorry, that won’t be happening, I’m sorry—and there she goes—
        They’re hand-to-hand, neck-and-neck, with everyone off of their asses and either half-standing or straightup leaning to see what’s going to happen—hell, even her perennially unenthusiastic boyfriend is peering curiously up and out of his seat in the stands to see who’s where, and the tall girl, she’s so excited that she almost pisses herself—the way she sees it, she is winning, just by a tiny bit, in that one second’s leeway she takes to turn her head to the side for a breath she can see Annie faltering just a fraction of a second behind her, and Oh my God, is this it? Is it happening? And the wall of the pool, that godforsaken wall which now looks blessed, its nacreous mosaic tile looking sort of inviting, sort of comforting, grows ever closer, with each labored stroke, with each shuffling kick, one more breath, just one more and it’s there, and then—oh, and then it’s there, and the girl pulls her head up out of the water and turns around and in a kabuki display of horror realizes Annie is already there, pulling her goggles off, and that can only mean one thing, and it’s confirmed with a look, a single look from Annie, a second’s glance, narrowed upturned eyes and a small smile in itself an act of vituperation, of invective more singular and delivered more directly than any whispered comment, any scrawled note passed around in class, and then it’s lost in the noise, in the commotion of cheering girls, of thundering feet, of applause:
        I am better than you.
        Annie lifts herself onto the blocks to the sound of her own name, smiling, varnished from the water, beautiful.