What Was Underneath
By June, Karim had a different shape.
He was at the library two afternoons a week. He had started swimming again, on his own terms — three mornings, in a small public pool, no coach, no clock, no race. He had taken up running, which he had always secretly liked but never had time for. He had picked up a saxophone from his school's instrument cupboard, after the music teacher had asked, gently, whether anyone wanted to learn an instrument as part of the activity-week programme. He was bad at the saxophone. He liked being bad at it. It was, he discovered, an interesting feeling — being a beginner at something — that he had not had in eight years.
He had also lost touch with most of the swim team. Lior had eventually come round, four months in, and said he was sorry for shouting. They had had a long, awkward, real conversation in Lior's kitchen. They were not close in the way they had been. They were friendly. Lior was on track for the squad. Karim was, very deliberately, not. They had taken different paths. The friendship had not survived the divergence intact, but it had survived in a smaller, gentler form.
His grandmother, who lived two streets over and who had always been the family's plain-speaker, asked Karim in May, over tea: "Do you regret it?"
Karim thought about this for a long time.
"Some days. Most days, no. I — I think I needed to find out who I was underneath