Poolside Proof

Tania Howell was thirty-four years old and she had been sitting in the Wagga Wagga airport lounge for four hours, and in that time she had read the same departure board eleven times. Cancelled. Cancelled. Cancelled. The storm had come through in the afternoon and knocked out half the terminal's power, and somehow the basement had flooded, which sounded fake to her, airports were not supposed to have basements that mattered, but here she was, standing in a carpeted bunker with a vending machine that only had orange Fanta.

And the worst part, the actual worst part, was not the Fanta. The worst part was that of all the stranded travelers in this building, the universe had seated her next to Franklin Jarecki.

"Twelve years," she said to her phone, mostly to herself. "I haven't seen him in twelve years and he still smells like chain grease and cheap deodorant."

Franklin, thirty-six now, lean as a whip and twice as annoying, had been her nemesis since first year at university, sixteen years ago. Debate club, rowing club, that stupid trivia night where he'd buzzed in early on a question about coral reefs and been wrong. Wrong! She'd carried that win for over a decade. She'd dated a cellist for two years when she was twenty-seven, and even then Franklin had somehow come up, because the cellist had played a piece Franklin once claimed to like, and Tania had spent the whole concert furious. No contact since. No contact, and now this.

"Plane's not coming, Howell," Franklin said, appearing beside her with two plastic cups of lounge coffee. He set one next to her without asking, which was exactly like him. "Ground crew walked off. Something about water in the switch room."

"I heard."

"So we're carpooling or what? I've got a booking at a motel. Sunbird, out on the highway. They had one room left, two beds, and I'll be honest, I already took it."

"You took the last room?"

"There's a trucker and an elderly couple ahead of us, apparently. Whole town's full because of the flight. I figured you'd rather share than sleep on that orange carpet."

She would not rather share. She also had a presentation at nine in the morning in a town two hundred kilometers away, and the last shuttle bus had left at six. "Fine," she said, and hated how fast she said it. "But you're paying for the wine."

The Sunbird Motel was low and flat and tan, the kind of place that existed purely so trucks had somewhere to stop. The pool sat in a cracked lot behind the office, lit by one buzzing floodlight, weeds coming up through the concrete in neat little green rows like the weeds were also paying for a room. The elderly couple nodded at them from under the awning. The trucker said nothing at all, which Tania respected.

At the counter the manager, a woman named Natalia according to her name tag, said the bar closed at eight, so Franklin bought four little bottles of red wine and a bag of salt and vinegar chips, and Tania hauled her proper suitcase, a hard shell with working wheels, into room six.

"Wow," Tania said, watching Franklin follow her in with the strangest piece of luggage she had ever seen him carry. It looked like a cello case. A deluxe cello case, padded and shaped and expensive, with a name tag and everything. "Since when do you play the cello? What's in the big blue coffin?"

"Instruments, actually, since you ask," Franklin said. "Delicate ones. Some people work for a living."

"Open it."

"No."

"Open it or I'll assume it's full of Branston pickle."

He sighed and unlatched it, and inside, nestled where a cello's neck would go, was a bottle of whiskey, three pairs of swim trunks, and a solar charger. That was it. A thirty-six-year-old man had carried a fake cello case across the country to smuggle alcohol and shorts.

"You absolute idiot," she said, laughing before she could stop herself. "You had a cello case made for whiskey?"

"Custom job. Guy in Melbourne does them. Best money I ever spent." He held up the bottle. "Also, wine was settled first, we agreed, so this is a bonus. You want ice?"

"There's no ice machine, Franklin, the bar closed, we're drinking warm whiskey from a fake cello case in a motel called the Sunbird, and I'm presenting to a council committee in fourteen hours."

"So a normal Tuesday."

It was, annoyingly, a little funny. They took the two chairs by the window, plastic ones with the seats cracked, and he poured whiskey into the wine bottles' caps because there were no glasses, and the room smelled like dust and pool chlorine, and outside the floodlight buzzed on and on over that empty cracked lot.

The trouble with whiskey, Tania thought about forty minutes in, was that it made her competitive in directions she had not planned. They had been arguing about bravery for twenty minutes, starting with the bike tour he did at twenty-four and circling back, the way arguments do, to the coral reef incident.

"You buzzed early and you were WRONG," she said, jabbing the cap at him.

"Bold of you to open with that in year twelve of our rivalry."

"Sixteen. It's been sixteen, do the math."

"Whatever. Point is, you've never done anything actually brave. You've done prepared brave. You've done curated brave. Museum brave."

"And what's your brave? Cycling across a desert with a support van?"

"Sure, and also dares. My mates and I used to do dares all the time. Standing on things. Swimming across things. Cold things. You'd last ten seconds."

"I would NOT last ten seconds!"

"Prove it," he said, and then he went quiet, and she watched him get that look, the reef-buzzer look, the idea arriving face first. "Okay. Okay, listen. The pool. Nobody's out there. It's dead flat dark except the one light. You go stand at the edge, no clothes, for three minutes, by your watch. I watch from this window. Then we swap. Last one to chicken loses the whole rivalry, done, settled, forever. No prizes, no money, just the right to say I told you so."

Tania put the cap down. Her heart picked up and she told it to settle. "You're insane."

"Probably."

"There's a trucker."

"He's asleep, I heard his door shut at seven. And the old couple are on the far side facing the office. And if anyone does come out, you walk to the chair by the door like you're going for a swim, who cares."

"Rules," she said, because if she was going to be ridiculous she was going to be precise about it, and this was where she got her teeth in. "Three minutes exactly, timed on my watch, both of us watching the same clock. No touching. No talking. No hiding anything with your hands, that's cheating. No comments after, ever, this dies in this room. And whoever flinches, covers up, or walks off before three minutes loses, and the loser concedes the rivalry out loud and never mentions coral reefs again. Also, either of us can say stop and the whole thing ends, no questions."

"Deal," Franklin said instantly. "Coral reefs gone forever. God, yes."

"And I go first."

"Fine, you go first, you've got more to lose anyway, you're the curated one." He was already grinning, picking up the bottle. "One more cap of courage before you suit up?"

"Two," said Tania Howell, and went to find her watch.

The bathroom at the Sunbird Motel had a mirror with a crack running through it and a light that buzzed the same way the floodlight did, and Tania stood in front of it for a full minute wondering how she had gotten here. Thirty-four years old, museum curator, two publications, and she was about to strip off in a motel bathroom to win an argument that started when she was eighteen. Well. Precision, then. She set her watch on the sink edge where she could see it, took a breath, and got on with it.

She folded everything. Sweater, shirt, trousers, bra, knickers, all folded on the closed lid of the toilet in a neat stack, because if she was going to stand naked in a weed-cracked parking lot she was at least going to have tidy clothes to come back to. The window in the bathroom was tiny and frosted, thank god, and the main room's window faced the pool, which meant she had to cross it. She pulled the curtain half shut first.

"Two minutes prep?" Franklin called from his chair. "I've packed faster than that for a tour."

"Quality takes time," she yelled back, and then, quieter, "Oh god, okay, okay."

She walked across the room in her own skin, past the curtain gap where she knew his eyes were, opened the door, and stepped out into the night. The air was hot and dry and moved against her all at once, and it was a lot. The floodlight buzzed overhead, yellow and hard