Dad tells me we are going to implement the Marshall Plan, which, if you know your American history, is a pretty good pun. Our Marshall Plan is simple. If you see Rich, or if he calls the house, dial 911. There is a restraining order on him for Alicia and the kids, as well as for us. “If I know Rich Marshall,” he says, “he’ll know where everyone is by this time tomorrow night. Whether he comes around depends on how much jail time he wants to log.”

It’s a pretty wild evening, with Heidi so glad to see her mother and all three kids fighting for Alicia’s time while her fuse smolders and she tries not to blow up at them in front of my parents. Mom seems to understand she’s on a short leash and helps with Heidi, while Dad distracts the boys, who I call Thing One and Thing Two. This is probably the first time Heidi’s been in a house with her mother and brothers where she’s been afforded equal footing, and she’s taking full advantage. By the time the kids are in bed, Alicia looks exhausted, and she steps out onto the front porch for a cigarette. I see her standing there, back to the door, a curl of smoke winding its way lazily toward the porch light. I pull on my coat and step out, dusting the skiff of snow off the porch swing to sit.

“Hey.”

She doesn’t turn. “Hey.”

“Guess we’re going to be family here for a while.”

“I guess.” She sounds cold, protected. “You okay with it?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

She still doesn’t turn around. “You know, Rich and all. Heidi.”

I say, “Heidi and I are tight.”

“I know, T. J. That’s my point.” She sounds irritated.

“Could I ask you something?”

“You can ask.”

“What keeps you with a guy like Rich?”

She is quiet.

“I mean, you don’t love him, right?”

“What do you know about love? You’re a kid.”

“Yeah, Alicia. I’m maybe five or six years younger than you.”

She takes a drag on the cigarette and finally turns to face me. In many ways, she’s a lot more than five or six years older than me. She says, “You must hate me.”

“I don’t hate you. I just don’t get it about Rich, and about Heidi.”

“I don’t either, T. J. I know what they say in my therapy groups, and what my counselor says. They say I feel worthless, and I have to prove the things to him that I could never prove to my dad. They say I have an overwhelming need for approval, and all he has to do to keep me around is not approve. They say I tell myself he cares about me because he wouldn’t get that mad at someone he doesn’t care about. They say the only way I think I can get power is to let him hurt me so he’ll come crawling back, begging me not to leave.” Alicia flicks the cigarette out into the snow.

I ask how much of that is true.

“All of it. But knowing it and doing something about it are two different things. I’m hoping living here will make the difference. I want to quiet my insides, get back to some feeling I can tolerate.” She sighs. “I guess some girls don’t feel complete unless they have two assholes.”

I watch her; listen. Under those hard times on her face, she’s a really pretty woman, and she has to be smart or she couldn’t have laid all that out for me. That makes it harder to understand.

“I just can’t be with anybody, that’s all.” She pauses, shaking her head slowly. “It was different with Willis, Heidi’s dad.” She chokes a second, remembering. “I mean, he was good to me but he could keep me interested.” She pauses again. “But then he was gone and I came back to Rich, and except for the fact that Rich won’t let me forget that I slept with a ni-Willis, it’s like he never existed, like maybe I dreamed it.”

“There’s Heidi.”

She looks me in the eye. “Things are going to get bad around here, T. J. I told your parents that. Rich will find me whether I let him know where I am or not; he always does. And you need to know he really hates you. He’s accused me of fucking you. He’s accused you of trying to take Heidi away from him. He hates that I’ve been with a black man, and his worst fear is that I want to be with another one. That’s the one thing he’ll never forgive me for. You want to watch out for him. You see only the very tip of what’s going on with him.”

I tell her thanks for the warning.

“Well, let me give you one more. I’m going to try to make it work here, I really am. I feel strong right now, but I know how I am. When the stars line up right, I’ll lie and protect him and deny this conversation ever took place.”

Man, this shit makes absolutely no sense, but all I have to do to believe her is look in her eyes. “That must drive you crazy.”

She looks at me like “No shit.”

We talk a little about Kristen Sweetwater, and she says about what my parents said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. You can be a pretty little cheerleader who looks like she owns the world, or you can be that funky little guy on your swim team that Mike hates so much, or you can be me. Deal is, if you’ve been treated bad, you’re going to have to find a way to get over it.”

I ask how she knows about Chris.

“Are you kidding? Mike hangs out with Rich all the time. Half of what they talk about is how things are going to hell at Cutter High. I swear, if I’m ever going to get over Rich, it will be because he’s dumber than dirt. Who cares about a high school football team?”

By the time we get to the conference meet, which is held at Frost High School in Spokane this year, all of us are pretty much assured of lettering if the Athletic Council doesn’t do a recall vote. Simet says it would be close anyway. A couple of the girls’ coaches would vote our way, and several votes are up in the air. Anyway, it will be the last meet for everyone but me, and we’ve tapered off our workouts, so times are dropping like rocks. Actually, I’m the only one who came close to not making it. In the second to last dual meet I almost missed my turn in the fifty, had to haul serious ass to get back, and, in fact, bettered my time by only a hundredth of a second. Coach isn’t going to swim anyone but me in that event at conference, because it’s too easy to miss a turn or get off the blocks slow and wreck your chances, and my time already qualifies me for State.

By now the coaches in the other sports are behind me a hundred percent, Benson included, because if I pull out a couple of top three finishes in the sprints and even as low as sixth in the two hundred, we’ll have serious pointage toward the all-sport championship, and the school who gets that has major bragging rights. Cutter has never won it because we’ve always been big in the major sports but have fallen down in sports like gymnastics and soccer and cross-country. And, of course, we’ve never had a swim team before.

On Friday morning the student body gathers on the school lawn, complete with the cheerleaders lined up on the steps like Rockettes, as Icko brings the bus around, and though no one is going to watch us swim, they cheer as if we’re the football team. Mott is on the bus already, having stopped Icko as he came through the parking lot. Chris stands totally amazed, waving at the crowd, while Jackie simply watches, not embarrassed, not anything that I can see. I see Tay-Roy tap Kristen on the shoulder before coming down to join us, and as we stand there ready to board, I elbow him. “Kristen Sweetwater?”

He looks embarrassed but keeps smiling. That would be so sweet.

“She’s cool,” I whisper, “but what are you going to tell your girls in Birmingham? And Evanston?”

Dan Hole is so busy calculating the times he should hit, he is oblivious to the celebration. Barbour and some of the football guys stand together to one side; only a few of them clap or cheer because he has convinced them this whole thing is a ploy to diminish their standing as nobility at Cutter High. The jock wars continue.