Surviving High School

again now—she’d been crying so much lately—but this time, she realized, they were happy tears. Sara hadn’t been the Machine at all. She’d been a girl, just like Emily, a girl who sneaked out and saw her boyfriend and lived a happy life. And in the end, her name on the leaderboard hadn’t survived, but these photos had. For the first time in her life, Emily felt like she actually knew her sister.
    After she’d looked over the last photo, one of Sara sitting on a picnic blanket on a sunny day in the park, Emily closed the window, got up, and walked over to the next room to find Nick waiting for her.
    As he rose from the desk where he’d been sitting, Emily approached him and hugged him close. With her arms around him like this, Nick felt skeletal and frail, and Emily hoped she wasn’t hurting him. He hugged her back.
    “Thank you,” she said, “for introducing me to her.”
    That night, Emily got home later than usual. After saying good-bye to Nick, she’d skipped the usual run home in favorof a long walk so that she’d have some time to think. So much had been coming at her over the last few weeks that she’d had no time to step back and take it all into consideration.
    She’d felt like a juggler asked to deal with ten, twenty, and then thirty bowling pins, so that at some point she wasn’t even sure how many were in the air. Now it was time to let the pins drop to the ground and pick up only the ones she cared about.
    She could see now that she’d given up too much to be a swimmer. She’d spent so much of her life unhappy, trying to please her father—and also trying to live up to her sister’s legacy, one that had turned out to be a lie.
    Sara had proved that you could be a record-setting athlete while still living a full life, albeit in secret. In the end, she’d died too early, but it had been an accident, something that could have happened to anyone. Emily couldn’t go on living her life based on a random car crash. Sara was dead. Nothing would change that. But Emily was alive, and it was up to her—her and no one else—to build the kind of life she wanted.
    “I’m not going.” Emily said it looking right across the dinner table at her father, daring him to blink first. The family had gathered around the table to make sugar-free, flaxseed-infused gingerbread cookies, the only holiday treat Emily was traditionally allowed to eat.
    “Going where?” asked her mother, pressing a snowman-shaped cookie cutter into some rolled-out dough.
    “To Junior Nationals.” Emily, favoring a knife over the cookie cutters, was carving out a girl in a pretty dress.
    “You’re not going?” asked her dad. And then louder. “You’re not going ?!”
    “Oh, so you can hear me from time to time.” Emily finished carving the hem of the dress. Not bad. Maybe if she stopped swimming, she could take up baking.
    “Since you were old enough to walk—even before that—you’ve been swimming, trying to win races,” said her dad, pressing a Christmas-tree-shaped cookie cutter angrily into his dough. “And now you’re not going ?”
    Emily took a bite of raw dough, then slowly and deliberately started rolling out a fresh sheet before responding.
    “You were the one who didn’t come to practice today,” she said. “You said it was over.”
    “I was hoping you’d redouble your efforts!” he shouted as he stood. “Usually when someone tells you that you can’t do something, people in this family react by proving them wrong. I remember telling Sara once that she should just give up. She wouldn’t get out of the pool until I practically fished her out with a cleaning net!”
    “Right,” said Emily, mashing a snowflake-shaped cookie cutter over and over into her dough. “Because Sara was your perfect daughter, right? Never broke the rules. Never did anything wrong.”
    “That’s right!” he said. “She didn’t argue. She didn’t break her regimen. She didn’t waste her time sneaking around with boys when she should have been sleeping!”
    “Do you really believe that?” asked Emily. She kept mashing down the cookie cutter, pressing overlapping shapes over each other, so that her dough was nearly shredded. “Really. I’m curious. Because I want to know if you’re just lying to me, or if you’re also lying to yourself.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    For a moment, Emily looked away from him and at the empty chair that had once been Sara’s. For the first time she could