He’s dust in four, actually has to be helped out of the water. It’s all we can do to get Chris to stop. He’s into this swimming thing.

I can’t help myself. I walk over to the other footballers and offer to let them make it a relay. Barbour has regained enough breath to say, “Fuck you, Jones. In case it slipped your mind, one swimmer didn’t hit his best time every time. You tanked that last race. You’re the only guy who doesn’t letter.”

“I know, Barbour. Some things just couldn’t get any better.”

Jackie gets Chris out of the water and jumps around the deck with him. On his own, Chris walks over to Barbour and sticks out his hand. He says, “You beat me on the first one. That was pretty good.”

“Get away from me, you little retard!”

Chris is stricken; he has no defense for that.

I start back toward Barbour, but Simet yells my name. “It just tells you how bad he got beat.”

Barbour tells him to go to hell.

Benson tells Barbour to get hold of himself, and Simet pats Benson on the back and says he might want to run his boys through a Dale Carnegie course in the off season.

Mott and Dan pat Chris on the back and tell him he just won us all letter jackets, and Simon puts him on his shoulders.

Barbour is long gone, but Benson comes over to tell Chris he did a hell of a job. And he apologizes for Barbour calling him a name.

“You should get him in trouble,” Chris says. “He don’t sposed to call me that.”

It’s hard to say much about the rest of the year. We sit at our own table for the winter sports banquet, and when time comes to introduce us and talk of our accomplishments, Simet makes them sound like those of any sport, never mentioning when he talks about “third-place points” that there were only three swimmers in the water, or that sometimes they were ready to turn out the lights by the time we finished.

We voted Chris “Most Inspirational,” and if there is anything that will be indelibly burned into my consciousness about this season, it’s the look on Chris’s face when Coach hands him the trophy. He giggles until I think he’ll pee his pants, then he touches the gold-plated swimmer at the top, which is pretty muscular, and says, “It gots Tay-Roy up here.”

Tay-Roy winks at him and makes a muscle.

Then Simet hands out our letters, never mentioning the controversy but letting the parents of the other athletes know what an amazing group of guys this is. “Today the quality of the Cutter athlete is elevated,” he says. “We began the year with only one true swimmer on the team. Most of these guys turned out with no idea what they were in for. The pool was too short, and the lanes weren’t wide enough. We worked out a system for dry-land swimming so we could keep everyone working all the time. Some days the air and water in the pool were so warm I thought guys would pass out, but not one did, and not one ever backed off.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “This was a different kind of team than I’ve coached. Jackie Craig said his first words on the way to the State meet. He just showed up twice every day and swam his heart out. Dan Hole turned us Shakespearean, and Tay-Roy kept us supplied with interested females.” Coach smiles wider and shakes his head. “And Simon DeLong.” Simon waves to the crowd. “You may have noticed that Simon does not have the body design of the swimmers you see atop the Olympic starting blocks, but let me tell you, folks, this kid has a sweet breaststroke and backstroke, and if he stays with it, in another year you won’t recognize him.” Then he says, “I don’t know an athlete in the world with more courage than Andy Mott,” and he doesn’t elaborate.

“Every one of these guys, every time he swam, with one exception, hit his best time, which was the criteria we set for our letters, which I will now present.”

We don’t get the jackets yet-that happens at an all-school ceremony at the end of the year-but Coach calls each swimmer up to accept the certificate. Everyone but me.

The afternoon my guys actually get the jackets, a few days after the state track meet and a week and a half before graduation, might just be the highlight of my high school career. Morgan calls the new lettermen down to the gym floor team by team, makes a long speech about the tradition of Wolverine athletics, how everyone who wears the blue and gold is a cut above, an elite athlete in an elite program. “We are the envy of our conference,” he says.

All the first-year lettermen stand in front-flanked by the second-and third-year lettermen-each receiving a jacket in a blue box tied in gold ribbon. When they announce the swim team, Carly and I stand and cheer, and they all throw a fist into the air. That plays to mixed reviews in the bleachers until Mott pulls up his pants leg, unhooks his leg, and thrusts it high into the air. The gym goes quiet. This is way better than his middle finger, because how can you suspend a guy for holding up his leg? He hands it to Jackie, who is taken off guard a moment, then thrusts it high. Andy Mott swam this entire swimming season on one leg, and not one kid outside the team even knew it.

And in the end I live up to my name. The Tao-the real Tao, that knows and is everything-celebrates irony. Nothing exists without its opposite. I didn’t earn a letter jacket because I could, and all my friends did because they couldn’t. Some things really don’t get any better.

And some things do. Chris taps Simet on the shoulder, and Simet calls me down to the gym floor. I work my way down through the crowd, watching Chris retrieve a paper sack he has hidden behind him. When I reach him, he pulls out a blue-and-gold jacket and hands it to me.

“I don’t get a jacket, Chris. I slowed up at State, remember?”

Simet says, “Take a closer look.”

I unfold the jacket, and my throat closes over. Across the back it says, COUGHLIN, on the front it says, BRIAN.

“My brother would of been glad if I gave you this,” Chris says. “So I did.”

It would be nice to say the year ends on this note, that we walk away feeling bigger and better because we set a goal and met it, that a bunch of obscure guys who never had friends before, now have friends and life looks different. And that’s all true, but that isn’t how it ends.

I talk the guys into switching sports through spring, into getting ready for Hoopfest. If you think we didn’t look like swimmers, you should see how much less we look like basketball players. After our third practice Mott says, “Let’s do this like the Chicago Bulls did when they had Michael Jordan. You find some guys who can play this worthless sport, and we’ll be your entourage.” The other guys are quick to agree.

My dad is a pretty fair ballplayer, particularly under the boards, and Simet is one of those rare animals like me, a good athlete on land or sea. We need a fourth, and I pen in Mott’s name, because though he doesn’t move real well on the court, he can put down three pointers with alarming regularity. After a few practices we discover he can also place the alley-oop pass pretty well, which could come in handy when we want to surprise a team for those last two or three points. We enter ourselves in the open division, knowing that will pit us against some tough teams, but we’ll be competitive.

We call ourselves the Slam-Dunking Mermen, in deference to our entourage, who attend most of our practices over at All Night and give us regular scouting reports on the Bushwhackers, Rich Marshall and Mike Barbour’s team. With any luck, fate will not stack us up against them, but they are in the same division, so it’s not unthinkable. If both teams keep winning (or losing, for that matter), we could run into them. Part of me would like to see that happen, and part of me wants to avoid it like STDs.