Learning To Swim For Real

Chapter 25: Butterfly

"Jack, I can't!"

"Kels, you can!"

Kelsey splashed Jack, though he was expecting her to, and easily avoided the water.

"You mocking me doesn't help at all, I want you to know, Jack LaGuardia," Kelsey said, sniffing dramatically and ostentatiously. She waded over to the step and sat down.

Jack sighed and sat next to her, taking her hand in his own and kissing it as he put an arm around her.

"What?" he asked. "Talk to me, tell me exactly, specifically what's wrong, okay?"

She nodded, still sniffing. "I don't exactly get the rhythm, and I specifically blow at this stroke," she announced. There's no way I can do butterfly, and if you're telling me that breast stroke is even harder, then there's no way I can do that, either." She leaned her head on his shoulder. "I've sucked up half the water in the pool through my nose, and I've barfed it out through my mouth, and it fucking hurts, Jack," she said. She lifted her head and looked at him plaintively, blinking.

"Oh, god, you're so cute," Jack murmured. "So, so cute." He just looked at her a moment longer before shaking his head to clear it.

"But, that is neither here nor there, he declared. "We're going to conquer the butterfly today, my beautiful girl, we are," he assured her. He swam over to where two colorful styrofoam noodles were floating in the deep end and came back with them.

"Okay, I'm going to hold these, and you're going to swim under one and over the other, and when you swim under, you're going to do the arms like we practiced," he instructed. "You're going to go nice and slow, make your body long on top of the water, and focus on undulating your hips, you got it? Under the blue one, over the pink one, then the same thing again."

"How?" she asked. "There are only two of them."

"I'll swim along and move them," he assured her. "In fact, hold on a sec." To Kelsey's astonishment, he bit the noodles, then tore them into thirds so they weren't so long and unwieldy, and easier to hold out and move.

"Ready?" he asked with a smile. "Now, remember, we're going to go slow, because I need time to move with these guys."

Kelsey nodded and lowered her goggles. She took a breath and did a shallow dive under the blue noodle, immediately surfacing to pull herself over the pink one. While she was surfacing, she pulled both arms symmetrically, all the way down by her hips, pulling them out and placing them in front of her to do another shallow dive under the blue noodle. This system fell apart almost immediately, because even with fins, Jack couldn't coordinate fast enough to keep the styrofoam noodles in position.

Kelsey sat up, treading water and smiling. "I did it a little bit!" she exclaimed. "I felt it! Did you see? It was just a couple strokes, but I did, I did!" She enveloped her coach in a splashy hug, kissing him at the same time.

"I did, you did, it was great, you looked marvelous!" he assured her. "So you do it again, from over on the wall, but instead of me placing the noodles, you just imagine they're in front of you, can you do that? First the blue, then the pink? Under the blue, then over the pink, got it?"

She nodded, smiling, and swam to the wall. On Jack's signal she pushed off and swam under the blue noodle, and over the pink. She continued across the pool without the noodles as Jack watched, doing a very slow and respectable butterfly.

"Yeah! Go Kelsey!" He yelled, jumping in the water and splashing. "That was great!" He quickly swam over to her. "Now all you have to is speed it up, and you're there!"

They spent the next hour working on getting it faster, and on keeping her feet together, and establishing a firm rhythm. Near the end of the session, Jack could even hear the sound of someone swimming the fly, the distinctive noise the water made when the powerful, two-legged dolphin kick happened in strong rhythm.