The one thing Calvin Throbly could not wrap his head around now that he was a werewolf was why the hell he still couldn’t grow facial hair. Weren’t werewolves supposed to be hairy? Calvin couldn’t even grow a decent moustache! In the movies werewolves all of the sudden had hair everywhere, but then again knowing his luck Calvin would have grown a ton of hair, but it all would have been invisible because he had such light blonde hair. Yes sir, he could just imagine how burly and manly he would look from four inches away, which was how close you had to be to see what little chest hair he currently had.
These were the kinds of moronic things Calvin thought about to distract himself while standing on the starting blocks before a race. He needed the distraction, because he always had to pee right before he swam in a meet. No matter how many times he went to the bathroom right before the race, as soon as he hopped up on the blocks he had to go.
“Let’s see some splashes, skinny man!” Calvin’s best friend Kari shouted from the bleachers and then wolf whistled loudly. Kari was a soccer player who did not understand why any sane human person would engage in swimming for recreation or competition, but she came to every home meet and cheered her head off any way.
For perhaps the hundredth time, Calvin silently cursed the team captain for choosing speedos for their team uniform. While Calvin was tall, pale, skinny and would not look any good in a speedo normally, he happened to have played on the tennis team in the fall and his tan lines had not faded yet so he had a lovely sock line, an equally magnificent shorts line, a farmers tan to make any Iowan jealous, and a nifty little V on his chest from the polo.
Calvin swam the first event of every meet, the two hundred yard individual medley. Being as graceful as a moose with a drinking problem, he had trouble with the butterfly, which was the first stroke of the medley, and he had a tendency to swerve during the backstroke which also set him back a bit, but where Calvin really shined was the third stroke, the breaststroke. For everyone else it was their rest before the fourth and final stroke where everyone sprinted to the finish. Calvin would haul ass during the breaststroke to retake all the ground he had lost and hopefully take the lead.
This was their first swim meet of the year and on top of that it was a full moon tonight, so Calvin found himself a little extra tense. This would be his eighth transformation, so it was not as though he were worried about that aspect, but the closer it was to the full moon, the more volatile Calvin’s emotions became.
Finally, blessedly, they were told to take their marks and Calvin got down into position. The buzzer blurted out the start signal and Calvin threw himself into the air and dove down into the pool. He could never tell how smooth his starts were on account of his aforementioned lack of coordination so he forced himself not to wonder if he had bellyflopped or failed to keep his legs straight or any other stupid thing he tended to do on a start. Calvin focused entirely on dolphin kicking furiously towards the surface. Once he reached the surface he threw his arm around for the first arm pull and actually felt like less of an idiot than he normally did when doing the butterfly. He kept himself from looking left or right to see where the other swimmers were until the turn.
When Calvin reached the wall he had only an instant to peek at the lane to his left where the other team’s best swimmer for this event would be. Generally, the two hundred individual medley swimmers were not the very best on the whole team since they were more or less a jack of all trades rather than super fast at any given stroke. During his quick peek Calvin was able to see that he had beat the his main competitor to the wall by just a fraction of a second. Calvin cursed violently inside his head as he pushed off and dolphin kicked again. If his opponent wasn’t thumping him at the butterfly that meant he was a fellow breaststroker and this was going to be a heck of a race.
The next turn took them into the backstroke and Calvin had to focus his whole attention on following the ceiling beams so that he went more or less straight instead of careening from one lane line to the other. That meant he had no idea where his opponent was. He might have been a backstroker instead of a breaststroker like Calvin assumed. Calvin told himself not to worry and focus on not missing the flip turn and banging his head into the bulkhead. He managed not to give himself a concussion and raced back to the starting side so that he could work his magic at the breaststroke.
Calvin excelled at taking a long underwater pull so when he came up to take his first stroke he was nearly halfway down the pool. He could hear shouts of encouragement every time he surfaced.
“GO! SPLASH! WIN!” Kari bellowed each time Calvin came up for air. Calvin had been told that breaststroke was a ridiculous race to watch people cheer for, because they would go silent every time their swimmer submerged and then have time to shout one syllable before going silent again.
At the turn Calvin was delighted to see that he was multiple body lengths ahead of his closest competition. Either that guy sucked or Calvin was about to start the season off with a huge personal best. He kept swimming as hard as he could.
Calvin blazed through the freestyle as quickly as he could, knowing that would be when everyone else would be sprinting after resting up during the breaststroke. He finished first easily and was ecstatic to have knocked nearly ten seconds off his best time from the end of last season. Not quite a state qualifying time, but more than good enough to let out a whoop of joy and have all of his team mates cheering like mad men.
After Kari, Calvin’s next best friends were Logan and Harris, both of whom were on the swim team with him, and both of whom were waiting to congratulate him once all the other swimmers had finished and he climbed out of the pool.
“Well done, buddy!” Logan slapped Calvin on the back and shook his hand. “Blew your old personal record out of the water!”
“Yeah, and you mopped the floor with that other guy!” Harris added just as that other guy was walking past.
Calvin smacked Harris on the back of the head. “You inconsiderate git,” he chided halfheartedly. If Calvin took the time to get upset with Harris every time he stuck his foot in his pretty-boy mouth, Calvin would have died of heart failure years ago.
“Ow! What? Chicks love winners, science has proven!” Harris protested as he and Logan followed Calvin over to the bleachers.
Kari sat on the first row of bleachers next to the only other person Calvin really talked to, Sara. Kari gave Calvin an enthusiastic high five while Sara quietly sat on the uncomfortable metal bench and almost didn’t glare at Calvin.
“Way to splash! You obviously had way more splashes than the other team!” Kari nodded as though this were high praise and splashes were an actual swimming statistic instead of gibberish that she thought was a hilarious cover for not knowing anything about swimming.
Calvin chuckled. “Thank you. We all splashed our splashiest.”
“Wait until you see the splash I make,” Harris winked one of his impossibly green eyes at Kari.
Kari’s hand darted out and twisted Harris’ nipple. “I see you trying to flex your muscles, idiot! You’re such a smarmy little bastard!”
“Ow! Ow! Ow! Let go!” Harris pleaded. “It was Calvin’s fault! He told me you liked the way I looked in my speedo!”
Kari punched Harris in the stomach and then let his nipple go. “And you’re a pathological liar. Calvin doesn’t think anyone looks good in a speedo.” She brushed her dark brown hair back and shook her head at Harris.
Harris never stopped trying to flirt with Kari. He considered it a personal challenge that she was able to resist his charms, which he thought were beyond even James Bond’s level of suave. Little did he realize that other than Kari, the only girls he tried to woo were pretty and dumb. That was probably why his lying worked so well normally.
“...and that’s why A Tale of Two Cities is my favorite Charles Dickens work,” Logan droned on as Sara sat next to him, blatantly ignoring the hell out of him as she stared daggers at Calvin as though this were all his fault.
Calvin winced when he realized that he had been ignoring one idiot friend because his other, more idiotic friend, had been more entertaining. Logan was an entirely different kind of obnoxious as soon as he was around girls and Calvin could never make up his mind which of his male friends were worse. So he grabbed both of them by the ear without a word and started pulling them away from the bleachers.
“Callie! Did we miss your swim?” An incredibly loud voice interrupted Calvin from dragging the boys away by their ears. Calvin’s family bustled noisily down to where he and his friends stood.
“Hi Mom, yeah you missed it, but I got a personal best by almost ten seconds and I’ll have three more races,” Calvin told her.
“Sorry, we had to stop and get Gemma ice cream,” Calvin’s father explained.
“It’s bubblegum flavor!” Calvin’s younger sister Gemma proclaimed proudly as she displayed her ice cream cone. She had pink smeared all around her mouth and some of it had already dripped onto her purple kitty shirt. She was wearing Grinch pajama pants and slippers that looked like duck feet. Gemma was only two years younger than Calvin, sixteen going on four and a half.
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