The Color War (4 page)
The girl who had been in the lead was just now pulling up beside him. Raymond gasped, his narrow chest rising and falling as the shouts of the Blue team covered his shoulders like a cloak. “The Blue team recaptures the lead,” Reverend Helm announced as Raymond glanced around wildly, trying to find Melody.
She stood in the path of the sun, so that Raymond had to squint, and even then he could make out only her silhouette. She was cheering, like everyone else. She was leaning back against the lifeguard with the birthmark, whose arms encircled her like a walled city, like she belonged to him.
It was harder for Raymond to breathe now than it had been when he was swimming. He ducked beneath the buoys that formed the swimming lanes, so that he was in the no-man’s-land of the lake, the part that was not roped off for swimming. He pointed himself toward the horizon, toward the far side of the lake, where he’d never been. Then he began to swim so hard that the muscles in his arms burned and his chest was on fire. He swam as if he were being chased. He knew that Melody was watching, and that he was surprising her with a skill he wasn’t supposed to have as a beginner. He knew she would not have believed he had it in him.
Raymond swam until he couldn’t hear people calling his name, until the sun branded the lake with a hiss. Then he stopped, treading water. In the falling light, he saw a rowboat coming toward him, all planes and angles. The world in that moment was two-dimensional, nothing but stripes and edges and marks. The lines, he realized, were already drawn; even a kindergartner knew that color was meant to stay inside them.
“Raymond?” Reverend Helm’s voice came from the boat. “Let us help you.”
For a moment Raymond hesitated. He could see the far shore of the lake now—the whisper of reeds, the bruised sand. He was certain he could make it—but he also was certain they would follow. So Raymond pivoted and swam wearily toward the rowboat. He felt himself being pulled into a shiver of air, tucked onto the narrow wooden seat, wrapped in a clean towel; and he knew as he sat surrounded by their safety that he was drowning.
Jodi Picoult
is the bestselling author of twenty-one novels, including
The Storyteller, The Pact: A Love Story, Lone Wolf, Nineteen Minutes, Keeping Faith,
and
My Sister's Keeper.
Among her other works is the young adult novel
Between the Lines,
co-written with her daughter Samantha van Leer, and five issues of the
Wonder Woman
comic-book series. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard, Picoult is the recipient of the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction, among others. Her volunteer work includes serving on the Writers Council of the National Writing Project, and she is active in promoting youth theater and athletics. She lives with her family in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Read more of
Jodi Picoult’s best stories
at Byliner.com
Photograph courtesy of Jodi Picoult
Byliner
works directly with the world’s best writers to deliver great stories to readers. Named “one of the 10 Most Innovative Media Companies in the World” (
Fast Company
), Byliner is a subscription reading service and digital publisher of award-winning short fiction and nonfiction. A Byliner subscription provides unlimited access to more than 30,000 stories by hundreds of bestselling authors, as well as personalized story suggestions based on your reading time and interests. The entire library of
Byliner Originals
—including bestselling e-books by Margaret Atwood, Nick Hornby, Jon Krakauer, Ann Patchett, Nicole Krauss, Alexandra Fuller, Richard Russo, and Sebastian Junger—is available in the subscription service and through the major digital bookstores.
The Color War
, you’ll also enjoy …
The Boy Vanishes
By Jennifer Haigh
Late one night in the summer of 1976, fourteen-year-old Tim O’Connor disappears. No one makes much of it right away: it’s not the first time his mom has forgotten to pick him up, not the first time he hasn’t come home. By the time local cops in the blue-collar seaside town begin their search, there is little trace of the boy—only witnesses to a complicated set of relationships in a place where surviving isn’t always thriving and where disappointment mixes with the salt in the air. In this superbly crafted story, bestselling author Jennifer Haigh creates a searing portrait of how much a community loses when one of its own is lost.
The Color War
, you’ll also enjoy …
An Arrangement of Light
By Nicole Krauss
Set in an unnamed country as familiar as it is otherworldly,
An Arrangement of Light
tells of a young horticulturist’s admiration for the work of a great landscape architect and his hope to help him build a new public park in the capital. The young man ends up being complicit in a scheme he could never have imagined or wished for. When a military coup ushers capricious generals into power and they arrive in their black sedans with dark plans for the new park, this personal secretary to the great designer discovers that dreams risk running headlong into nightmares. Nicole Krauss has been hailed by
The New York Times
as “one of America’s most important novelists,” and this masterful, chilling short story is proof positive.
The Color War
, you’ll also enjoy …
I’m Starved for You
POSITRON | EPISODE 1
By Margaret Atwood
In the first installment of Byliner’s new serial
Positron
, Margaret Atwood, one of the most prophetic authors of our time, delivers a fictional tale of sexual obsession that is equal parts
Tom Jones
and
Brave New World
. A hilarious yet harrowing story that lays bare the very real dangers of trading liberty for safety,
I’m Starved for You
evokes the irrepressibility of human appetite and asks just how far a man and a woman are willing to go to get what they’re truly hungry for.