Prologue:

Escape

Water is a mirror. Reflected in it, you see yourself as you truly are. The water clenses the reflections of all opinions, giving us a chance to find out whether or not we can accept who we are. All of us, I can tell, will be unhappy with what kind of person stares back at us.

Heat splashed down onto seventeen-year-old Ellie Churchill's back, heating up her already sun-burnt body. Australian summers were the worst. Especially when the weather prevented Ellie from completing her Extended English homework. Some things just worked against her no matter what she did. There was no 'pushing through the pain' with the sun, not like swimming. The sun didn't like to be messed with and Ellie was in no position to back away from it's rays.

The sun was always harsh in the summer time. Although the humidity was virtually non-existent over the Blue Mountains and into the Central West, Ellie still found herself sweating out the dry heat that followed her around every day that summer. It was stifling, forty-six degrees too hot, and even stepping so much as a foot outside would lead into sweat drenched clothes and a splitting headache. Waiting for Ellie's coach to arrive seemed a little bit like torture after fifteen minutes of sitting out in the open, splayed across the itchy grass in high-waisted denim shorts and her swimsuit. Ellie was hot. Far too hot.

Luckily, Ellie was not alone in her discomfort. Nothing seemed to cool anyone down. Swim training had been moved to the outside fifty-metre pool in November, which had always been a few degrees warmer than the indoor pool, and by mid-summer, none of the Bathurst swimming team were too keen to jump into the lukewarm pool for the hour and a half sessions at five in the afternoon every weekday. The sun stole too much energy from their bodies and the sprint sets seemed like they had almost doubled in the lengthened pool. Transitions from winter swimming to summer swimming were always hard but Ellie had no choice. She had nationals to worry about, after all.

"Do you think Rhonda will let us do dive sprints today?" remarked Carla, Ellie's fair-haired best friend.

She had laid herself down onto her towel almost as soon as she and Ellie had arrived, yanking off her Nike tank-top and shoving it firmly into her swim bag before quickly laying out her towel and plonking herself down onto the ground. Ellie had barely dropped her bag down before Carla had shoved on her sunglasses, laid back and relaxed. Ellie blamed it on her European heritage. Carla never did well under extremely hot conditions.

Carla fidgeted idly, twisting her goggles between her fingers as the pair watched the various overheated citizens laze around the pool in varying degrees of suitable swimwear. "I mean, she's not so nasty as to make us swim hard today," she continued hopefully. "No one is meant to be doing exercise in this heat anyway. It'd be child abuse."

Ellie rolled her eyes, laughing at Carla's optimistic views of their sadist coach. "It'd be a miracle if she did. I doubt it though. Rhonda will push us no matter what the weather. It's her trademark. Besides, she expects a lot of us. Being in the national team and all..."

"She shouldn't expect anything from us," Carla grumbled, her blonde hair sticking to the sweat on the back of her neck. "Especially since we won't even be in the country by next month. Besides, I'm just taking it easy this season. You're the one going places, Little Miss Tidal Wave. You're the one who should be worried."

So you say, Ellie thought. Everyone expected things her at this point. The weight of two Youth Olympic silver medals around her neck made Ellie a living, breathing target for high expectations. Her coach expected her to come home from nationals with four gold medals hanging around her neck and an Olympic team offering by the end of the year. Her teachers expected top marks from their high achieving student and a near perfect result in her Year 11 Preliminary Exams. Her parents expected her to be happy and successful. They expected her to make good choices and not to waste opportunities. They expected a loving daughter, most of all.

But Ellie had hardly any expectations for herself at all. It worried her that she never aimed for the highest mark in class or the fastest time in a race. She just swam because it was natural. It was everyone else that made her worry, that placed these extraordinary expectations on her shoulders. It was endless torture just trying to pull herself out of that pit of anxiety that threatened to swallow her up every day. She needed to be free. That was the point of leaving to study abroad in Japan that year; to free herself from the endless amounts of expectations placed on her shoulders. A break, in short, was what she desired. A break from her own harsh life.

Carla pushed her training bag away with her feet, stretching her long legs out along the towel laid out underneath her. Of course she would think she isn't going places, Ellie thought as she laid down on the grass next to her best friend. Only Carla would refuse give herself as much credit as she deserves.

Carla had been Ellie's best friend ever since she had began swimming. Ellie had felt distinctively alone when first joining the Bathurst swim team. She'd just moved down from Tweed Heads, a large town less than an hour from the border of Queensland. She had already possessed a few State Age gold medals and various achievements at age ten and at first, that gave Ellie a sort of celebrity status at the club. Parents compliment her parents and the other children would approach her and tell Ellie that they wished they could swim like her. But no one really talked to her for more than ten minutes. It was quite lonely, especially since she had left behind all her old friends and her old life back in Tweed Heads.

Carla had been the one to first talk to Ellie. It had been during training, when Ellie's foot had slipped on the diving block during dive sprints and completely ruined her dive. Her angle of entry was wrong and she went far too deep below the surface to get any further than the flags. All the other children had stared at her as if she had committed a crime but Carla, smiling and light-hearted as ever, had laughed and patted Ellie on the back in mock consolidation. "Good to know you're human, Ellie. I was seriously started to doubt whether or not you could actually lose."

Ellie, quiet and shy, had smiled in return before focusing back to training and redeeming herself from her humiliating failure. But the girls continued to talk. From small remarked-comments during training to full-blown conversations before and after training. It was quite refreshing to Ellie. All the other children were too awestruck with her fast times and flawless form to even consider talking to her for more than an average of five minutes but Carla could see straight through all that. Her attention had been on Ellie as a person, as a friend, not as some inhuman swimming machine. It hadn't taken long for the two of them to become inseparable, nor had it taken long for them to start competing against each other in each event.

School carnivals and local competitions as well as State Age and National Championships were their battlefields as they raced against each other and earned achievements for their club. They were Bathurst's pride and joy by the time they both reached fourteen, Ellie especially, after being selected for the Australian Youth Olympic team and then going on to win two silver medals for her country. Carla wasn't far behind of course, with just as many nationals medals as her and a bronze from the Youth Olympics. The two were never far from each other and when Ellie had decided to take a year of studying abroad in Japan, it hadn't been long before Carla decided to follow her out of the country.

"How are you even going to last in Japan?" Ellie laughed, thinking aloud with the random question. "All you ever eat is pasta and popcorn. I'm going to end up force feeding you just about everything."

Carla snorted and pushed her bright red sunglasses up the bridge of her nose a-matter-of-factly. "I'm sure they'll have pasta, smartass."

"Oh my God, you're going to starve."

"I will not. Besides, that might be good for me. I may just lose some weight."

Ellie groaned. Carla consistently complained about her supposed 'fat' stomach, which was actually flat and toned. With long lanky limbs and the trademark back muscles of a backstroker, Carla could wear racing bikinis and get away with it easily. Ellie could never wear anything other than her knee length body suits. With broad man-shoulders and no thigh gap to be seen, Ellie was eternally doomed to either wear slimming black swimsuits or nothing at all.

"I swear to God Carla, if you say something like that that one more time-"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," She snapped. "I'm sure the opinions of my best friend are equal to the stares I get from strangers. Seriously, it's horrible. I haven't had a boyfriend in what? Three years? Neither have you, for that matter a fact. No guys want to date swimmer girls who have more muscles than they do. That's the one thing I hate about this sport! We never look attractive. It consumes us completely. Don't you agree?"

Ellie almost managed to respond before Rhonda walked out of the main building and out onto the pool deck with kick boards and pull buoys packed into her large drawstring bag. Her opportunity vanished and the team was forced into the pool with loud threats from Rhonda. "Anyone who's not in the pool in the next five minutes will be doing one-hundred fifty metre IM sprints with Ellie and Carla standing guard to make sure you do them. Is that perfectly clear?" Rhonda's message was heard perfectly and the entire team dived into the pool with groans of complaint.

Ellie found that Carla had been half-correct in her wish a few minutes when Rhonda pulled them out of the pool after warm-up and told them to practise their dives and turns in the indoor pool. "I'm not burning the both of you out two days before national championships," She had said before shooing the two girls away. "I really don't want the Swimming Australia appointed coach to come snapping at me next week, saying I wore out his two best swimmers. Seriously, just go."

Carla was more than happy to slip into the indoor pool, which strangely was always colder, and waste the entire hour and a half by talking and laughing like a normal teenager. Ellie was more than happy to oblige. She wasn't feeling up to swimming that day either, considering she spent almost four hours fixing the fences on her family's property with her father that day and only managed to achieve half an hour of rest before driving herself to training in her father's sauna of a ute. Her heart just wasn't in it that day and it hadn't been for a while.

Swimming, Ellie concluded, managed to overtake everything in her own mind. Swimming was life for Ellie. Nothing else ever came close in a matter of importance. But for some reason, Ellie ceased to truly care about how she went in competitions ever since she was fifteen. It was as if she felt like swimming had no meaning anymore, like it was now a chore rather than a love. But the funny thing was, she couldn't seem to give it up either. It felt too natural to smell like chlorine every day and wake up at five every morning to go running through the bush to avoid swimming in the mornings.

But swimming wasn't the same anymore. Ever since the Youth Olympics, it was not the same. Ellie had no idea what it was about swimming that felt so wrong. All she knew was that she had to get away. Away from the expectations and hopes placed on her shoulders and away from the stress of having to achieve for others satisfaction, rather than her own. It was all she wanted.

And her opportunity in Japan...was all Ellie was ever going to get.

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