Page 141 of Final Drive

“Ten. Nine. Eight.”

The boat is flying. Not the way people say it when they mean fast. I can feel the hull come up and stay there, barely touching the water between strokes because all eight of them are moving together and nobody is trying to take more than the man in front of him.

“Five. Four.”

Gray’s face is three feet from mine, wrecked with effort, and for some reason that’s what cuts through everything else. Not the grandstand or lane five or the finish coming at us.

I’m going to remember his face for the rest of my life.

“Two. One. Through.”

We cross the line and the horn goes, but I don’t know if we’ve won. Not immediately. Lane five is close enough that for half a second all I have is noise and white water and Gray still pulling through the finish.

Then I see the board.

Lane three.

First.

A length and a quarter.

We just won the grand final of the American Varsity National Championship.

The announcer is saying something I can’t hear. My hand is still wrapped around the rudder line, and I have to remember that the race is over before I can make my mouth work.

“Way enough.”

Eight blades come off the water together, and the shell keeps running beneath us with all that speed still in it. For a few seconds, nobody says anything. They just sit there breathing while the boat carries us past the finish, eight men upright in their seats like none of them quite trusts what just happened.

Then Zane screams.

After that, whatever dignity Sable Ridge brought to the national championship disappears.

Bo is laughing too hard to get a word out. Beckett tries to stand up in the boat, which is both physically impossible and a good way to put the newly crowned national champions in the water, and Tyler catches the back of his uni and hauls him down without taking his other hand off his oar. Jackson leans back and looks straight up at the sky. Eli has both hands over his face.

Cameron is all the way down in the bow with seven men between us. He’s found a sightline through them anyway. Everybody else is losing their minds, but he isn’t smiling. He’s just looking at me.

I know that look.

He saw my face before we launched. He knows something is wrong. Maybe he even knows this was more than a final to me, although there’s no possible way he knows why.

I don’t care right now.

Gray leans forward over his oar until his face is close to mine. He’s still breathing hard, sweat running down his temples, and there’s a look on him I’ve never seen before.

“Out loud,” he says.

I laugh because I know exactly what he wants. “We won.”

“All of it.”

Something catches in my throat. I look down the boat at eight men who are still yelling over each other, then back at him.

“We won the national championship.”

Gray starts laughing.

Not the quiet thing he does sometimes when one of them says something stupid. He’s actually laughing, head down for a second, shoulders shaking, and seeing Gray Lockwood lose it in the middle of a racing shell almost gets me worse than the finish did.