And it dawned on me one night, when the rubber-band marks were vivid across my skin and my eye bags were dark and haggard, that mermaids would never be disqualified for their legs coming apart, like I, a girl who couldn’t even keep her legs together for her best swimming event, had been. If mermaids, the most successful swimmers of all, owned single tails instead of two legs, then wouldn’t chlorine mermaids carry tails too? I frantically schemed how I could achieve this conquest. How I could become. I realized I would have to force my body to embrace pain, one of Jim’s favorite mantras. I
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