Breathing Underwater

by Alex Flinn

  “This wasn’t—”

  “Mrs. Walters noticed the same pattern last year.”

  “It’s not what you think,” I say.

  “What do I think?” Higgins draws breath between slightly parted teeth. I can’t avoid her eyes. She knows about my father. From my poem, maybe, and my face. But what does that mean? Teachers are supposed to report child abuse, but I’m not a child. I’m sixteen, old enough to take care of myself. I shift my suddenly immense weight from foot to foot.

  Breathe.

  I give her a Nick Andreas smile, meeting her eyes with my good one. “That I have lots of enemies?”

  “Or one enemy,” she says. “Someone at home, perhaps?”

  I gesture at my eye. “My dad didn’t do this.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I shrug and walk away, almost breaking into a run at the door. I don’t think I breathe until I get to chemistry class, but my mind is racing. If Higgins says anything to my father, he’ll just get meaner.

  The sound of ice cubes greeted me. In my father’s house, ice cubes are airraid sirens that send me diving for cover. I searched for an exit. There was none. Usually, I missed happy hour, my father’s version of dinner at home, but he was early, I was late, and worlds collided. My father swirled his glass. I tried to look casual—impossible—and walked past him.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He gestured me closer. The clink of ice against crystal intensified, and I began the countdown in my head … ten, nine, eight… I walked toward him … three, two… He brandished a wrapped condom between two fingers like a witness with the bloody glove. “This is yours?”

  Nailed. As in crucified, in the true, biblical sense of the word. I hung back, trying to avoid the inevitable blow. I stared at the evidence.

  “Answer me.”

  I stepped toward the stairway. He didn’t react, and I glanced back at him, expecting the worst, bracing myself. Finally, I said, “Yes, sir.”

  My father smiled. He sat in his antique wing chair against the backdrop of Biscayne Bay, clutching his crystal glass and grinning like I’d never seen. “Congratulations.”

  I figured I must have heard him wrong. I said, “What?”

  “Congratulations, my son, for becoming a man.”

  I felt marble beneath my feet. My fingers relaxed. My father was proud. Of me. For years, I’d brought home perfect report cards, trying to make him happy. But now, he was proud. Is this the only thing that makes me a man in your eyes? I wanted to scream it. But that clinking ice brought reality back. My father was finally proud of me.

  I smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

  He gestured toward the leather sofa beside him. He poured another scotch, filling his glass almost to overflowing, drank half and filled it again. He filled a second glass halfway and thrust it toward me. He raised his drink. “To my son becoming a man.”

  I drank with him. I’d had scotch before, but this tasted different, bitter. Impossible. My father bought the best. He asked me if I had a girlfriend. I took another sip—still bitter—and nodded. “Her name’s Caitlin.”

  This he ignored, reaching for his wallet. He pulled out a wad of bills, hundreds, who knows how many, and leaned forward, fanning them in front of him. “Buy her something nice. Then, give her a hundred, and tell her to get some pills because these things…” With the money, he gestured toward the condom, thrown on the glass table. “These things do not work.” He shoved the bills at me and refilled his glass. I heard the waves, the pale liquid sloshing against crystal, and his question. “Do you know how I know this, Nicos?”

  I nodded. I’d heard it before, too many times to care. I met his eyes, not taking the money. His smile was gone. He dropped the bills onto the table. I threw back the rest of my scotch.

  “Sixteen years old,” he said. “I came to this country with nothing. I worked, joined the navy, went to school. I made an error.” He stopped and refilled my glass before emptying his own. “For one mistake, I was to pay, to marry a nothing whose family barely kept her in shoes. I paid once. I will not pay again.” He slammed the empty bottle to the glass table. “You must not make my mistake, Nicos.”

  I nodded. I was the mistake. But I was numb to it. I felt the scotch’s heat inside my body, in my toes, my fingertips. I didn’t drink any more. I also didn’t point out the obvious, that he was rich anyway. My father was silent, his green eyes expecting no answer, and finally, I stood, took the money, said, “I’ll do that, Dad,” and shoved the wad into my pocket. I counted to three before I added, “Okay if I go study at Tom’s now?”

  He nodded, and I walked back to the door. His voice stopped me.

  “Nicos?” I turned, hand on the knob. He was smiling again, eyes half-closed, slumped in his chair. “You were a tough little bastard, Nicos, tough like me. You wanted to be born.”

  I nodded. The glass slipped from his hand and shattered against the marble floor. I was out of there. I sprinted down the driveway, not knowing where I was going, and jumped into my car. I roared into the night, wanting to scatter my father’s money, like his words, to the December wind.

  APRIL 2

  * * *

  Miss Higgins’s classroom

  Thursday morning, there’s an envelope on my desk addressed to my father. My vital organs dance a jig as I turn it over. Not sealed. Casting a glance around the room, I slip the sharp paper from its ice-blue envelope.

  The stationery is the blue FROM THE DESK OF type. The handwriting, elderly. I read:

  Dear Mr. Andreas,

  It has been my experience that children reflect the lessons learned at home. Therefore, you are to be congratulated on your fine son.

  Nicholas is an exemplary student in my class and a valued member of the Key Biscayne High community. He is intelligent, innovative, and reliable. I am certain the affection and understanding he receives from you play a part in that.

  Please give your son the respect he deserves.

  Sincerely, Laetitia Higgins

  I stand there, chuckling at first at her characterization of my father’s “affection and understanding.” On second reading, the phrases attack me, too saccharine and pointed to misinterpret. I realize Higgins and I have an agreement. She knows. She wants my father to know she knows, but she won’t get me in trouble. Why does she even care? After class, I read it again, leaning against the white-tiled men’s room wall. How much of what she said about me is true?

  At noon, I go to her. She crams her paperback under her cafeteria box lunch when I enter, but not before I notice the title, Love’s Savage Fury. She grimaces.

  “You were expecting, maybe, The Iliad?” she says.

  I smile, hesitating in the center of the room with nowhere to put my hands. Finally, I approach her desk and lean against it. “You wrote to my father.”

  “You read it, then?”

  “No, I—”

  “I meant for you to read it.”

  “Then I read it,” I say, smiling. “Thank you.”

  “No thanks are necessary. What I wrote about you was truthful.”

  I look at her gnarled hands playing on her calendar blotter. “You know about—”

  “Your trouble with the law?” she says, rescuing me before I say anything about my father, anything that might require her to do or say something I don’t want done or said. I nod.

  “Yes, I know.” She reaches into her drawer and pulls out a stack of papers, the poetry assignment. “Doing something wrong, even something hurtful, doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, Nicholas, not at sixteen.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you? I wasn’t certain.” Her watery blue eyes meet mine a second, and she smiles. She whisks a sheet from the stack of papers. My poem. It’s not graded, but she’s written “See me” across the top, “See me” being teacherese for “Call the guys in the white coats.”

  “See you?”

  “I advise the school’s literary journal, the Seagull. I thought the writer might wish to
submit some other work. When I saw it was you, I knew you wouldn’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Wouldn’t suit your image.”

  “Didn’t know I had one.” But I can’t help it. I give her a Nick Andreas smile.

  She looks away. “Your image precedes you into the room. You should try leaving it home sometime.”

  The warning bell rings and I hear the hallway sounds. “Look,” I say. “I just wanted to thank you.” She nods, and I shove the paper into my notebook. I collect my backpack and start to leave. I turn back. “Was my poem really any good?”

  She nods again, chewing a bite of cafeteria hoagie before saying, “Think about what I said.”

  I keep walking, but I’m picturing myself, dressed in black, reading poetry in a dimly lit coffeehouse.

  My room, later that day

  I can’t help taking out the poem again. I feel kind of weird about it. It takes me a minute to realize the weird feeling is pride. Maybe I can actually write. What a laugh. It’s just a stupid poem. But no one’s ever really said I was good at anything before. I reread it. The content strikes me again. I miss Tom—even though he doesn’t deserve it.

  After drinking with my father, I thought I’d end up at Caitlin’s. But when my motor stopped, I was in Tom’s driveway. It was eleven-thirty. I’d driven two hours to travel two blocks. I grabbed the packed gym bag I always kept in my trunk and walked to the patio door. Tom let me in, unquestioning. Still, I told him my father had a woman over. If Tom knew I was lying, he never mentioned it. I followed him down the hall.

  The great thing about Tom’s room was it never changed. It evolved, maybe, over the years, with Pokemon posters replaced by Miley Cyrus, then Taylor Swift. But if you looked on his top closet shelf, next to the Barron’s SAT Prep, there’d still be bags of plastic army men and enough Tonka trucks for a major construction project. He’d deny it, but they were there. Tom sat, texting, I saw him type nick here.

  Liana’s reply appeared. Hi, Nick.

  I took Tom’s phone and typed Hi. Then I flopped onto the bottom bunk of the bunk bed Tom had begged for when we were eight. I buried my face in the old University of Florida bedspread. I loved the smell of the sheets at Tom’s house. I knew it was just bleach, but to me, it was home. I took out my Spanish workbook and spent the next half hour making pointless marks in it. Tom’s two-fingered typing punctuated the silence. I finished the assignment, then walked to his chair and stood over him. He turned to me. “You mind?”

  I looked away, let him have his tender moment. Finally, he put the phone down, and I said, “You at least sexting?”

  “What do you think? Liana’s mom turns off her phone at 9.”

  “I think Liana’s mother’s been watching too many talk shows.”

  I walked into the bathroom. I even kept a toothbrush there. I used it and got into bed. The desk lamp was off, so the only light was the glow from the Dilbert screensaver. Tom hoisted himself to the top bunk. The bed always creaked when he did that. Was my father still in the living room, drinking? Could Tom’s father ever do that? Impossible. Springs sagged above me, and suddenly I wanted to talk, wanted to tell Tom everything, things I’d never told him or anyone. Not only about my father but about me and Cat, that sometimes I felt so out of control with her. But about my father too, how afraid I was of becoming like him. Tom shifted in bed. I asked him if he was awake.

  When he said yes, I said, “Do you and your dad ever fight? I mean, argue about anything?”

  “Sure, doesn’t everyone?”

  “Like, what?”

  “Stupid stuff, mostly. Grades, helping around the house. His ongoing thing’s my hair, same as Liana’s. You know he offered to buy me a boat if I cut it short?”

  “Sailboat or powerboat?”

  “Doesn’t matter. If I take it, it’ll never end. I mean, you think my hair’s stupid, but you accept it. You accept me. My parents just want me to be like everyone else. Last week, my mom said, ‘Nick always looks so neat.’” He laughed. “This stupid bet’s the worst thing. If we win the Winterfest game, we go to the regionals, but I don’t care. I’m just worried about not having to cut my hair.”

  I heard quick, light footsteps. The door opened, and something landed on my bed. “Wimpy’s here.”

  “Yeah, dumb dog loves you.” Tom’s head disappeared from view, and I thought he’d gone to sleep until he said, “How about you and your dad?”

  I stroked Wimpy’s bumpy fur. Then I let my hand drop to the side of the bed. I couldn’t tell Tom. His problems were normal, the kind on Very Special Episodes of TV sitcoms. Mine were intense foreign films. What could I say: By the way, my father calls me a mistake, and I slapped Caitlin on the way back from Key West? What could Tom do besides think I was subhuman? Maybe he’d even be right. Finally, I said, “You know. He’s not around much, doesn’t care what I do. Guess he likes work better.” Wimpy warmed my feet.

  “You’re lucky,” Tom said.

  “Maybe so.”

  I lay there, listening to Tom’s breathing become even with sleep, the stop and start of the central air. The last time I looked, the digital clock said two-thirty. I always wondered if things would have turned out different if I’d talked to Tom that night.

  APRIL 4

  * * *

  Mario’s class

  “How did you feel then?”

  Somehow, I’m telling Mario and the world about the fight Caitlin and I had on the Seven Mile Bridge. Mario ambles toward me, plants his feet, and says, “What emotion were you feeling then?”

  “What emotion?”

  “Name it, it’s yours.”

  “Guess I was pissed off.”

  Mario sighs audibly. “Are you ever anything else?”

  Why is he yanking my chain? I don’t have to listen. I push the off button.

  I sit.

  “Well?” he says.

  “Thought it was rhetorical.”

  “You thought wrong.” Mario places a hairy hand on my shoulder. “What, my volatile boy, did you feel besides pissed off?”

  I don’t feel like answering.

  “Here are some choices.” Mario smiles, patient, a botanist waiting for flowers to grow. “Were you afraid? Embarrassed? Ashamed of being a jerk to the woman you supposedly loved?”

  “You said no put-downs.” I stand, my shoulder brushing his gut.

  “Am I embarrassing you?” Still angelic.

  “No.” I look into ten eyes. Are they laughing? “What’s your point?”

  “You’ve got two speeds, pissed off and asleep. You can’t operate like that. You’ve got to acknowledge other emotions, other ways of dealing with them.” He starts to walk away, then turns. “Your girlfriend says something you think questions your manhood, so you call her a bitch. Or a whore. Or whatever particular term of endearment you learned at your father’s knee. Next time, you figure she asked for it, so you hit her. Is that the best thing to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to know? Think!”

  Outside, a guy and girl jog by. I watch them slow to a walk, first her, then him. He swings an arm to grab her, and she stops, leans toward him. They kiss. Then again, his free hand caressing her hair.

  “I don’t know,” I repeat. But the words are hollow.

  “That’s great,” Mario says. “No, really. It’s great you’re proud of what you did.” He leans over me. “Whoooee! Nick Andreas is a hero! He can lick any girl he wants!”

  “Screw you.” Behind my eyes feels suddenly hot.

  “I’m pissing you off ?” Mario says.

  “Yes.”

  He leans closer, on me like tight briefs. No one else moves. He waves a chubby forefinger in my eyes. “So you’re pissed.”

  “Yes.” Swallowing.

  “You’re madder than my fat brother, Julio, when someone beats him to the dinner table?”

  “Yes.”

  Across from me, A.J.’s mouth hangs open.

  “The
n hit me,” Mario whispers.

  “What?”

  “Did I stutter? Hit me.” When I don’t budge, Mario yells in my face, “Hit me!”

  Instead, I elbow past him, the running girl’s image still tattooed on my brain. “I can’t.”

  Mario follows. “Why the hell not? You chicken?”

  “Quit it.”

  “No. You’re mad, aren’t you?”

  “Right.”

  “When you got mad at Caitlin, you hit her?”

  “I slapped her.” But it’s no different, even to me.

  “Hit her, slapped her. You didn’t turn the other cheek, adopt this Gandhi posture you’re taking here, did you?” When I shake my head, he says, “So you’re mad at me, you hit me. Right?”

  “You’re a teacher.”

  “It’s okay to hit your girlfriend, but not a teacher?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I say.

  “You didn’t have to. You say it with every molecule of your being.”

  I look away. “I know it’s not okay.”

  “But you can’t control yourself?” I shake my head, just to get rid of him, and sit down again. The room’s so quiet I swear I hear my hair blowing in the air conditioner. Mario nudges Tiny over and sits by me.

  “Sure you can,” he says. “You just did it with me. You can do the same with her.”

  I should have hit him when I had the chance.

  The rest of class, Mario lectures about the three C’s, compromise, communication, and control. Near the end, Kelly says, “Hey, Mario, what do you call a woman with two black eyes?”

  “We’re not doing that today,” Mario says.

  Kelly stops, but when Mario turns away, Kelly whispers, “The new and improved model.”

  After class, I gather my stuff, hanging back so I’m the last to go. When everyone’s gone, I approach Mario. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead.

  “That day on the bridge, when I slapped Caitlin…”

  “Yeah?” He turns to give me his full attention.

  “I was afraid, okay? I was afraid she’d leave me.”