How to Breathe Underwater

by Vicky Skinner

  Marisol chewed silently, but there was something judgmental about it. I never knew chewing could be judgmental.

  Patrice groaned. “Shut up. It’s not even a big deal. We’re going to be fine.” Her natural glow dimmed a little, but it only lasted a second before she was smiling up at me. “So where are you from?”

  “Salem.”

  Patrice bounced a little in her seat. “Oh, I have a cousin in Salem. I like it out there.” Her face scrunched adorably. “But I’m sure you’ll love it here.”

  Marisol fluttered her eyelashes. “There isn’t anyone as awesome as us in Salem.”

  Patrice nodded, agreeing solemnly. “It’s true. And now you have the most awesome friends in Portland.”

  I had friends in Portland. I wasn’t going to be completely alone. The thought was such a relief that I spent the rest of the lunch period listening to them talk and argue, and I knew that if I didn’t like anything else about Portland, I liked them.

  *   *   *

  When I walked into American Lit and saw Michael sitting in the back of the class, I thought maybe my day had peaked.

  He didn’t notice me at first, his head down as he scribbled on a piece of paper, but then his head came up, and he smiled. My brain shorted for a second, and I snapped myself out of it. I’d known the boy less than the length of one school day.

  “You must be Miss Masterson.” A pretty woman with caramel-colored curls and dark skin who I assumed was Mrs. Hure grabbed a stack of supplies off the corner of her desk. “Textbook, syllabus, and reading list. Have a seat where you like.”

  There was an open seat beside Michael, so I took it before anyone else could, and as Mrs. Hure started to lecture on The Great Gatsby, Michael turned slightly in his seat to look at me. We were far enough in the back that he could lean over and whisper to me.

  “Having a good day?” he asked, and I caught the faint smell of cigarette smoke on his clothes, clumsily covered by cologne.

  I nodded and shrugged, a weird half-committed, casual gesture.

  He leaned back to settle in his chair again.

  “Has anyone already done the reading for Friday?” Mrs. Hure asked, and everyone chorused a resounding, “No.”

  Everyone but Michael, who said yes quietly enough that I thought maybe I was the only one who’d heard him. I bit my lip, but Michael still heard me laugh. He glanced over at me, and even though he didn’t smile, there was amusement in his eyes.

  In front of him, he had his book open, and I caught the color of pen marks in the margins, notes written up and down the page. Maybe they were his or maybe they were in the book when he got it, but either way, I was mesmerized by the way they seemed to devour every page as he flipped through his book during the lecture.

  I tried to focus through the lesson, taking notes even though I’d already read the book last year, but my eyes kept finding their way back to him, and every once in a while, he caught me looking and I had to focus elsewhere.

  When we were dismissed, we didn’t speak to each other, but he lingered long enough for me to gather my stuff and we walked out together. In the hallway, he looked at me over his shoulder, already turned away from me.

  “Know where you’re going?” he asked with a teasing smile.

  “Yeah,” I said, but as he walked away from me, I wasn’t so sure.

  *   *   *

  Waiting for the bus at the end of the day, I watched people gather, talking and laughing and meeting up with their friends. They moved in groups to get into cars—three, four, or five students piling into one four-door sedan. I checked my phone, but there were no messages from Harris to indicate how swim practice had gone.

  Someone brushed my shoulder. When I turned, Michael was standing beside me, completely casual. We do this every single day, his posture seemed to say. In the afternoon sunshine, he somehow looked even better than he had in the gray morning.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I watched him as he took one out, stuck it between his lips, and then froze, blinking off into the distance. He seemed to remember where he was: a school campus that definitely didn’t allow smoking. He untucked the cigarette from his lips and put it back in the pack, coughing out a laugh. “Habit,” he said, sticking the pack back in his pocket. He rocked back on his heels and smiled at me. He had great teeth and the kind of smile that came with dimples, and I had to stop staring at him.

  I couldn’t help noticing any time a cute boy was within ten yards of me. I liked their mouths and their arms and the way they held themselves. I liked their voices and their hands and the way their back muscles rippled every time they moved. I’d spent the majority of my life hanging around lean, muscular guys who wore little clothing and were always dripping pool water.

  But my dad didn’t like boys. Any boys. He didn’t even particularly like Harris, and Harris and I had never been even remotely interested in each other romantically. My father had always been successful when it came to keeping guys away from me. No one was interested in going near Coach Masterson’s daughter, especially not when she was too busy training her face off for District and State meets to focus on dating.

  And now, here I was, standing next to an extremely attractive guy, and I wanted to say something. Anything. But I couldn’t. Coach Masterson somehow struck again, and he wasn’t even around to witness it.

  “Kate!”

  A line of cars had parked itself against the curb in front of the school, and there, right in the center, was my sister’s Mercedes. She had her head poked out the window and was waving at me.

  I waved at her and was already stepping off the curb when I remembered Michael. I turned back and his eyes were on Lily. “Dress fitting,” I said, as if that explained everything, and took off toward her car.

  When I hopped into the front seat, Lily wasn’t even looking at me. “Who’s he?” she asked.

  I waited until we were out in traffic before I looked back. He had disappeared onto the bus. “His name is Michael.”

  “He’s cute. Please tell me you batted your eyelashes at him.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Not everyone is interested in getting engaged at nineteen.”

  She shrugged. “Fine. Get engaged at sixteen. I’m not judging.” She grinned over at me then and gave my shoulder a playful shove. “How are you?”

  I waved off her question. “Excited for Saturday?”

  She bit her lip. “I’m nervous. There are going to be so many people there! You know how Tom is. He wanted to invite everyone he knows, so there’s going to be, like, two hundred people.”

  “Everything is going to be great. I used to get so nervous for big meets, but it was over so fast, it always made me feel a little ridiculous for worrying.”

  She snorted and flipped on her turn signal as we pulled into the parking lot of the little boutique dress shop where she’d gotten her gown and ordered all her bridesmaids’ dresses. “Somehow I doubt I’ll feel that way,” she said, turning off the car. “But thank God, I get a big vacation afterward.”

  Three

  The shop was a white-lace wonderland, with so many puffy and satiny dresses poking out from every corner that I could barely see where I was going. Then I was being whisked off to a dressing room in the back, where I was told to strip down to my underwear.

  My dress was strapless and turquoise. Behind me, the sales lady was tugging on the fabric of the dress, pulling it tight and putting pins into it.

  “Do you think you can have it ready by Friday?” Lily asked around the finger in her mouth. At the rate she was going, she wasn’t going to need a manicure before her wedding because there would be no nails left. Pacing like she was, she looked just like our mother. Same crease between her eyebrows, same long, dishwater-blond hair, same tense posture.

  The woman, pins sticking out of her mouth, hummed a little and then nodded.

  Lily sighed. “You look great.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have the crowd applaudi
ng my beauty. No one will even notice you.”

  She shrugged in a strange, artificially indifferent way and took a seat on the high-heel-shaped chair facing me. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

  I felt myself go rigid from my toenails to the roots of my hair. “Sure.”

  Lily bit the inside of her cheek, drummed her fingers on her knee, did everything but ask me the question.

  Meanwhile, the saleswoman was trying to shimmy me out of the dress without sticking me with any of the pins. She wiggled it over my head, and I tried not get impatient as I stood on a platform in front of my sister in nothing but my underwear.

  “Do you think I should uninvite Dad?” she finally asked without looking at me.

  I went for my clothes, hurrying into my jeans and top before sitting next to Lily on the little pink seat. “I don’t think you can do that.” It wasn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her to disown our father, to never speak to him again, to disinvite him and also tell him where he could shove it. But I couldn’t. “He’s our dad.”

  She balled her fists in her lap, clenching and unclenching them. “Aren’t you mad?”

  “Of course I’m mad. He cheated on Mom, at my school, at my pool. And then he kicked us out of our house. And now Mom is looking for a job, and I have to go to a new school, with a new swim team and a coach I don’t even know, and boys who show up on my doorstep at seven in the morning, and I have to take the bus, and my lab partner sleeps through class, and it’s all Dad’s fault.” I stopped talking and stared down at the carpet, aware of her eyes on me. Sure, I was mad. Of course I was mad. How could I not be mad? But what was I supposed to do about it? I’d already cut Dad out. I couldn’t erase him from the planet completely, no matter how much I wished I could.

  “But it’s your wedding, and I think Dad has to be there.” It was like poison on my tongue to admit that. If it were my wedding, I’d have a very large human guarding the door to make sure Coach Masterson couldn’t come in.

  She nodded, but she stared off into space, her face alive with doubt.

  I tried to smile. “Look on the bright side. At least on Friday night you’ll have all those naked guys to distract you.”

  She groaned. “God, I’m sorry Julie is being totally ridiculous with the strip club thing.”

  I was not at all upset about not being able to attend my sister’s bachelorette party. Her other bridesmaids had decided the night would be incomplete without leather-clad men shaking their junk around, and luckily for me, no one was letting me into a strip club.

  “Trust me, it’s not a problem,” I told her, getting up to put my shoes back on.

  “Hey, maybe I can give Michael a call and he can come put on a private show for you.” She waggled her eyebrows at me, and I tossed my shoe at her.

  *   *   *

  After we got back to the apartment, Lily and I were discussing the validity of competitive cooking shows when I threw the door open, and we both stopped cold. My mother was crumpled on the entry room floor, crying.

  Lily and I were on our knees on either side of her before the door had even fallen closed. For half a second, our mom didn’t seem to notice we were there. She sobbed into her hands, dressed in a black pencil skirt and a white blouse, her high heels discarded on the floor beside her.

  “Mom?” Lily asked because I couldn’t. We looked at each other in horror.

  “Oh God. I’m so sorry.” My mother looked for a moment like she was going to paste on a smile and face us, but when she took in a deep breath, it seemed too much for her because she exhaled a sob and was crying again.

  We helped her to her feet and led her to the kitchen table, where Lily sat patting her back while I put water for tea on to boil.

  When my mother met my eye, she looked a little like a fun-house clown. Her makeup had run, her eyeliner trailing black marks down her cheeks and her bright-red lipstick smudged down her chin. “I’m okay, girls. Today was just a tough one. Turns out that no one wants to hire me, even with a master’s degree. That’s what I get for deciding I should be a stay-at-home mom for so long.”

  I knew she didn’t mean her comment to be hurtful, but I still felt a twinge of guilt in my chest. If it weren’t for me, if it weren’t for Lily, she would have kept her old job, would have been perfectly successful, wouldn’t be trying to start from the bottom.

  My mother sighed, her momentary bravado gone and her shoulders sinking low. “I didn’t mean it like that. I loved staying home with you girls.”

  I nodded, but turned to pull the teakettle off the stove so that I wouldn’t have to look at her anymore. What was I supposed to do for my mother? How was I supposed to help her rebuild her life when I couldn’t even figure out how to rebuild my own?

  I dipped tea bags in three cups and turned back to face them. “Let’s stay in tonight,” I said, walking the few steps from the stove to the kitchen table and setting cups of hot tea in front of them. “I don’t really want to go out. I can make spaghetti or something.”

  My mother smiled, obviously relieved. “That sounds nice.”

  I went to the pantry to take out pasta and sauce, pushing aside boxes still piled in front of the oven. Mom and Lily spoke quietly at the table while I started dinner, but I kept my eye on them as I worked. How had things fallen apart so fast? A month before, I was prepping for swim season—early-morning swims with Dad, late-night stretches to keep my muscles warm—and now I was listening to my mother cry.

  I put water on to boil and tried not to look at Lily and my mom while I pried the box of pasta open. It felt like maybe if I didn’t look, I could pretend it wasn’t real. I’d never seen my mother break down like that, not even when my grandpa died.

  “I’m just going to run to the restroom,” my mother said, fanning her face and disappearing down the hall.

  Lily got up from the table and leaned against the stove, her arms crossed. “Has she been doing this a lot?” she asked quietly.

  I shook my head. “I haven’t even seen her look particularly upset.”

  Lily sighed. “Maybe you guys should come stay at my place. I can help you look after her.”

  I waved her off. “She’ll be fine. It’s just been a rough week.” After word had gotten out about what happened at the pool, my mother slept in the guest room in our old house while she found us a new place to live. She’d hidden in there for over a week, and when she’d emerged, it had been with a rock-solid plan for a new home and a new life. Maybe this wasn’t her first breakdown.

  “What about you?”

  “I’m fine.” I couldn’t look at her while I said it. I wasn’t so positive that I was fine. Or that I would ever be fine. But my mother was getting rid of evidence of a breakdown in the bathroom and my sister was getting married at the end of the week, so it was time for me to be fine.

  She nodded, like she believed me. “Do you think we’re going to be like that someday?” she asked.

  I put a lid on the pot of water. “Who, me and you?”

  “Me and Tom.”

  When I turned to look at her, her eyes were vacant. “What if hurting each other is inevitable?”

  “Lily, Tom is not going to cheat on you. And he’s not going to be Dad. They’re nothing alike. Tom has a soul.”

  Lily smiled a little, but I could still see that wariness in her eyes, and I wanted to tell her that she and Tom would never end up like Mom and Dad, but what if that was a lie? What if it was inevitable that people who loved each other would eventually tear each other apart?

  “You’re getting married,” I said to her, “and it’s going to be great.” And I tried to believe it.

  *   *   *

  “Do you believe that you can really like someone after only meeting them once?” I asked Harris over the phone.

  I couldn’t see his face, but I could imagine him on the other end, scowling in thought. His voice came out loud from my phone’s speaker while I unpacked books in my room, putting them on my boo
kshelf in alphabetical order.

  “Sure, why not?” I heard him take a bite of something, and then he was speaking around the food in his mouth. “I don’t think I believe in all that love-at-first-sight bullshit, but I do believe in lust at first sight.”

  I laughed. I supposed that made sense. What I was feeling for that cute boy across the hall wasn’t love. It was definitely lust. Definitely, definitely.

  “Are you asking me this because you have the hots for some guy you just met?”

  “I might.”

  Harris snorted. “Damn. You’ve been gone three days, and you’re already ready to give it up to the first guy you see?”

  “Don’t be an asshole. It’s not like that. I just think he’s cute. And he might be nice. But he smokes.” I grimaced at the memory of cigarette smoke curling out of his mouth.

  Harris chuckled. “Man, you really caught yourself a good one. So, what’s the problem?”

  “There’s not really a problem. I’m just not good at boys.”

  He laughed. “It’s really not that complicated. You smile a lot, you tell him how great he is, and bam, he wants to follow you around everywhere. April told me she liked my abs while she was wearing that bikini, the one with the cherries all over it. That’s all it took. I was done for.”

  I snorted. “Oh, it’s that easy, huh? I’ll just walk up to him, tell him I really like his hair, and we’ll live happily ever after? Well, thanks, Harris. Problem solved.”

  “What? It worked for me!” Harris said. “My relationship with April is totally simple. No drama, no games. It’s the best.”

  “Yes, well, good for you, but normal relationships don’t work that way, and I’m not just going to walk up to Michael, tell him I like his dimples, and assume he’ll just fall all over me because of it.”

  “Your loss,” he said with a sigh. “You seem to have a good list worked up. Hair, dimples.”

  “How was practice today?” I said over him, pulling the subject away from Michael’s dimples.