Breathless 3 (Breathless #3)

by Claire Adams

  I came into the clearing where Johnny had built the fire and saw him standing there, in his hockey gear. Another scream ripped through my ears, cutting through my brain, and I saw him bring his hockey stick down onto someone, over and over again. That had been the thudding I had heard — the sick sound of the wooden stick hitting a person. I staggered backwards, staring at Johnny as he laughed, bringing his stick down again, blood spattering across his uniform. He was singing something — words I didn’t know, a song I couldn’t recognize — as he laid into whomever he was beating, and it was so completely horrifying that I screamed.

  “Oh hey, baby,” Johnny said, turning towards me. “Just have to take care of this real quick.” He turned away and started beating the person at his feet even more viciously, chuckling under his breath. Realizing the screams were feminine, I looked down at the broken, bloody person, curled in on herself. The next moment, the person’s face turned towards me and through the streaming blood, I saw to my horror that it was Claire White. I screamed again and again, trying to get away from the fire, from the sight of Johnny beating the poor defenseless girl. My legs wouldn’t work and I thrashed around me, trying to cover my face, trying not to see what was in front of me. It couldn’t be Johnny. It couldn’t be Claire. It couldn’t be real — Claire had killed herself, she hadn’t been murdered by Johnny. I heard a sickening crunch, a thud, and turned away, trying to run, trying to escape.

  I woke up all at once, dripping with cold sweat, sitting up in my bed, my heart pounding in my chest. God. God. What was that? I shook from head to toe, reeling from the vividness of the nightmare. My throat hurt — had I screamed for real or just in the dream? I swallowed and tried to get a grip on myself. It had only been a dream. It had been terrifying, but no matter what Johnny had done to drive a girl to kill herself, he obviously hadn’t actually beaten her — not like that. If he had, there would have been no way for him to escape punishment for it.

  I climbed out of bed, deciding that I needed a drink of water. I needed to talk to someone. But Georgia’s room was deserted — she wasn’t back from her date. It wasn’t even midnight. I shook as I tried to open a water bottle and spilled half of its contents all over myself. I’m exhausted, I’m stressed out, and I went to bed hungry, I told myself firmly. No wonder I had a nightmare. I fumbled in the darkness of the common area and found a box of crackers, cramming them into my mouth and washing them down with the last of the water. My stomach was still unsteady, but my heart started to finally slow down and I climbed back into bed.

  My mind still reeled with what my dream had shown me. It wasn’t real. Johnny didn’t do that to her. Whatever else I could manage to believe about him, I couldn’t believe that he could beat a girl to death and then go on to college as if nothing had happened. I finished off the water and tossed the bottle towards the recycling bin in my room without even caring whether or not it actually landed inside. I decided the only thing I could do was try and go back to sleep, as terrifying as the prospect of another nightmare was. I was so tired. I was so confused. I closed my eyes and drifted off gradually, telling myself that I would think of nothing but pleasant things. I started to call up the nicest things I could think of. Kittens and puppies. The cookies my grandmother had made when I was a kid. The smell of laundry fresh out of the dryer. Eventually, I drifted off without knowing what I was thinking of, without knowing I was actually falling asleep.

  Chapter Three

  The next day, I had more or less shaken the nightmare I’d had the night before. I was still anxious; I still didn’t know how to feel about Johnny. I managed to get the sleep I had missed out on the night before, so at least when I woke up in the morning — the interruption of my sleep notwithstanding — I didn’t feel like a zombie. I got out of bed and got dressed, still thinking about what I had discovered.

  What had I really found, though? I had found out that Johnny was somehow involved in Claire White’s suicide. There had been a group of boys who were also involved. How do a group of boys drive a girl to suicide? It could have been bullying. It could have been hacking into her phone or somewhere and finding incriminating pictures. But Johnny had admitted to me that he had been Claire’s boyfriend. That she had been his first. Had he been her first? I shivered, wondering. The words from the comments on Claire’s page came back to me. The boys who had gone to jail had obviously done something awful, but I couldn’t think of what Claire’s own boyfriend could possibly have done that was as bad — unless Johnny was abusive.

  I thought about what my high school health class teacher had taught us about abusive boyfriends and girlfriends. At first they tended to be very charming, very friendly and they often were even once the abuse started, when they were in a “reconciliation” phase. The image of “The Cycle of Abuse” appeared in my mind as I wandered aimlessly through the dining hall to grab some breakfast. The abuser would be charm itself; they would be sweet and kind and attentive. Gradually, as the relationship progressed, things would start to go bad. They’d explode and become frighteningly angry and then, just as suddenly, they’d back off and be sweet again, even kinder and gentler than before, contrite and careful. They’d bring you gifts or go out of their way to be kind to you. You would assume that the explosions were just an isolated incident and that as long as things never worked up quite that tensely…

  But then over time, the teacher had told us with the health counselor nodding solemn agreement, those isolated incidents would happen more and more. The threshold for the explosions would get lower and lower. What started out happening maybe once a month or even more rarely would start to become a weekly event, sometimes even daily. The abuser would try to control more and more aspects of your life to compensate for what was out of control in their own and try and make you stay in spite of every impulse in your mind to go. If you let them, they would convince you that the real person inside was the kind and gentle, sweet and charming person they had shown you at first. The ugliness, the rage, was something that you had caused — whether you meant to or not. That was why so many battered men and women stayed; their abusers convinced them that they were the ones who were wrong, not the abuser.

  If I could trust that Johnny’s story about Claire being his first sexual partner was true — if I could trust anything he had told me at all — I couldn’t imagine that he and Claire hadn’t been together for a long time before that. Plenty of time for him to become abusive towards her, if that was what had happened. What he did to her wasn’t love. That was what the anonymous commenter had said about Johnny. That pointed to abuse of some kind — abuse that the other boys who had been sent to jail must have somehow aided and participated in.

  I was in my second class of the day, still mulling over the various different things that had happened between Johnny and me, the little scraps of accusations that had been leveled against him, when my phone vibrated in my pocket. I took it out carefully with a sense of dread. It was Johnny again. Hey, baby, I’ve got an away game coming up soon and I can’t stand the idea of waiting so long to see you. My stomach started churning and I regretting having oatmeal for breakfast, even if it had tasted good at the time. Can I see you tonight? I miss you so much! I bit my bottom lip. How many women on campus would have cut off their own left arm to get a text like that from Johnny?

  I worried at my lip for a moment as I thought. I couldn’t just ignore it. But I had a ready-made excuse; I had told Johnny last night that I was sick. I’m so sorry, babe. I miss you, too! But I’m still feeling really bad — don’t know what I’ve got and I’d hate to give it to you. An away game — that would be a good thing for me. It would give me a little bit of time without having to worry about Johnny running into me, seeing the liar that I was. I wouldn’t have to see him for a while. I could think and figure out what was going on.

  My phone buzzed again with Johnny’s reply. Aw. I’d love to share germs with you anytime. He had added a little kiss-face emoji to the end of it. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know
what to think. If Johnny was really some kind of crazy, abusive person — if he had driven a girl to suicide — then I should be running away. But how could he be so sweet and so terrible at the same time?

  I knew that I should talk to him, that I should give him some kind of opportunity to explain the situation. He had told me in the one instance when we’d talked about Claire White — in the woods, after the girl had tried to poison my mind about Johnny on the other girl’s behalf — that there were a lot of people who blamed him for Claire’s death, even though he hadn’t done anything. The mere fact that he hadn’t been able to save her had been enough to condemn him. But the comment I’d read, anonymous as it was, had implied that there had been more to it than that. It had implied that Johnny hadn’t just failed Claire — but that Johnny had hurt her.

  I messaged back to Johnny that I just wasn’t feeling up to being around anyone at all; it wasn’t a complete lie. I felt sick. I decided that since I hadn’t managed to actually absorb anything of the lesson, it would be better off to skip the rest of my day’s classes. I emailed my professors and told them that I was too sick to attend and that I had spent half the night in the bathroom. One or two of them emailed back as I was waiting for my class to be over, telling me to definitely keep to the dorm as they would rather not catch whatever it was that I had and that if it lasted longer than a day or two, that I should visit the campus nurse to get looked over.

  I left my class the moment the professor called a halt for the day and hurried back to the dorms, not wanting to run into Johnny or anyone I knew. I just wanted to get back into the quiet and relative peace of my room and to try and think about how everything had managed to go so completely wrong with my college career not even a full semester into it. I put my bag down as soon as I was safely in the room and pulled out my laptop.

  I’m not sure what possessed me to start looking things up. Not things about Claire White exactly and not even things about Johnny exactly, but just questions about the kind of person who could drive someone to commit suicide. I Googled “sociopath characteristics” and opened a few tabs, flipping between them, and became more and more alarmed the more I read. Marked readiness to blame others or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behavior that has brought the person into conflict into society… That could be Johnny saying that people were blaming him for not being able to save Claire; but then, he wasn’t blaming others — he was just explaining. If I could believe him. Sociopaths tend to lack symptoms of nervousness and agitation and tend to have a great deal of superficial charm and intelligence... That sounded like Johnny! He never seemed to be nervous, he was always charming, and he was definitely smart.

  I saw that sometimes psychopath was used interchangeably with sociopath and started further down the rabbit hole of research. Psychopaths are often able to make quick decisions without agonizing over the outcomes…they tend to be assertive, even aggressive… Johnny certainly was assertive and even aggressive on the ice; he never seemed to hesitate when it came to decision making. When a psychopath engages in criminal behavior, they tend to do so in a way that minimizes risk to themselves. They will carefully plan criminal activity to ensure they don’t get caught, having contingency plans in place for every possibility. If Johnny was guilty — if he had some part in Claire’s suicide, he had definitely prevented himself from being caught. I started to wonder if the other boys who had been caught had been Johnny’s “contingency” plan, his way to get away with it. Another article said, Psychopaths tend to focus on the positive. Psychopaths don’t take things personally; they don’t beat themselves up if things go wrong, even if they’re to blame. And they’re cool under pressure.

  I tried to decide, objectively, if I had seen any evidence of the negative sides of Johnny’s possible sociopathy; he hadn’t done anything cruel to me. He hadn’t been abusive to me. I thought about the way he acted on the ice and about the look of enjoyment in his eyes when we’d been going down the trail through the middle of the woods. Had that been because I was scared or because he was anticipating the surprise of showing me the stars? That certainly had been an impulsive date idea. Could I really say that he had shown a “callous unconcern for the feelings of others?” Or that he had “A very low tolerance to frustration?” I hadn’t seen it, but I realized that he and I, in spite of having sex a few times, hadn’t really spent that much time together and I hadn’t really seen him in many situations that would make a person frustrated. He had been so comfortable and unconcerned about meeting my parents, and he hadn’t even minded my mom being rude to him. My mind was spinning and I couldn’t help but think that Johnny had to be — just had to be — some kind of sociopath.

  Chapter Four

  I was on the verge of a full-blown meltdown of epic proportions, reading all of these things about sociopaths and psychopaths and trying to decide which Johnny might be; the consensus amongst the psychological community was that sociopaths were made by circumstances while psychopaths seemed to have some kind of difference in their brain from birth. I was shaking, unable to close the tabs on my browser, unable to think of anything but what might happen the next time I let Johnny convince me to go on a date with him, when he might take me out into the woods again. Instead of s’mores, cider, a crackling fire, and making love, he might kill me. Claire White killed herself, I told my mind firmly. But do you really know that? Wouldn’t a psychopath make it seem like suicide?

  I was dwelling on this point, my heart pounding in my chest, imagining all the ways that someone could make a murder look like a suicide to get away with it when I heard the door to the dorm open. I looked up, half-expecting to see Johnny there, knife in hand. Instead it was Georgia and I was almost as frightened by her coming in as I would have been of Johnny showing up. I quickly closed out all of my tabs, trying to get rid of any evidence of what I was searching for and the answers I was trying to find. In my haste to close everything, the laptop started to slip off of my legs and I barely caught it before it tumbled to the floor.

  “You look like my brother when I walked in on him jerking off to ‘Lesbian Flower Shop Five,’” Georgia said as she came in, grinning at me and shaking her head. “What, did Johnny send you pictures of his cock?” I blushed, shaking my head.

  “Nah, nothing like that,” I told her, hearing the tension in my own voice. Georgia stopped on her way to her side of the dorm room, frowning. She looked at me more closely.

  “What’s going on? You look like you’re about to throw up.” I shrugged, swallowing down the nausea I was feeling and trying to force my heart to slow down in my chest.

  “I just haven’t been sleeping much lately,” I said, looking down at the keyboard. I glanced at Georgia. She set her backpack down and sat down in the chair next to the couch were I was, watching me more heavily than even my mom would when I pretended to be sick to get out of school.

  “I ran into Johnny earlier,” Georgia said slowly. “He’d said you were sick…also said that he was glad I had taken care of you last night.” I blushed. I should have told Georgia about my cover story, but I hadn’t had the opportunity. “Of course, I just went along with it. I mean, if somehow you’re tired of hanging out with him now that your parents approve…”

  “Oh God, they do,” I said, shaking my head. I remembered how approving they had been. How charming Johnny had been. Somehow it all seemed so much more sinister with their approval — with the way he had buttered them up, talking to my dad about hockey, answering my mom’s impertinent questions without batting an eyelash, being just as funny and sweet to them as he had been to me ever since I’d first run into him in the dining hall.

  “Why is that a bad thing? I would have thought you’d be happy to have a boyfriend your parents wouldn’t come after you for.” Gigi’s eyes narrowed. “What exactly is going on, Becky? I mean, you were over the moon about Johnny just a few days ago. What happened?” I bit my bottom lip and worried it between my teeth for a few moments, trying to decide what to say. I didn’t wan
t to lie to Georgia about the situation, but I couldn’t think of what the truth was. I didn’t know what the truth was. I didn’t know if I was out of my mind or if Johnny was.

  “Nothing. Nothing is going on. At least, not that I know of,” I said, correcting myself. I didn’t know — that was the problem. I had no hard proof one way or the other what Johnny’s involvement in the suicide had been or what it hadn’t been.

  “Come on, Becky, tell me the truth,” Georgia said, looking at me sharply. “You don’t go around telling gorgeous guys that you’re sick and have to stay away from them if everything’s fine. Do you think he’s cheating on you or something?” I shook my head. I felt my eyes burning.

  Before I knew it, a huge sob worked its way up from the pit of my stomach and I pushed the laptop away, tears streaming down my face as the enormity of what was going on in my life crashed over me. Everything I had been so happy about was turning into complete shit. “I…don’t…know…what to do…” I managed to say in an almost-howl as more and more sobs hiccupped out of me. Georgia stood up out of the chair and came over to the couch, pulling me into a tight hug as I continued to cry.

  “Shh, Becky, it’s okay. Just tell me what’s going on. It’s not that stupid girl from the game is it?” I shook my head, for a moment not even able to talk. I took a few deep, shuddering breaths.

  “So,” I said, still trying to get a firm hold of myself. “When I got home the other night from the dinner with my parents, something was bugging me about the whole…Claire White thing.” Georgia’s eyes widened.