Breathe

by Melanie McCullough

  Swallowing hard, I waited while he considered his options. There weren’t many: he could give me back my bag or he could continue to taunt me. We hadn’t always been at odds—Nolan and I. I hoped that he’d remember that. And I suspected that if his friends weren’t watching, I’d’ve gotten off easier.

  A smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth as he lowered the bag to allow me to take it. I snatched it, intuitively knowing that couldn’t be the end of it, and turned on my heels. Once I’d put some distance between us, I leaned over and placed the bag on the ground, unzipped it and searched for my towel.

  I felt his hands upon my hips first.

  Snapping upright, I spun around and took a step back, the metal lockers banging against my spine. He was too close. Too large. I clutched my towel to me and willed my heart to remain inside my chest. It pushed against my rib cage like it meant to escape. Flee to the safety and comfort of the water.

  “You’re a little jumpy,” Nolan sneered, leaning in and pressing his palms against the lockers on either side of my head. Behind him, I heard his friends snicker. “Do I scare you?” he asked.

  He terrified me. Always had. Ever since his tenth birthday party when I’d seen him and his friends try to microwave a field mouse. “It’s only a mouse,” he’d cried after I’d run and told his mama. Only a mouse. Something tiny and helpless. As if that made it okay.

  But I wasn’t about to admit that I was frightened. “What do you want Nolan?” I asked instead. I hoped he couldn’t sense my fear. Of course, Nolan was more animal than boy; he could probably smell it on me the way I could smell the rain.

  He’d delighted in torturing me just about as long as I’d known him—pushing me off the swings and the monkey bars, pulling on my pigtails. I remember Maggie once telling me he only behaved that way because he liked me. I’d wondered aloud how the two could be related. How someone who was supposed to love you could go out of their way to hurt you. Maggie had replied that love was all about pain. “It’ll tear you up good,” she’d said. “If it doesn’t, sugar plum, you’re not doing it right.”

  I was pretty sure it was all bullshit. Nolan didn’t antagonize me because he was harboring a secret crush on me. He tortured me because he was bigger and stronger than I was and somehow pushing me around and picking on those weaker than himself made him feel significant.

  My fear urged Nolan on. His nostrils flared and his gray eyes flickered to my minimal cleavage. Gooseflesh cropped up where he ran his fingers along my arm. All I could do was lean back and try to get to know the locker behind me a little better.

  “Well you did promise me some gratitude,” he replied.

  I brushed his hand away. “Okay. So, thank you,” I said. “Now if you’ll get out of my way, I need to change and get to class.” Leaning under his arm, I rounded his body and tried to walk away. I knew he’d turned even before the towel was wrenched from my hands and I was forced back against the lockers. I’d felt the air behind me shift. Sensed his mood as it changed from playful to dangerous. I’d been around enough of those kinds of mood swings to recognize it immediately.

  He pressed into me, not allowing me any room to wiggle free this time. His breath was hot against my ear. I reminded myself to breathe. Don’t let him see you squirm.

  I tried to listen but there was another voice in my head—one that shouldn’t have been there—telling me that it was my fault. That I deserved it. “Come on,” he whispered and I heard the other voice, deep and hard like it’d been cut from stone, saying the same thing—“Come on Abby. It’ll be fun.”

  Nolan’s fingers traced the side of my body down to the spot where my swimsuit met my hip. He lifted the fabric with a fingertip and let it snap back into place. It stung against my wet skin and I bit the inside of my lip to keep from flinching. “I know somewhere in there’s gotta be a little slut. Just like your mother.”

  “Hey!” Garrett shouted, his voice filling the room followed by a splash. Nolan blocked my view of the pool so I couldn’t see Garrett as he moved through the water. All I knew was thirty seconds later Garrett had wrenched Nolan away from me. There was a squealing of cleats against the tile, low growls, and the thwack of skin and bone meeting skin and bone, before Nolan’s friends moved in to break up the scuffle.

  “What’s your problem, man?” Nolan spat blood on the floor and wiped a trickle from his nose with the back of one of his bear hands. Garrett had punched him. From the looks of it, he’d gotten him good.

  “My problem?!” Garrett hollered. “Keep your damn hands off of her.”

  I didn’t know whether to be ecstatic or terrified. Garrett had stood up for me and while it wasn’t the first time and though I knew he was only protecting me, his temper scared me. Seemed almost out of control lately. It was a possessive and volatile side of him I wasn’t sure I wanted to get used to.

  Nolan lifted his palms into the air in a show of surrender. “Sorry, didn’t realize you two had a thing going on.” He paused and chuckled before asking, “Does Zoe know?”

  I’d almost forgotten she was there and when I glanced across the pool to meet her gaze, it chilled me from the inside out, as if she’d plunged a large icicle straight through my heart. She stamped her foot and stormed off in the opposite direction toward the exit.

  “Zoe,” Garrett called to her but it was too late, she was gone and I was surprised that he remained planted between me and Nolan Carter. I thought for sure he’d go after her, but he stayed to protect me and force Nolan to retreat.

  They stared each other down for a bit, neither one budging, until finally Nolan laughed and tapped his nearest crony on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” Then he turned back to Garrett. “She’s certainly not worth it.” Garrett lunged in his direction but I stopped him with a firm touch to his arm. Garrett didn’t need to get suspended because Nolan was an ass.

  “You should go after her,” I told Garrett, thinking of Zoe, as soon as Nolan was out of sight.

  Garrett shook his head. He was so close droplets of water from his still-wet hair slicked my skin and memories from a night just a week ago flooded my mind—Garrett’s face above mine, his wet hair dripping on my forehead, my cheekbones. The feel of his fingertips as they grazed my lips.

  “Just get dressed,” he replied, breaking through my reverie. Then he stood guard outside the girls’ locker room while I slipped from my bathing suit and slid into my uniform. When I emerged, he was talking to his father, Coach Scott.

  When they were that near to one another, it was hard not to notice how unlike they were. Garrett was tall, broad shouldered, and tanned skin, while Coach Scott was short, pasty, and overweight. I imagined Garrett looked like his mother, though in the five years that I’d known him, I’d never once met the woman. Much like Maggie, she never came to meets and only rarely did he speak of her except in generalities, like ‘my mom got me that game for Christmas’ or ‘I can’t go swimming today, it’s my mom’s birthday’.

  From the way folks in town talked, I got the impression she was a few sandwiches short of a picnic and I wondered if he kept her at a distance to avoid embarrassment like I did with Maggie.

  “Garrett says you missed your run this morning,” Coach Scott commented in the straightforward way of his that had a habit of catching me off guard. Like he couldn’t be bothered with a simple hello.

  “Yes, sir. I was late,” I replied.

  “You’ll do it this afternoon.” It wasn’t a question, but I gave a curt nod anyway to show I understood it wasn’t an option.

  “Did you swim?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And your time on the hundred?”

  “Fifty one.”

  He raised his eyebrows and gave me a stern look that said he knew I could do better. Which was true. Garrett and I had been playing around and I hadn’t exactly been trying. I hadn’t even bothered to put my hair away.

  “I can get it under forty nine,” I promised.

  “Do
it before next Saturday.”

  “Sir?”

  “Penn State is coming.”

  He disappeared into his office without another word. Then again, ‘Penn State is coming’ are the only words I’d’ve heard anyway. I’d set my sights on a swimming scholarship to Penn State five years ago. It was the only thing that kept me going day in and day out. It was the reason Garrett and I got up at five o’clock every morning and swam laps in the pool. It was the only thing on this planet I wanted. And now it was finally within my grasp.

  ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

  By lunchtime, the school was buzzing. Not about the Garrett/Nolan scuffle, or who was going with whom to the Homecoming dance the following weekend, or even the fact that Garrett and I ate lunch together while Zoe shot daggers at us from across the cafeteria.

  Everyone, it seemed, was talking about the body that had been found down by the river. Nothing like that had ever happened in Little Bend before. Sure, we had our share of scandal—cheating spouses, an overwrought mother who left her kids in the car while she picked up groceries at Howell’s just so she could have a moment’s peace. Then of course there was Maggie’s story—an affair with a young teacher, an unexpected pregnancy, a man run out of town and a teenage mother with a baby she had no business having. But a dead body—outside of a funeral—was something new. Almost exciting.

  At the end of the day, Garrett and I exited the main building side by side and headed for the pool. We were so close, I could smell his familiar scent of chlorine and wintergreen mint, and I wondered if he wanted to take my hand as much as I wanted him to reach for it. I craved the quiet comfort of his touch, the strength that radiated from his hands. I wanted it to rub off on me, invade me the way that water did.

  There wasn’t time for any of that though. Up ahead, I spotted a figure I recognized. Of course, in this town everybody knew everybody else’s name, date of birth, and blood type. But this figure was different from the others scurrying about the school grounds. He stood in front of the large, metal double doors of the pool building. A sentinel standing watch, his thumbs linked through his belt loops, and his short, dark hair hidden beneath his large, gray hat. He watched the entire crowd but I knew he was waiting for me. Spotting us, he headed in our direction. Garrett greeted him with a polite smile and a quick, “Sheriff.”

  “Mr. Scott,” Sheriff Wilson replied with a nod. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at Garrett’s truck. “You can head on home now. I need to have a word with Miss Rhoades.”

  “What about?”

  The ill-advised question slipped through Garrett’s lips before he could stop himself. Inwardly, I grimaced as Sheriff Wilson’s eyebrows met above his nose. “None of your damn business is what,” he snapped, his tone sharp and cold. “Now I said to get on out of here.”

  Garrett glanced at me, an unspoken apology upon his lips, and though my heart was in my throat and I had this gnawing feeling growing in my gut, I nodded to let him know I’d be okay. He gave me an uneasy smile and walked away, leaving me alone with Sheriff Wilson’s intimidating stare.

  “Tom Ford’s body’s been found,” was the only thing the sheriff said before leading me toward the Dodge Charger parked and waiting in the fire lane.

  Chapter Two

  Abby

  Lyle MacNamera, Little Bend’s resident drunk, discovered the body earlier that morning on the bank of the river when he’d attempted to stumble home at four am and stopped to take a piss in the woods.

  As Sheriff Wilson spoke, pacing back and forth on the other side of the table between us, I pictured the scene in my mind. The river would be just about the only thing moving that time of day, its routine unabated by the scene growing along its bank. Undaunted by the police officers and the flashing lights. Continuing to flow as if nothing had happened.

  And I pictured Tom lying there, the bugs perusing his flesh, the birds beginning to peck at his lifeless eyes. It was easy for me to imagine him dead. After all, I’d wished it upon him.

  “I spoke to your mother a bit ago,” Sheriff Wilson told me. “Way I understand it she hasn’t seen Tom in nearly four days. Sound ‘bout right to you?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I replied. “It’s not like Maggie and I sit up at night and talk about boys.”

  Both Sheriff Wilson and Maggie had grown up in Little Bend. They’d gone to school together. Hell, they’d probably slept together. Maybe after prom or a drunken one-night-stand when I was still a baby and Maggie was still considered hot. Point being, Sheriff Wilson knew good and well that Maggie would never have discussed with me when she’d last seen Tom Ford. All I knew was what I could figure from Maggie’s moods. About four days ago she’d seemed worried, then pissed, and then last night she’d taken a razor to her wrist. So, I suppose four days was ‘bout right.

  I wasn’t about to tell Sheriff Wilson that though. I couldn’t be sure why he’d dragged me into the station, and until I knew that, I’d decided to keep my mouth tightly clamped. People could say what they wanted about me, and most did, but I certainly wasn’t stupid.

  The room they’d stashed me in was much like the town itself—nondescript and uninteresting. White walls, gray concrete floor, a long wooden table in the center. Sheriff Wilson and I were on either side, staring each other down. He took a seat and looked down the bridge of his large, crooked nose at me, unfazed by my lack of cooperation. “Well then,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me when it was you last saw Tom?”

  I concentrated on inhaling and exhaling slowly, deliberately. Like I’d been taught for swimming. “It’s all about control, Abby,” Coach Scott had once told me. “If you control your breathing, your pace, you control the race.” Controlling my emotions, hiding the way I really felt, these were things I’d mastered long before Coach Scott came into my life. Long before Tom Ford.

  “Not sure,” I told Sheriff Wilson.

  “So it wasn’t you Loralie Baker saw arguing with Tom outside your uncle’s bar on Monday night?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I managed to choke out around the lump forming in my throat. “Just can’t be sure that’s the last time I saw him, that’s all.”

  “And what were you two arguing about?”

  “Politics. Religion. Who’s gonna win on Sunday. You know, the usual.”

  Sheriff Wilson’s gaze fell and I realized that I was wringing my hands. I wasn’t intentionally trying to draw attention to them, but he stared hard, like he already knew what had happened. “What happened there?” he asked anyway.

  I peered at the skin. It was raw and scratched where it had shredded against the gravel. I could still feel the skin tearing. I folded my arms across my chest and buried my hands beneath my armpits. “I fell. Scraped ‘em on the sidewalk.”

  “Hmm…And where exactly did this happen?”

  “Behind my uncle’s bar.”

  Sheriff Wilson looked down and began jotting down notes on the yellow legal pad in front of him. “And when was this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. A day or two ago.” I wondered what he was writing. Was there something significant about my injuries? Something that told Sheriff Wilson all my secrets? Something that told him what happened between Tom and I that night?

  “You know, nothing good’s ever come from lying, Abby,” he warned and my heart stilled.

  “And why exactly would I lie about scraping my hands? Happens to me all the time. I’m a bit of a klutz, just ask my uncle.”

  Sheriff Wilson’s lips quirked and he chewed on the inside of his cheek, taking his time before he spoke again. Like he was choosing his words with caution. “And what exactly was the nature of your relationship with Tom Ford?” he finally asked.

  “He was my mother’s boyfriend.”

  “And how long have you known him?”

  Was it me or was the room growing warmer? The top sheet of yellow paper in front of Sheriff Wilson shrank away from the air sputtering from the ancient air conditioning unit jammed in the room’s only window. It
was definitely me.

  “About a year,” I admitted. “Don’t you know this already?” I rolled my eyes in an unconvincing show of exasperation and boredom, and Sheriff Wilson smiled. Not a happy smile, just a knowing one. As if he thought he could see right through me.

  “I know a lot more than you might think, Abby,” he replied. “But I wanna hear it from you.”

  “Cody!” I heard my uncle’s voice, loud and angry, as it resounded through the station. “Cody Wilson!”

  A silent moment passed before the door to the closet-sized room flew open and crashed with a thud against the wall. “Sorry Sheriff,” a woman apologized as she tried in vain to block the doorway and prevent my Uncle Jim from entering. It was useless. My uncle was a massive man. All gristle and brawn. He dwarfed the deputy and she was far from a tiny woman.

  As Sheriff Wilson stood the metal feet of his chair scraped against the floor and emitted an anguished wail. ““It’s okay Karen,” he assured her. “Let him in.”

  Karen moved out of the way and allowed my uncle to enter. He engulfed the space behind the sheriff, filling the tiny room with his formidable presence. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing Cody?” he demanded to know.

  Sheriff Wilson sighed and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “My job, Jim. Abby here’s a witness.”

  “Don’t give me that shit, Cody. This about Tom?” So everyone already knew. It shouldn’t have shocked me. The smallest towns are filled with biggest mouths.

  “You know she ain’t got nothing of use to tell you,” Uncle Jim shouted then looked at me, his brown-green eyes hard, unreadable. He nodded his head toward the door. “Go get your things. You’re done here,” he told me.

  “Now wait just a second, Jim—,” Sheriff Wilson started.

  My uncle whipped around to face the sheriff so fast the man reached down and placed his hand on the butt of his holstered gun while my uncle pointed a large finger in his face. “Next time you wanna talk to Abby,” Uncle Jim ordered. “You come see me first.”