Breathless

by Jessica Warman

  Even though I don’t know how Mazzie’s mother died, I wonder how it was ever a mystery to me that she is all alone in the world. Watching her sleep, it’s obvious that she is a kind of orphan. Even though we’re both almost grown-ups, Mazzie will probably look like a child forever. Maybe I will too. We are both so incomplete; it’s like we were made to find each other someday. Every other friend I’ve had seems inconsequential compared to her.

  Swimming season is brutal this year. My muscles ache all the time. We’re well on our way to winning the OVACs, which wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for me. I get up before the sun rises every day. When I am too tired to pull the straps up on my bathing suit, I let Mazzie do it for me. I lean against the bed while Mazzie sits on it, my head between her legs, letting my eyes flutter closed while she brushes my hair, and it’s moments like these when I wonder what I will ever do without her once our time here is up.

  For Drew, who is approaching the end of his senior year, his time is almost up. He gets into every school he applies to: Harvard, the University of Virginia, Rice, Notre Dame, and West Virginia University (his safety school). I know he wants to go to Harvard more than anything. The only problem he’s got is that his mom—who is a nurse—doesn’t have any way to pay for it. They’ve offered him a pretty substantial need-based scholarship, but it still isn’t nearly enough. If he goes anyway, he’ll be up to his eyeballs in student loan debt by the time he graduates.

  We’re sitting in his car, which is parked on a remote hillside in Oglebay Park. It’s a few weeks before prom. I’m going back to Yale for the summer, and Drew is going to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity until late August, so he’ll barely be able to visit on the weekends.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot,” he begins, and I know what’s coming. I’ve understood for a while that this conversation is inevitable. And I’ve even tried to convince myself that I’m all right with it—but sitting here beside him, all of a sudden it’s clear that I’m not all right.

  I want to say, “Drew, it’s okay, I understand. You’re going to Harvard, and I’ll still be here,” but my eyes are getting wet; I can’t help it after almost two years with him. Before I can stop myself, I start to panic. What will I do without Drew? He’s always been so sweet to me. He’s been my biggest swimming supporter, a better coach than Solinger in lots of ways. And he’s so genuine. It’s the thing about him that I love the most, even though it drives me crazy sometimes. So many people around us are phony, preoccupied with grades or their social lives and who’s dating whom—with Drew, I always know that what he’s feeling is real. I always know I can depend on him.

  Drew watches me cry. He seems deeply interested in my emotion. “Katie,” he says, so softly that I almost can’t hear him.

  I wipe my nose on my sleeve. I’m a mess. “What?”

  “I talked with Dr. Waugh about some of my options,” he says. In addition to being the admissions director, Dr. Waugh also functions as the college admissions counselor. “She had some interesting ideas.”

  I blink at him. “Like what?”

  “She suggested I talk with the director of Habitat, which I did.” He starts to smile. “And here’s what I can do. If I delay college for a year and volunteer for them instead, they’ll give me a grant for Harvard.”

  I’m stunned. I clap a hand to my mouth. “That’s fantastic! Drew, I’m so happy for you!”

  He nods. “I knew you would be. So, you know they’re building homes all over the country, right?”

  We’re back to where we started. I can feel myself deflating a little. “Right.”

  “I don’t have to go to any of those. I can stay right here in the Ohio Valley. We’ve got more than enough homeless.” His grin is huge. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  I don’t know what to say. I’m happy, sure—but I’d been expecting us to break up, or at least agree that we’d have to break up at the end of the year—and now not only are we staying together, but surely everyone—Estella, Lindsey, and Grace and all of her nasty ilk—is going to think that a big part of why Drew’s staying is because of me. Which, I guess, it kind of is. I’m actually surprised by how good—how relieved—I feel.

  We start kissing, and immediately things go from warm to hot to heavy; we climb into the backseat and I unbutton the shirt of my uniform while Drew puts down the seats with two flicks of his wrist, like he’s done so many times before.

  I feel like I’m kissing him for the first time again, except now it’s better, because I know we love each other. And God, he’s beautiful. I can never decide where to touch him, because everywhere feels so good: his curly hair, which changes shades from dishwater blond to almost white, depending on the season; his sinewy muscles; his rippled tummy with that perfect V of definition at his hips.

  We’re both in our underwear, pieces of our uniforms scattered all over the backseat. Drew is still wearing his tie, which I grab and tug so that he falls on top of me.

  We’ve never gone this far before, but I’m certain this is it. He doesn’t seem like he wants to wait, and I know I don’t.

  “Katie,” he breathes, panting through his open mouth, “wait, Katie, we should talk about this first.”

  He pulls away and leans against the opposite window, his body leaving a smear in the fog that has accumulated on the glass. “Katie, I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Drew.” I crawl toward him. “I’m ready for this.”

  He’s still panting. He seems genuinely torn.

  “We can’t do it—not all the way.” Pant, pant, pant. “I told you I made a promise,” pant, “to God.”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I mutter.

  “No, I’m not, but,” pant, pant, pant—his face is white and sweaty—“I’m ready to make love in a different way.”

  “Okay. How?”

  He moves toward me and gives me a long kiss. He takes my hand and moves it down his body until I’m touching him so that his eyes close. “Katie,” he says, looking at me gravely, as though God himself is supervising us from the front seat, “I’m ready for you to start giving me blow jobs.”

  As a senior prefect, Stetson McClure occasionally acts as a class supervisor when one of our teachers is out sick. So, when my chem professor breaks his leg in a bicycling accident a few weeks before school ends, my class gets Stetson for the whole week.

  He doesn’t even notice that I’m in the class at first. On his first day, he strolls to the blackboard and writes, LESSON PLAN: HAVE FUN AND DON’T BLOW ANYTHING UP, and then he takes a seat in our professor’s cushy chair and proceeds to lean back and take a light nap for the remaining fifty minutes.

  But later that week, as I’m sitting with my head down against my open book, my eyes closed, I hear someone clearing his throat beside me. When I look up, there’s Stetson.

  “We need to talk, Katie,” he says.

  We go into the deserted hallway. I’m almost sure it’s the first time Stetson has ever called me by my name.

  “You don’t look good,” he begins. “You look like you haven’t slept in weeks. Have you?”

  “I was trying to,” I say. “But somebody interrupted me.”

  He shrugs, giving me an easy smirk. “It’s my responsibility to make sure nobody misuses their class time. Okay—let me get to the point—I need you to talk to Estella for me.”

  The last time I saw Estella, earlier in the day in English class, she had thrown a balled-up piece of paper at my head while our professor had his back turned. When I opened it, I saw that she’d written, If you don’t have sex soon, your lady parts are going to grow shut. Beneath the words, there was an illustration. I never should have told her and Lindsey about my experience with Drew in his car a few weeks earlier. But I mean, really—how could I not have told them? It was all just so . . . weird.

  “Estella isn’t going to listen to me,” I tell Stetson. She and Jeremy Chase are still going out, and Drew has told me Stetson is sick about it. “You should ask Lindsey to t
alk to her.”

  “I already asked. She said no.”

  “Stetson?” I figure since she isn’t even speaking to him, I’ve got nothing to lose. “Can I ask you a question? What’s so great about Estella, anyway?”

  He leans against the wall and raises one eyebrow at me. The look alone is enough to make my knees buckle. “Do I detect a hint of resentment, Captain Kitrell?”

  I shake my head. “It’s more like confusion. Estella is . . . well, you know.”

  “I don’t. Please illuminate.”

  “She’s a bitch,” I blurt.

  Stetson touches the tip of his tongue to his upper lip, grinning. “Katie, haven’t two years of gender studies taught you anything?” He recites one of Dr. George’s favorite feminist maxims, which has been written at the top of the chalkboard for as long as I’ve been at Woodsdale: “Women who degrade other women are a male-dominated society’s most powerful tool for continued oppression.”

  “She’s a bitch,” I repeat, “and you know it. She broke up with you because of a minor injury.” I don’t think it’s necessary to mention that, for at least a few months before she dumped Stetson, Estella was already seeing Jeremy on the side.

  Stetson only shrugs. “The girl likes to get what she wants. It’s one of the things I admire about her. Just because she isn’t timid or quiet and says what’s on her mind doesn’t make her a bitch. And even if it does”—he grins at me again—“she’s the most perfect-looking girl I’ve ever seen.”

  When I don’t say anything, he says, “Come on, Katie. You can admit it. If you could trade places with a girl like that, you’d do it in a second. Everything that people want, Estella’s got.” And he takes me by the wrist and presses a note into my palm. “Make sure she gets this, okay?” He leans a little closer, his voice almost a whisper. “By the way, I know all about you and Drew. He tells me everything, you know.”

  I close my fist over the note. “What do you know?”

  “Everything.” He holds my gaze, tonguing the side of his mouth real slow, so I can’t miss what he’s doing. “You’re a bad girl, Katie.”

  A few days after I give the note to Estella, I notice her and Stetson talking in the hallway for the first time all year. Her arms are crossed, chin pointed toward the ceiling. I told him he wouldn’t get anywhere with her.

  Estella, Lindsey, Mazzie, and I have Russian lit together this year. Aside from gender studies, which I mostly like because of Dr. “Please Call Me Evan” George, our lit courses are my favorite classes. Sometimes, when I’m reading a really interesting book or short story, it’s the only time outside the water when my mind can focus on something without all my other, noisy thoughts bursting through.

  We are spending the last part of the year studying Chekhov, starting with one of his first plays, The Bear, and ending with The Cherry Orchard.

  Estella, who is usually chatty to the point of distraction throughout class, sits down before the bell without a word to me or Mazzie. The four of us are in the back two rows, where we can easily pass notes back and forth undetected by our teacher. Dr. Silva is a brilliant, elderly woman who has been teaching at Woodsdale for something like fifty years. She has a humpback and a thick Russian accent. She doesn’t hear that well anymore, but man can she deconstruct literature.

  Estella is quiet throughout the beginning of the lecture.

  “Now you spleet into pairs and finish ze worksheet,” Dr. Silva says.

  Behind me, in a low voice, Estella mutters to Dr. Silva, “Why don’t you come back here and read me a story, Grandma?” Then she says, to Lindsey, “I haven’t read any of this crap yet, so you’re going to have to do all the work, okay?” And as she turns her chair to face Lindsey, she kicks me in the shin so hard that it brings tears to my eyes.

  Mazzie notices. She gives me a questioning look. I only shake my head, my whole body tensing, and we put our heads close together and pretend to start the worksheet.

  After a few minutes, Estella raises her voice pointedly in my direction. “Hey, Linds,” she says, “did you know that I’m a bitch?”

  “Yes,” Lindsey says. She probably doesn’t even look up from the worksheet.

  I can feel my eyes stinging as I try to stare straight ahead, my gaze fixed on Dr. Silva’s hump as she copies a Chekhov quote onto the chalkboard in her shaky cursive handwriting.

  “Listen to me,” Estella snaps. “Guess who I talked to today?”

  “Stetson,” Lindsey murmurs, still probably not looking up. Even though I’m staring forward I can imagine her looking bored, used to Estella and all the drama that comes with being her friend. And Stetson did tell me that he’d tried talking to Lindsey about Estella first.

  “That’s right.” She raises her voice just a little higher. From the corner of my eye, I see Mazzie glancing at me, her mouth slightly open, unsure of what to do.

  “He wants to take me to the prom,” Estella continues. “He told me he’s still in love with me. Can you believe that?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Of course I told him I can’t go, since things are getting serious with me and Jeremy. But I’m still glad we talked. He had sooooo many interesting things to tell me.”

  Lindsey, sighing deeply, cracks her neck. There’s no air-conditioning in the main academic building, and we’re all sweating and rubbing our eyes in the heavily pollinated air, a general sense of weariness and constant fatigue and headache having caped the school for weeks. “Like what?” Lindsey asks.

  “What I just told you. That I’m a bitch. He says even some of my Very. Best. Friends think so.” She kicks me again, this time so hard that my chair moves a little, forcing my tummy against the desk. “Can you believe someone would say that to him? I mean, how could anybody be so stupid? Of course he’s going to tell me about it.”

  Dr. Silva takes a step back to admire her handwriting, which is barely legible. “Here”—she gestures with a bony arm to the board—“is Anton Chekhov’s most famous piece of wisdom. True in life eez well eez art, I beleef.”

  I have to squint at the board to see what she’s written.

  “I can’t read that,” Estella shouts at Dr. Silva. At the same time, she leans forward and flicks me hard on the back of the head.

  The board reads, If a gun is on the mantel in the first act, it must go off in the third.

  I rub at my eyes with my fists.

  “Poor baby. Look at the poor little crybaby,” Estella murmurs. Lindsey, confused, says nothing.

  I get to my feet and move toward the door; I can’t breathe, I need air. I walk fast down the hallway, not quite sure where I’m going. Estella won’t follow me; I’m certain she’s satisfied enough already.

  The girls’ bathroom is deserted. I splash water on my face and take deep breaths. Every time I close my eyes, I see Will and the Ghost through the upstairs window, my brother pacing in those tight crazy circles like a wild animal. I see the Ghost crying. I see my own father, begging his son not to shoot him or himself. Without another thought, I crouch down and open the cabinet door beneath the bathroom sink. The space looks impossibly small, half-filled with winding pipes, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever fit.

  But I do. And as soon as I’m settled, I know why Mazzie comes here sometimes. The space evokes the same claustrophobic feeling as sharing a twin-sized bed with another person or being underwater: so suffocating that it winds all the way to the other side of the spectrum to feel liberating.

  I pull my knees tightly against my chest. It’s cool under here, quiet as can be, and I let myself breathe and cry.

  But I freeze when I hear the bathroom door open. I hold my breath.

  Mazzie opens the door to the cupboard. She shakes her head. “That’s my spot.”

  And before I can respond, she closes the door, opens the second door on the farther end of the sink, and climbs in with expert, almost acrobatic grace. It takes her only a few seconds. She rests her head atop her knees, legs folded, and smiles. “It’s nice,” she whi
spers, “isn’t it?”

  I nod.

  “You’re upset.”

  “No, Mazzie. I just wanted to be as close as possible to human waste.”

  She nods. “Estella probably forgot already,” she says. “She was just being . . . you know. A bitch.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not all.”

  “It’s what Dr. Silva wrote, isn’t it?”

  I nod again.

  Mazzie appears at a loss for words. We sit together in silence for a long while. We listen as a handful of different girls come into the bathroom, the sounds of the toilets flushing loudly. And then, when they wash their hands, I notice that one side of the pipe nearest my legs has a slow leak. The pipe itself is cool and damp with condensation. Beneath it, a small puddle of water has accumulated on the cabinet floor.

  “Mazzie,” I whisper once we’re alone again.

  Her eyes are closed, head against the wall. She probably naps in here sometimes.

  “Can you reach my shoes and socks? Can you take them off?”

  She reaches toward me—she’s so much smaller that there’s wiggle room for her—and removes my shoes, tucking them into the space between her thighs and heels. Then she rolls my knee socks down, one at a time, and slides them off to reveal my bare feet.

  I put both feet in the puddle of water between us. I smile at her. “Thank you.”

  She reaches toward me again with both arms and puts her tiny hands over my own long fingers. She squeezes my hand and whispers, “We can turn the phone on at night, if you want.”

  “It’s been on,” I say. “He hasn’t called.”

  I expect her to let go of my hands after a few moments, but she doesn’t. I expect her to get up, to go back to class, but she stays put. We stay there like that for the rest of the hour, together under the sink, with my bare feet loving the feel of cool water against their soles, until the bell signaling the end of the period rings, and we have no choice but to go our separate ways.