Breathless

by Jessica Warman

  In the morning—through my blurred, stinging vision I see my alarm clock switch from 4:59 to 5:00—Mrs. Christianson knocks at our door again, opens it just a crack, and I see that she’s still in her pajamas. I pull up the covers to hide Mazzie, who’s sleeping beside me, and start gearing myself up to swim. I start by curling and relaxing my toes, feeling the sleep slip away.

  “Ladies,” Mrs. C.’s sweet voice lilts with clear pleasure, “school is canceled. Go back to bed.” This time, she doesn’t even turn her head in our direction. She’s still in her nightgown, no robe, no slippers. She’ll be back to sleep like the rest of the house in no time.

  But there are things that need to be accomplished, no matter what the weather is like. I take a few minutes to stay in bed with my eyes closed, awake, wiggling my fingers and toes. Beside me, with her head covered by the blanket, Mazzie is curled into a tiny ball, almost invisible. When she breathes in and out, light and delicate, I can smell liquor on her breath. She looks so angelic like that, I don’t want to wake her up. So I get up as slowly as possible, placing one foot on the floor at a time, wincing as the floorboards creak beneath me. Almost without making any sound, I pull on my swimsuit and warm-up clothes, slip my bare feet into snow boots, pull one of Mazzie’s ski hats—it barely fits my head—over my ears, and tiptoe out the door, down the wide curved staircase, and into the coldest October day I’ve ever felt.

  Aside from Papa Rosedaddy, who raises a gloved hand at me from across the street, I’m the only person outside on campus. Papa Rosedaddy and I are used to meeting this way. He doesn’t say anything as I trudge past, keeping my head down. Campus is still dark. The streetlights are no help at all, their brightness dimmed by the thick layer of ice that has accumulated on the glass. I make my way uphill, unsteady on my feet, and he pauses in his work to watch me, making sure I’m okay. I can’t imagine when the guy sleeps.

  The side door to the natatorium is always kept unlocked specially for me, but even if someone forgets, I have my own key. I spend the next two hours swimming, loving the feeling of water rushing past my body, and not thinking about anything at all.

  That’s not exactly true. I think about Will when I’m swimming sometimes—in fact, I think about him almost all the time, both in and out of the water, no matter how much I try to stop. He’s there in the faces of strangers, in my every memory of home, his absence always taking up space inside me.

  Thoughts like these can make you crazy if you don’t find a way to keep them out. In our humanities class, we’re doing a whole unit on philosophy. We’ve been talking about things like morality and the meaning of it all and human codes of conduct, and it’s enough to make me dizzy sometimes when I think about it too much. I wouldn’t be here if things hadn’t happened with Will the way they did, which begs the question: would he be where he is, if it weren’t for me somehow? Did my very existence do something to damage him that I don’t know about? And could I have prevented it in some way, if I had known or tried?

  But how could I have known? How could I have tried? Even in the water, sometimes, when I open my eyes to look forward, I see his face for just a second. But it’s not Will like the last time I saw him. It is Will at maybe fourteen, kind of chubby, his teeth in braces for the first time. Back then, his eyes still had some hopeful color to them; he still laughed and told us he loved us, and there were more good times than bad. I tell myself that it’s because there’s so much water between us—not just the water I’m under, but all the rivers and clouds between us—that this is the reason I can’t get a clear picture of what he looks like now.

  I’m in the locker room, pulling on my warm-up suit, wet hair still wrapped in a towel, when Solinger taps at the door, tilting it open a crack before I can say “come in.”

  “Hold on. I’m not even dressed.”

  “It’s okay,” he says from the other side of the door, “I’m a doctor.”

  “You’re a doctor of sports medicine, not a gynecologist.” I yank a sweatshirt over my head.

  Once I’m dressed, I go to his office. I’ve been in here so many times—even sitting on his side of the desk, looking at racing times and merchandise catalogues and whatever—that I go ahead and perch my butt on the edge of the desk, waiting as he finishes some paperwork.

  “Freshman intramurals,” he says, shoving the papers into a drawer. “They’re gonna drive me to drink. How many games of Frisbee golf can one man referee before he loses his mind?” Moving on, he asks, “How are your applications coming?”

  He means my college applications. “Great,” I say.

  He leans back in his chair. Despite the ice outside, he’s wearing a threadbare Dave Matthews T-shirt and swimming trunks. “Tell me again where you’re applying.”

  “Brown. Penn. Harvard. And, obviously, Yale.”

  He narrows his eyes. “No safety school?”

  I return the look. “Do you think I need one?”

  Even though we’re alone, he leans closer to me, resting a hand on my knee. He’s like that with all the girls. If this were public school, he’d be fired in a second, but at Woodsdale he’s just the flirty swimming coach.

  When he doesn’t say anything, I say, “I could apply to WVU, but it wouldn’t matter. I won’t have to go there.”

  He still doesn’t say anything. “Right?” I ask. “I’m getting into Yale for sure, aren’t I?”

  “Don’t see why you wouldn’t.” He sits up and leans back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. “Do you think the cafeteria has any brownies left over from last night?”

  I shrug, staring at the floor. “Probably.”

  “How were your grades last summer?”

  “One A, one B.”

  “And how were your times?” He means my swimming times.

  I hesitate. “They were good. You know me.”

  “Uh-huh. Katie? Is there something you want to tell me?”

  I shrug again. I’ve known this conversation was coming, and I’ve been trying to avoid it for weeks.

  “I got a call a few weeks ago from Paul Goodman. You had some trouble this summer, didn’t you?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Oh, it always is.” He pats my knee again. “A bunch of high school kids, unsupervised on a college campus . . . Come on. I want to hear all about it.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I screwed up. I met this boy. You can’t say anything to Drew.”

  His eyes twinkle with interest. “Right-o.”

  “We were just friends,” I say, a little too defensively, “but he was in a frat and he started taking me to parties all the time, and . . . I overdid it. After Goodman talked to me, it wasn’t an issue anymore.”

  Solinger nods. He licks his lips. “Oh, the drama of it all. What I wouldn’t give to be eighteen again.”

  “Do you think I’ll still get in?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Sure. I don’t see why not. It’s just . . .”

  “What?” I feel cold all over, even though it’s almost too warm in his office. “What’s the matter?”

  “Swimming was your ace in the hole, that’s all.”

  “But I have almost straight As. I missed only one question on my SAT verbal. I’m a prefect.” I cross my arms. I can feel my shoulders rising in tension toward my ears. Half-kidding, I say, “If you rearrange two letters in the word, it spells perfect.” It’s something I’ve heard Estella say a hundred times—except she’s not kidding.

  “Right.” He nods. “You’ve got a lot going in your favor. You and every other kid who applies to the Ivy Leagues.” He leans back in his chair, stretching. “There’s one other thing, though, in addition to all of that. You’ve got the whole rags-to-riches story. Places like Yale love that.”

  I blink at him a few times, confused. “What do you mean, rags to riches? My father is a doctor.”

  He shrugs. “Katie, you’re from a little town in Pennsylvania. These other kids . . . you’re talking about kids of senators, CEOs, people whose families
have legacies at places like Yale.” He looks around the room. “And between you and me, Woodsdale might be a nice fancy prep school, but it ain’t Exeter.”

  “I’m not poor,” I tell him.

  “I know you’re not—not compared to a lot of people. But you’re going for the big leagues, kid. Hey—don’t get all upset on me. Everything will be fine. I’m sure you’ll get in, no problem.” He stands up, walks around the desk, and tugs me out of my seat. “Come on. Let’s go see about those brownies.”

  Campus is still deserted as I make my way back to Merri-weather Hall, my wet hair wrapped in a towel. As I’m coming down the hill toward my dorm, I brace myself against the ice and just let my body slide all the way down, like I’m on skis.

  Mazzie is still sleeping; she looks like she hasn’t moved since I left her a few hours ago. I take off my clothes and put my pj’s back on. I tiptoe down the hallway, into the empty bathroom, to blow-dry my hair, which is frozen in parts just from walking back from the pool. And then I slip back into bed beside Mazzie, wriggling close to let her body warm me up again.

  chapter 13

  Estella, who lives two doors down the hall, with Lindsey, wakes us up a little after noon by pounding on our door with her fist.

  “Get dressed,” she says, glancing past me at Mazzie, who is sitting up, rubbing her eyes with closed fists, sweet as a little child.

  I know Estella has noticed before that we sleep in the same bed sometimes. But I figure she knows personal space takes on a different meaning when you live with someone for so long. She’s never said anything to us about it.

  Normally, anytime school is closed for weather, nobody is supposed to leave campus for anything. But because our grades are good, we’re allowed to go off campus for the day to Lindsey’s house. Besides that, there’s a kind of mild insanity that seems to have settled on campus because of the ice storm. Normally we’d still be wearing shorts this time of year, and nobody—not even the maintenance staff—is prepared for something like this, so everything is improvised.

  The four of us glide down National Road on skis borrowed from the field house, each of us wearing maroon jackets that have been embroidered over the left breast with the words “Club 813.” Other people like to pretend they think it’s stupid, but that doesn’t stop them from coming to all of Lindsey’s parties.

  Lindsey’s house—specifically her indoor pool—is the kind of atmosphere where we can do anything we want: we can drink and smoke and peel away our clothes and swear and scream just to hear the echoes of our own voices against the cement walls. The boys are always taking advantage of the chaos to cop quick feels of so many tangled legs, or better, under the water. We intertwine ourselves and make sloppy business of socialization, learning how to hold a cigarette in the air while swimming across the pool, or to keep a bottle of liquor from being contaminated by pool water.

  Being so used to the water puts me at an advantage; I am able to maintain my composure long after other girls have lost theirs. There have been plenty of nights when someone has gotten sick enough that we end up folding them over an inner tube and casting them into a corner or laying them on a beach towel to be supervised by Mazzie. But it never happens to me. Almost never.

  Once in a while, when I’ve had way too much and the room starts to move without my approval, Mazzie and I catch each other’s gaze across the room, or brush past each other’s shoulders, and sometimes I think I can feel her getting angry that I’ll do these things with so many other people—even strangers—when she will do them only with me. But I think she needs to get over it. Everyone just wants to fit in, and doesn’t she know this is just what people do in high school?

  All the kids who are in the know are here, many of them spinning in fat black inner tubes on this frozen afternoon in the Maxwell-Hutton family pool, which is crowded and stinky from too many bodies bumping into each other and has stray cigarette ashes collecting in scummy half moons around the overworked filters. The water feels thick and suspicious, as though it has collected a slick of mucus from God knows what. There are panels of recessed lighting in the ceiling, turned off today in favor of a half-dozen tacky tiki lanterns positioned around the room: Lindsey’s dumb idea. The room is a shade too dark to make out everybody’s faces. The cement deck is littered with oversized white bath towels monogrammed with the Hutton family crest and acting as a patchwork picnic blanket for scattered plates of half-eaten cucumber sandwiches and wineglasses swimming with cigarette butts.

  Most of the girls have cocktail tans, which require an investment of a few hundred dollars to get right. They are available by appointment only from the area’s premiere tanning salon, When a Tan Loves a Woman. A cocktail is a combination of light-bed tanning, achieved a few minutes at a time over a three-to four-week period, enhanced by spray-on tan applied by a trained professional with an airbrush gun. Aside from Mazzie, I’m the only girl in the room without one. I tried it once and was left with patches of pasty skin, like a flesh-eating disease working backward, when the chlorine ate its way through the spray-on.

  With so many dyed bodies in slow motion, the spray-on chemicals leak into the water as the girls move, the subtly different shades of reddish bronze spreading out on the surface like a hundred open veins. These girls all have long hair cut into smart layers and painted with creamy highlights. Behind their inner tubes, they trail long wet tendrils that puddle around them, sticking like glossy seaweed against the rubber, fanning atop the water. The girls—my friends, all of them, even the ones I don’t really like—are circling the boys like sharks, nestled into their inner tubes with their flat bellies folded into small, exposed rolls of skin, rowing themselves around with cupped palms. From above, I imagine our group looks like a cluster of bumblebees moving clumsily through steam.

  Estella is perched on the edge of the swimming pool, splashing whoever happens to pass her, laughing loudly when she manages to get their hair wet enough to ruin their style. She wears an ivory one-piece swimsuit covered in red polka dots, cut low to show off her cleavage. Her right breast is pushed so far up and outward that I think I see the edge of a nipple—but she’s quite tan, so it’s hard to say. Her eyes are hidden behind a huge pair of sunglasses with heart-shaped rhinestone detailing at their outer corners. She has gathered her long red hair into a high ponytail and tied a red ribbon around it. Her fingernails and toenails are manicured to match the pattern of her bathing suit. She looks trashy, yet like perfect meringue—and she’s both of these things, for sure—but the whole effect is so expensive. There’s a big difference between trashy poor and trashy rich.

  She lowers her sunglasses to look at me. Her lips spread into a grin that’s so moist and lovely, it sends a shudder of warmth through me; that’s how good her attention feels. Estella has applied to Yale too, and she’ll probably get in; both her mother and stepfather are alumni. Behind her back, I tell everyone that I’m praying she gets rejected (her grades are good but not great; her SAT scores were above average but not quite as high as they should be). Secretly, though, there’s a big part of me that hopes she gets in, that we can be roommates, at least for the first year. I don’t want to be all alone, and I know Estella will always be a good person to know.

  At the opposite end of the pool from Estella, I’m sitting on the edge, wiggling my toes in the water, bored, when I notice a few of the girls around me getting quiet, gazing past me and upward, batting their damp eyelashes at the presence that has come up behind me and is invading my personal space.

  I feel big hands on my shoulders. They slide down to my arms and hook around my waist.

  The hush in the girls’ conversation is ripe with envy. I press my lips together into a smile, feeling a tug of satisfaction.

  “Would you mind telling me,” Drew says, kissing my neck, nipping the strap of my swimsuit, “where the hell you’ve been all morning? I thought I’d go nuts without you.”

  “Oh, really?” We both slide into the water. I turn around to face him, our hips pres
sed together. “Are you okay now?” I gather a fistful of his curls, which have grown long over the summer and hang almost past his eyes. “I’d hate for you to suffer because of me.”

  He pretends to pout. “I think I’ll live. Wait—you’d better—oh God, I need CPR.” And he cups my face in his hands, pulling me onto my tiptoes for a kiss.

  He pulls away after a few seconds. Even though we know everyone here, he still gets embarrassed by public displays of affection.

  I slide my hand down to his butt, walking him backward until we hit the wall of the pool. I give him another kiss on the mouth, pressing my hips against his, forcing him to keep kissing me.

  When he finally wriggles free, he says, “Katie, come on. What the hell’s gotten into you?”

  “It’s the storm,” I say. “It’s making me crazy.” I reach around to pinch his butt, but he jumps out of the way before I have a chance.

  He’s wearing green swimming trunks and a white T-shirt over his thick swimmer’s build, along with a woven hemp necklace that asks, “WWJD?” in square ceramic letters. He takes me by the hand and guides me as we weave through the inner tubes to the shallow end of the pool. We hop out beside a cooler filled with Budweiser and sit on the edge to dangle our feet in the water.

  In a lot of ways, being with Drew for so long has created a constant feeling of mild disappointment in pretty much every aspect of his personality. I wish he still seemed perfect, like he used to, and like he still does to everybody else. But after so long together, he’s just Drew: smart, but only because he studies for hours upon hours. Fast in the water, mostly because of all the time he spends in the pool and the gym, not to mention the dozens of supplements he takes every day, and all the salmon he eats. For a while, he was having it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It got to be so his sweat even stank like fish.

  As much as I try to avoid it, I find myself thinking about Eddie all the time. I wonder what he’s doing and whether he has a girlfriend. Sometimes, when I’m by myself in the dorm, I even turn on PBS, looking for old episodes of Sesame Street.