Breathless

by Jessica Warman

  Drew snaps his fingers in front of my face. “Earth to Katie.”

  I smile at him. “What? I’m right here, baby.”

  “Hey,” he begins, “my youth group is having kind of a Halloween party tomorrow. Do you want to come?”

  “Halloween is weeks away,” I say, avoiding the real question.

  He weaves his fingers through mine, his tone hopeful. When I don’t say anything else, he adds, “You’d have fun, Katie. Everybody brings food, and there’s music . . .”

  In the past few months, Drew has become more concerned than ever about my lack of faith. He’s told me about conversations he and his priest have had regarding my salvation.

  But it isn’t Drew’s religion that has started to bother me so much. It’s how absolutely certain he is that Mazzie is going to hell. Lately, the more obvious it’s become to him that she and I are close friends, the more vocal he is about her eternal damnation. And it’s not just her—it’s her and everyone else who isn’t exactly like Drew. A couple of years ago, I couldn’t stand to hear about it. Now, the more he tries to force his values on me, the more I feel sorry for him. But that’s just Drew, and there’s nothing I can do about it, so I’ve stopped trying.

  “Drew, no. You know I don’t want to go.”

  He pretends to be confused by my lack of interest. “Why not?”

  “Drew. Stop it.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  Drew tightens his arm around my waist. His entire body is tense. “Can I just say one more thing? Please?”

  “What?”

  “I’m just worried about you. I have nightmares sometimes.”

  “Nightmares about what?”

  He keeps his voice low. “You know. About you . . . in hell.”

  I imagine how Mazzie might respond, if she were in my place. And I have nightmares about you . . . being elected to public office.

  Instead I say, “That’s fine. Feel free to be concerned.” I turn to look at him. “But while we’re talking about it, aren’t you getting a little bit old for youth group? You’re nineteen, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Katie.” His voice is low, hurt. “Please. Don’t say ‘Christ’s sake.’ And I’m not a member of the group anymore—I’m a leader.” He tries a different angle. “You don’t have to be a Christian to come to youth group. It’s a bunch of people just like you and me, trying to do good things to help the less fortunate.”

  “I go to the soup kitchen every Saturday.”

  He and I both know this isn’t true. Since signing up to volunteer at the soup kitchen at the beginning of sophomore year, I’ve gone exactly twice. It isn’t my fault that I always have swimming meets or scrimmages or practice or something that prevents me from going. Nevertheless, nobody says anything when I put it on all of my college applications.

  “You don’t go enough,” Drew says. He puts his forehead against mine. “I know you’re a good person, Katie.”

  I look across the room at Mazzie, who wears a plain red bathing suit and sits cross-legged against a wall, staring into nowhere. With one hand, she reaches into a bag of Cheetos, mindlessly eating them, her mouth stained bright orange. She catches my gaze and rolls her eyes.

  I put my hands in Drew’s hair, holding his curls with my fists, trying to feel the way I used to about him. But all I can think about is Eddie’s hair, and how much softer it was. I don’t understand what I’m even doing with Drew.

  As the night wears on and everybody continues drinking, we come to overlap in the water, Lindsey and Estella and me, our inner tubes bumping together, each of us sipping directly from a bottle and holding our cigarettes high in the air, rubbing each other’s calves with our painted toenails, murmuring a private conversation below all the noise. Estella’s knuckles are loose around the neck of her wine bottle. She takes delicate sips from a straw, looking around distractedly. She seems bored. In the moment, she thinks everything is lame.

  Lindsey has a polo shirt with “Club 813” embroidered on it covering her bathing suit. She’s self-conscious about her weight, which has climbed a few pounds over the summer. She elbows me sloppily as we bump together, and says, “We all have to promise each other, guys.” She gets like this from drinking—one of those girls. She’ll tell us we’re her best friends in the world. She’s so desperate for approval that it’s hard to watch sometimes. In college, I imagine she’ll be the girl who has too much to drink and starts taking off her clothes.

  Estella narrows her eyes, emits a low burp, and a small green bubble rises between her perky lips. Somehow her lipstick is still bright and even. “What is it, Linds? What do we all have to promise each other?”

  Lindsey gives my arm an urgent shake and says, “If any of us are famous someday, we all have to use our power to bring everyone else up. We all have to support one another. Okay?”

  Estella snorts. “What if one of us doesn’t deserve it?” And she does a careless spin in the water, splashing me with her feet so I’ll know exactly who she’s talking about.

  “Don’t worry,” I say, “you can just sleep your way to the top.” Estella is the only person who I talk to this way, because Estella is the only person I know who doesn’t get offended.

  She points her tongue and runs it across her upper lip. But she doesn’t say anything.

  Then, changing the subject without taking her gaze off of me, she says, “Hey, Linds? You’re having a Halloween party, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, that’s right, I am! It’s going to be a costume party.” She raises her voice. “Everybody hear that? Halloween, costume party, right here.”

  Estella, shouting louder than Lindsey, adds, “Seniors only!”

  A girl in the corner, whom I don’t recognize, claps a hand to her mouth and points at the four of us: me, Lindsey, Estella, and a senior named Matilda Ashton, who happens to be standing nearby. “You should be the Beatles,” she suggests. Turning, she points across the room at Mazzie. “And you could be Yoko!”

  When I take a closer look at this strange girl, I see that she’s got piercings all over her face, eyebrow and nose rings and even a stud going through her chin like a bulbous silver zit. She obviously doesn’t go to Woodsdale, because we aren’t allowed to have any piercings except for our ears.

  I pinch Drew lightly in his side and he pinches me back as if to say, I know. My gaze moves quickly—from Estella to Lindsey to Mazzie—each of us exchanging a flicker of a glance that means Who is this girl? Only Estella has the nerve to say anything right away, so she doggy-paddles herself over and demands, “Who are you?”

  The girl blinks. “Who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter who I am.” Estella’s posture improves.

  Silence. I look at the water, tapping my toes. It’s almost too awkward to stand.

  “Did somebody invite you?” Estella asks, and now everybody looks at them, and a part of me feels bad, but at the same time, I mean, come on. How does she expect anyone to take her seriously with all that garbage on her face?

  “You guys,” Lindsey says, shifting uncomfortably, “leave her alone.”

  “Do you know her?” Estella asks.

  “Not really.”

  Estella paddles herself closer to the girl, leisurely, and stops when their faces are inches apart, pronouncing her words pleasantly enough, her lips lovely and full around their sound. “Why don’t you get out of here? Okay? You’re getting everything scummy.” She pauses, pretends to realize something she hadn’t considered yet, then says, “Oh my God. Do you go to the public school?”

  Silence. I can feel the adrenaline pumping into my finger-tips, the tips of my toes, as the girl gets up and leaves.

  “You guys,” Lindsey says after she’s gone, fiddling anxiously with her cigarette, shaking her head at us. “She brought dope. You shouldn’t have just kicked her out like that.”

  Estella splashes water in Lindsey’s face. “Smarten up, dummy. Just because somebody is providing you with a service,
that doesn’t mean you invite them to the party.” Estella snorts. “Why don’t you call the pizza delivery guy and have him hang out with us? Huh? Maybe he can get us some pot.” She glares at Lindsey. “God, you’re dumb sometimes.”

  Drew rubs my shoulders, wrapping his arms across my chest. “Are you okay?”

  I’m tense. “I’m fine. Where’s Mazzie?”

  She’s in the corner again, drinking a can of Hawaiian Punch. Now there’s a red mustache to go with her orange mouth.

  “Good.” He squeezes my shoulders. “I’m sorry you had to see that, baby.” He gives me an extra squeeze. “Sometimes, in this world, we see things we don’t want to see.”

  Oh my God. I am dying to get out of here. “Thank you, Drew.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Can you just do one thing for me?”

  He turns me around to face him. “Anything, Katie.”

  “Can you please, please, please shut up?”

  Back at the dorms that night, Mazzie and I have shut ourselves in our room to finish the homework that would have been due that day had school not been canceled. As quickly as the ice storm arrived, it’s gone; the temperature is above freezing and there’s no doubt we’ll have class tomorrow.

  Studying is a halfhearted effort on both our parts; I watch Mazzie as she looks around the room, distracted, and chews so hard at the end of her pen that I’m afraid she’ll break it.

  After a while, she says, “Did you know girls like that?”

  “Girls like what?”

  “Like that girl at Lindsey’s today. From the public school.”

  I shrug. “My brother is a lot worse. He’s got that tattoo.”

  She nods in agreement. “And he’s criminally insane.”

  “Well, sure, that too.” Will hasn’t been in touch since the end of last year. Once we started plugging the phone in at night again, it was too late—I guess he’d given up. I feel almost wholly detached from him now. For the first time in my life, I’m doing everything the Ghost always wanted me to do, and in a lot of ways it’s freeing. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find myself asleep on the floor, and I don’t remember how I got there. Or else Mazzie will wake me up to tell me I’ve been squeezing her arms and muttering to myself while we sleep. And she’ll push up her sleeve to prove it, showing me the fingernail marks I’ve left in her skin.

  “You could have ended up like that girl,” she says.

  I shake my head. “No. I wouldn’t have.”

  Mazzie shrugs. “You know what Estella says. You can take the girl away from the white trash, but you can’t take the white trash out of the girl.”

  “Estella is a bitch.”

  “I know that. But that doesn’t make her—”

  “Mazzie, shut up. I’m nothing like that girl. She didn’t know what she was doing. Who just shows up at a party without being invited?”

  There’s a tap at our door. It’s Mrs. Christianson.

  “You girls are being loud,” she says. “What’s the matter?” Her gaze flickers back and forth between us. “You aren’t fighting, are you?”

  We both shake our heads, sullen.

  “You’ll have to get in bed soon,” she says. When neither of us moves, she presses us. “Come on. Somebody tell me what’s the matter.”

  “Katie is mad about . . . something Estella said,” Mazzie supplies.

  “Oh? What did Estella say?”

  “It’s not important,” I tell her.

  “I’m sure it’s not,” she says. And she comes all the way into our room, shutting the door behind her. “Let me tell you something about girls like Estella,” she says, helping herself to the free chair in our room. “Everybody knows someone like her in high school.” Her gaze grows cloudy. “Mine was Angela Caruso. Her father was an Italian grocer, and her mother used to pick her up from school in these ridiculous floor-length fur coats. Of course, then, every time Mrs. Caruso got a new one, she’d give Angela her hand-me-down, and so Angela would march into school wearing her own mink, while the rest of us were—Oh, you’re not paying any attention, are you?”

  Mazzie and I both shake our heads.

  “Okay. Let me put it to you this way.” She stands up. “People tend to grow into their personalities as they get older. It’s like Kafka said: ‘By middle age, pretty much everyone has the face they deserve.’ ”

  When we still don’t say anything, she rolls her eyes. “And so will Estella. Trust me. At my last class reunion, Angela Caruso was on her third marriage, and she was still wearing her mother’s old fur. High school is almost over, girls. Things will be different for everyone soon. Nobody is going to care who Estella’s stepfather is.”

  I want to believe Mrs. Christianson—I really do. But she just doesn’t get it. It’s like, sometime after college, it seems like people wake up and all of a sudden they’re adults, and they forget everything that matters about being a teenager. They start recycling and listening to talk radio. How can Mrs. Christianson be so dumb, when she lives with teenagers every day? What does it matter if things won’t always be this way? All that matters is what things are like now.

  “Right,” I say to Mazzie, once Mrs. Christianson is gone. “I’m sure it won’t matter a bit that Estella’s stepdad donated a Wallace Hall to Yale, too.”

  Mazzie closes her chem textbook and chucks it across the room. It whips past me, just a few inches from my face, and lands in the middle of the floor. “I am so tired of this.” She rubs her temples. “I just want to graduate and go to college.”

  I know what she means. Since I’m feeling so sure of where I’m going to school, everything about our classes seems meaningless. All I have to do until graduation is tread water: keep my grades up, win OVACs again, and make it to May.

  By the middle of the year, between being swimming captain and studying for AP exams and waiting to hear back from colleges, I start to feel exhausted almost all the time. The only class I have even the slightest interest in anymore is our senior-year gender studies class. Dr. George—Evan—has been my favorite professor for three years. He tells us he’s trying to give us the ability to “function as intellectuals and better understand our personal humanity as we prepare to navigate the adult world.”

  One day in class, just before winter break, he draws a number line, which goes from 1 to 10, across the dry-erase board. “Sexuality is a continuum,” he tells us. “You don’t have to be gay or straight. There’s a lot of in-between.” He leans against his desk, his wedding band flashing beneath the fluorescent lights. “For example, if one is completely straight, and ten is completely gay, then I’m about a two and a half.”

  The guys in the class all groan. Nathan Boyer, who is a well-known pervert, raises his hand. “So, can environmental factors affect where someone is on the continuum?”

  “That depends,” Evan says. “Can you give me a specific example?”

  “Sure I can. Like, all the ladies who live in the dorms together. I mean, if all these chicks are seeing each other naked all the time, walking around in their panties with their hair all wet”—he starts talking real fast—“you’d think even the straight ones would get a little curious from time to time and maybe want to start touching each other. Right?”

  “Maybe so.” Evan nods. “I’m sure it’s possible. You’re a boarding student, too, aren’t you?” he asks Nathan, who nods.

  “Well, you tell me.” Evan winks at the rest of us. “Does being around all your naked guy friends ever make you feel curious?”

  “Helllll, no!” Nathan roars. “I’m no two and a half. I’m a one.” He nods at the rest of the class, mostly girls, and says, “You ladies feel free to experiment, though. I’d like to encourage you to explore all those feelings you have late at night. Preferably with your blinds open.”

  Nathan couldn’t have things more backward. Even Evan doesn’t really get it. When I�
��m with Drew, sex is always an issue. The fact that we’re not having it drives me crazy. And no matter how much Drew talks about religion and virginity and all the other reasons why he wants to wait, I can’t help but feel rejected. But with Mazzie, we both know that all we want is to be close to each other. There is no awkwardness, no expectations, no tension. We can just relax.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Estella. She’s in the front row—Evan’s class is the only one where she sits in front and pays attention and takes perfect notes the whole time—and she’s turned around in her seat, looking around the room. I can tell she’s looking at Mazzie, then at me, watching the two of us with a casual scrutiny, and I can only imagine where her mind’s going, and what she could possibly be thinking that makes her lean back in her chair and cross her arms and crack her knuckles, like she could turn the whole world on its side with a flick of her wrist.

  chapter 14

  I can’t stand the idea of another Halloween party at Lindsey’s house. I don’t want to dress up like JFK and Marilyn or Romeo and Juliet or Bonnie and Clyde with Drew. It’s like I feel this slight tug, and even I am surprised when I ask Mazzie, “Do you want to come home with me for Halloween weekend?”

  She’s eating a pile of chocolate chip cookies smuggled back to our room in her blazer pockets from the cafeteria. The corners of her mouth are covered in chocolaty crumbs. “That depends. Can you guarantee my safety?”

  I roll my eyes. “You’ve been there with me half a dozen times since last year. You know Will isn’t home.”

  I feel a pang just saying his name.

  Mazzie shrugs. “Whatever. It’s better than being forced to dress up like Yoko Ono for another year.”

  My parents have grown to love Mazzie. My mother typically has her camera on hand all the time, ready to take candid photos of Mazzie doing the most everyday kinds of things, and in her studio there is a series of really beautiful pastel portraits collecting dust in a corner: Mazzie washing her hands in the kitchen sink, the running water catching the light of sunset that came through the window at her back; Mazzie winding spaghetti around a fork that seems too big for her small hands; Mazzie tinkering a few bars of Tchaikovsky on the piano; Mazzie leaning over a Monopoly board, fingers pressed to her temples, making her move to build a cluster of condos on Atlantic Avenue and drive me into bankruptcy. I was in each of these photos, too, but my mother always chose to paint Mazzie alone.