Breathless

by Jessica Warman

  His hugs haven’t changed. He squeezes me so tightly that he picks me up off the ground. Once we let go of each other, we stand there grinning.

  “Wow,” I say. “You never seem to get any older, Drew.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “I mean it. In fact, wait a second.” He pats his coat pockets. “I can prove it to you.” He pulls a wrapped package from his inner pocket. “Shelly found this while she was going through our old stuff.”

  I open the present. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe you still have this!” It’s a framed photo of me and Drew, taken back in high school. We’d just started dating. We’re sitting side by side in our bathing suits, our feet dangling into Lindsey’s pool.

  “I remember this,” I say, clutching the photo to my chest. “I was smiling so hard that my cheeks hurt.”

  He nods. “What did I tell you? You look exactly the same.”

  I study the photograph a little closer. I had the same blond hair, the same swimmer’s build, but it’s obvious from the tension in my shoulders, the lack of confidence in my eyes, that I was just a baby back then. I had no idea what I was getting into—not with Drew, or with anything.

  “Shelly’s amazing,” I say, once we’re settled in his car, on our way to my hotel. “If I were married, I don’t think I’d ever give my husband’s old girlfriend any pictures of them together.”

  He grins at me. “Come on, Katie. You’re the one who introduced us. Besides,” he adds, “you and I were a terrible match.”

  “Hey! We weren’t that bad.”

  Drew shrugs. “Oh, whatever you say.”

  We drive in silence for a few moments. The roads in Pittsburgh are covered with a light dusting of snow, but it’s nothing compared to what I’m used to in New York. The afternoon feels calm, a little lonely. I know Pennsylvania will never feel like home again.

  “How’s Mazzie?” Drew asks.

  I shrug. “I haven’t talked to her in a while.”

  He grins. “So you haven’t talked to her in, what, a few hours?”

  “A few weeks, actually.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Okay, it’s been, like, two weeks. She’s busy finishing her residency in Santa Monica.”

  He shakes her head. “I can’t believe people trust her with their kids. I always thought she’d be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon.”

  I smile. I don’t say anything. Her choice—she’s a pediatrician—doesn’t surprise me one bit.

  Just before we reach the hotel, Drew says, “Wait—I almost forgot. You have to see this.” He reaches across me, into the glove compartment, and pulls out a travel magazine.

  “Turn to the back,” he says, “to the advertisements.”

  Sandwiched between two full-page brokerage ads, there’s a section for wedding announcements. As I look them over, I gasp. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  There’s a full-page article, along with a glossy color photo of the new bride and groom. It’s Estella, looking radiant as ever, standing beside her new husband, whom I don’t recognize. I scan the article. Dress handmade from Italian silk . . . reception at the Atlanta Museum of History . . . “Lindsey was the maid of honor?”

  Drew nods. “I guess they’re still the best of friends. You know, my company buys space in this magazine, and those wedding announcements are technically ads. Can you believe she paid just so everyone would know about her wedding?”

  I nod. “Sure. Were you invited?”

  “Nope.” He grins at me. “Thank God for small favors.”

  Once we’re at the hotel, Drew carries my suitcase into the lobby for me.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I say. “I could have taken a cab.” Drew lives just outside the state line, about an hour west of Pittsburgh.

  “No problem. I would have insisted you stay with us, but Shelly is in nesting mode. She’s going nuts, Katie. Last week I caught her cleaning the floorboards with a toothbrush at three in the morning.”

  “I hear pregnant women can get like that.” I give him a hug.

  He pulls away, holding on to my shoulders. “What about you? Any wedding plans yet?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Katie!”

  I can’t stop myself—I reach out and muss his curls. Just for a moment, I feel a twinge of the same excitement from the first time I touched them. I know it will never go away completely. “I haven’t decided yet whether or not I’m the marrying kind of girl.”

  In general, institutions for the criminally insane are not the most warm and fuzzy places. But Will seems happy enough.

  We talk on the phone a lot, but for the past few years, I’ve seen him only on Christmas. There isn’t much we’re allowed to give him. This year, I’ve brought him a game of checkers.

  My parents stop by the hotel to pick me up on their way to the prison. We stand in the lobby for a few moments, catching up. I only talk to them every few months, but it feels okay. I think we’re as close as we’re ever going to get, at least in this lifetime.

  My mom smoothes my hair. She has tears in her eyes. “It must be so cold in New York. How do you go swimming? Do they have a Y in that little town?”

  “Mom,” I laugh, “the school lets me use the pool. It’s kind of like my office.”

  My dad gives me a hug. As we’re holding each other, I can’t stop myself from smelling his hair, his neck, trying to take in every detail.

  “You quit smoking,” I say, surprised.

  He nods. “It’s been almost six months.”

  “Good for you.”

  My dad looks back and forth, from me to my mother. “Well,” he says, without a hint of sarcasm to his voice, “let’s go celebrate Christmas.”

  Will loves the checkers. We spend a good two hours playing; each of his moves is slow and calculated and interspersed with frequent commentary and attempts at conversation.

  But it’s impossible to ignore where we are: there is only one small, depressing Christmas tree in the corner of his common area. None of the other inmates have guests today. My parents and I are the only people not wearing scrubs or robes or worse. And Will still has the scars on his arm; of course, it doesn’t matter in here, but every time I look at them I feel a pang and imagine how things might have been different if only we’d found him sooner, or been able to stop him before he got out the front door. But we didn’t. And we couldn’t. So here we are.

  He triple-jumps three of my pieces and lands in my back row. He puts his arms in the air, fists clenched in triumphant victory, and says, “King me!”

  So I do. It will be, I know, the highlight of my brother’s Christmas. It is the best I can do for him, but for the rest of my life, that is what I will always give to Will: my best. For the rest of my life, no matter what becomes of us, he will always be my big brother. No matter how far I go, I know now that there is no escape—and I know, too, that there was never any point in trying. He will always be with me.

  acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank my agent, Andrea Somberg, for her seemingly endless support and encouragement, as well as my editor, Stacy Cantor, for her consistent enthusiasm, confidence, and hard work. My gratitude also goes out to my amazing parents and my big brother, whose love, hilarity, and pathology have warped me permanently—I can only hope to return the favor. Thanks to my little daughters, Estella and Esmé, who keep me constantly motivated to show them the endless possibilities that come with being a woman, and to my most enduring and patient friend, Alisa. This book would not exist without all the knowledge and support I received at Seton Hill University, particularly from my wonderful mentors, Pat Picciarelli and Leslie Davis Guccione. My English professors at Indiana University of Pennsylvania—Jean Wilson, Chauna Craig, and Michael T. Williamson—all deserve recognition and thanks. I would especially like to acknowledge Curt Gsell, my amazing trainer, who showed me the peace and meditation that can be found in long-distance running. Thanks to you
, I have learned that my most valuable thoughts have room to surface when I am surrounded by the calm of perpetual motion. Finally, I need to recognize the years I spent at the Linsly School, and its fabulous faculty and staff (both former and current) including Matt DiOrio, Robin Follet, Chad Barnett, and Reno DiOrio.

  A Conversation with

  Jessica Warman

  Breathless is a work of fiction, but according to your bio it is inspired by personal experience. Can you explain?

  About 80 to 90 percent of the novel is grounded in reality. Many of the characters are based on people I actually knew, although names and other elements of their identities have been changed to fictionalize them somewhat. I did get sent to boarding school at fifteen; I was a swimmer; I did take summer classes at Yale. . . . Katie is most definitely based on me; her story is my story in many ways. I’d say the most crucial elements that make it fiction are related to Katie and Will’s relationship. I have an older brother, but he isn’t Will. My brother is a functional, independent adult (not in prison!). However, there’s a lot of metaphorical truth to Katie and Will’s relationship in comparison to my relationship with my brother.

  What made you want to write about this experience in novel form in the first place, and then specifically for teens?

  I’ve always been a writer. From the time I was sixteen, I’ve spent every summer writing a novel, so that part came naturally. As far as writing for a teen audience, I’m so fascinated by our teenage years because it’s such an intense time of development. We learn so much about the world, about ourselves, and each individual’s experience feels so profound and personal. I hope that Breathless is the kind of novel that both teens and adults can appreciate, but it’s definitely for teens, almost an homage to what they’re all going through in their own unique ways.

  Was it cathartic writing Breathless?

  Absolutely. Cathartic, painful—there’s a lot in the novel that was difficult to relive, even though it was fictionalized—but overall it poured out of me. It was a very organic experience, just something that I obviously needed to write.

  What is your relationship with your brother like now?

  We’re not friends; I don’t think we ever will be. We’re incredibly different people, and our personalities don’t mix well. But it’s funny—I can tell you there’s nobody I love quite as much as my brother, even though we can’t get through a conversation without fighting. I’m certain he feels the same way.

  Was it difficult to realistically portray parts of the story based on fact, such as when Katie’s brother attempted suicide in the neighbor’s yard, while keeping the teen audience in mind? Did you feel you had to tone down these scenes for personal or literary reasons?

  Both. As a novel for young adults, some of the scenes were initially too graphic. For my own emotional reasons, I wanted to get as far away from the realities of those memories without fictionalizing them too much, because they were crucial to the story. They were very difficult scenes to write; I didn’t want anybody to feel that I had violated or exploited their history, so it was important to shift just enough away from the memories so they stayed intact within the story without infringing on anybody’s privacy.

  Are there any events or situations that happened in real life with your family or friends that you wish had gone differently, and through writing this novel you were able to get a “do over”?

  Yes! Mostly the boarding school dramas. . . . Don’t we all look back on our teen years and think of all the witty things we would have said, if only we’d thought of them at the time? There are people I knew in high school whom I wish I’d been nicer to, people who weren’t nice to me who I now understand had their own issues. The later drafts of the novel gave me a chance to address those things. And of course all the family issues . . . I wanted to portray a family that had begun with this idyllic country life, an enormous amount of love, and the absolute best of intentions for their kids, and then slowly teetered off course in a sad, unforeseeable way. I wanted to show the disintegration of a family that was not due to any lack of love or effort on anyone’s part but the facts of life and how they can wear people down, and how different people choose to respond to those pressures. Katie’s mom, for instance, chooses to basically shut down, while her father retreats into his clinical persona and buries himself in work. My goal was to make each character almost a dissection of their real-life inspiration, to look back and say, “This is what happened (either factually or metaphorically), yet there was always so much love. We just couldn’t see it at the time because we were so wrapped up in ourselves.”

  You are a runner, not a swimmer like Katie. Was there a reason you chose an athletic outlet for her, and why swimming as her sport of choice?

  Katie certainly needed some kind of outlet, something that made her feel safe and set her apart from her peers. I swam in high school, but I was not good at all. From a literary perspective, swimming was a more appropriate sport than running; it’s just an absolutely loaded metaphor on so many levels: birth and rebirth, purification, suffocation, etc. I knew enough about swimming to make it accurate, and I know how it feels to lose yourself underwater while you’re swimming. It was a perfect fit for Katie’s character.

  At first, Katie was emotionally estranged from her father, but after going away to school, seeing other family interactions, and distancing herself from her own situation, she gained perspective, and with it came a new understanding of her dad. How important was it to you that Katie learned how to redefine this relationship? On a scale of one to ten, how autobiographical was this dynamic?

  It was crucial to me that Katie come to understand how loved she and her brother were. This was one of the most autobiographical elements of the story—a definite ten.

  Before going away to school, Katie came across as a loner. After arriving at Woodsdale, she was wary of friendships but soon gained confidence in herself and formed solid relationships. Mazzie was in a similar situation, yet didn’t open herself as widely or as fully as did Katie. Do you see more of yourself in Katie or Mazzie?

  Oh, I’m definitely Katie. But there’s a real Mazzie out there, too, just as wonderful as her fictional counterpart. Mazzie is many of the things that Katie wishes she could be: more assertive, less self-conscious. At the same time, Mazzie has her own issues that this book only begins to address. I definitely have plans for her in another novel. . . .

  What advice do you have for teens who are being bullied in high school and feel like they don’t fit in anywhere, the way Katie felt before going away to boarding school?

  I can’t imagine what a terrible experience that must be. High school might be the toughest four years of your life, or it might be the best four years. It’s absolutely true that, in the adult world, nobody’s going to judge you based on whether or not you were popular in high school. And if they do . . . they’ve obviously got some issues to deal with. It’s funny; when I look back on what I was like in high school, I think, “Oh my goodness, I was so awkward! If I could go back in time, knowing what I know now, I’d be much cooler.” But I think that, if I were to be magically transported back to boarding school (not that I’d want that!), I’d be just as insecure all over again. Adolescence is such a bizarre time. Everybody is insecure; everybody is scared; nobody knows what they’re doing. It can be the most thrilling and most difficult time in a person’s life, but hopefully it’s a little bit of both. If you’re dealing with serious bullying issues, though, you need to reach out to someone who you can trust. Don’t be embarrassed or afraid to find help. Nobody deserves to be treated cruelly, and those who find their self-esteem through bullying also need to understand how destructive and hurtful their actions are.

  You started writing Breathless when you were eighteen, and you’re now in your late twenties. What took you away from the story and what brought you back to it nearly a decade later?

  I never really left it. A few days after I graduated from high school, I sat down and wrote the first draft in abo
ut six weeks. It was a gush; I had to get it all down. I tinkered with it a bit in college, but was too busy to do much more than some minor editing from time to time. Then, when I got to graduate school (for my master’s in creative writing), I had a whole new perspective: I’m an adult and a parent myself now. There was finally enough distance between the true story I’d written for me to transform it into something meaningful that was still based heavily on fact. So, the novel evolved as I grew up, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it all turned out.

  You now teach writing. What was the best advice you were given as a young writer, and what advice do you now give to your students?

  I teach writing very part-time on a graduate level. It’s my absolute dream to teach creative writing to high school students or undergrads. But the best advice I’ve ever heard is to write what you know, what comes naturally, and what you feel passionate about. Everything else will fall into place. And of course . . . never, ever, ever give up.

  What do you hope people will take away from their reading of Breathless?

  A deeper understanding of the phrase “the best-laid plans of mice and men”. . . As I said earlier, the story begins with a young family that seems to be heading nowhere but up in life: a loving marriage, two bright kids, success in every way imaginable. And then it starts to unravel, and every character finds a different way to deal. I hope this is a story that everyone—both teens and adults—can relate to. At one point in our lives, we all see things teeter off course, for better or worse. It’s how we choose to deal with the unexpected that eventually defines us as individuals.

  Would you ever send your daughters to boarding school?

  Yes. Not until high school, but boarding school was such a positive experience for me. Obviously, it’s something that has impacted me well into my adult life. I got a wonderful education, made some of the best friends of my life, and wouldn’t trade a second of it. I would love the opportunity to give my girls a similar experience, if they’re interested.