Just Breathe Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Three: Four Months Later

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  Books by Cammie McGovern

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Chapter One

  JAMIE

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Hello!

  Dear David,

  I just wanted to tell you that I can’t really do this idea of being pen pals or whatever you’re suggesting. I’m not very good at that kind of thing. I’m sorry. I hope you’re feeling better soon.

  Signed, Jamie

  I’ve already wasted way too much time thinking about this response. If he writes me again, I’ll probably lose the whole afternoon.

  He does.

  Write me again.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Hello!

  Hi, Jamie, what are you talking about? You’re great at this! I especially like the “Signed, Jamie” part. That’s not strange at all.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Hello!

  Ha ha. I warned you.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Hello!

  Fine, we don’t have to be pen pals if you don’t want to. I wanted to write and thank you for what you did for me the other day. You pretty much saved my life, and I owe you.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Hello!

  Hardly. I just went and got a nurse.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Hello!

  I vaguely remember you laying a hand on my sweaty back, which couldn’t have been pleasant. I was in the worst pain I’ve ever experienced and I’m only grateful now that I hadn’t wet the bed. My embarrassment is still high, and my gratitude is bottomless.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Hello!

  Don’t be embarrassed. Seriously. No one should be embarrassed for being sick.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Hello!

  The embarrassing part isn’t being sick so much as being gross and smelling like roadkill. I’d thrown up a few hours earlier and I still hadn’t taken a shower. Aren’t you glad to know that now? Doesn’t that make you want to go and wash your hands? Like five times.

  No, it doesn’t make me want to wash my hands. It makes me look at my hands and remember how he felt—warm and a little sweaty.

  I keep expecting this email thread to stop, and then I turn on the computer that I now share with my mom and find another message from him. The computer sits in our new, tiny, not-private living room, and even though my mom is on the sofa a few feet away, looking over at me with a face that says, What are you doing over there? I’m not leaving. I’m staying here, writing these messages and waiting for another one.

  This is the problem with sharing a computer and spending all our time together. My doing anything different seems strange.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Hello!

  Maybe you’ve forgotten that I volunteer on the pediatric floor of the hospital. I’ve seen a lot of gross things.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Hello!

  Oh, tell me the grossest! Please. It’ll make me feel better.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Gross things

  There was once a boy who threw up into a nebulizer mask. Those are machines that you use to breathe medicine if you have asthma. That was fairly unpleasant.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Gross things

  I know what a nebulizer is (all too well) and I make a big point of only ever throwing up on myself and my own clothes. I just think there have to be some rules. By the way, when you said you’re bad at these things, what did you mean? Emailing? So far, I’d say you’re fine.

  I didn’t mean emailing exactly. I meant talking casually and seeming normal over email. Even though I’m pretty sure my mom is still watching, I type and delete a few different answers as quickly as I can:

  I have a bad track record with friends.

  I had a few friendships last year that blew up spectacularly.

  Right now I have no friends unless I count my mom, which I do, but I’m not going to tell you that because even I know how pathetic that makes me sound.

  Finally, I give up and write:

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Gross things

  I’m shy.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: It’s okay

  Funny job to have if you’re shy. I thought all Smile Awhile volunteers were super friendly. I also thought they were mostly retired nurses. Or at least old.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: It’s okay

  You’re right, I’m an exception, but how do you know so much about Smile Awhilers?

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: It’s okay

  Alas, this isn’t my first time at the rodeo. So why are you a Smile Awhiler if you’re so shy?

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: It’s okay

  My mom works at the hospital. She pulled strings to get me the job. She thought it would be good for me to practice talking to strangers.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Not okay

  Covered in vomit.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: Not okay

  I guess that makes me feel less shy, surprisingly.

  The longer this conversation goes on, the more shocked I am. Partly that I’m being funny with a boy, and partly that I’m being funny with this boy: David Sheinman, senior class president, who makes
microphone announcements in the cafeteria every week. I consider him a school celebrity, though it’s possible not everyone thinks of him in that way. This year, I’ve been eating lunch alone all fall, so I have no distractions and nowhere else to look. He isn’t good-looking in the standard, high-school-athlete way (he’s very thin for one thing, and he also wears glasses, which I think are cute but would probably knock him down a point on Missy’s one-to-ten scale). Still, I could tell you the color of his eyes—hazel, with surprising yellow flecks—and a few other bits of trivia. Like this: he carries a cloth handkerchief that he sometimes coughs into before he starts his announcements. Then he folds it up and slides it into his pocket, like somebody’s grandfather would do. I’m not sure if noticing these things means I have a crush on him or if it means I’m a strange person who notices weird things. I don’t have much experience in this area.

  When I first walked into his hospital room, I knew who he was right away. Even though his back was to the door and he was lying on the bed, clutching his stomach, I could tell by his thin arms and his hair, which is brown and curly and long enough that he sometimes tucks it behind his ears. He was obviously in pain, like maybe he’d been admitted for appendicitis and they hadn’t given him any pain medication yet.

  In that moment, I surprised myself. It was like I forgot who I was—my shyness; my disastrously bad handling of friendships; my nonexistent experience with boys—and became my mom for a few minutes. Or at least a nurse-like person assessing a situation. His breathing sounded rattly, like maybe in addition to whatever was going on with his stomach, he was also having an asthma attack. I know those can be more dangerous than people think. When I said hello and he made a noise like he was starting to choke, I got really worried.

  I put my hand on his back, something my mother would have done to check his breathing. I left it there long enough to make sure I was right: he was definitely having trouble breathing and he had a fever.

  “Hang in there,” I whispered. “I’m going to get you help. I’ll be right back.”

  It was well handled on my part.

  Uncharacteristically so, I have to add. I only wish now that I’d left it at that and hadn’t gone back to check on him a few hours later after he’d been taken care of—cleaned up, wearing a new hospital gown, with an IV drip that must have included pain meds because his eyes were half-closed and he was smiling.

  “Hi,” I said, surprised that he was still alone. Where were his countless friends from school? Or his family, who should obviously be there? “I’m just stopping by to see how you’re doing.”

  “Are you my angel of salvation? I don’t know how I can ever thank you.”

  He held out his hand like he wanted me to cross the room and hold it, which was crazy and not something I could possibly do. We weren’t friends. We didn’t even know each other. We happen to go to the same school, but so do fifteen hundred other kids, and that doesn’t mean you hold someone’s hand while they’re lying in bed with hardly anything on.

  “Actually, I have to go,” I said awkwardly. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “I’m okay. I’m also David.”

  I knew that of course. I also knew that his last name was Sheinman because every week when he stepped up to the cafeteria microphone, a few people yelled, “Shine on, man!” which I thought was some kind of rude slang until I heard his last name. I’m always guessing at these things because, for most of my life, I was homeschooled by my artist dad, who prioritized visiting museums and painting together in his basement studio over any activities involving other kids.

  I stopped homeschooling two years ago, which means I should be savvier about things like hecklers and their slang by now, but I’m not.

  Eventually, I figured out that people weren’t making fun of David; they liked him. Maybe he isn’t as popular as the football players and the cheerleaders, but that group always listens to his announcements and claps afterward. If he mentions someone by name because their club is having a meeting or a bake sale, that person usually stands up and waves. After they sit down, their friends all say, “You just got Shined on,” but not in a mean way. He is like a mascot to the pretty-girl/jock crowd, except he dates Sharon Dinow, one of the pretty girls, with blond hair that she styles every morning or else wears in a neat, bouncy ponytail. Dating her means he’s not a mascot really, but more like a part of that crowd.

  “Do you want to tell me your name?” he said. He was still smiling, but his eyes were almost closed. He must have been on a lot of pain meds.

  “Jamie Turner,” I said, and then, in a fit of nervous confusion, I kept going. “We go to the same school. You don’t know me because I’m in tenth grade and I don’t belong to any clubs or anything. I don’t even have any friends really. I’m not that type.”

  Instead of being horrified by all this, his smile spread. “What type are you?”

  “I don’t know. Never mind. I hope you feel better,” I said, and left.

  My face stayed red for about an hour afterward.

  Of course I didn’t expect him to get in touch.

  I prayed he was so doped-up he’d forget the whole thing.

  Then I couldn’t believe it. I got home and opened my computer to an email that sounded so casual I assumed he’d mistaken me for one of his friends: Hey. How’s it going?

  I thought about it for a while and finally wrote back: This is Jamie Turner. From the hospital.

  He wrote: I know. I thought maybe we could be pen pals.

  I didn’t understand. Hadn’t I already proved how bad at socializing I was? I might listen to his announcements every week at lunch, but that didn’t mean I went to any of the activities he suggested. I don’t like crowds or marching bands or girls getting drunk and falling down bleacher stairs, which happened at the only football game I’d ever been to.

  For a whole day, I didn’t respond.

  Maybe he was still giddy on pain medicine, or maybe he was playing a trick—popular older boy pretends to be nice to younger geeky girl. In the end, my response was an overworked attempt to not sound too paranoid. It was meant to say, essentially, Hi back, now let’s not worry about pretending we’re friends just because you’re in the hospital and we go to the same school.

  I never expected the rest. That he’d respond every time within two minutes. That he’d be a good writer and funny, too. That even when I was honest and told him I’m shy, he didn’t seem to mind.

  All of it was a surprise, but none more so than his final note at the end of this flurry of exchanges.

  * * *

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Gotta go

  I’ve got visitors right now, so I have to go, but it looks like I’ll be here for another week at least. When do you work again?

  Most kids on the pediatric floor stay in the hospital for a night or maybe two at the most. Even kids with cancer don’t stay for a week unless they’re getting a bone marrow transplant, and then they stay on the isolation unit of the oncology floor. This whole time I’d assumed he had appendicitis or a kidney stone because he was in so much pain and was holding his stomach. But those things don’t put you in the hospital for a week.

  I remember him coughing when I walked into his room and flash on the memory of his cloth handkerchief at school.

  I spin around to see my mom, who’s only pretending to read on the sofa behind me. I know she’s been watching me.

  “How long would someone with bad pneumonia stay in the hospital?” I ask her.

  “Depends on how they respond to treatment.”

  She hasn’t worked as a nurse on the pediatric floor in more than a year, but even if she did, I know she’d never tell me someone’s diagnosis.

  Instead of leaving the computer, I tell her I have a little more research I need to do for homework and poke around online. I google symptoms and clues, including the fact that he knew I was a Smile Awhiler, which means he’s sp
ent at least a little time in the hospital before. I type in labored breathing, fever, chest pain, gut pain, and then add recurring hospitalizations. A few possibilities come up, but nothing seems quite right until I remember him saying he knew about nebulizers (all too well), which means his lungs must be part of the problem, and I add chronic cough to my search.

  A few minutes later, I’ve read enough to guess what he might have.

  And now I wish I didn’t know.

  DAVID

  I don’t know why I’m writing this girl.

  Actually, that’s a lie—I do know why. I’m writing her because it’s easier than writing my real friends, who I’ve been lying to for months, pretending I’m busy when really, I’ve been too sick to do anything or go anywhere. It’s a complicated business, having something like cystic fibrosis, which is a big deal, except you spend most of your life pretending it isn’t. You say, “It’s like asthma, only I cough a lot. I’m not contagious; my body just makes extra mucus,” which is gross but acceptable if you smile sheepishly. Or else you shrug and say, “It’s like diabetes. Incurable but manageable. You get used to it.”

  Which you do. Sort of.

  But how do I tell people, after years of pretending this is only like diabetes: Hey, with my pancreas crapping out, the doctor thinks I might have that, too?