Just Breathe Read online

  I was right, as it turns out. In the three months since I got home from the hospital, Sharon’s been stopping by every afternoon on her way home from school. Sometimes she’ll bring me funny things, like a terrible oatmeal cookie from the cafeteria. Last week she brought a flyer the student council had just put out.

  “Here’s what a bad job we’re doing without you,” she said, pointing to a typo. “This is why we need you back.”

  Technically, I was supposed to wait five months before doing anything strenuous like go back to school. “Four months, give or take,” the doctor said.

  “Could I give or take a month if I’m feeling okay?”

  “A week maybe,” he said. “And small doses at first. Go to school for an hour. Believe me, that’ll be enough.”

  He was right. I haven’t even been to a class, and I’m wiped out. Sharon picked me up an hour ago so I could come for lunch and make the cafeteria announcement about senior-week activities, and, already, I’m exhausted. Lunch isn’t even over yet, and I’ve talked to more people in the last thirty minutes than I have in the past four months. Most of the conversations are two seconds long.

  “Great to see you, man.”

  “You look amazing.”

  “We’ve all been rooting for you.”

  Everyone is so nice that I worry I’m going to lose it. This is what happens when you can’t control your moods. Someone says, “You look good,” and your mouth wants to say, “Fuck you, I’m fat and I’ve got acne I never had in puberty. I look terrible.” Your brain doesn’t consider the wisdom of saying something like that out loud. Instead of a man with an ice pick in my chest, I have a drunk, angry stranger in my head.

  Smile, I tell myself. Don’t worry if you talk to people you don’t care about for a long time and hardly at all to people you do care about. Just get through this. There’ll be time.

  By the end of lunch, I feel like I’ve been here for six hours. How do people do this all day long—talking and smiling and not saying anything real at all?

  It’s completely exhausting.

  I keep signaling to Sharon, who doesn’t register what I’m saying. When I finally catch her eye, I point to my wrist, which of course has no watch, just the medical alert bracelet I’ll have to wear for the rest of my life declaring that my body contains transplanted organs.

  Sharon smiles and waves back like I’m saying, Isn’t this fun? She even mouths, “I told you.”

  I try to remember what she said: That people would be happy to see me? That everyone would clap? I don’t know if I’m just having a mood swing, but to me, it doesn’t seem hard to get a round of applause if you’ve spent time in a coma and almost died several times since the last time you’ve seen these people. In ninth grade, Jeremiah, a mean boy no one liked, got hit by a car and when he finally came back to school with his leg in a cast, everyone politely stood up and clapped. It’s an automatic response. I wonder if I should explain this to Sharon when she says, “See? Everyone is so happy to see you.” I’ll remind her of Jeremiah, universally loathed until his brush with death got him a standing O. Maybe I’ll also point out that I didn’t even get that—just a lot of foot stamping and noise, the same as a dropped tray or a food fight might get.

  I keep smiling back at the people who walk up to me. I don’t want to be in a bad mood when everyone is being so nice. It’s not that hard to say, “It’s great to see you, too.” Which is what I say to everyone who files by me and touches my shoulder or shakes my hand.

  Then one voice makes me look up.

  “I can’t believe how different you look.”

  It’s Jamie. The sun is behind her, so it’s hard to see her face.

  “I mean, good. You look good.”

  I remind myself to breathe. This is what happens when you get new lungs. You can never be sure they’ll work when you need them. But they always do. They work perfectly. I breathe in and breathe out.

  “Jamie,” I say, and hold out my hand. I need to say something more so she knows that seeing her again is different for me than seeing all these other people. She deserves more than “thank you,” and I never even told her that much.

  She looks down at my hand and doesn’t take it. Instead, she steps backward. “I should go,” she says.

  Say something, the angry voice in my head screams. Say something, you moron. Tell her none of these people were as good a friend to you in the hospital as she was.

  My mouth opens, but nothing comes out.

  I can’t even manage one of the throwaway lines that I’m giving everyone else. “We should catch up,” or “Text you later.”

  I don’t understand this.

  I sit with my hand outstretched, untaken, and I stare into her eyes and say nothing at all.

  Hannah barrels up behind her and throws her arms around my neck. “I’ve got some great news! We’re throwing you a party! It’s going to be at Suze’s on Friday, and it’s in honor of you, which means you’re not allowed to back out last minute. That’s why I’m telling you now, so you can sleep and do whatever. But you have to come, okay? Say, ‘Yes, Hannah, I’ll be there.’”

  “Yes, Hannah,” I hear myself say, even though I can’t stop staring at Jamie. “I’ll be there.”

  “Perfect! See? It’s not that hard.”

  In the course of this thirty-second exchange, Hannah has touched me more than I remember Jamie and I touching in our whole hospital friendship. She’s taken the hand I was holding out for Jamie, ruffled my hair, squeezed my neck, and kissed my cheek.

  It’s enough for Jamie to shake her head and walk away.

  What is the matter with me? I can breathe better now than I have in ten years, and I can’t exhale a few kind words for someone who actually means something to me?

  When Sharon comes over and whispers in my ear, “Isn’t this nice? Don’t you want to stick around for the afternoon and come to the student council meeting?” a black anger has already boiled up in my chest. I can taste it in the back of my mouth.

  “Fuck no,” I say. “I need to go home.”

  To really make my point, I start walking toward the parking lot, but then I remember I need a ride from Sharon because of course I’m not well enough to drive my own car yet.

  JAMIE

  Well that was a mistake. I have so much trouble measuring the size and proportion of my social missteps that I don’t let myself think about this one until I get home that afternoon and then I feel so icky about the whole thing I have to take a twenty-minute shower to wash the feeling away.

  When I get out, I feel a little better. I stare at my face in the circle I’ve wiped clean in the mirror. That wasn’t your fault, I tell myself.

  It’s taken me a long time to say this and mean it. None of it was easy, and nothing happened quickly.

  It took a long time for the new dosage of medication to feel like it was working. Before it did, this depression felt different and scarier than the one after my dad died. This time it was even more physical. I felt it in my bones and in the back of my neck. In the mornings it was a vertigo that made it impossible to get out of bed. It also felt—at times—like I was just plain crazy. More than depressed, I was delusional. I kept thinking David was in the room with me or hovering somewhere, just outside my window. Like he was in the air around me, watching me fall apart.

  I only told my mom once, “I hear his voice sometimes. Like he’s here, talking to me.”

  “He’s not, sweetheart. That’s your brain playing tricks. I had the same thing with your dad. Memories surface, and you feel like they’re real.”

  These weren’t memories, though. If I held my breath and listened carefully, I could hear snippets of what he was saying, and they weren’t things we’d already talked about.

  It was impossible to put it all in perspective. The best I could do was be as honest with Rita as I could possibly be, and the rest of the time, put David out of my thoughts. It’s taken months of seeing Rita twice a week for an hour and going over the fac
ts—or at least my interpretation of the facts—to settle on what is probably the truest version of what happened.

  I am, according to Rita, an “unusually mature tenth grader” who stumbled into a friendship with an older boy at a crossroads in his own life. We connected on topics most teens don’t grapple with. Because it felt real and powerful at the time, he convinced me to help him take risks he shouldn’t have. Just because my judgment is “usually quite good” (Rita’s words, not mine), that doesn’t mean I’m not still a fifteen-year-old capable of making mistakes.

  “Your friendship wasn’t a mistake, your actions were,” Rita says. “Important distinction.”

  My mom also helped.

  “Let’s make a list of everything you think you’ve done wrong, so we can put it all in some perspective,” she suggested at the end of my second week seeing Rita again.

  The list was easy at first: “I broke hospital rules. I endangered David’s health. I pretended I was on dates with someone else’s boyfriend. I liked pretending that, and I indulged in imagining that he liked me back. I never gave Bethany or the other girls much of a chance to be friends again. I once loved art but don’t do it anymore because I’m scared it will make me sad. I’ve gotten sad again and can’t stop it.”

  “It’s a good list, sweetheart,” my mom said, writing it all down. “Now, let’s go over it and see what’s fair and what isn’t.”

  The more I thought about it, the more surprised I was at how badly the second to last one made me feel: not making art. After spending two weeks at home, Rita asked me a surprising question: “Is there something you wanted to do at school but didn’t get a chance?”

  I thought about the art room. About the nice teacher saying he’d consider letting me work there after school. “Maybe,” I said.

  About two weeks after David’s surgery, and after two weeks of sessions with Rita, my mother was clear—she wanted me to go back to school. She couldn’t take more time off from work, and she didn’t want me home alone. “I think you’ll be okay this time,” she said. She sounded sure of herself, even if she wasn’t.

  She reminded me that I’d always held it together in school pretty well. I wanted to tell her that was part of the problem. I didn’t fall apart right after my dad died; I fell apart seven months later. Seven months after I first told my best friends that he’d died of a heart attack.

  At the time, it seemed like an easy lie to tell. What my friends knew of my dad didn’t fit the other picture. They all thought he was funny and cooler than most dads. Bethany always said I was lucky, having the parents I had.

  “I wish my dad was an artist,” she said.

  After he died, I had come back to school in a state of hyperawareness. My skin prickled with self-consciousness. Everyone knows, I thought. Everyone is watching me. Bethany hugged me with tears in her eyes. “It’s so unfair. Your dad was so awesome.”

  The prickling sensation turned into a hot wave through my body. “Yeah,” I said. “There wasn’t much we could do. That’s what happens with heart attacks.”

  At lunch that day, I told the lie again. Only Missy cocked her head, looking skeptical. “Really?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “He had an undiagnosed heart condition.”

  I expected the lie to bring me relief from the awful feeling that I was being watched all the time. It didn’t. I still wonder how things would have been different if I’d told them the truth. If I’d found a way to say “My dad killed himself,” maybe I would have figured out how to understand it all better. As it was, the secret became a black hole I fell into.

  I started saying things that didn’t make sense. I talked about him too much, mostly about his old success. I told people I couldn’t get together on weekends because we were putting together a retrospective show of his work. I lied about the show for months, until finally I had to pretend that it had happened and had gone really well.

  After that, I had no excuses. I had to go to Missy’s house for the boy-girl party. It was the first time I’d been to her house, and I couldn’t get over how phony everything seemed. Bowls of plastic grapes next to potted plastic plants. Even the sofas looked fake to me, which made no sense.

  A few weekends later, Missy invited us all back. I said nothing the whole night until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and then I screamed at all of them. “You guys are so phony. . . . You don’t understand anything. . . . You think we’re all friends but we’re not. . . .”

  I rode my bike home in the middle of the night.

  There was only one week of school after that. A messy week of silence and finals and eating lunch by myself in the school library. At the end of the last day of school, I sat on a nearly empty school bus and watched my friends pile into Missy’s mother’s car. In that moment, it seemed like maybe Bethany had been right. It was better to have a big group of bad friends than no friends at all.

  I’d made a terrible mistake, I thought. I’d destroyed my own life. I was no different than my father, self-destructive in ways I didn’t understand. I had no summer plans. No money for arts camps or even supplies to carry me through the next two empty months. I remembered the pills I’d found months earlier in my father’s basement studio: prescription sleeping pills, fourteen left. I didn’t know what I was saving them for, and then suddenly I did.

  I didn’t take the whole bottle. I only took four in the distorted logic that I’d save some for next time, in case this didn’t work. It didn’t work because within ten minutes of swallowing the pills, I called my mother in a panic, and told her what I’d done. In the ER, they made me drink a terrible-tasting charcoal liquid so they wouldn’t have to pump my stomach. The doctor said I had to spend thirty-six hours on the psych floor under mandatory observation.

  In the end, I was in the hospital for three weeks. When I got out, I spent the rest of the summer in my mother’s constant company: at the hospital, at home, watching old movies. Having spent so much time with my dad growing up, it was nice to learn new things about my mom. She once dated a woman named Georgia. She once thought she didn’t want to get married and have kids.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I thought it would make me too vulnerable to getting hurt. Now look at me. Here I am, a puddle of pain. The most vulnerable human being in the world.” She smiled as she said these things and squeezed my hand so it was clear—she was half joking, half not.

  When I came back to school this time, after David’s surgery, the first person I talked to was Bethany.

  “Are you okay?” she said softly.

  “Sort of,” I said. I was surprised—I didn’t feel so vulnerable, or so confused. “I had another bad patch for a while, but now—” I look around. “Well, I’m here again.”

  She gave me a hug, which surprised me so much I started to cry. Then I stopped myself and said, “Thank you, Bethany. That’s all. Just thanks.”

  I walked up to David today because I wanted him to know that I was happy to see him well. I also wanted this much to be clear: I never wished he would stay in the hospital or get sicker. Of course, maybe I was hoping for more. Maybe in the back of my stupid mind, I thought he might say, Jamie! I’ve been watching a bunch of Hitchcock movies! I want to talk to you about them. Maybe I wanted some acknowledgment that our hospital friendship might not survive the fluorescent glare of our school status differences but still, we could say, I remember it all. It was real to me too.

  But no.

  He looked up from his chair, said “Jamie” once, and nothing more. Yes, he held his hand out, but I don’t really count that. He did the same thing the first day I met him in his hospital room after he’d gotten his pain medication.

  I could have even said, We’ve held hands when it meant something. I don’t want to do it now, in front of all these people, when it obviously doesn’t.

  Now that I’m home again, I’ve tried to shower all these thoughts away. We were friends—more than friends, really, I know we were—but we’re not anymore.
/>   I started eating lunch again with Missy and the other girls because Bethany asked me to and I have to admit, it hasn’t been awful. I’ve even learned a few things in the last few months that have made these girls seem more interesting than I once thought. Nicki wants to get her GED at the end of this year and start taking classes at the community college where my mom got her nursing degree. She says she wants to become a physical therapist, so why waste time sitting around high school . . . ? She leaves the rest of the sentence unspoken: being miserable. Or: feeling bad about herself. For the first time, I remember Nicki coming to my defense that night at Missy’s house. Not in any big way, but quietly, from the corner. I remember her saying, “She’s got a point, Missy.”

  Hearing her plan made me happy. She already knows what I need to remember: We aren’t going to be here forever. There’ll be a life after high school, where girls like us will be able to follow our interests and have a better time.

  I also kind of like the new girls who’ve joined us. They aren’t the silent Missy minions I assumed they were from afar. One, named Mary Ann, is actually very funny. She transferred from Catholic school at the start of this year, she told me. “That’s why all my clothes are new. I’ve been wearing a uniform for years. It turns out getting dressed every morning is hard.”

  I laughed because I knew exactly what she meant and felt the same way when I started eighth grade after so many years of homeschooling. Some nights I spent an hour figuring out what to wear when it shouldn’t have been complicated because I always ended up with jeans and a T-shirt. I remember thinking: The possibilities make it harder. I had funkier clothes I’d bought with my dad, but did I dare try for a scarf or a skirt tiered with mirrored chips? Did I dare be myself and wear clothes I loved but couldn’t explain?

  Mary Ann seemed stuck in the same conundrum: “I have this whole funny T-shirt collection, but I’m not sure this school is ready for it.”