Just Breathe Read online

  Even I’m surprised by how frantic I sound. It’s like I’m back in my dream, wandering the hospital corridors, only this time people can hear me, thank God. Maybe I am losing my mind, but I want Eileen to understand why.

  “When I got so close to dying, it’s like everything was clear—who I was and what I wanted. The person I wanted to be with. Then I woke up and I forgot all of it. I went back to my little cocoon of safety. I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to be scared of having something real. And I don’t want to wait anymore. I’m sorry, I just don’t.”

  Eileen smiles.

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “You sound like me.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m not that crazy.”

  “You know you do. It’s like you’re trying to sound like me, but usually I’m acting, and you really mean it.”

  “I do really mean it. Maybe you’ve been right about a few things.”

  “I’m right about everything.” She’s really smiling now. “Just say it. You know you want to say it.”

  “I want to know why Jamie’s not texting me back. That’s what I want to know.”

  “I think it’s because she probably has a new boyfriend.”

  “Shut up.”

  She’s really laughing now. “She had enough of waiting around for you to have your little revelation. She’s found someone new to fold her origami with.”

  “I’m begging you to shut up.”

  “Fine, okay. I actually saw her just now going into the art room. I guess that’s where she spends most of her time these days.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this five minutes ago?”

  “Because I like watching you freak out. Plus I was waiting for you to calm down, but obviously that’s not going to happen.”

  “Okay, so I’m going to the art room to find her.”

  “Can I come and watch?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “If I promise not to laugh?”

  I’m already running backward. “You’re a terrible human being. . . .”

  “That’s what makes me such a great sister.”

  Eileen’s right. Jamie’s here.

  My breath catches when I see her in the corner near a window, in front of a canvas that’s painted in geometrically divided shades of the same color—a beautiful pale green, shaded darker in some triangles and lighter in others. Her back is to the door, so she doesn’t see me. I walk in quietly so I can stand behind her and study the painting she’s working on. It’s simple and beautiful. At first it looks abstract and then, after a minute, I realize what it is.

  “A piece of folded origami paper?”

  She gasps and spins around. “You scared me! What are you doing here?”

  I smile and stare at her wonderful face. Her beautiful brown eyes. Her freckles. “I was looking for you.”

  It’s almost too much to take in all at once. While I was regaining bodily functions like the ability to breathe, she has started painting again. Even with an idea that’s seemingly simple—painting a piece of folded paper—I can tell she’s good. There is light on her mountain folds and shadows in the valleys. Almost as if the canvas has been folded, but it hasn’t.

  “It’s a frog base, unfolded.”

  “Really?” My eyebrows go up. “Isn’t that what a geisha would give to a man to say, ‘Come back’?”

  She doesn’t turn around and look back at me. This isn’t going to be easy. She isn’t painting this as a message to me.

  I start over. I say, “I’m sorry to interrupt you here. I’ve been looking for you all day.”

  “What for?”

  She starts painting again.

  “I wanted to talk to you. About how stupid I’ve been, forgetting . . . what happened between us. Going to the social. All of that.”

  She peeks over at me. “You remember that now?”

  “Not all of it. But enough, I think. We danced, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then we went outside.”

  “Yes.”

  “And did I collapse right away?”

  “No, you put on your cannula, and I turned the oxygen up too high. You felt great for about five minutes, and we thought everything was fine, but it wasn’t.”

  I don’t care about that part. “Did we kiss? I’m sure I wanted to. I remember wanting to, but did we do it?”

  She looks away again. “Yes.”

  I close my eyes for a second and try to imagine it. I’m glad it happened. I’m sad I don’t remember. “Was that my only chance, or is it possible you might give me another?”

  She waves a hand that’s covered in green paint. She doesn’t want to talk about this right now. It takes her a moment to gather her thoughts.

  Finally, she turns around. “Why are you saying this when you have a girlfriend?”

  “Sharon and I just broke up.”

  She nods and takes a deep breath. “Okay.” She turns back to her painting. “I have to tell you, these last four months have been really hard for me. I felt very guilty about what happened to you, and then I had lawyers saying I should feel guilty, I was guilty.” She shuts her eyes. “The only way I got through it was to go on a kind of autopilot where I don’t think too much and I don’t feel too much. I’ve told myself that if I can do that, at some point I’ll wake up and high school will be almost over and I’ll have survived.”

  “That’s not really a great plan.”

  She spins around, her eyes flashing. “Yes it is, David. It’s the only plan that will work for me. I can’t kill myself, because that would destroy my mother. This is the only way I can think of to not want to die most of the time.”

  “I don’t think you could be painting like that if you wanted to die.”

  “Don’t, David. Don’t come in and say you’re so happy to be alive and everyone else should feel the same way. It’s not really fair.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I stayed with Sharon for way too long because I was scared that if I met someone who I really connected with, being sick would be ten times harder and dying would be unbearable. Then I met that person, and it happened, and I figured out that it didn’t make my life scarier or worse. Being with you made my life easier.”

  “Because I said you should forget college and watch movies and do origami instead?”

  “No. Because you write your own rules. You make decisions for yourself. Most people never do that. They’re too scared to take a risk. They’ve never done it. It’s not easy, carving out your own path. Just ask Eileen, she’s carved out fifteen of them.”

  She laughs like she’s grateful to change the subject. “How is Eileen?”

  “She’s okay. I think she’d like to be friends with you again. She feels terrible about what our parents did. We both do.”

  “That wasn’t her fault. Or yours.”

  “Still. She’s not as ridiculous as she seems sometimes. She helped me see a few things.”

  “I never thought she was ridiculous.”

  “It turns out she did all that stuff with Nicolai because Sharon’s been secretly dating him for a while and she wanted to get him to stop seeing her. Even though she hates Sharon, she wanted me to think I still had my girlfriend while I was dying.”

  “That’s weird but nice.”

  “Exactly. ‘Weird but nice’ is the right description. Now she’s saying I should forget about all that and go out with you.”

  “She said that?” Jamie’s obviously surprised.

  “Yeah. She was never really mad at you for getting her in trouble. She felt bad about a bunch of things and didn’t know what to say to you.”

  JAMIE

  Eileen doesn’t hate me? Is that even possible? For some reason this is easier for me to wrap my mind around than David standing here saying he wants to kiss me again. The second thing is terrifying and real. The first is a relief. I liked Eileen, and I wanted to be fr
iends with her. I thought she wanted to be friends with me, too. Realizing I was wrong about that made me feel like I was wrong about a lot of things.

  “I’d like to be friends with her,” I say. “Real friends. Not friends where I’m meant to be babysitting her.”

  “Yeah, that was a bad idea on my part. I’m sorry about that.”

  He looks so different than he did in the hospital. His face is full; his curly, overgrown hair is gone. He sounds like the boy I visited every day for seven weeks, but he doesn’t look like him. It scares me to imagine him saying, Okay, yeah, let’s pick up where we left off at the social. I’m pretty sure we were kissing and I was talking about breaking up with Sharon.

  Maybe that’s my problem.

  “Did you really break up with Sharon?”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure both of us felt relieved.”

  “Sounds like you’re having a busy day.”

  “Very busy, because I’ve spent most of it looking for you. I’ve been to your locker about eight times. Why don’t you ever go there?”

  “I’ve never figured out how to open it.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Of course I’m serious. “Yes, David. I’m a sophomore who has never used her locker because it’s embarrassing to stand in a hallway and not be able to open something for ten minutes. That’s not the only embarrassing thing about me.”

  “Do you want to tell me the other embarrassing things?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay. Maybe I could help you with your locker then?”

  “I don’t know about that. Wouldn’t everyone wonder why you’re opening this random tenth grader’s locker?”

  “We could pretend I’m conducting a random locker search. Hopefully you don’t have any contraband in there. No, Jamie, on second thought, let’s not pretend anything. I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I care what you think. I want to try going out with you. What do you think about that?”

  The problem with him saying something nice like this is that he hasn’t been listening to what I’m saying. He doesn’t know what depression is like and how you have to think about it all the time. He doesn’t have to make sure he’s not alone too much and also not around people who trigger bad feelings. He doesn’t understand that it’s always here, waiting to sneak back into your life.

  I tell him all of this. “I can’t take risks, David. I just can’t. That’s all.”

  “Going out with me would be a risk?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “What would be so risky? I don’t understand.”

  “You’re about to graduate and go off and start a great new life. You’re a hundred times more experienced than I am in every aspect of socializing, including dating and sex, which I can hardly bring myself to say, and I certainly can’t look at you when I do. No. Just no, David. You’re not listening when I say I can’t do this.”

  DAVID

  She turns around and looks at me. She still looks beautiful to me, but I understand I shouldn’t tell her that right now. I hold up both hands.

  “Fine,” I say. “But just so it’s clear: I’ve only kissed one girl before you in my whole life, and yes, we’ve had sex, but not very much and we’ve always had towels around so we can clean up right afterward. It’s always struck me as a little bit . . . not the way it’s supposed to be. I wouldn’t mind going back to the start and going slowly with someone . . . more right. That’s it. That’s all I’m saying. I’ll leave you alone now.”

  I don’t want to leave, but now that I’ve said this, I have to.

  I walk out into the hallway and, a second later, walk back in.

  “I don’t want to leave on that weird, creepy note. This isn’t about sex, which I’m not supposed to have. For a while anyway. Eventually, I can. This is about realizing I came close to dying and now I’ve got a new lease on life and I want to make some changes. That’s all. That’s it. I want to spend more time with people I actually like, not people I feel like I’m supposed to spend time with, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I haven’t made a dent, I can tell. I take a step back. “So now I’m going to leave, and the last thing I’ll have said will not be about sex.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  JAMIE

  IT DOESN’T HELP TO obsessively replay conversations in my mind, but it also doesn’t work to tell my brain not to. I spend all evening going over everything David said. With every replay, I can’t help it, my armpits tingle and my heart speeds up a little.

  David is still David.

  I didn’t imagine our connection or fabricate some bond that I wanted to believe was true. It was true. Then I remember what I wanted to say in my speech about my struggle with depression. Sometimes people can feel a connection, but acting on that feeling isn’t good for either one of them. It just isn’t. Did I say it, or did all those words get caught in my throat? I’m not sure anymore.

  I’m almost sure I’m right about this. David needs to go off to college without feeling tied to anyone back here, and, more important, I need to figure out how to get through the rest of high school without getting depressed. With an objective like that, you can’t add other people into the equation. It makes you too vulnerable. They leave and then what?

  I check my messages all night not because I want to see one from him but because I want to make sure I don’t. There, I think, each time I look and find nothing there. I was right. If I’d said okay, I’d be spending all next fall doing just this: waiting for messages and texts that wouldn’t come.

  Over dinner, my mother asks me if I’m ready for this weekend. She was the one who pushed me into entering the same citywide art show I did in eighth grade. The one I’m working after school every day to get ready for. Six schools participate, and four students are selected from every school. I almost didn’t tell my mother when Mr. Standish told me I’d been chosen. I didn’t think I deserved it, for one thing. I’d only been in his class for two months, though I’d started going to his room when I first returned to school after two weeks at home. It was the only place I could think of to go after school when the hospital wasn’t an option anymore.

  The first day I went, I was shocked at how comfortable it felt. I’d been so scared doing art would carry me back to memories of Dad, and it did, but not in a way that made me sad. Instead, I remembered the hours we spent together: my dad squeezing paint from tubes, washing brushes, adjusting lights, and setting us up. I remember how, in the years before he became unpredictable and hard to be around, it was surprisingly easy for us to spend hours alone together working on art, not talking at all. Now that I look back on it, I can hardly believe that I had the attention span to work as long as I did without getting restless. We didn’t even listen to a radio, which Mr. Standish had playing in the corner the first afternoon I stopped by.

  I don’t know if Mr. Standish knew anything about me or who my father was. I couldn’t look him in the eye when I asked about working after school in his room. I was so nervous, I stammered.

  “I’d be happy to clean up . . . or wash brushes in exchange for supplies. I want to try painting . . . and I can’t at home.”

  He said it was fine, with a surprising stipulation.

  “I’d like you to sign up for an art class next semester.”

  When had a teacher ever noticed me enough to ask me to take a class of theirs? Never. Maybe he could see how shocked I was because he said, “For my more parsimonious colleagues, that would help me justify giving you supplies.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I want to take art.” I stopped myself from saying anything else that might lead to oversharing. I’ve wanted to paint again for a while. I’ve been scared. It’s complicated for me.

  Since then, I’ve gotten to know Mr. Standish better, and I’ve told him a few things. When he asked how I knew so much about art supplies (where to buy them, which brands I liked best), I told him the truth.

>   “My dad was a painter. We worked together a lot.”

  When I said his name, he raised his eyebrows. “Oh my gosh. I remember him. I had some friends who used to know—” Then he remembered. “I’m sorry about your loss.”

  Mr. Standish didn’t ask too much of me at first, but after I finished my first painting, he put his hand over his mouth and shook his head, as if he wasn’t sure what to say. Then he smiled. “Well, I see talent must run in the family. It’s great to have you in the fold, Jamie.”

  I replayed his words in my mind a lot. It was just before Christmas break—our second holiday without Dad and our first in the new apartment. We had to spend Christmas Day with my aunt who is high-strung and hard for my mom to be around for more than a day, but the rest of the time we were on our own, which wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Mostly we watched movies. And in between, I thought about Mr. Standish’s expression when he looked at my work. I thought about what he said. It’s great to have you in the fold. It made me think about origami and see it for what it really had been all this time: a replacement for doing art, which scared me too much.

  I’ve learned that I can’t bear not creating. It soothes me to look at colors and study the way they change in different lights. I love the magic of transforming paper from a flat one-dimensional object into an animal or a piece of art. It taught me things I’d never learned in all my years of painting and drawing with my father. Paper has a life of its own. I’m interested in three-dimensional art, something my father always dismissed as belonging in the realm of craft shows. Mostly I’ve realized it’s okay to think about my father’s ideas and disagree with some.

  Mr. Standish was careful when he asked if I’d like to represent my class in the citywide art show. “I wanted to ask you first because you’re the most obvious choice, but I also understand if you’d like to wait until next year. It would mean working intensively over the next two months to create three works you’d feel good about displaying.”

  I wanted to say yes right away.

  To my ear, “working intensively” meant I’d have permission to come in at lunch and during study hall. Maybe even before school. It meant filling my days (and my mind) with something besides worrying about how David was recovering and what would happen when he came back to school. I’m glad I had this pressure. In the week since he’s been back at school, I’ve been too busy to think much about him until today.