Just Breathe Read online

  Life science is part of the non-honors course load I signed up for this year to lower my stress level and avoid my old friends. After everything that happened last spring, I was happy to get away from that crowd, but it’s hard to tell if this current schedule is the answer. In this class, I sit behind a boy who spends the bulk of every class period covering the inside of his textbook with elaborate and surprisingly well-drawn dragons, like he’s hoping to be a tattoo artist one day. I’ve never talked to him, but every time he opens his book, I wonder how many other people have secret stashes of artwork they keep hidden away like I do.

  My dad would have been fine with my schedule this year (“You’ll be surrounded by artsy types!”) but my mom worries (“You know you’re smart enough to do the work—maybe you shouldn’t limit your options.”). More and more I’m realizing my mother’s instincts are probably right, but for now we decided this was all I could manage, so I sit in classes where teachers hand out “cheat sheets” with the notes we should have been taking all along. This month our unit is the “Criteria for Life,” and posted on a bulletin board behind the teacher’s desk is:

  Living things are made of one or more cells.

  Living things use energy.

  Living things reproduce.

  Living things maintain homeostasis.

  Living things respond to and interact with their surroundings.

  We’re supposed to use these criteria to debate whether a substance is alive. Water? Fire? Virus? As Ms. Fisher, our teacher, has said, the “thinking process” will be on the test, not the list, so it’s interesting that from where I sit, I can see Eileen has copied them all down in her notebook in fancy handwriting with a curlicue border of climbing roses and little animals. Maybe she’s a bored doodler, but she also seems like she might be a decent artist. As if she’s studied some manga and knows how to pencil shade. But why the little animals and flowers? I wonder, and then it occurs to me: Living things.

  After class, I wish I could say something to her, but I can’t mention her brother without saying how I met him. Which means I can’t really say anything. I have to wait for her to ask me about this dance class idea. Which means it’ll probably never happen, I tell myself.

  In the hall as I walk away, I hear a voice behind me. “Jamie, can I talk to you for a second?”

  I spin around. It’s not Eileen. It’s Bethany, who hasn’t talked to me since the first day of school, when she looked at my schedule and asked me not to sit with our old friend group at lunch. I’ve passed her maybe twenty times since then, and she has never said hello.

  “Missy wants to talk to you. She thinks we should clear the air so she doesn’t have to worry about seeing you in the hall and feeling awkward.”

  “It’s not that awkward, Bethany. We’re just not friends, that’s all.”

  She rolls her eyes like I’m missing something obvious. “But you’re not friends with anyone else. You just sit by yourself watching people all the time. You shouldn’t do that. It scares them.”

  Does it? I wonder. What are they scared of?

  “She just wants to talk. She thinks maybe we should all give each other another chance.”

  Bethany was the first friend I made when I started school in eighth grade. Up until then, I’d been homeschooled by my dad, who had no friends himself and never saw any reason to help me make any. The first time Bethany had invited me to her house I’d clapped my hands in gratitude.

  “Yes!” I’d said. “Sure!” I’d hoped making friends might be as easy as getting over that initial awkward hump.

  For six months, we were each other’s only friends, which made Bethany nervous.

  “If we don’t have a bigger group before we get to high school, we might get left behind,” she’d worried.

  Toward the end of the year, she’d set her sights on Missy.

  “I think she’s looking to expand her group. I heard her complaining about her lunch friends in English today.”

  I wish one of us had recognized a red flag when we saw one. Missy is a girl who is always looking for better friends than the ones she has. She sits on the fringe of the cafeteria, keeping tabs on the popular people who hardly know who she is. She tracks their love lives and their friend fights in a way that even I understand disqualifies her from joining their ranks. When you care that much about people who don’t know your name, it’s creepy.

  I wonder if they’ve learned this lesson by now. I have to admit, though, Bethany standing here like this softens me a little.

  “She says it’s fine if you want to eat lunch with us today. I think you should.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  I spend the rest of the morning second-guessing this idea. It might be sincere, but it also might be Missy, restless and bored, wanting a chance to take another swipe at me in front of other people.

  I show up to their table ten minutes after lunch has started because I don’t want Missy to think I’m too eager. I’m not the same person I was last spring. Unfortunately, I’m still not completely sure who I am, which makes my voice sound a little shaky. “Hi, Missy. Bethany said you wanted to talk to me.”

  Missy looks up and doesn’t say anything for a while. She isn’t the prettiest or smartest in this group, and I’ve never understood why everyone gives her so much power, unless the explanation is simple: when you’re unpredictable and capable of saying incredibly mean things, everyone is scared of you.

  Apparently two new girls have joined their group. I don’t know their names, but they both look nervous, like they’ve never seen someone stand up to Missy before. Come to think of it, neither had I before I did it last spring. I feel like telling them not to worry, I’m not about to do it again.

  “That’s right,” Missy finally says. “I don’t like worrying all the time about running into you. I just want to clear the air.”

  “Okay.”

  Long silence.

  “I’m pretty sure you should start by apologizing to all of us. Me especially, but to Nicki and Bethany, too.”

  I look at both of them. I try to say with my eyes, Is she really going to do this in front of other people? Do you see how she makes everything worse than it needs to be?

  Their expressions say they don’t.

  “I’m sorry, you guys. I was going through a lot of stuff last spring, and I wasn’t really myself for a while. I took it out on you all, and I shouldn’t have.” My heart is pounding, but it’s not because my mouth is saying the wrong things like last time. To me this sounds like a good apology: reasonably heartfelt and fairly mature.

  Except Missy doesn’t think so. “Yeah, I don’t know. What you said at my sleepover was pretty unforgivable.”

  I don’t want to have this argument. In fact, I don’t want to be friends with them, so why am I even standing here?

  I look up and see Eileen sitting with her own group of friends, two tables away. From the outside, they look like they’re better friends to each other than my group ever was. They’re more touchy-feely, straightening each other’s bra straps and reaching into each other’s pockets. But watching Eileen, I can tell she isn’t really part of their conversation. She plays with her food and stares at her phone, like their talk is noise she has to filter out to keep her thoughts straight. I remember this feeling so well that for a second, I want to go over to her and ask if she’s okay.

  She doesn’t look like she is. Mostly, she looks lost—like she has no idea what she’s doing here. Maybe she’s worried about her brother and she can’t talk about it, or maybe it’s something else. Maybe she’s keeping a secret the way I did, but she’s not even sure exactly what it is. It catches my breath for a second—how much she reminds me of myself last spring.

  Like maybe we actually could be friends.

  I don’t know why seeing Eileen makes me feel empowered, but it does. I turn to Missy and say, “Sorry about this, but I can’t eat lunch with you guys. Today or ever, probably.”

  That night, I get a message from Davi
d.

  I loved Rear Window. I want more Hitchcock.

  Even though I don’t have a shift, I stop by the next day and bring him North by Northwest and Vertigo. He messages me the next day to say he loved the first one but Vertigo freaked him out a little.

  David: That is the psychologically creepiest movie I’ve ever seen. Jimmy Stewart is evil. He’s trying to change her the whole movie.

  Me: Exactly. You think he’s the hero, and he’s really not. It’s twisted.

  After that, I bring him Laura, which freaks him out even more. “Oh my God, she’s been alive this whole time?” he gasps at the big reveal. He’s the perfect audience for these movies. Everything shocks him.

  “As alive as you and me,” I say.

  On the other hand, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is kind of a downer.

  “This might be reminding me of my parents a little too much,” he says. “Except for drinking too much and fighting all the time. Mine don’t do that because they’ve got—you know—yoga at night and work in the morning. But looking at each other with bitter disappointment and making up stories about their children. They definitely do that.”

  “What stories do they make up?”

  I’ve met his parents only once, a few days ago. Even though David looked happy to see me, they seemed confused. They knew I wasn’t a friend from school. It was awkward, and I left pretty quickly.

  I haven’t mentioned Eileen or the dance class idea since then. I still haven’t said anything to her in class, and she hasn’t, either.

  “They like to pretend that I’m not really that sick and I’m definitely not going to die anytime soon.”

  It’s the first time he’s ever said anything like this. We both get quiet. I want to say a bunch of things:

  You’re not dying right now.

  Maybe it’s okay to be in denial about some things.

  They love you, and that’s what people do when they love someone.

  I don’t say any of it, though. Instead, we sit quietly for a while.

  Finally, he asks, “Did you really watch these movies in elementary school?”

  “Yes. I’ll admit I didn’t always understand the plots, but my dad would talk about visuals and how a director had set up a shot, and I’d watch for things like that.”

  “Weren’t some of them—a little disturbing for a young kid?”

  It’s hard to explain what those years of being home alone with my dad were like. “Maybe a little, but it was part of our homeschooling curriculum. He was an artist, so we did a lot of art together. And we watched movies.”

  “And that was it?”

  “We had to cover some things for school, but mostly he let me choose what subjects I wanted to learn. We went to museums and worked in his basement studio a lot. It was great for a long time. I loved it. Then I got a little older and realized I was the only sixth grader in the world who’d never read Harry Potter. I wanted to learn other things.”

  Does that sound normal? I can’t tell.

  David keeps asking to do more origami even though he’s not very good at it. His fingers are shorter and wider than most people’s. I didn’t notice it until he held up a hand and pointed it out. “It’s a weird CF thing. We’re stubby-digited. Go ahead. Laugh.”

  I don’t laugh. Instead, I bring in an abalone paper folder the next day, shaped like a letter opener. “The pros use this to make their folds crisper. You can, too.”

  He smiles. “Should I wonder about the fact that you own something like this?”

  “Does it make me a nerd? Possibly. It also means your origami will get much better.”

  I’m right. With the next bird he tries, his folds are a hundred times better. He laughs as he holds it up. “I did it! I made a decent crane even with my club fingers!”

  After a while, we’ve got a pattern. He watches the movies I bring after I leave, and we spend my visits folding origami. Today, when I walk in, the origami book is open to a new page.

  “Have you ever done a tessellation?” he asks. “They look so cool, don’t they?”

  “They’re pretty advanced, actually. They might look simple, but they’re not.” I look down at his paper, an accordion of folds. Tessellations are folded patterns on flat paper that have to fit perfectly. “You’ve got a decent start, though.”

  “Should I admit that I’ve been working on this for two hours, or should I lie and pretend it’s taken me much less?”

  I smile. “Maybe you should take a break.”

  Recently, we’ve been telling each other stories from our childhood. Not the hard ones that I avoid, but funny ones. He tells me he’s trying these tessellations because they remind him of the armor he used to wear when he was obsessed with anything medieval.

  “Armor, castles, anything like that. I had a pretty extensive collection of swords at one time. Don’t laugh.”

  “I’m not laughing.” I smile. “And capes? Did you have any hooded capes?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Some really nice ones. There was a store downtown that sold old costumes, and I used to beg my mother to take me. I’m only just realizing now that makes me sound like a geek.”

  “Not at all. It just sounds like you were probably shopping with some geeks. Did you do Lord of the Rings every Halloween?”

  “I was Frodo one year. And Robin Hood another.”

  “With tights or without?”

  “I’m not going to answer that.”

  “You don’t have to. I can guess.”

  “Fine, yes, I wore tights, and, yes, everyone thought I was Peter Pan. Even though obviously Peter Pan doesn’t carry a quiver of arrows.”

  “That doesn’t sound embarrassing at all.”

  “Didn’t you have some Halloween costumes that were a misfire?”

  I don’t have to think about that one for too long. “I’m not sure Marie Antoinette quite worked out the way I was hoping.”

  He laughs, which turns into a cough.

  “Everyone thought I was Cinderella even though I was carrying a piece of cake on a plate.”

  “Overinvesting in props was always a big mistake for me.”

  “That, or choosing random historical figures most kids haven’t heard of. That’s a mistake, too.”

  “I bet you looked great.”

  “I did actually. My dad spent a long time making the dress. He was kind of a Marie Antoinette buff. It was his idea . . .” My voice wavers. I hope he doesn’t ask any more.

  He doesn’t because we’re interrupted by a nurse, rolling her cart into the room to take David’s vitals. Whenever I’m here for this, I try to remember the numbers they’re recording. I want to keep track and see if there’s any good signs in there but it’s hard for me to tell. It’s also hard for me to know exactly what I’m hoping for. Of course, I want him to get better as quickly as possible, but I also know that when he does, he’ll leave the hospital. He’ll still be sick and waiting for a transplant, but if he does it at home, everything will change. He’ll go back to his old life of being senior class president with a million friends and Sharon for a girlfriend, and I’ll go back to my old life of being nobody to anyone.

  When I leave his room, my mother is waiting for me at the end of the hallway. I’m surprised; usually she meets me down in the cafeteria.

  “All set?” She smiles, trying to look cheerful.

  “Yeah,” I say. We haven’t talked much about David since she told me his diagnosis. She’s busy at work and tired when she gets home. I haven’t told her that I’ve been stopping by more often, on days I’m not working. Now, I say, “David seems better. He’s more energetic.”

  “Good,” she says, and starts walking.

  The whole way down to the cafeteria, we don’t say anything. Finally, we get to our table with our food and she says, “I have to tell you, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to spend so much time with him.”

  “I’m careful, Mom. I always wear a mask,” I say, even though I don’t. I wear one in
to the room, but I don’t always keep it on.

  “I’m not talking about germs. He’s facing something that you shouldn’t have to deal with, Jamie. You’re not ready. You want to think about him, but I have to think about you.”

  “What do you think he’s facing? What are you even talking about?”

  “He has a terminal genetic disorder. You know what that means.”

  “You think he’s going to die?”

  “Yes. Sooner or later, he will.”

  I remember her saying this the first time I asked about CF, but this is different. David was incredibly healthy up until a month ago. “One of his lungs collapsed and it takes time to heal, that’s all! Plus, things are changing a lot. There’re new treatments for CF every day. People don’t die in their teens anymore.”

  “Yes, they do, sweetheart. Some people live into their thirties, but some aren’t so lucky. I’ve seen this before. And I know that the sicker these kids get, the more they need to save whatever strength they have to be with their family and their friends.”

  “I’m his friend, too!” I say, much louder than I expected to.

  “Even if he likes you, Jamie, it makes his life harder—can you see that? It adds one more person he has to deal with. You might not realize how little energy he has right now.”

  I think about the way he fell asleep last week from the strain of sitting up in the chair. I think about how often he’s wearing an oxygen mask when I walk in. Though I haven’t wanted to dwell on it, I know the G-tube hasn’t worked the miracle I promised. He’s gained a little weight but not a lot. I know he’s not getting better. He won’t—not really—until he gets new lungs. “Has he complained? Or his parents?”

  “No, of course not. They’re too busy processing this all themselves.”

  I can’t stop visiting him just because he might be sicker than I realize. I won’t do it. I look my mother in the eyes. “Then how do you know what’s best for him?”