Breathe

by Sarah Crossan

  “Do you wanna skip school today? We could go back to my house and watch a movie. I know … let’s get drunk. Dad never locks up the booze,” he says, laughing. I push him again. He’s teasing because he knows I’ve never missed a day of school in my life and, unlike him, I can’t drink more than a glass of anything alcoholic without falling over.

  “I can’t. The mock-trial team is having a meeting. Anyway, don’t you have a history test?” I say.

  “Thank God I have you to keep me on the straight and narrow, Bea,” Quinn says, taking my bag and throwing it over his right shoulder, his own bag already over his left. Walking together in Zone One feels so natural, I forget for a moment I don’t belong here. But walking along wide streets and enjoying the light, being with Quinn, of course, are things I could definitely get used to. I shouldn’t, but I start to plan for a new life—a life as a Premium.

  I spend the whole day dreaming and planning and recalling my victory in the debate, so the message that lights up my pad as I’m waiting in the school foyer for Quinn to finish soccer practice doesn’t make any sense at all:

  Dear Ms. Whitcraft,

  We regret to inform you that your recent candidacy for the Breathe Leadership Program has been terminated. We encourage all failing candidates to maintain high scores in standardized tests to increase the chances of being recalled next season to stage-one enrollment.

  Professor Felling

  I stare at the message for a couple of seconds, stand up, and march out the double doors of the foyer. I walk as quickly as I dare down the street, slumping onto a bench several blocks away. I reread the message several times, and when I’m certain I haven’t misunderstood, I turn off the screen and push the pad into the deepest pocket of my backpack. I sit looking down at my hands.

  A small part of me wants to storm into the Scholastic Institute and demand justice. But I don’t know how to be brave or pushy. Instead, I stand up and quietly walk home from school wiping my eyes and nose along my sleeve whenever the tears get the better of me. I think about calling Quinn, but if I didn’t make the Leadership Program, he probably did, and hard as I might try, I’d find it difficult to be pleased for him.

  I take the winch up to the fifteenth floor of my building, walk down a corridor ablaze with fluorescent tubes, and press my thumb against the fingerprint scanner. The outer door to our small apartment buzzes open and as I step inside, it closes with a gulp before the inner door automatically slides open. The apartments are airtight and fitted with oxygen meters so the Ministry can monitor our intake—if they have to pump in any more oxygen than our taxes cover, we pay extra.

  Mom is already in the hall, where she clicks on the light so she can see me better. I must be red and puffy. “Bea?” Mom’s face is deathly pale, her wrinkles so deep they could be scars. She has blue circles beneath her eyes. I just can’t help it; I imagine how much longer she has to work and struggle without ever taking a break, and I start crying again.

  “I don’t want you to die,” I whimper.

  “Goodness, Bea, what’s gotten into you? I’m not dying. I’m tired, that’s all.” She wraps me up in her bony arms for a moment, and when she lets go I notice my father sitting at the dining table. A steaming bowl sits in front of him, but he is so tired that he has fallen asleep in the chair, with his fork standing upright in his food.

  “I failed the debate. I’ll have to wait a year to reapply.”

  “Oh, Bea.” Mom hugs me again, pressing my face deep into her shoulder. She doesn’t tell me not to worry because she knows I will. And she worries, too, when she wonders how we’ll live if I don’t manage to reach Premium status soon. “Let’s go for a walk,” she says. Yes, a walk: we can afford that.

  We stroll along the choked streets of Zone Three into Zone Two, where the buildings don’t appear to be toppling into one another quite so much. The schools are here, the hospitals, the steward academies, and the housing for low-level Ministry workers. I could live here one day if I trained as a nurse or something. But I don’t want to live here. I want to live in Zone One on the pod’s edge with all the light. I want to live in a spacious house on a wide, linoleum lawn. Getting to Zone One is easy—you just walk in a straight line from any direction toward the light. Staying is quite another thing.

  When we reach it, we peek through stocky gates at the few families who have their lamps on and blinds open for a glimpse into what we’re missing: antique dining tables salvaged from The Outlands with a gaggle of plump children surrounding them; platters of real food; glinting chandeliers.

  At the world-viewing post, only a block from Quinn’s house, we sit on a metal bench looking out at the air-recycling stations connected to the pod with thick rubber tubing and listen to them whir. Beyond the stations lies an expanse of cleared land punctuated by faint patches of rubble, and in the far distance, the remnants of the old city. A steward passes by with his hands behind his back, glares at us, and when he is satisfied we are behaving ourselves, moves on.

  “Haven’t they anything better to do than watch us?” Mom grumbles.

  “I should get a job. We need the money,” I say.

  “No, Bea. I want a better life for you than the one I’ve had. And that means school. Your job is to study.” She squeezes my hand. Sitting with my mom, looking out at our starry-skied, oxygen-starved planet, I’m no longer sure I’ll ever get my family out: I rely on my brain, but it doesn’t look like that will be enough.

  “Your grandfather hiked a trail over there. Every spring,” she says, pointing. “But, gosh, I haven’t been out of this pod since the honeymoon. We saved up for a year and were out there for three full days. It was spectacular. Scary though. When the sun goes down it’s dark—no artificial lights anywhere.” She turns and waves at the streetlamps gently illuminating Zone One. “We slept during the day and hiked at night just so we could enjoy the stars. We got as far as Marden. No, Maldon. Oh, I can’t remember its name.” She points to a spot we can’t see because a low hill hides it from view. “They used to have boats you could take out on the water.”

  “I wish I could live in The Outlands.”

  “Don’t fill your head with nonsense, Bea,” she says with a sigh, though she’s the one who’s wistful. “And anyway, it’s sad out there. Desolate. The land and the sea.” She is meant to be cheering me up, but she isn’t doing a very good job; if anything, I’m starting to feel worse, and I wish it had been Dad who’d discovered me so upset. He would’ve made jokes.

  We stand up and stroll along a walkway looping the pod. A group of Premium runners rush by in facemasks, mini airtanks attached to their waists with BREATHE printed in yellow on the side. They are panting and sweating and rather ugly-looking as they exercise, but even so, Mom smiles after them, her eyes as wide as dinner bowls.

  “Where do people get the money?” she wonders aloud, staring after the group. “They probably have twelve children apiece, too.” I ignore her and try to enjoy the view.

  “I was asked to go camping,” I say.

  “Camping?” She touches the curved, thick glass of the pod.

  “Quinn invited me.”

  “But it’s January, and we haven’t got warm clothes. There’s no climate control outside, love. And the airtanks. We just can’t afford it,” she says.

  “The oxygen is a gift. And Quinn has plenty of stuff I can wear.”

  “I bet he does,” she says. She looks away. She likes Quinn but hates his parents. She thinks they’re stuck up, which they are, and she considers his father personally responsible for most of her problems, especially when she receives an oxygen bill.

  “You should marry him,” she says.

  “What?” I think I’ve misheard her.

  “If you marry Quinn, you’ll get a perfect purple circle on your earlobe and everything would change. You’d be one of those wives who goes around with a purified airtank.” Mom teases me about Quinn sometimes, and maybe she knows how I feel about him, but she’s never before suggested anything
like this. I want her to laugh and elbow me and turn what she’s said into a big joke. She doesn’t; she stops walking and turns to look at me. “I think you’re brilliant, Bea, and I know you can be anything you want. But Quinn has it easy, and with him you would, too, and we wouldn’t ever have to worry again.” Her voice is earnest. “If you married Quinn Caffrey, do you think his father would allow the Breathe Leadership Program to refuse you a place?” I can’t believe that my mother has even thought about this. Does she know what she’s saying? I’m still at school and she’s planning my wedding.

  “Quinn took the exam, too. I was better. He won’t have passed if I didn’t,” I say, simply to counter what she’s suggesting. It wouldn’t be fair, but there’s every chance Quinn will have passed.

  “We’ll see,” she says. “I just want you to have children if you want to, lots of them, without worrying about how you’re going to pay their air tax, without having to tie them to their cribs when they’re toddlers to stop them from moving around too much and sucking all the oxygen from the apartment. I know how you love to dance. I can never give you that. Quinn though, he can.”

  The question is, would he ever want to? The way Quinn and I are together and the way he treats me, I can’t blame her for imagining he feels something he doesn’t. The number of times he’s given me a “spare” airtank or checked in on me when I’ve been sick would be enough to fool even the most cynical person. Only last week I left some supplies at school and wasn’t able to do my technology homework without them; when I called Quinn to complain about it, he pretended he had to get off the pad, and then he went all the way back to school, got the stuff I needed, and turned up at my apartment door an hour later with them. Then he rushed off home so he wouldn’t miss dinner.

  “You wouldn’t be saying this if I’d been born a boy,” I say. She must be desperate to push like this. We’re standing under a street lamp and I can see every furrow in her face, every vein in her eyes. How can I be annoyed when my mother looks so old and works so hard just so I can breathe?

  “I would want my son to marry a rich girl. Then he could run and climb and kiss and do whatever he wanted without checking himself. I want you to have what I never had. Quinn’s good-looking and clever and, well, rich. You can love someone rich or you can love someone poor. Why not love a Premium, huh?” I want to say, But I do! I do love a Premium. And I don’t care how rich he is. If Quinn were a poor auxiliary, but loved me, that would be perfect.

  Instead I say, “I’m still only sixteen, Mom.”

  “And in two years you’ll be eighteen and I will be forty-nine and your Dad will be fifty. Just think about it.” Think about it? I spend my life thinking about Quinn Caffrey, for all the good it does me, and it doesn’t matter how much I want him; the fact is that he does not want me.

  “He doesn’t feel that way about me,” I say. I have never admitted this out loud, so when I hear the words spoken in my own voice, clear and undisputed, I could cry. I look at my mom steadily.

  “Is that so?” she says. At that moment my pad vibrates. It’s a message from Quinn: I thought we were going for shakes after school? U ok? “Just think about it,” Mom repeats.

  3

  QUINN

  The vaccination line winds all the way from the nurse’s office to the back of the damn gym. It’s my lunch period and I’m starving, but this is the quietest time of the day, so I stand and wait for my jab. Not that I’m dying to be jabbed. I can’t stand injections. The school announcer is reminding us every hour that we’re required to go to the nurse to be inoculated, so it’s better just to get it done, get it out of the way.

  I’ve been waiting twenty minutes, passing the time reviewing formulas for a physics test, when Riley and Ferris saunter up to my place in the line.

  “Thanks for holding our places, man,” Riley says.

  “Yep, really nice of you, dude,” Ferris adds. I turn around to look at the students behind me. They scowl. As they should.

  “Guys, everyone else has been waiting,” I say, pointing at the grim line that’s formed down the corridor. Ferris grunts and forces his way in next to the wall so he’s firmly in front of me. Riley does the same. The students behind us are younger and apart from grumbling, there isn’t much they can do.

  “Wanna play soccer after school?” Riley asks, nudging me in the chest.

  “Watch it!” I say and push him.

  “We need a goalie,” he says.

  “And we thought about how much you like grabbing hold of balls. Right? Right?” Ferris sneers. I roll my eyes and pull out my pad, scrolling through to the school display where my tests and quizzes are logged.

  “I can’t play,” I say. “The old man says my grades aren’t good enough.”

  Ferris and Riley squint down at the screen. “Ugh,” Riley says.

  Ferris laughs. “I suppose you can’t have it all, Quinn. Looks, money, smarts. You’ve gotta lose somewhere.” I want to tell him that getting low As and high Bs isn’t exactly losing and that if it weren’t for my father, I’d be quite happy with my grades. Anyway, they’re a lot better than what I know he’s getting. But before I have a chance to finish the thought, both Riley and Ferris are engrossed in games on their pads—it doesn’t take a lot to distract them. I feel a tug on my arm, and when I look up, standing there is, quite possibly, the most outrageously beautiful girl I’ve ever met in my life. And that’s not an exaggeration. She has large green eyes, the pupils dilated in rage, and her long hair is haphazardly heaped on top of her head. She looks like she is about to hit me. I smile at her.

  “I’ve been here for ages, and out of the blue your little buddies come along and slip right into line,” she says. “I don’t think so.” Riley and Ferris have headphones in so they can’t hear a word she’s saying, and even though I can, I’ve pretty much lost the power to speak, which is new. “Are you there?” she asks and waves her hand in front of my face. I continue staring but manage to close my mouth. “Go to the back,” she says, pulling on Ferris’s elbow when she figures she’s getting nothing from me.

  “What do you want?” he snarls, turning and yanking off his headphones.

  “You have to go to the back.”

  “Who says I do? You?” He laughs. Riley turns and takes out his headphones, too.

  “What’s happening?”

  “This bossy cow wants to take our place in line,” Ferris says.

  “Cool it,” I say, stepping between Riley and Ferris and the girl. “You two pushed in first.”

  “Be careful who you take on, babe,” Ferris continues, stepping forward and standing taller.

  “You don’t scare me. Pompous Premium. You think you can do whatever you like,” she says, pushing me aside. I take a quick look at her earlobes; she isn’t tattooed. She must have noticed ours right away and that would have riled her even more.

  “I actually do get to do whatever I like,” Ferris admits. He raises his eyebrows lasciviously. I want to tell her that she shouldn’t really mess with these guys because they aren’t afraid to hurt girls, but I have a feeling that nothing I say is going to stop her.

  “You’re pathetic,” she says. She snorts and turns to me. “Nice friends you have there.” As I begin to apologize for them, she stomps off.

  “What was that about?” I say, shoving Ferris.

  “I know, what a nut!” Ferris says. “She’s a hottie though.”

  “I don’t mean her, I mean you two. Why don’t you grow up?”

  “Us? You’ve gotta be joking,” Riley says.

  “He’s gotta be joking,” Ferris repeats.

  I’ve had enough. Enough of standing in line and enough of trying to reason with two idiots. I pick up my bag and take off after the girl.

  “Quinn!” Ferris calls after me. “Tell Bea I’ll call her tonight.” I ignore him and keep going.

  She doesn’t rejoin the inoculation line as I expect her to. She walks straight past the end of it and into the canteen, where she joins the lunch
line instead. I grab a tray and follow her to the counter. The menu for today is flashing above the food stations.

  “They aren’t usually that bad,” I say. She didn’t notice me coming after her and turns with a start.

  “It’s you,” she says.

  “Pleased to see me?” I ask, even though she doesn’t look one bit pleased.

  “Whatever,” she says and leans in to speak to the server. I wait until I see that all she has on her plate is some dry toast, and I order exactly the same thing. The server smiles. The girl doesn’t. She edges down the counter away from me.

  She pays and sits alone at a round table by the window. When I take a seat next to her she says, “I’m waiting for someone,” and looks up at the large wall clock.

  I pretend not to have heard in case she goes on to tell me that she’s waiting for her boyfriend. “I wanted to get my vaccine before lunch. I don’t have time after school,” I say. She doesn’t look up. As she eats, her hair starts to come loose. She pushes the stray pieces behind her ears. “To be honest, I’m kind of sick of getting stabbed with a needle every other week. What can it be for this time?”

  “They’re immunizing for the green flu,” she reminds me, biting into her toast. She points to a revolving billboard above our heads that has the words GREEN FLU INOCULATION DUE blazing in neon letters. I laugh, hoping she will, too. She doesn’t. She gulps down some water and squints at me as though she isn’t quite sure what she’s seeing.

  “Wasn’t the green flu last month?” I say.

  “That was the copper flu. Read the memos.”

  “I can’t keep track,” I tell her. She’s trying her best to ignore me, that’s obvious, but she’s more gorgeous than any girl I’ve ever met—and she’s tough and secretive—and I want to get to know her even if she doesn’t want to get to know me. I want to touch her. And I want her to touch me back. “I don’t know about all these vaccines. Sometimes I think it would be better to get one of these colorful diseases,” I ramble on, hoping I can keep her engaged. And I do.