How to Breathe Underwater

by Vicky Skinner

  My mom shook her head, her eyes moving from computer screen to newspaper as she sipped her coffee. “I need the car for job hunting today. You’ll be fine. You can take the bus.” Gloom must have been written all over my face because she rolled her eyes. “Stop being so dramatic. It’s just public transportation; I’m certain that you’ll survive.”

  She smiled at me, and it almost looked real against her dirty-blond hair, wide mouth, and freckled skin. I tried to erase the disappointment from my face. I wanted to make this as easy as I could for her, and if that meant taking the bus to school, then I wasn’t going to argue.

  “Oh, by the way, I talked to your new coach on the phone yesterday evening, and I don’t think we’re going to have any issues getting you prepped with the team in time for the season. Their first practice is tomorrow, and she wants to meet you then. But you just focus on having a great first day.”

  My stomach turned, and for a second, I thought I was going to lose my breakfast. Until then, I’d almost been able to distract myself enough to forget about swimming, about joining a new team. I suddenly wished my mom was taking me to school just so I wouldn’t have to be alone with my nerves.

  “Oh, and you have your last dress fitting this afternoon.”

  How could I forget? Lily was getting married on Saturday, and I was the maid of honor. My sister was the one who had convinced my mother that moving to Portland to be closer to her made the most sense when my parents split. Lily had chosen to transfer to a college in Portland to follow Tom, the love of her life, when he was offered a job in the city.

  “How long before the bus comes?”

  “I think you’ve got time.” Her eyes were unfocused in thought. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. What was she supposed to do, hold my hand and drop me off at my first class?

  “I’ll just go ahead and go down now,” I told her. I didn’t think I could stand another second of sitting there, listening to her fingers typing on her laptop. I picked up my bag and moved to the front door, my eyes on her, waiting for her to offer to walk me down or at least to the door.

  “Okay, sweetie. I’ll see you tonight. Maybe we can meet for dinner after the fitting? Somewhere nice to celebrate your first day.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” I hesitated, my hand on the doorknob. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  She looked up and smiled, and I tried to let that be enough for me for the moment, but once I left the apartment, I would be in a brand-new place with unfamiliar faces and unfamiliar streets. I fiddled with the doorknob, feeling the tips of my fingers start to sweat.

  When I opened the door, my heart stopped.

  I immediately recognized the boy standing in the hallway, leaning against the door directly across from ours. I gasped and he straightened up, putting both hands out quickly, like I was a rabid dog he needed to persuade not to bite him. It was the boy that knew where the trash chute was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Um, your mom said I could just wait out here for you.”

  “My mom?” I heard my mother’s chair scrape away from the table.

  She rushed to my side. “I completely forgot. This is Michael.” She gestured to the guy, who now had an uncomfortable tilt to his mouth. “He lives across the hall, and he rides the bus to school, so I thought the two of you could ride together.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. How in the world had she had time to make friends already? We’d been in the building for a whole forty-eight hours.

  She smiled at Michael and, as if she could read my mind, said, “We met in the lobby last night. It’ll be nice to have a friend on your first day, won’t it?”

  Michael watched me, waiting. The truth was, I had eyes. Michael was cute, almost painfully so, like he was completely unaware of it. I noticed. It wouldn’t kill me to be in close proximity to him long enough to get to school.

  “Okay,” I told them both and stepped out of the apartment.

  Michael’s face crept from hesitant to kind. He gestured to the elevator. “After you.”

  I hesitated. “I’m going to take the stairs. I can meet you down there.”

  He stood there, his arms hanging limply at his sides. My mother was still standing in the doorway. She laced her fingers together in front of her hips and sent me a sympathetic smile, like I was a kindergartner on my first day, throwing a fit in front of everyone.

  “When Kate was really little, she wandered into an elevator by herself at a department store and got stuck between floors. She’s had some trouble with them ever since.”

  I just stared at her. Was it completely necessary for her to divulge all my business to anyone within a two-mile radius?

  Michael’s eyes were fixed on his shoes, but the generous curve of his mouth made it obvious that he was holding back a smile. “No problem. I’ve always liked the stairs better.”

  We didn’t speak the whole way down, but every few seconds, Michael glanced over his shoulder at me, probably to make sure I was still there.

  Out the lobby windows, I saw that large storm clouds were building up in the sky like a vast army about to attack.

  “Don’t worry,” Michael said as the doorman held the door for us. It wasn’t Bobby. This was a guy who sent us a close-lipped smile and wished us a nice day without enthusiasm. “It rains way more here than it does in Salem, but it doesn’t usually last very long.”

  He knew I was from Salem. What else had my mother told him? My Social Security number? The shape of the birthmark on my shoulder? Which, incidentally, Harris always said was shaped like Denmark.

  When we reached the curb, I breathed in the moist air, closing my eyes and tilting my head back, like I could suck all of it into my pores if I tried hard enough. I loved the way the air smelled right before a storm. Wet and thick. I heard a whir and a click beside me and opened my eyes just as another smell mixed in the air: the acrid, nauseating smell of cigarette smoke, pulling me out of my euphoric moment.

  “God, who’s smoking?” I said seconds before I realized that Michael, standing beside me at the stoplight, was the one who had lit up. He blew out a mouthful of smoke in the direction of the stoplight, but the wind blew it back in my face. I coughed.

  “Man, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize…” He trailed off as he walked around me to stand on my other side.

  I focused on not gagging. The smell of cigarettes was the worst thing imaginable. It always got my stomach churning. How could someone so cute be a smoker? Didn’t he know what it did to his lungs? I clamped down on that thought when I remembered the shape of his mother, bent over in her station wagon.

  “I’m trying to quit,” he told me, even though I hadn’t asked. I glanced over at him and watched as his full lips closed around the cigarette. He pinched it between his fingers and noticed me staring. “Should I put it out?”

  I waved the suggestion away. I didn’t want to be that girl. “No, it’s fine.”

  A silence passed between us, and then out of nowhere, he said, “Your mom told me you guys picked this building because your sister lives close by. That’s pretty cool.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” It certainly didn’t feel cool. It’s not cool when your dad is cheating on your mom, your parents are getting divorced, and you’re being uprooted from your entire life. But I got the feeling he meant well.

  “We really only live here because my uncle owns the building.” He smiled, and I was caught for a second. The hand holding his cigarette was down at his side, and he looked like a photograph hanging on a blank wall in an art gallery, his body tipped slightly toward mine and smoke trailing up out of the cigarette into the humid air. Black jeans, olive-green thermal top, hair shining with the moisture in the air around us so thick I could almost touch it.

  I wasn’t really sure why he mentioned his uncle. It was completely irrational, but I felt like everyone was staring at us.

  “I’m just trying to even the playing field a little,” he told me, putting his cigarette out on a NO PARKI
NG sign beside him and flicking the butt onto the street in front of us, where it was immediately crushed under the tire of a passing car. “You know, since your mom pretty much shared your entire life story with me last night.” When I didn’t say anything, he lifted a hand and scratched the spot where his hairline met the back of his neck. “My uncle set us up in this fancy place. Because my mom is…” He trailed off and looked away from me. “My uncle owns buildings from here to Seattle.”

  Over his shoulder, I saw the bus approaching, but I was still looking at Michael, who seemed to have lost some of his confidence. The bus came to a hissing stop in front of us and the door folded open. I hopped on quickly, Michael behind me.

  I took the first empty seat I found, and Michael slid in beside me. He didn’t greet anyone, didn’t even look at anyone, just took the seat next to me like we’d known each other forever.

  He turned to me as the bus started to move. “Your mom said you were some kind of famous swimmer.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like that. I won a few races at the state championships last year. And I, uh, sort of set the state record in the 200-yard freestyle race. Not a big deal.” Except, of course, that it was. I’d worked harder than anyone else on the team. I knew part of that had to do with my father always working me, always pushing to make me better, but at the end of the day, it was me. I’d won that race, I’d set the record, I’d taken the medal, and it had admittedly put me on a pedestal at my old school. But I wasn’t sure I was ready for everyone at my new school to know about it.

  He shrugged. “If you say so. Sounds like a big deal to me.” He was so close I could see the sprinkling of freckles spread across his cheekbones like constellations.

  We fell into silence, and the question that had been at the back of my mind rushed to the surface. “So, um, is your mom okay? Because the other night…”

  He nodded, the corners of his mouth turning down slightly. “She’s fine.” He fell silent, looking out the front windshield, and I grasped for something to say, coming up empty. Maybe I’d gone a step too far, asking about his mom?

  We sat in silence for a moment, but then I could feel Michael’s eyes on me. “You nervous?” he asked.

  “No,” I lied, partly because of my pride and partly because I still wasn’t so sure I wanted this guy to know everything about me.

  “What’s your first class?” he asked.

  I reached into my backpack and pulled out my schedule. “Chemistry.” He leaned in close to me, taking the other side of the paper in one hand so that we were looking at it together. Except I wasn’t looking at it at all. I was looking at the side of his neck, at his pulse beating there.

  “Oh. Dr. Stewart,” he said. “I had him last year.” His eyes continued to scan the page. “Hey, we have American Lit together.”

  He looked away from the paper, at me, and I was inexplicably more nervous than I had been a second ago. “Is it a good class?”

  He quirked an eyebrow at me. “If lit is your thing.”

  “Lit is pretty much my thing.”

  He grinned. “See, your mom didn’t mention that to me. You still have plenty of your own secrets to divulge.”

  I knew he meant it as a joke, but I felt a weight in my chest at his words. Yeah, I had secrets. Like the fact that I hadn’t been in a pool since that preseason practice, like a part of me was relieved to be away from my coach, like the last month still didn’t feel real.

  He had a strange, serious look on his face, so I turned away from him, shoving my schedule back in my bag.

  We pulled up in front of the school, redbrick and separated into multiple buildings that were fanned out along the block. It was a little like a college campus, with buildings curving around each other and the streets on either side a labyrinth. According to my mom, they didn’t have an on-campus pool.

  I followed him into a building, and inside, Michael stopped and pointed across the open lobby. “Your classroom is down that hallway there. First one on the left.” I nodded, and then we stood there in silence for a moment as students rushed past us. Maybe we’d just met, but he was officially the only person I knew in school, and the thought of being alone again made my palms sweat.

  “I’ll see you later?” he asked, already backing away from me.

  “Okay.” Once the sea had swallowed him up, I turned to the hallway he had directed me toward. I hovered awkwardly in the doorway of my classroom. No one noticed me, and I took that second of inattention to ground myself.

  The bell sounded and the teacher spotted me. He was short, mostly bald, and wearing a maroon sweater-vest. “Oh, hello. Katherine Masterson? We still have a group that only has three right over here.” He gestured toward a lab table at the front of the room, where two very pretty girls sat with a boy who had his head down on the table. When I took a seat beside him, the boy let out a quiet snore.

  “That’s Roger.” One of the girls, whose long black hair was pulled into a ponytail, smiled at me. She was thin and had big, full lips that glittered with a layer of lip gloss. “He sleeps his way through first and last period. It’s kind of his trademark. I’m Marisol, and this is Patrice.” She nudged the girl beside her. I could tell even while they were sitting that she was almost a head shorter than Marisol. Patrice had a round face, curly brown hair, and a friendly smile.

  With perfectly applied makeup, shiny dark hair, and brown skin, they were the kind of beautiful a boring girl like me dreamed of being. I crossed my arms over myself.

  “I’m surprised Dr. Stewart even put you here,” Marisol went on. “He wouldn’t let anyone but Roger be in our group because he says we’re a bad influence.”

  Patrice snorted. “Oh, please. He said you were a bad influence.”

  Marisol rolled her eyes, and then, like I was no longer there, they began speaking to each other in Spanish while I sat there feeling as relevant to the conversation as my buddy Roger.

  “Ladies,” Dr. Stewart sighed, “can we please start class?”

  *   *   *

  I was on my way to second period with my nose buried in my map of the school when I heard someone call my name. It was a bit surprising, as I didn’t really know anyone yet, but when I looked up, I spotted Michael’s smiling face in the crowd. I maneuvered through the throng to get to him.

  “Are you lost?” he asked.

  “Um.” I looked down at my map. “I don’t think so. This is Building C, right?”

  His mouth made a funny shape, and then he reached out and flipped my map around so that we were now in Building F.

  “Okay, yes, I’m lost,” I said.

  He laughed. “Just go across the quad. The building directly across from this one.” His phone beeped and he pulled it out, concentrating on sending a text before he looked back at me. “Is our campus really that much bigger than the school you went to in Salem?”

  I looked down at the map, with its string of buildings and sharp turns. “I guess not. Just … different.”

  He held his hand out to me. “Here, let me put my number in your phone in case you need me.”

  I stared at his outstretched hand for a second before surrendering my phone. I’d never let a boy put his number in my phone before. He tapped away at it while I watched, and I knew the image would be burned in my brain forever.

  *   *   *

  There were four different lunch lines in the cafeteria, and as people shuffled past me, splitting off in different directions, I chose the one closest to me and got in line behind a girl I thought I recognized from second period.

  I grabbed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then found myself staring at rows and rows of mostly full tables. I searched for an empty seat somewhere, but they were all surrounded by groups of intimidating strangers, and I was beginning to lose my nerve.

  Back in Salem, the swim team always ate together, and it had been a long time since I’d been confronted with this many unfamiliar faces.

  “Kate?”

&nbs
p; I turned back to the line to find one of my lab partners a few people back. She smiled at me, and I took a step back to join her. “Patrice, right?” I asked as I slid alongside her. I’d met so many new people that I was having a hard time keeping them straight.

  “Yeah. Chemistry.” She reached for a container of yogurt and then smiled up at me. The sincerity of it stretched all the way to her dark eyes. “Sorry we got our first big assignment on your first day. Kinda sucks.”

  I shrugged. “That’s okay. I’m actually glad. It’s better than being tragically behind.”

  “True.”

  She paid for her food, and I was just about skulk off alone when she said, “Hey, do you want to sit with Marisol and me?” She gestured to a table in the center of the room, where I recognized Marisol sitting by herself, doing something on her phone.

  “Really?”

  She grinned. “Of course. Lab partners have to stick together.” She laced her arm through mine and led me to the table. “Look who I found,” she said when we sat down.

  Marisol’s eyes found me across the table and she smiled. “Kate! Hey! Lunch buddies!”

  She sounded so genuinely happy to see me that it made my stomach warm. Had I ever been this nice to a complete stranger in my entire life?

  “What class do you have next?” Marisol asked, shoving a french fry in her mouth.

  “American Lit, I think.”

  Marisol’s eyes went wide. “With Hure? Or Johnson? Because everybody got Hure for Am Lit this year, except me and Patrice.” She rolled her eyes. “She’s the absolute best. Johnson is a walking ferret.”

  Patrice smacked her on the arm. “Calm down. You’re scaring her.”

  I was feeling the complete opposite of scared. I felt comforted. I consulted my schedule. “Um. Yeah. Hure.”

  Marisol groaned. “Everyone got Hure. Even Patrice’s boyfriend.”

  Patrice nodded, as if she needed to confirm the information.

  “She’s thinking about breaking up with him,” Marisol said absently. I blinked at her, wondering if this word vomit was normal for her.

  Patrice smacked her again. I felt like I was getting the CliffsNotes version of their relationship. “I am not,” she clarified in my direction. “Things are just weird right now.”