How to Breathe Underwater

by Vicky Skinner

  She left me standing there, and I still wanted to knock. Yes, I’d heard it directly from her mouth what Michael was dealing with, but part of me wanted to see him with my own eyes, see if he was really okay, not physically but emotionally.

  I backed away from the door and went back inside my apartment. I slid back into my chair and tried to act normal.

  “Kate, is something wrong?”

  Mom and Lily were watching me. I had done a good job at keeping a happy face on in front of my mother. I couldn’t let her worry about me. I couldn’t give her something else to stress about. I hadn’t missed the fact that a stack of divorce papers had graced our kitchen table this afternoon or that my mother had taken more time than usual to get ready for dinner, probably fixing her makeup after another crying jag.

  So even though she’d given me yet another perfect opportunity to spill my guts about the swim team and Dad and Michael, I shut her down by plastering on a smile.

  “Yeah, everything’s fine.”

  *   *   *

  The next morning, I waited outside in the hallway. And then I waited at the bus stop. And then I rode to school alone, rain splattering against the bus windows.

  “So how bad was it?” Marisol was asking Patrice when I sat down at lunch.

  Patrice bit her lip and then put down the plastic fork she’d been using to scoop up her peas. “She didn’t look great. Real pale. I don’t think it was anything worse than the usual.”

  “The usual?” I asked, feeling a little shocked.

  Marisol nodded. “Yeah. Michael’s mom kind of has episodes pretty often. Sometimes they’re not a big deal and Michael just hangs around at home for a day and everything is fine. But sometimes she ends up in the hospital.”

  “One time she was in the ICU. Fluid in her lungs. It was awful,” Patrice added.

  I should have gone to his apartment the night before. I should have been there in case he needed someone.

  Patrice sent me a sad little smile. “How was he after I left?”

  “Oh, um.” I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t knocked because I was too chicken. “Actually, I didn’t end up seeing him. Something came up with my sister, and I had to go back home.” I was a terrible liar.

  “Oh. Okay.” She looked down at her tray, her eyes sad, and I understood why Michael was with her. She was so caring and kind, and I felt guilt curdle in my stomach at even thinking about Michael in a romantic capacity.

  “Hey, not to change the subject, but do you guys have any idea what we should do for our chem project?” Marisol asked. She went back to her salad, and I stared down at my tray. I’d gotten nachos and soda, things my father wouldn’t let me have when I was training. No soda for the whole season and no junk food. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had junk food in September.

  “Not really,” I said. “You’ll soon discover that I’m not exactly creative.” As a group, we were supposed to make a periodic table of elements using a unique medium. “I couldn’t even decide what color to paint my bedroom. It’s currently white.”

  Patrice snickered a little, and there was something about the sound that was encouraging.

  “We could make the periodic table out of food,” Marisol suggested. “Fruit and veggies and stuff. And we could eat it after.”

  “What about a giant cookie? We’d be Dr. Stewart’s favorite table,” Patrice said. “Maybe he’ll finally forgive Marisol for being a pain.” Marisol snorted. “It would take a whole truck of giant cookies for that to happen.”

  Patrice grimaced. “Maybe food isn’t a good idea. First of all, the food would be covered in glue. Second of all, it would be gross by the time we got it to class.”

  Marisol pointed at Patrice with her plastic fork. “You’re one smart cookie. Pun completely intended.”

  *   *   *

  After school, I waited for Harris on the roof. I wasn’t positive when my mom would be getting home from job-hunting, and if I was home when she got there, she would ask me questions about swim, and I wasn’t in the mood to answer them.

  I stared down at the pool and thought about how to tell Harris that I’d quit the team. I figured that it was going to be easier to tell him than it would be to tell my mom, and telling him at Hoochie’s, our place, felt right, a comforting mixture of my old life and my new one. Also, he would have ice cream to console him.

  I tried to rehearse how I would tell him. I would start by saying that it had nothing to do with him, because I could imagine him taking it personally. To a certain extent, a less severe extent, swimming belonged to Harris and me almost as much as it did to my father. We’d started at the same time, we’d gone through all of it together, we’d pushed each other all these years.

  My phone rang, and excitement mixed with nervousness rocketed through my stomach as I grabbed my bag and headed for the door, my phone already pressed to my ear.

  “Did you cut class to get here this early?” I asked.

  “Not quite,” Harris said, and I paused halfway out the door, staring down into the dark stairwell.

  “But you’re here, right? Or on your way?”

  He sighed, and that’s when I heard it. A splash in the background.

  And my father’s voice.

  “You’re still in Salem?”

  “Your dad called a last-minute practice. I can’t skip.”

  “Yes, you can.” It came out much more forcefully than I’d meant it to. I lowered my voice. “Harris, he can’t make you go to that. Tell him you already have something to do.”

  He was quiet long enough that I heard my father yelling for Cal to start drills. “This is really important to me. I have to stay, okay?”

  I pulled my phone away from my ear, completely ready to just hang up without another word. I watched the seconds tick by on the screen, my jaw set in frustration and anger and just plain disappointment.

  I put the phone back to my ear. “Okay. I guess I’ll see you later.” I hoped he didn’t hear the quiver in my voice.

  “Don’t forget the meet on Friday. Please come.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” I hung up.

  I dropped my backpack in the doorway to the stairs and sank down next to it. For a second, I was afraid I might cry. But I took a deep breath. I couldn’t blame him. I couldn’t tell him to give up just because I had. If things were reversed and I had joined the team, I would have bailed on him for a practice any day of the week. If he felt like he owed my father another practice, then who was I to stand in the way?

  I scrubbed my hands over my face and pressed my head to the doorjamb. And then I heard footsteps on the stairs below. I started to push myself up, but then Michael’s face appeared around the corner, and I felt the fight go out of me.

  He froze when he saw me and then took the last few steps hesitantly. “Kate?”

  I closed my eyes. I was glad to see him because I’d been worried, but I didn’t want him to see me like this. I thought maybe if I closed my eyes, I could make him disappear.

  “Are you okay?” No such luck.

  I sucked in a shaky breath and prayed that my voice wouldn’t tremble when I spoke. “I’m fine.”

  When I opened my eyes, I saw he had an unlit cigarette in his hand, but when he leaned against the wall beside me, he tucked it into the pocket of his jeans.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  I forced a smile. “It’s so stupid. Trust me, it’s not worth your time. Please don’t even worry about me. How’s your mom?”

  He was quiet. He had a strange expression on his face. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to know that she had gotten sick, or at the least, I wasn’t supposed to say anything.

  “Patrice told me. Please don’t be mad.”

  His expression didn’t change. “Not mad.” He pressed his back to the doorway. “My uncle is here to help out. I just needed to get away for a second.” He let out a shaky breath and then leaned his head back against the wall. “Tell me what’s going on.”

&nb
sp; I shook my head, insistent. “You don’t need my problems—”

  He spoke over me. “I could use the distraction. Please.” One of his hands gripped the doorway by his side, and I saw sadness flash in his eyes, just momentarily, before it was gone. “Is it your dad?”

  When I started to say it, it sounded like the stupidest thing I’d ever said to anyone, especially Michael. “I was supposed to hang out with my best friend tonight, but he got called in for a last-minute swim practice, so now I’m all by myself. I’m just upset because we’ve barely seen each other since I moved, and I realize that it hasn’t been that long, but we got into kind of an argument after Lily’s wedding, so everything is a little tense, and he doesn’t know that I quit swim and now I guess I feel like he’s getting close with my dad, which kind of makes me sick because I’m still mad at my dad for being a huge asshole to my mom. And none of this even matters compared to the fact that your mom was in the hospital. I’m ridiculous. You really shouldn’t have offered to ride the bus with me last week. Then you would be free of my complete insanity.”

  He smiled a half-hearted shadow of a smile, and it highlighted the exhaustion on the rest of his face. He had bags under his eyes and a slight pallor to his skin. “Are you okay?” I asked him. I got that he wanted a distraction, but I was worried, and I needed to know he was okay more than he needed to know about Harris.

  He put up his hands. “Okay. One thing at a time. First of all, I’m really sorry about your friend, but if it makes you feel any better, you can hang out with me. I might not be as cool as him, but I’m really not that bad.”

  I wasn’t really sure I was the best person to act as the deciding factor on that front. I was completely biased in favor of the cute boy in front of me.

  “Second, anything that goes on in your life matters. Don’t think it doesn’t just because someone else’s problems seem bigger. My mom is fine. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and I’m fairly certain it won’t be the last. Third, I’m really glad I offered to ride with you last week, because I don’t think you’re insane. I really like you.”

  I was pretty sure I stopped breathing when he said that, but he kept going before I had a chance to react.

  “And fourth, yes, I’m okay. I’m a little tired. But I’ll be okay.”

  “We were going to go to an ice-cream shop.”

  His eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

  “Me and Harris. We were supposed to go to this ice-cream shop that we used to go to all the time. It’s a really long drive for him, so I shouldn’t be surprised that he flaked on me, but we used to skip school to go all the time, you know?”

  “I have ice cream in my apartment.”

  “That’s really sweet, but it’s not triple-chocolate brownie ice cream from Hoochie’s.”

  “Hoochie’s?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you think maybe my ice cream will do, for now?”

  I bit my lip. It wasn’t like I could go home. Not while my mom thought I was at practice. “Okay.”

  He smiled and clapped his hands together once. “Great. I’m actually really hungry. I’ll run down and get it.” He was gone like a shot, and I closed my eyes, letting myself forget everything for just a moment. I could pretend that Harris hadn’t ditched me and that Michael didn’t have a girlfriend, and maybe I could be happy for just a second. I went to take a seat by the pool, on one of the plastic benches there, and watched the water sway slightly under the pressure of the wind.

  The door opened with a creak and Michael came out onto the roof, a bowl in each hand. “So, we had rocky road and chocolate chip. I didn’t know which one you’d want, so I got a bowl of each. You pick.”

  I picked the chocolate chip. He sat on the arm of the bench, hunched over his bowl. We ate in silence, and I couldn’t keep myself from looking over at him. He did that thing with his spoon where he flipped it over before sticking it in his mouth, so that the ice cream hit his tongue instead of the roof of his mouth.

  Finally, he looked at me. “So, tell me something that your mother doesn’t know. Something she’s not likely to let slip to a stranger in the lobby of an apartment building.” He crunched at the nuts in his rocky road ice cream.

  I shrugged. “Other than swimming, there’s not a whole lot to know about me.”

  “I don’t believe that for one second.”

  He watched me for a long moment until I had to break the eye contact, my face a little flushed. I placed my empty bowl on the bench next to his black sneakers. “Here’s something you don’t know: If I keep eating like a swimmer when I’m not swimming, I’m going to gain a lot of weight.” That much was true. I already felt bloated from eating seconds at every meal but not burning off the calories like I used to.

  Michael rolled his eyes. “No more swimming-related subjects. Tell me something else. There’s more to you. I know it.”

  I ran the tip of my spoon through the melted ice cream at the bottom of the bowl. “Okay. Promise you won’t laugh?”

  His eyes went wide for a second. “I mean, I can’t promise. Not if you’re going to tell me that you dress up as a rhino and run through the streets every weekend.”

  I smiled. “It’s nothing like that.”

  He pursed his lips. “Okay, then I’m fairly certain I’m not going to laugh.”

  “Okay, so, since I was a kid, I’ve always been into ballroom dancing. Like, really, dancing of any kind, but I used to tape the ballroom dancing that they showed on cable, and me and my sister would watch it in the middle of the night while my parents were asleep.”

  “Why just when they were asleep?”

  I shrugged. “My dad didn’t really like me to be into anything that girly, you know? We watched football on the weekends and stuff like that, and sure, I like football, but I love watching dancing competitions. The costumes and the footwork. It’s so beautiful.”

  He was staring at me. But the upside was, he wasn’t laughing. He set his empty bowl in mine, the porcelain clanking against my spoon. “Why would I laugh at that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  I watched him, his nervous fidgeting. He probably wanted a cigarette, but he wasn’t reaching for the one in his pocket.

  “Why would your friend be getting close to your dad?” he asked after it felt like we were going to sit there all night in silence, listening to the traffic noises below.

  I hadn’t been prepared for the question, and my heart thudded in my ears while I considered it. “I guess he’s probably not. Not really. My dad is his coach, so he’s just trying to keep the peace. And I get that. We’ve just never really been apart. It’s harder than I thought it was going to be.”

  He chewed on his lip, sucking it into his mouth in a way that distracted me a little. “Salem’s not that far.”

  I threw my hands up. “I know. That’s the worst part. It’s not like he lives on the other side of the world or something.”

  “Are you, uh, into him? I mean, is he, like, your boyfriend or something?” He stumbled so hard over his words, and when I looked up at him, towering over me just enough to make me feel small beside him, I saw the downward curve of his mouth.

  I found myself stumbling as much as he had. “No. He’s not my … He’s not anything. I mean, he’s my best friend, but we’re not into each other in any … romantic … way … at all.”

  And then we sat there for a long time, staring at each other. I felt like my heart was going to explode out of my chest and take a dive into the pool.

  He picked up the bowls before hopping off the bench. “I should probably get back. They might need help down there.”

  I just nodded, and he left me there, feeling like I’d done something wrong.

  Nine

  When I got back to the apartment, Lily was making dinner. I could make out the smell of garlic, and the area around the kitchen was degrees hotter than the rest of the apartment.

  “Since when do you cook?” I asked her, opening a cabi
net and pulling out a glass. I got a pitcher of filtered water out of the fridge and poured myself some, leaning against the fridge to drink it as I watched Lily drain a vat of pasta and then stir a curious sauce on the stove. It was an orange-red color.

  “Tom taught me a little here and there,” she replied without looking at me. She moved with sure limbs, and I remembered the Lily that lived with us when I was in middle school, completely unable to even make grilled cheese without ruining it.

  “Didn’t you set the microwave on fire trying to make mac and cheese once?”

  She dumped the sauce into the pasta and then stirred it in. Once the pasta was orange, she dipped the wooden spoon into the pot and pulled out a few orangey noodles, which she presented to me. “Try it, smart-ass.” She pushed the spoon in my direction.

  I leaned forward and pulled the pasta off the spoon with my teeth, tilting my head back to keep it in as I opened my mouth to let the steam out. The pasta was hot. When it cooled enough to really let me taste it, I found that the sauce was like a creamy marinara. It was delicious. “Wow. Okay. Point made.”

  Lily grinned just as the front door flew open. My mother swept into the apartment, a huge smile on her face. “Girls! I got a job!”

  “That’s great!” I swooped over to give her a hug while Lily shoveled pasta onto plates.

  My mom’s eyes went wide. “Lily, how sweet. You didn’t have to cook dinner.”

  Lily turned her back to get drinks from the fridge, and my mother snuck me a devastated expression. I laughed, and Lily slammed the fridge shut. “You two just calm down and have a seat.”

  My mother admitted defeat after she’d taken a bite of the pasta, and Lily boasted mercilessly.

  “So this job?” Lily asked. “What is it?”

  “I took an activities director position at a nursing home on Washington. It might be long hours starting out, but I really think it could go somewhere.” My mother was sitting straighter. She’d gotten her color back since that meltdown, and maybe some of her confidence. She waved a hand at both of us. “But let’s not get too excited about it until I know for certain it’s a good fit. Lily, Kate, how were your days? Class? Practice?”