“Oh. O’Dell’s. Sounds like a great time.” He smiled from her to me, and it seemed like his face was frozen like that.
Patrice glanced at me and smiled. “It was good.” She turned back to Michael and pushed up on her toes to kiss him.
I turned around and unlocked my door.
“We’ll see you tomorrow?” Patrice asked, and I gave them an awkward wave over my shoulder.
“Yeah, I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
They disappeared into Michael’s apartment, and I was left staring at the number on his door.
* * *
“Your friends are nice,” I told Michael at our next swim lesson as we sat on the edge of the pool. “So different from everyone I knew at my old school.” I didn’t mention that that was because I mostly only hung out with Harris unless there was something swim related going on.
Michael laughed. “By different, do you mean boring?”
I dipped my feet into the pool and splashed just a little. Michael splashed back. “What are you talking about? They’re not boring.”
“Pizza and project talk?”
“If it weren’t for you guys, I’d be spending all my time watching America’s Next Top Model with my sister, so this week has been an upgrade.”
“What would you be doing if you were in Salem?”
I made a humming noise, like I even had to think about it. “On a Friday night after a meet? If my dad let me, I would have been at the after-meet party.”
He held up a hand. “See? Exciting.”
I swatted his hand away. “Or if my dad hadn’t let me, I would have gone home, sat with my dad while he verbally perfected my technique for our next meet, gone to bed early, and then gotten up early for a jog before a nice early-morning swim practice.”
He whistled. “Fun weekend.”
We were silent for a moment, and just when I was wondering if I was a buzzkill, Michael said, “It looks like you and Ben really hit it off.”
I was getting cold, now that my feet were in the warm water and the rest of me wasn’t. “Yeah. He’s sweet.” I didn’t look at him.
Maybe I really did like Ben. He made me smile, and it was nice to be noticed. Not many of the guys at school had really noticed me. I’d caught a few looking as I walked past, but other than Ben and Michael, not many of them even talked to me.
When Michael didn’t respond, I said, “Patrice is really sweet, too. How long have you two been dating?”
He looked away from me, down at the water, running his fingers through his hair. “Four months.”
Four months felt like a long time. “Ben said you and Patrice have been friends since you were kids.”
“We met in kindergarten. Grew up together. We met Marisol in middle school and then we met Ben two years ago, when he moved here.”
“Is he really going to Stanford?” I wasn’t sure why I found the concept so surprising. Ben was obviously smart and talented. I supposed it was because he seemed so relaxed, as if I could judge someone’s work ethic by the way they acted while icing cupcakes.
Michael nodded. “That’s the plan at least, but nobody’s doubting that he’ll get in. Ben’s a pretty smart guy.” He pushed himself up abruptly and stood over me. “We should probably get started.”
The sound of his wet feet smacking against the concrete gave me goose bumps. We were the only ones at the pool. People rarely came up at night and during the week, which was perfectly fine by me. I liked not having an audience for once.
“Okay, get in streamline,” I told him, slipping into the water from the edge instead of walking around to the stairs like Michael had. It was still as cute this time as it was the last time he did it, but I pretended not to notice.
Like before, the water was almost peaceful, but there was something tentative about it, like it was a living thing that could turn on me at any moment. As long as I kept my mind focused, kept out thoughts of everything else, the water was almost my friend again.
I showed him how to do a freestyle stroke, but like every other casual swimmer, he had trouble keeping his head down. Coming up to breathe on the side wasn’t a normal movement, and he didn’t like it. And since he wasn’t exactly training for the Olympics, I let him bring his head straight up to breathe, even though it negatively affected the rest of his stroke, pushing him out of form to make his shoulders hunch forward as he did it.
“Okay, I’m going under. I want you to do it one more time. Don’t forget that you’re trying to move the water back. You’re not trying to propel yourself forward.”
“Wait,” he said before I’d even really gotten the end of my sentence out. “You’re going under? What do you mean?”
I pointed at the bottom of the pool, even though his view of my arms would have been distorted past the waterline. “I’m going to lie on the bottom so I can see your stroke from underneath.”
His eyes flitted straight down and then back at me. “You can do that?”
I didn’t tell Michael that I could hold my breath for just over two minutes, even though I knew he would probably find it impressive. Michael had a really hard time holding his breath, seeing as how he had the lung capacity of a mouse, thanks to smoking. I didn’t want him to feel any worse than he already did.
“Yeah, I can do that,” I told him. “Once I’m on the bottom, push off from the side. Don’t leave me hanging too long. I’m not David Blaine or anything.” I pulled in a lungful of air before blowing it out and letting my body sink to the bottom of the pool.
Before chaos had disrupted my life, being under the surface was my favorite thing in the whole world. I loved how quiet everything got. How you could hear everything going on in your head, the sound of your heart beating. I loved letting the water plug my ears and the muted groaning it made all around me, like whale noises. I loved letting my limbs float up like they weren’t attached to me at all, my hair coming out of its ponytail to swim like seaweed around me. This, beneath everything, where nobody could touch me, had once been the safest place on earth.
But now I could feel myself teetering on the edge. My heart beat faster than it should, and I was almost desperate to shoot back to the surface for air. But I held myself down, letting out tiny breaths to kill the quiver in my stomach.
And before something terrible could take hold, Michael pushed off the wall, catching my attention. I watched as he swam freestyle from one side of the pool to the other. It was a sloppy lap, but he made it the whole way.
When he touched the wall, I pushed away from the bottom, coming up to take the kind of breath that was cold and relieving and somehow disappointing. I wiped a hand over my face, and when I opened my eyes, Michael was smiling.
“Hey, I did it.”
I laughed. “Well, you would move much faster if you actually kicked your feet, you know.”
His smile faded. “I wasn’t kicking my feet?”
I laughed again. “Not really. You may have flapped once or twice.”
He was contemplative, like if he thought hard enough, his mistake would become a success.
“So this is where you’ve been spending your time,” I heard someone say, and both of us splashed around to see that my sister had walked out onto the roof, her towel wrapped around her shoulders like a blanket to protect against the cold air until she could get into the heated pool.
“I’ve been teaching Michael to swim.” I catapulted myself out of the pool as Michael took the stairs, and then we were both shivering and wet in front of my sister. Her eyes went back and forth between us, and I felt like the principal had just caught us skipping classes.
“Is this what you’ve been doing when you tell Mom you’re at practice?” she asked, and I saw Michael fidget uncomfortably.
I turned to him. “Hey, why don’t you head to your place? I’ll meet you there in a minute.”
He took off for the door. It closed behind him with a slam.
“I’m going to tell her,” I said once he was gone. “I wil
l.”
Lily shook her head and tossed her dry towel onto a nearby bench. Michael’s own towel was draped over the table beside it. He’d left it in his hurry to get away. I went to grab it, along with the stuff I’d brought with me, but Lily put her hand on my arm before I could snatch it all up.
“Kate, are you sure this is a good idea?”
I sighed and moved around her to get my towel. I wrapped it around me and turned to face her. “I’m going to figure out a way to tell Mom soon.”
“I’m not talking about Mom.” Her jaw had gone tense, and in a strange way, she reminded me of Dad, but her eyes were infinitely softer.
I looked at the door, which had firmly shut behind Michael.
Lily put her hand on my arm again. I sighed, clenching my towel around me tighter. “How do you make yourself stop wanting someone?” I asked her.
She didn’t bother to answer. We both knew she didn’t have the answer.
I headed for the door. “We’re just friends,” I finally said. “I want to be his friend.”
With a hand on the doorknob, I glanced back at her standing by the pool with that look on her face that said we were both drowning.
“I’ll figure it out,” I told her. “Don’t tell Mom, okay?”
She nodded, and I left her there.
* * *
Before I’d even shut the door to Michael’s apartment behind me, he had a finger to his lips to tell me to be quiet. He’d already changed into dry clothes.
“My mom’s asleep,” he whispered, coming close to me. “Is it okay if we do it in my bedroom?” He blushed. “I mean … I just meant the lesson. Is it okay if we do the lesson in my bedroom?”
I tried not to smile. Michael was supremely adorable when he was flustered. I just nodded as I felt myself relaxing. It was always somehow relieving not to be the most nervous one in the room.
I lifted my clothes between us. “Could I change first?”
When I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Michael wasn’t in the living room anymore. I knew that his mom’s room was the one by the kitchen, the master bedroom, just like my mom’s was. So I went back down the hall and tapped on the closed door next to the bathroom.
He opened the door, and I stepped in and froze. Behind his bed was a huge mural of a beach. The sky was blue and the waves were rolling in, and I walked up to it.
“This is amazing.” I went around the side of his bed to see it better. Up close, the sand was pixelated, everything a little less perfect, a blown-up image instead of a painting. It was beautiful, and I reached out and touched it before I even realized what I was doing. I snatched my hand back and turned around. Michael had closed the door. “Sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to barge in here.”
He put his hands in his pockets. He had changed into a gray T-shirt and blue jeans, and I was suddenly very aware of him in this room with me. We’d never been alone in an enclosed space. The bed was between us, and he looked so amazing standing there with his wet hair pulled in all directions, and I realized I shouldn’t have agreed to come to his bedroom because I wanted to launch myself across the space between us and kiss him.
I needed to distract myself. “Can I ask you a question?”
His smile stayed intact. “Sure.”
“How long has your mom been sick?”
He frowned, but not like he was sorry I’d asked. We never talked about him, and the longer I knew him, the more I thought that was the way he liked it, like he could erase all the bad things if he never spoke about them.
He sat down at the end of his bed, and I moved to stand in front of him. I hadn’t noticed anything else in his room until that moment. It felt the way normal rooms feel lived in, with clothes in random places and water glasses by the bed. His bed was made, his bookshelf messy. A framed picture of Michael and his mother sat on one shelf.
“She got really sick when I was eleven. My dad was already gone by then. He died when I was a baby.” He placed his hands on his knees, his shoulders slumped. “She started smoking when she was just a kid. She was in almost perfect health until one day she just couldn’t breathe. She went to the hospital and they thought she’d just had an asthma attack even though she’d never had asthma before. They said sometimes people develop it as adults. Then she had a horrible case of bronchitis. And then that turned into pneumonia, and then they told her to stop smoking. She didn’t. She smoked for two more years before she quit, but the damage was done. Her lungs never really healed the way they were supposed to, and it’s hard for her to do things. She has these episodes where just sitting up in bed makes her wheeze. And sometimes we go to the hospital so they can pump her full of steroids.”
I sat down on the bed next to him. “I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “People make stupid decisions that come back to bite them. It’s nothing new.”
I nudged him a little with my elbow, felt how cold his skin was from being not quite dry. “How long have you been smoking?”
“It used to be a game Patrice and I played. We’d put my mom’s cigarettes in our mouths to look cool when we were hanging out alone here. We went to this party one night, and I had my mom’s cigarettes in my pocket. I was fourteen. That was the first night we lit them. A month later, I was hooked. Patrice hated them.” He shrugged again. “I’ve been trying to quit. It’s only been three years, I should be able to, you know? But things have been hard with my mom, and I keep coming up with reasons why I need to sneak out at two in the morning to have one.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’m such a loser.”
I put a hand on his arm, feeling the tiny fine hairs across it. “You are not. Being addicted to something doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“Right. It just makes you weak.”
His eyes met mine, and there was a sort of desperation in them. I wasn’t supposed to be the person who comforted him, who helped him through bad times. He had Patrice. He had Ben. But then why did it feel like he was confiding in me?
“You’re anything but weak,” I whispered. I so desperately wanted him to believe it. I wanted him to see himself the way I saw him: brave and beautiful and kind.
His eyes found mine, scanning my face with a sadness that I couldn’t quite decipher. I hated to see him lose even a little bit of his light.
“Hey, do you want to dance?” I asked him.
“Yeah.” His voice was still a little weak, his face drooping.
I took both of his hands in mine and pulled him up off the bed, up against me. Some of the life sparked in his eyes when we stood close, and even though we didn’t turn on any music, we started to move.
During our last lesson, there’d been enough space between us to fit an ocean, barely any contact, and quick movements to keep us occupied. But there in Michael’s bedroom, he held me just a little too close, gripped me just a little too tight as he taught me how to do different turns. Every time I went under his arm and he spun me back against him, it was with such force that we bumped together, until eventually, we weren’t even trying to salsa anymore, and I had my head on his shoulder as we swayed.
“I don’t want anything to happen to you,” I said against his shoulder. It was sharp and digging into my cheekbone, but I didn’t care.
I felt his fingertips in my back. “Yeah?”
I pressed my forehead into the skin of his neck, knowing we shouldn’t be dancing like this, closer than I’d danced with Ben the night before, closer than I’d ever been with anyone in my life.
I knew that he wasn’t mine, that he belonged to someone else who he cared about enough to hold on to. And I knew that we could hurt her—Patrice and her kind smile.
But she was hard to focus on when I felt his breath on my ear. “Okay.”
Thirteen
The next night, Lily brought a guy to dinner. It really shouldn’t have been that shocking. Lily was beautiful and smart and successful. She was the kind of girl guys wrote poems for and followed around like puppy d
ogs when she was in high school. Guys would show up on our doorstep, asking with desperate eyes if she was home.
This guy didn’t look desperate. He looked like he knew he belonged with her. He had dark hair and bright eyes and came to dinner wearing a suit, which told me he was probably someone she met through one of her business major friends. He sat at the head of the table and smiled every time someone glanced at him for even a second. He knew he was handsome.
We were all quiet, unsure what to say with a stranger at the table.
“Any news on your first meet?” my mother asked as we all cut into our steaks. I wasn’t a big fan of steak, but it had become a staple when we lived with my father. He was always waxing poetic about how an athlete like me needed the correct amount of protein, and I could only ingest so much chicken.
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to lie much longer. I’d just gone to Harris’s first meet. The districts weren’t all that different. I had to have a meet at some point, right?
“Soon. But you totally don’t have to come. It’s not even that big of a deal, and you probably need to work.” How much bullshit could I throw out before my mother got suspicious?
My mother shook her head. “Absolutely not. I’m not going to miss your first meet.”
“Well, I haven’t been paying as much attention as I should at practice. I’ll find out on Tuesday.” That bought me a whole four days.
“What sport do you play?” the hunk asked me. He stopped eating for a moment to look at me, waiting for an answer and not putting food in his mouth so that he could respond.
“Kate is a swimmer,” my mother answered proudly, saving me the trouble. “She came in first in her event at the State Championships last year. She’s absolutely incredible. She could even go to the Olympics someday.” My mother was glowing, and I felt my stomach twist. I was never going to the Olympics, and the longer I held on to this secret, the more it was going to hurt, and I knew it. But I couldn’t make myself say anything in front of Lily’s date. Lily was staring down at her dinner plate.
When dinner was over, my mom and I sat on the couch, sharing a handmade blanket we’d gotten on a trip to Idaho. Her eyes were glued to the TV, watching a home remodeling show that I found particularly boring, and I watched her closely. She’d barely given any sign since her breakdown before the wedding that anything was wrong, but I could see it in the lines around her mouth, the bags under her eyes, the too-much enthusiasm anytime she smiled.
How to Breathe Underwater Page 14
