How to Breathe Underwater

by Vicky Skinner

  My body went hot. I was standing in Michael’s kitchen, and he was telling me things I definitely wanted to hear, and I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t answer him, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.

  We didn’t speak for a long time, too long, so long that I was afraid maybe I’d made the whole thing up. We held on to the silence, and he crossed the kitchen to me, coming close enough for me to smell the sleep on his skin.

  The room was too bright and Michael was too dark, all shadows in a black shirt and his dark hair, and without thinking, I reached out and grabbed his shirt. He leaned forward and kissed me.

  His mouth finally on mine felt like coming up out of the water after a race, like triumph and fresh air. I let go of his shirt and slid my hands up to his neck, feeling his skin beneath my fingers while his tongue found mine. I grabbed his shoulders and felt him push me back into the counter, felt the ache in my skin as my jeans dug into me, and it felt incredible.

  He pulled back and sighed my name. He pressed his forehead to mine, and I tried to breathe, but somehow I breathed better when he was kissing me. His fingers streaked down my face, and I finally opened my eyes to look into his.

  “This is a terrible time to be this happy,” he whispered.

  I just nodded and wound my arms around his neck, pulling him back down to me. He tasted like peppermints, so much sweeter than I’d imagined. He tugged at my ponytail, and I finally stepped away from him, bumping into the counter behind me.

  “You need to eat.” My words were a little shaky, and so was his breathing.

  He, regrettably, went back to his side of the kitchen and picked up his sandwich. I had never enjoyed watching someone eat so much. I leaned against the counter, feeling like I needed it to hold me up. My legs were still trembling.

  He’d actually kissed me.

  He’d actually told me he had feelings for me.

  He’d actually broken up with Patrice.

  My heart was beating impossibly fast, like I’d just swum the last split of a long-distance race.

  Michael was smiling around his sandwich until his phone beeped in his pocket. He pulled it out, setting the sandwich aside to send a text message. “My uncle.”

  Right. God. His mother. Guilt washed over me. I’d come to check on him, and instead we’d made out in his kitchen.

  I tried to focus on other things, focus on anything but the way the curve of his mouth felt against mine. Dammit, why did he have to kiss me while we had so many other things to deal with?

  “What about you?” he asked, tucking the phone back in his pocket. “Are you okay?”

  “My mom found out about everything. She grounded me.”

  He pursed his lips and took another bite of the sandwich. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

  “I’m not even really supposed to be here, but nobody was home, so…”

  He finished his sandwich, and I thought he already looked more like himself, color in his cheeks and a slight smile on his lips. I wanted to kiss him again.

  His phone beeped with another text message. “I’m just going to call my uncle. Check in on her.”

  He disappeared into his bedroom, and I went to his living room. It felt smaller now somehow, with only me in it. Even though I knew I should probably be going to class or at the very least respecting my mother’s grounding, I wasn’t ready to leave Michael. His apartment was warm and quiet, and, well, it had Michael in it.

  Michael, who didn’t have a girlfriend anymore.

  I reached over and turned on the stereo. Apparently no one had touched the stereo since the lesson we had had in the living room because salsa music immediately flooded the room. I was still fiddling with the thing when Michael appeared beside me. He put his fingers over mine, and my heart lurched in the most pleasant way.

  He moved my hand out of the way and changed the song, letting the salsa music fade away and a slow guitar song take its place. He pulled me against him and let his hands fall to my waist. It was deliciously bizarre to be able to do this with him, to be able to slide my fingers up his neck and press my head to his shoulder. We could do this now.

  His mouth found mine again, and this time, I let him kiss me because maybe if we stayed here, we could pretend the rest of the world wasn’t flawed. He pushed me back until we were on the couch, our mouths sliding lazily over each other, until I was too tired to keep my eyes open, and we fell asleep pressed together.

  *   *   *

  We jerked awake at the sound of someone knocking on the door. As I pushed away from Michael, my mind went to all the people who it could be: my mother, catching me in the act and prepared to ground me further; Patrice, come to get back together with Michael; Michael’s uncle with news on Harriet.

  I wasn’t expecting Lily.

  “Are you trying to get yourself in even more trouble?” she hissed when I got to the door. I put my shoes on while she watched me. “Mom is on her way home. She just called me.”

  “Text me,” I said to Michael before Lily dragged me into our apartment and shut the door. She stomped into the kitchen and started to rummage through the pantry.

  “Are you mad at me?” I asked because she was certainly acting like it.

  She sighed and dropped a pan onto the stove. “No, I’m not mad at you.” She turned to look at me. “But my life would be significantly easier if you would stop doing things behind Mom’s back that would get you in trouble.”

  I leaned against the counter. “Yeah, I know.”

  She stopped and looked at me, but after a second, she went back to what she was doing, and I was left to watch her, feeling the excitement of my afternoon with Michael slipping away.

  Sixteen

  The next night, I was back at Marisol’s house, my blood pounding in my ears as I knocked on the door. Michael and I had agreed that keeping whatever we were doing secret for now was our best option, but the guilt was already eating at me. I hadn’t seen Patrice yet, but I could only imagine how she felt. I knew how much she liked him. And here I was, swooping into their lives and stealing him away. I pressed my face into my hands.

  How could I face her after this? When she found out, she was going to hate me, and I couldn’t even blame her. I was an awful friend. An awful, awful friend.

  Marisol’s smile was bright when she opened the door, but as soon as it was closed behind me, she latched onto my elbow. She leaned in close, so close I could smell something salty on her breath. “Okay, so you heard, right? About Patrice and Michael? I mean, how could you not know? You live across from Michael. He told you, right?”

  I opened my mouth to object to her assumption that Michael would have immediately told me, even though it was true, but before I could, she was steering me into the living room.

  Patrice was sitting in the middle of the floor with a hot-glue gun in her hand. Since Harriet had been dealing with her health, Patrice had convinced her older sister to do the sewing on our elements blanket, and now we just had to glue into place all the letters and numbers we’d already cut out. Or more specifically, that Patrice and Marisol had cut out while I was busy with Ben.

  “Okay, so tell me again exactly how it went down,” Marisol said when we’d settled onto the carpet, and I felt my entire body tense up. She couldn’t seriously mean for Patrice to reenact the breakup.

  I hadn’t even really had the chance to discuss it in full with Michael. He had missed another day of school, deciding to stay home and take care of his mother, and other than deciding not to tell anyone about what happened, we hadn’t discussed what was going on between us.

  “I already told you everything.” Patrice was focused on hot-gluing a very large F on a blanket square.

  “Right, I know,” Marisol said, “but you haven’t told Kate, and we definitely need a second opinion.”

  “A second opinion on what?” I busied myself with sorting things on the floor. We only had one glue gun, so there wasn’t much to do while one of us was using it.

  Pat
rice looked at me, her eyes steady and wet. There was something there. Suspicion? Knowledge?

  I looked away. I was imagining it. There was no way that Patrice could know I’d already kissed Michael unless she had put a hidden camera in his kitchen. What I was seeing in her eyes was probably just plain devastation. I felt sick.

  “Marisol thinks he’s into someone else,” she finally said. Her voice was tired and gravelly, and I felt a little disoriented by it. Patrice was usually cheery and kind, but now she had bags under her eyes, strands of her curly hair stuck to her face.

  Marisol shrugged. “It just feels so out of the blue. Guys don’t just give up regular nookie unless there’s the promise of getting it somewhere else.”

  I felt like Marisol had punched me in the chest. Just the week before, Patrice had said they weren’t sleeping together. Oh God, they couldn’t have slept together, right? Did he sleep with Patrice days before breaking up with her and kissing me on his couch?

  Patrice sighed. “Mar, you know we didn’t have sex.”

  Marisol rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine.”

  Patrice’s arms fell, like the tiny scrap of fabric and the mini glue gun in her hands had become too heavy to hold up. “He said we never really fit right but he’d wanted to give us a chance. And then he just decided he couldn’t do it anymore, said he really liked me more as a friend.”

  I couldn’t do this. In the story of Patrice’s life, I had just become the villain. How could one moment make her so miserable and me so happy?

  Marisol put her arms around Patrice and held her close. I took possession of the glue gun. I needed to get out of there as soon as possible, so I started gluing parts.

  “So what do you think?” Marisol asked, and it took me a second to realize she was talking to me.

  “About what?” The hot tip of the glue gun touched my thumb, and I jerked it back.

  “Do you think Michael is seeing someone else?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You live right across the hall from him. Have you ever seen any girls coming or going from his apartment?”

  Both of them were looking at me, but I’d gotten so used to lying. I could lie to two more people. “No, I haven’t seen anyone.”

  Patrice sent Marisol a told you so look.

  “How’s Jesse?” I asked, effectively changing the subject. Marisol’s eyes lit up. Beside her, Patrice sent me a small smile that I took as a thank-you for changing the subject. Guilt roiled in my stomach.

  “Oh, um.” Marisol glanced at Patrice, who rolled her eyes.

  “It’s okay. You can talk about Jesse. It’s not like I expect everyone to be miserable just because I am.”

  Marisol didn’t seem too convinced, but she continued anyway. “Well, I was going to tell you the news later, but I’m no longer in the virgin category.” She smiled at both of us. “It happened last night.”

  Patrice’s eyes went wide. “Really? Wow. That’s um…” Patrice and I glanced at each other, and I had to look away. There was too much trust and companionship in her eyes that I didn’t deserve.

  I did my best to get through the night with little talk about boys, instead talking to them about TV shows that I didn’t watch and music I rarely listened to. At the end of the night, I walked out of Marisol’s house with a mental list of their favorites to look into.

  Watching to make sure the door closed behind me, I scrambled into the driver’s seat of my mom’s car and dialed Michael’s number. I felt somewhat frantic by the time he picked up the phone.

  “Hey.” I could hear the smile in his voice. It was going to kill me to hear it disappear.

  “Did you break up with Patrice because of me?” The obvious answer was yes, he had. But I needed more than that. I needed to know that I wasn’t directly responsible for the end of their relationship.

  I honestly expected him to hesitate. I expected him to trip over his words and try to convince me of something that I was already dead set against. But he didn’t.

  “No.” Confident. Positive. Perfect. “There were a million and one reasons for me to end it with Patrice, but I didn’t really care about any of them until I realized I had the chance to make it work with someone I was crazy about.”

  I set my head against my steering wheel and let out a breath. “Maybe this is a bad idea.”

  “What’s a bad idea?”

  “Us.” I wasn’t even sure us was a real thing yet. But it felt real. I put my car in gear, feeling twice as awful for having this conversation with Michael when Patrice was so close by. I pulled out of Marisol’s driveway and headed toward home.

  “Doesn’t feel like a bad idea to me.”

  “You didn’t see her, Michael. She’s completely shattered.”

  “And that sucks. But we’re all going to get through this. Patrice and I have been through worse together.”

  I opened my mouth to speak as I pulled up to a red light, but he spoke over me, like he knew I was about to argue.

  “If you want to take some time, I understand. This didn’t exactly happen in the best way. I shouldn’t have made a move a few hours after breaking up with Patrice. But I’ve wanted to kiss you since we met, and it was the first time I was allowed to do it, even if it meant maybe upsetting Patrice. I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about upsetting her, and I think I need to do what feels right to me now.”

  Someday we’d have to tell her that we were an us, if that’s what we were, and she would be even more devastated and confused, and she would know that her suspicions had been right. Why did Michael have to be such a good kisser?

  “I don’t want to take time. I want to be with you.”

  The smile was back in his voice. “I want to be with you, too. We’ll figure everything else out.”

  “Yeah. We’ll figure everything out.” We hung up at that, and I felt just as heavy as I had before. Trying to juggle utter guilt and uncontainable happiness was already exhausting.

  *   *   *

  Not being able to tell anyone about Michael and me was like trying to contain fireworks inside my rib cage. We couldn’t hold hands at school or kiss or do anything that anyone, especially Patrice, might see.

  On the bus, we sat just a little too close and stared just a little too long, and when we separated to go to class, we lingered a little too much, and it was glorious.

  Lunch with Patrice, on the other hand, was torture. She looked miserable, her eyes tired and her skin dull. It was in such direct competition with the sunshine that I felt sparking out of all my pores that I considered skipping lunch until we could get everything figured out.

  But how long would that be?

  I sat down next to Michael in American Lit and groaned.

  “Lunch went well?” he asked, his mouth turned down.

  I groaned again, louder. “This is awful. Are you not having this problem?”

  He rapped his fingers on his desk. “Well, Patrice has kind of been avoiding me, so no.”

  I reached into my bag and pulled out my copy of The Crucible. “I feel like I kicked a puppy.”

  He reached across the aisle and massaged my shoulder. “I’m sorry.” His fingers moved down my arm, and I shivered.

  “Do you think there’ll ever be a time when we can tell her without her freaking out?”

  He seemed to seriously consider the question. “To be honest? I don’t think so. But we can put it off until we’re ready to deal with the consequences.”

  I groaned and dropped my head onto my desk. “How did I manage to get myself out of one problem just to get myself into another?”

  “What was the first problem?”

  I rolled my head to look at him. “I had a huge crush on my friend’s boyfriend.”

  His face dissolved into a smile, and I smiled back even though I was really very screwed.

  *   *   *

  That afternoon, I met Michael at the bus stop, and it was strange how everything had changed. When the wind bl
ew my hair in my face, he reached out and moved it out of the way, and then he left his fingers on the curve of my neck.

  He bent down to put his mouth against my ear. “I wish I could be alone with you.” It came out of him in a rush, like he’d been holding it in.

  I had pushed up on my tiptoes to whisper in his ear when a honking horn caught our attention. The bus had pulled up and people were filing on, but my mother had pulled up beside it, just feet away from us. Her eyes went from Michael to me.

  “I guess that’s my cue,” I told him. I hadn’t been expecting her, but knowing my mother, she was probably here to check up on me, make sure that I was actually where I said I was.

  Michael’s mouth perked up in an imitation of a smile, and I nudged him with my elbow. “You want a ride?”

  Michael glanced in my mother’s direction and then back at me. “No, you go ahead. I bet you and your mom could use some one-on-one time.”

  I hesitated, mostly because I wasn’t positive I wanted to be alone with my mother right now, when I was still feeling guilty about lying to her and uncertain about how everything had gone down with her and my dad. But I let it go.

  “How was school?” my mother asked when I was buckled in. She maneuvered into the line of cars that was migrating slowly out of the parking lot.

  “It was fine. Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  She glanced at me and tightened her hands on the steering wheel. “Some things were canceled today, so I left early. I thought it might be good for us to talk.”

  I picked at my cuticles and refused to look at her. What was there to talk about? Dad? Lily? The fact that I was becoming an uncomfortably good liar?

  “I’m ungrounding you.”

  The shock of what she said felt like a jolt through my entire body. “What?”

  “But I need you to be honest with me from now on.” We weren’t far from the apartment now, but the closer we got, the more obvious it was that we weren’t going home. We drove right by. I glanced at the building as it passed.