How to Breathe Underwater

by Vicky Skinner

  But as I was staring out at the field, I realized that the meet had to be over by then.

  Which meant the after-meet party had begun.

  *   *   *

  It took half an hour of calling around to everyone I knew on the team to figure out where the party was. I had called Harris half a dozen times, but of course he hadn’t answered. I didn’t even know for certain if he was going to be there tonight, but if he wasn’t, I could almost guarantee someone at the party would know where he was.

  I had been to plenty of after-meet parties over the years—the ones my father allowed me to attend because he thought I’d worked hard enough to earn it. The swim team used the parties to blow off steam.

  The party was at Rex’s house. Rex (breaststroke, nose plugs) used to be the team geek, but if the success of his party was any indication, he was coming up in the world. People I recognized and some that I didn’t were packed into the living room, where pop music screamed out of the speakers so loud that the hardwood floor was vibrating.

  No one noticed me as I walked through, bypassing people pressing in on every side. I made it into the living room and around to the dining room, where there was a game of spin the bottle going on, people gathering around a Ping-Pong table. When I stepped in, Rex was being devoured over the top of the table by Clarissa (individual medley alternate, black lipstick). When they parted, Rex’s lips were smeared with black. Everyone cheered, and then, while I was pushing toward the door to the kitchen, someone yelled my name.

  I saw Cal at the head of the table, and then everyone else at the table turned, and they all started shouting my name, like any second they were going to hoist me onto their shoulders and start singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Cal stumbled out of his chair and came to wrap me in his arms. I hadn’t seen any alcohol around, but he was very clearly drunk. He planted a wet kiss on my cheek and moved in close until I was stuck between him and the wall behind me.

  Everyone else went back to their game.

  “Hey, you should join.” His breath smelled like gasoline. “Maybe me’n you can finally swap spit.”

  I tried not to grimace. “Cal, have you seen Harris?”

  Cal clearly wasn’t paying any attention to me. He slid around to my side and pressed his face into my neck. “Harris?” he mumbled. “Nah.” I elbowed his side, and he flinched away from me, his eyes finally clearing up a little. “Damn it, Kate. Come on. What is it?”

  “I’m looking for Harris.”

  He threw up his hands. “I dunno where he is. Been gone for days.” His shoulders sagged then, and I saw the second that the realization hit him. “You here ’cause of the drug test?”

  I grabbed Cal by the wrist and pulled him behind me into the kitchen, where the light was so bright, I actually flinched, and I wasn’t even drunk. There were a few girls giggling over something by the bar. I kept pulling Cal until I found a walk-in pantry. I shoved him inside and shut the door behind us. I pulled a string and the light came on.

  Cal bit his lip and took a step toward me, but I put up a hand to stop him. “We’re not hooking up,” I told him. “I need to know what’s going on with Harris.”

  He frowned and leaned back against the shelf behind him that housed cans of green beans and corn. He crossed his arms and shrugged. “Okay. Whattaya want me to tell ya?”

  I wanted to roll my eyes as he slurred the words. It was barely nine o’clock. “It’s true? He got kicked off the team?”

  He sent me a look like duh.

  “Harris has been doing steroids?”

  His eyes roved over my head. He reached past me and came away with a tin of cheese puffs. He popped it open and tossed a handful in his mouth. “Aren’t you, like, his best friend or sumthin’?” he mumbled around the puffs.

  I reached out and pinched his arm, right above the elbow.

  “Ow!” Chunks of cheese puffs flew out of his mouth. “Shit. What’s your problem?”

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  He rolled his eyes and slammed the tin of cheese puffs onto the shelf next to him. “Yeah. K? He’s been juicin’. And he would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for April.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  He leaned in, until his lips grazed my ear, and whispered, “She snitched.”

  I groaned. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that April had known. She was his girlfriend. Apparently the only one who hadn’t known was me, his best friend, if I was even that anymore. “I can’t believe you all knew the whole time. You are such an asshole. That shit can mess you up. And even if it didn’t, you and everyone on the team should have known better than to let him do that.”

  “I’m not his babysitter!” he shouted.

  Just then, the door of the pantry opened, and Alexandria (50-yard freestyle and a wingspan of over six feet) smiled in at us. “What is this, seven minutes in heaven?”

  I shoved past her. Halfway through the kitchen, I looked back over my shoulder. “Alexandria, have you seen April?”

  She was still standing in the doorway of the pantry, but now she had one hand on Cal’s chest and a cheesy smile on her face. “The snitch? Last time I saw her, she was running upstairs, crying.”

  Crying?

  I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. Michael. I stared at the screen for a long time. His picture was one of us, sitting on the edge of his bed acting chummy, and I stared at it until the screen changed, notifying me that I’d missed his call. There was no way I could talk to him right now. If I did, he would know where I was. He would know that I’d ignored his advice. So I shut my phone off. Michael and our rooftop pool felt a lifetime away.

  It took quite a bit of shoving before I finally made it up to the second floor. I checked the bathroom first, since that’s where I would go if I was crying, but it was empty. From there, I moved to each door, knocking before entering and leaving the door shut if it sounded like there was an enthusiastic couple inside. Finally, in the last room, empty enough of personal belongings for me to assume it was a guest room, something caught my eye. The closet door was closed, but golden light seeped out onto the carpet.

  I walked over to it and knocked.

  “What do you want?” a voice—April’s voice—came from inside.

  “It’s Kate. Could I come in?”

  When she didn’t answer, I pulled the door open. She was sitting inside, with her back against the wall and tears streaming down her face. Completely alone. I stood in the doorway, just staring at her, until her head came up, and she saw me, her face halfway covered by her hair.

  She laughed, a wheezy, completely humorless laugh. “I guess I should have known you’d come looking for me.”

  I didn’t feel like I’d thought I would. I’d thought I would be angry. I’d thought I would go in and yell at her like I had at Cal for letting something like this go on. Or maybe for getting him kicked off the team. I couldn’t even decide which. But now, looking at her, I felt the dread in my stomach. Because I knew it was true. Without even asking her the questions I’d planned to.

  I went into the closet and sat down on the carpet across from her. Her eyes and nose were red. I pulled the door shut behind me. With both the closet door and the bedroom door shut, the only indication that there was a party going on was the rhythmic thumping of the floor beneath us.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  Her head tilted back, and she stared up at the light above her. “Not exactly.”

  I’d always considered April my friend. We’d been on the swim team together since freshman year, and we’d gravitated toward each other when I didn’t always get along with the other girls. And then, almost a year ago, she’d started seeing Harris, and I’d started seeing a little less of both of them, but I’d still always really liked April. She was nice and not overly competitive, and she was good to my best friend. Looking at her, I almost didn’t even see the girl I’d always known.

  “Why are you hidin
g in a closet?”

  She took in a deep, shaky breath. “Because I’m the snitch, and everyone hates me.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “When it got out that it was me who told Coach to test Harris…,” she trailed off, shaking her head. “No one would even look at me. At practice on Tuesday, they trapped me in the locker room and told Coach I started my period and couldn’t come to practice. And tonight at the meet, someone hid my cap and goggles, and I got disqualified. When I got here, everyone started chanting snitch until I came up here, and now I can’t go back out there.” She pressed her forehead to her knee. “As if it isn’t bad enough that my boyfriend probably isn’t my boyfriend anymore.”

  “Harris will forgive you.” I couldn’t say whether that was true, but I wanted to say something to comfort her.

  She scoffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “I just wanted my boyfriend back. I found him passed out in his room last week. I was terrified, but Cal told me not to call the police or tell Harris’s parents or anything. I shouldn’t have listened. He’d just snap at me for no reason—fine one minute and screaming in my face the next. I just wanted it to stop. I knew he would get in trouble, but I thought it was a small price to pay for him to get clean.”

  I’d seen Harris help little old ladies put groceries in the trunks of their cars. He adopted Boomer from a shelter because they were going to put him to sleep. He’d talked to me while I sat in a tub full of ice after a particularly grueling workout. I couldn’t imagine that man, the one I’d seen go from a boy to a scrawny teenager to someone I respected and looked up to, doing drugs to get ahead.

  I watched her, wrapped around herself in the mostly empty closet. “You did the right thing,” I finally said, and she let out a tiny breath. She shouldn’t have had to be the one to speak up, but I was glad she had. “Can I ask you a question?”

  She looked directly at me, her eyes wet and unfocused, like she hadn’t really meant to say any of those things at all. “What?”

  “How long has he been doing this?”

  She shrugged. “A few months. Since the beginning of the summer.” The tears had started to seep from her eyes again.

  Since the beginning of the summer. He’d been doing it while I was still in Salem, and I hadn’t even known. Harris was already slipping away from me, even then.

  “Did he call you? Is that why you’re here?”

  I thought I heard a little bit of hope in her voice. I hated to dash it. “No. I read about it online.”

  She sighed. “I thought so. No one can find him.”

  “He’s probably sleeping in his truck somewhere.” Harris had once said that his truck was more comfortable than his bed because he didn’t have to listen to his parents snore in the next room.

  I was angry about the idea that I might have to go back to Portland without seeing Harris. But what was I supposed to do, drive all over Salem until I stumbled upon him?

  “Drive you home?”

  She frowned. “There’s no way I’m going back out there.”

  “Well, you can’t sit here all night. And I don’t think you’re going to be able to climb out the window. We’re on the second floor.”

  Her eyes went to the closet door, like any moment someone might whip it open and throw eggs at her face. “I don’t know, Kate.”

  I pushed myself up off the carpet. “I have to drive back to Portland. I’d be happy to walk you out and give you a lift.”

  Her lips curled warily, her eyes full of fear. “Okay,” she finally whispered, and we emerged from the closet together. The closer we got to the door, the louder the music got, and I could feel my heart pounding along with it.

  We made it all the way downstairs without anyone noticing us, and I thought going through the kitchen might make it easier for us to slip out unnoticed, but I’d forgotten about the game of spin the bottle going on just outside the doorway.

  We’d barely taken a step by the crowded Ping-Pong table when someone shouted. “Look, it’s the snitch!”

  And then it started.

  “Snitch! Snitch! Snitch!” I could think of worse names they could have been calling her, but with everyone’s attention on us, every mouth in the room open to attack April, I started to feel her terror, too.

  Without thinking, I grabbed her hand and pulled her through the room, rushing past people booing and shouting, until I threw the front door open and we raced down the driveway.

  By the time we made it down the block to my car, huffing and trying to catch our breaths, the party was just a distant rumble of bass in the night.

  I pulled open the driver’s side door, but April didn’t climb in, and when I looked at her over the top of the car, she was leaning against the passenger side, her hand on her stomach, laughing.

  She saw me watching her and laughed harder. “Oh God,” she said when she’d caught her breath. “I’m so screwed.” Her mouth hung open in exaggerated misery, and I laughed at the sight of her, pressing my forehead to my cold window, fogging it up with my breath.

  We laughed until there wasn’t anything else to laugh about, and then we got in my car and I drove her home.

  *   *   *

  April didn’t live far from the Monroes, in a little house that I’d always thought was cute. She waved to me from her front lawn, and I waited until she was inside and the porch light came on before pulling away.

  I was just going to go home. Maybe in the morning things would look different, as people were so fond of saying. I could go home and swim with Michael or watch TV with Lily or just do homework, and maybe I would feel better when I opened my eyes the next day.

  But when I drove by the baseball field again, farther away on the other side of the hill than where I’d been before, I saw a figure down there, under the streetlights along the main road, pressed against the fence like a proud father watching his kid play T-ball.

  I pulled over to the side of the road and parked, barely remembering to turn my headlights off before rushing down the hill to meet him.

  “Harris!”

  He hadn’t seemed to notice me running toward him, didn’t realize I was there until I was right beside him, he was so zoned out in the dark. “Kate?”

  I was the slightest bit out of breath from the run, and Harris watched me until I found whatever it was I was going to say to him. “Where have you been?”

  He turned away from me to look back out at the red dirt on the baseball field. “Here and there. Doesn’t matter. Guess you heard what happened.”

  “Yeah.”

  He sucked both of his lips inside his teeth and shook his head. “I really fucked up. I fucked everything up.”

  I reached out to put my hand on his arm, giant with hard muscle, but he jerked away from me, turning to face me and suddenly so aware, so focused on me, that it was a little frightening.

  “What are you even doing here?” he demanded, his face all sharp lines and edges. “I thought you didn’t want to have anything to do with us anymore.”

  So many different emotions bounded through me all at once: fear, hurt, worry, and anger, and eventually the anger won out. It wasn’t the right thing to do in that moment, when Harris obviously needed comfort, but I was so angry at the world, and especially at him, and that anger got the best of me.

  “What are you talking about? You’re the one who chose my dad. You’re the one who never shows up and never answers my calls. You’re the one who did drugs and got thrown off the team and didn’t even tell me about it.” It was the wrong time for it, the wrong time to point the finger at him. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. “You’re supposed to be my best friend. I’ve been sitting around wondering what happened to you, and you were here, ignoring your life to do something as stupid as steroids.”

  He shook his head, silent, looking out at the baseball diamond, and I realized that he was crying. He was actually crying, right in front of me, so hard that his cheeks were wet in seconds. I’d never seen hi
m cry before. All the anger in my chest evaporated. “I just wanted to be as good as you. I just wanted to be good at something for the first time in my fucking life, and all I did was fail even harder, and now I have nothing.” He scrubbed violently at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  “You don’t have nothing. What about April? What about school? What about me?”

  He crumpled even further, bowing over slightly, his arms wrapped around himself. This couldn’t be healthy. Could he be going through withdrawal? Was he about to pass out right in front of me? Maybe he needed to go to a hospital. He shook his head, over and over. “I’m so tired.”

  I moved toward him again, reaching out to him. “Let me take you home. Your mom is worried.”

  He threw himself away from me. “Don’t touch me! You haven’t been here, Kate. You left, remember? You left me here.”

  “Harris.” I didn’t know what else to say. How could I tell him he was right or wrong or anything when he was like this? How could I tell him that he wasn’t the only one who was hurt? How could I tell him that he had so much in his life without swimming? But I knew how he felt. I knew what it was like to find meaning in something only to have it taken away, only to have it turn on you, and I knew nothing I said was going to make that hurt go away.

  He focused on me again, his eyes clear and steady in the darkness, his face still shining with undisturbed tears. “You don’t belong here anymore. My world is fucked up enough without you coming back and trying to fix everything.”

  I took a step toward him, but he moved away just as fast.

  “Just go,” he pleaded with me.

  “Harris, please. Let me help.”

  He shook his head. “I’m done.” And like he needed to prove it to me, he turned and walked away fast. I took a step to go after him, but he disappeared so fast that all I could do was drop down on the bench behind me and bury my face in my hands.