Breathless

by Jennifer Niven

  Yet somehow, this fall, we are going to different schools. Me to Columbia in New York City. Saz to Northwestern in Chicago. We’ve agreed not to talk about it until the end of summer because the thought of being separated is unbearable.

  Saz pulls a bottle of vodka out of her bag. She passes it to me and I drink, hating the taste. What I do like is the warm, burning feeling I get in my chest as soon as I swallow. Like there’s a little furnace deep inside. We sit, staring out over the city. Since sophomore year, this is where we come when we don’t want to talk but need to feel better. We think of it as our Art Institute, the way we think of I-70 as our highway, and Mary Grove as our town, even if we don’t fit in.

  I pass the bottle back to Saz, but she shakes her head. “Driving.”

  I take a drink for her.

  “Hen,” she says, “I have something to tell you.” She’s been calling me Hen, short for Henry, short for Claudine Henry, since we were ten years old. Lew, I want to say. Call me Lew instead. I’m Claudine Llewelyn now.

  I have something to tell you, too.

  She breathes out as if she’s been holding her breath for a long time. “I slept with Yvonne.” Before I can say, But we just saw her with Leah last night—or was it days ago? she says, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when it happened.”

  I say the first thing that comes to mind: “But she’s got a girlfriend.”

  “They’ve been off and on for a while.”

  “When did you sleep with her?”

  “Three weeks ago. Remember when Mara and I went to Adam Katz’s? That weekend you were hanging out with Shane? It happened then.”

  I say, “Oh.”

  Three weeks ago.

  “I know we were supposed to wait to fall in love and have sex so we could do it at the same time, but we were ten when we made that pledge, Hen. You know I’ve dated. Maybe not a lot. Not as much as Alannis.”

  “No one dates as much as Alannis.”

  “Right? But, I don’t know, no one’s ever really mattered before. Like this. I mean, they mattered, but they didn’t get in there. As in right here.” She rubs at the area over her heart and then thumps it twice. “I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t see her coming. I guess you’re not supposed to.” And she smiles, lost in the memory of Yvonne.

  For some reason, this news hits me almost as hard as the news about my parents, because here is another secret someone was keeping from me. I am a person other people feel the need to keep things from, and all the things I thought were truths aren’t actually truths. I can feel my lungs give out. I stare down at the concrete steps, but they’re no longer there. There’s only all this air between my feet and the ground.

  I clear my throat, which has suddenly gone completely dry. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know. I should have told you. I just wasn’t sure what it was, what we were, Yvonne and me. I guess I wanted to figure that out first.”

  “And did you? Figure it out?”

  “Not completely, not yet. But I didn’t want to not tell you about it any longer.”

  “You mean you didn’t want to keep it a secret any longer.”

  “Yeah.”

  Even as I sit there guarding my own secret, hers stings like an open wound. I want her to take it all back and rebuild the stairs so we can sit on them together, side by side, just like always.

  “Did Yvonne make you swear you wouldn’t say anything? Because she was still with Leah?”

  “No. The fact that I didn’t tell you, that’s on me. Besides, virginity is so fucking subjective, Hen. It’s like something made up by the old, straight, white men who run this country, or whoever their equivalent was back in ancient times, to make you feel left out and less than and somehow incomplete. It doesn’t actually mean anything, not to me.”

  “But your first time with Yvonne meant something.”

  “Yeah. It meant everything.” And her voice cracks—like, actually cracks, as if it can’t begin to hold all the emotion she’s carrying.

  I should put my hurt and anger aside and ask Saz what it was like, how she’s feeling, what this means for her and Yvonne. I should ask her something about her because this is momentous and big and, like it or not, Yvonne is happening. But when I open my mouth, the only thing I’m capable of saying is that I might be pregnant with Shane Waller’s baby.

  “You know it’s not the 1950s, right? Like, you have other options if you somehow are pregnant, which by the way you aren’t.”

  “He thinks I’m a series of boxes, and every time he opens one, there’s another one inside.” I look down, past the place where the steps used to be, and the ground has disappeared too.

  She says, “I think we both know there’s only one box he wants to get into.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s thirty-five miles to Mary Grove. Instead of talking, we blast the music so loud that I can feel it entering my bloodstream, taking root in my bones. Saz drives with one arm out the window. She takes a corner too fast and we’re yelling along with the song, and I pull my hair back because it’s blowing and blowing and if I don’t hold it back I’ll swallow it whole. With my free hand I grab the vodka bottle and drink, and the burning and the bone-vibrating music make me feel alive. We reach Mary Grove in twenty minutes because Saz drives faster than anyone I know, even my dad.

  In the glow of the dashboard, I study the inside of my arm, where the bruises are. The little bruises from the little pinches I gave myself sometime between this morning and right now, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming this.

  We turn into my neighborhood, following the curve and slope of the road.

  I can still tell her.

  We go down one hill.

  I can tell her now.

  Round a bend. Another.

  I can open my mouth and let the words come out, and then she will know and she can help me make sense of this and I won’t be alone, and then it will all be real.

  The car rolls to a stop in front of my house. We sit there a moment, the music still playing. I don’t want to go inside. I don’t want to see my parents.

  But I can’t sit here forever, because Saz will want to know what’s going on, so I start to get out of the car. She leans over the seat and lays a hand on my arm, stopping me. “You realize this isn’t the end of us, right? Not just you going to New York and me to Chicago, but Yvonne and me? Falling in love wasn’t about you, Hen, or all the plans we had. It’s about this girl I really like and the right, I don’t know, moment. But there’ll never be an end of us.”

  “I know.” But there’s an uneasy flickering in my heart. Saz broke a promise. Maybe it was a silly promise. An eight-year-old promise given by ten-year-olds. But more than the promise, it’s that Saz kept Yvonne a secret from me. We haven’t even graduated and left home yet. How many more secrets will there be once Saz is at Northwestern and I’m at Columbia and we’re not here, together, in Mary Grove? Sometimes things end, even if you don’t want them to.

  Maybe none of it would bother me so much if I didn’t have a secret of my own, a secret belonging to my parents that they’ve now handed to me. A secret I don’t want.

  I force myself to take her hand. I say, “I wish we were going to California.”

  “Me too.”

  Her eyes meet mine, dark and flashing. Saz usually looks as if she’s thinking a million exciting thoughts at once. But right now her eyes are quiet, and behind the happiness that’s there over Yvonne, I can see the worry and the sadness and maybe the fear that I’m upset with her.

  I say, “I could never be mad at you. Especially not for following your heart.” Especially not when I’m keeping secrets too.

  “Promise?” she says.

  “Promise.”

  I can see the relief in her face. She squeezes my hand. With the othe
r hand she scoops up the vodka bottle. Takes a drink now that she’s so close to home.

  She says, very low, “I really like her.”

  And it feels almost like a death, like Old Saz and Old Claude are suddenly gone. I squeeze her hand this time, because if I don’t, I might burst into tears and lose it right here, right now. Then I hug her hard and long before climbing out of the car.

  “Hey,” she says, leaning over the seat, eyes shining. “I love you more than Tootsie Rolls and Ariana Grande and summer.”

  We’ve done I love you more than since we were ten, because we love each other beyond three words and needed to find a way to say it.

  “I love you more than Kraft mac and cheese and Zelda Fitzgerald and spring.” But the words fall flat onto the ground around me. She holds up her hand and waves her pinkie, and I hook it with my own. Then I slam the door and run for the house.

  6 DAYS TILL GRADUATION

  When I wake up the next day, the world is different. It’s a different I can feel more than see, as if something in the gravity of the earth has shifted.

  There’s a short story by Ray Bradbury about a man who pays a company named Time Safari to go back in time for the privilege of shooting a dinosaur. He can only kill this specific dinosaur, which has been carefully marked, because it’s old and diseased and going to die no matter what. In killing it, the man won’t upset the balance of nature. He’s warned to stay on the path Time Safari has built. Never venture off the trails. If he kills anything else, no matter how small, it could throw off the future of the world.

  And of course he goes off the path, and they almost leave him there, and when they get back to the present, it all looks just as it did when they left it. But not the same as they left it. And then—dun-dun-dun—the man finds a dead butterfly on the sole of his boot. And he knows he has changed everything.

  What sort of world it was now, there was no telling.

  That is how it feels in my room, in my house, in my life. Mom, Dad, Saz, sun, earth. Atmosphere. Stars. Floor. All gone.

  THE WEEK OF GRADUATION

  The days that follow are strange, like the aftermath of a natural disaster, when the world goes too still. My parents and I move carefully around each other, glass figures in a glass house, and when we are outside, we move even more carefully, so as not to give anything away to anyone we see.

  My dad and I are rarely alone together. I tell Saz he needs to be at work early this week and ask if I can ride to school with her. She talks the entire way, but I like how the words fill the silence and the air and the hollows that have grown up inside of me.

  At home, if my dad walks into a room and finds me by myself, I make up some excuse to walk out. I don’t know what to say to him right now: Please bring my dad back because I don’t recognize you, this person who’s decided to leave my mother and me. I don’t even know you anymore. I don’t want to know you anymore. He seems to get this—or maybe he doesn’t know what to say to me, either—because he doesn’t push it. My mom, on the other hand, hovers. But the strange thing is that they are also acting weirdly normal. They run errands and we do our usual chores and we watch Netflix together and eat dinner together except for a night or two when Dad works late. But this is normal too.

  As we ease into our everyday roles, I feel this tiny, delicate bud of hope growing in my chest. Maybe it won’t happen after all. Maybe this is some sort of midlife crisis that all dads go through. Maybe Mom will talk him out of it. Maybe it was all a mistake. I stare at the floor of my room until I tell myself that I can see it again and that it won’t break like thin ice if I walk on it.

  Meanwhile, life goes on, and I try not to be shocked that it does. I go to school on Monday—my last Monday of high school—and wait for everyone to see that I’m Claude, but not Claude. The old Claude has been replaced by Robot Claude, who sits in class and walks through the halls and eats lunch and listens to her friends talk about sex and college or complain about their bodies. I’ve never realized how hard we are on our bodies. I think, Why are we so mean to ourselves? Why aren’t we happy with what we have? And then I say it aloud, and Alannis and Mara stare at me like I just told them they were monsters.

  I get my period during lunch hour, which means I’m not pregnant with Shane Waller’s baby, but I barely feel it—the relief. I see Shane afterward, in calculus, and we don’t talk. He doesn’t even look at me, and it’s as if we’re strangers who didn’t go out for two months. It’s so fucking bizarre to me that one minute you can be naked with someone and the next it’s as if you never met, yet I’m so strangely okay with this that I wonder if I ever really cared about him. Maybe Mr. Russo is right and I’m incapable of feeling.

  Except that later that day I’m in the hallway outside the library when I see Wyatt Jones and Lisa Yu making out against her locker, and as I watch it happen, I can feel myself unraveling. Lisa is cooler than anyone has ever been on this earth. She is cooler than I can ever dream of being. And now she has her mouth suctioned to his. Not you, too, Wyatt Jones, I want to say. I need you to stay still, to remain the Wyatt you’ve always been. No changing. No leaving like everyone else.

  Saz says, “Control your face, Hen. Look away! Look away!”

  I blink at her because until this moment I didn’t know she was there. I say, “When did that happen?” And I mean Wyatt and Lisa. “Wyatt doesn’t like Lisa Yu. He likes me. Since when is she someone who gets to kiss him? That should be me making out with him, not her.” On and on. Even to my own ears, I sound like a complete and total baby.

  Saz starts to sing the ice cream song, and I think, What is my normal reaction to Saz singing the ice cream song? I access my memory banks and make a face at her. She makes a face back, and I feel relieved because she thinks I’m being regular everyday Claude.

  “Men suck,” she says. “That’s why I’m thankful I like women.”

  That night my phone buzzes and it’s Shane. I stupidly think maybe he’s going to apologize for—what? Wanting to have sex with me? Not being the boy I wanted him to be? He’s sent a photo, and at first I’m not sure what exactly I’m looking at, but then I recognize it. Shane naked from the waist down, and the caption This is what you’re missing. Let me know if you change your mind.

  There are a thousand things I could write back—Your dick is the last thing on my mind, for starters—but instead I just delete the whole thread. Goodbye, Shane Waller. I can’t remember what I ever saw in you.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning before school, I sit on the rug in my room thinking back on the first year we lived here. My old bedroom in Rhode Island is now a hazy, fuzzy blur, but this room, even more than this house, is my home, my very first own space that I filled with me. My safe haven from everything—exams, teachers, breakups, fights with friends, the stress of the outside world. Until the day my dad walked in and took away the floor.

  A knock on the door and my mom appears. She comes in and sits down next to me. Without thinking, we tilt our heads, letting them touch. We’ve been doing this since I was little.

  I say, “When did you know? That you and Dad weren’t working?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Like, for a while? Or did you just find out?”

  “Yes and no. I knew but didn’t know.”

  My mom, who is never cryptic with me, is being cryptic for the first time in my life, and I feel my heart slow and quiet and grow very, very still because somehow this is worse than my dad sitting on my bed crying.

  “Is this what you want or what he wants?”

  She sighs. “Claude.”

  “Mom.”

  My mother never lies to me, and I’m hoping she’s not going to start now, even though, right or wrong, I already feel lied to.

  “Is it what you want?” I say again.

  “No,” she says, and I can tell this is the truth.r />
  I’ve been waiting for them to change their minds and tell me they’ve decided to work it out. Instead she tells me about an island in Georgia where they send wives and children who are no longer loved, where there are no cars and no phone service, and where alligators and wild horses roam free. She tells me that we are being banished there. That as soon as I graduate, the two of us will be leaving this house, where we’ve lived for the past eight years, because my dad is sending us away.

  What she really says is that we are spending the summer in Georgia on the island where my great-great-aunt Claudine Blackwood lived and died. Mom and I usually visit her family in Atlanta this time of year, so we’ve already got the perfect alibi for our friends in Mary Grove. We’ll stop in Atlanta like always and then head for the island.

  I say, “Why should we be the ones to leave when he’s the one who wants out?”

  “Because I need to get away from Mary Grove and your father and this house. Just to clear my head for a while.”

  “Well, Saz and I are going on our road trip. So I don’t need to go to an island to get out of his way because I’ll be gone.”

  “Claude.”

  “Mom.” And I know what she’s going to say.

  “The road trip will unfortunately have to wait. I promise you can do it at some point, but right now…just for a few weeks…” She shakes her head and her eyes are suddenly wet. “Honey, right now I need you to come with me.”

  Divorce Island is a national seashore or a state park or something. In addition to alligators and wild horses, it is filled with ruins and family history. For almost five weeks—exactly thirty-five days—we will be staying in a house belonging to Mom’s cousin Addy. Mom was there for Addy when she got divorced and when her son drowned in a rip current the summer he was twelve. Now it’s Addy’s turn to be there for us.