Just Breathe

by Cammie McGovern

  DAVID

  She doesn’t answer for a while. Finally, she types, I really have to go, and signs off.

  That night I have a dream where I’m wandering around the hospital, trying to talk to people who can’t hear what I’m saying. I scream to make my point, and they look right through me. I’m not sure why it’s so terrifying, but it is. I wake up in a sweat.

  I know it’ll be hours before I fall back asleep. I go to the kitchen and stand in the dark, trying to remember what I came in here for. Eileen turns on the light and screams. “Oh my God! Were you standing here, waiting to scare me?”

  I don’t tell her No, I’m standing here because I forgot why I came in. That’s another thing that happens with these medications. You can’t sleep, and you can’t remember anything. You stand in dark rooms, trying to remember why you walked in.

  “Yeah Lee-lee, I’ve been standing here for three hours waiting to scare you. It was worth it, right?”

  “Shut up.”

  She opens the fridge to take out a yogurt and unpeels the lid.

  “So why were you standing here?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I’m losing my mind, maybe.”

  “Too late. You already did that today when you screamed at those girls in front of everybody.”

  Oh God, I think. I was hoping only a few tables around us noticed. It’s bad news if Eileen has heard about it. “Is that what it looked like?”

  “That’s what it was. Senior class president yells at random table of tenth-grade girls. No one’s sure why.”

  “They were being mean to Jamie. If you knew the whole story, you’d say I was right.”

  “Now suddenly you’re friends with Jamie again? I don’t get it.”

  I know why she’s saying this. I don’t get it, either. For three months I’ve been home and recuperating—plenty of time to get in touch with Jamie—and I never did. Instead, I focused all my energy on Sharon.

  “I never stopped being friends with her.”

  “Yes, you did. What you did was sort of the definition of not being friends with someone. You never even wrote her to tell her you were out of the hospital.”

  “I know. It was complicated. But I told her I’m sorry. That’s what I was doing at her table today. Why were you even watching us? Don’t you usually sit across the cafeteria?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “Because my friends are idiots, and I hate them. But I have to tell you, you’re the bigger idiot. You don’t see anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind. Just—never mind.” She’s only eaten a few bites of the yogurt, but she opens the trash can and drops it in.

  “No, tell me. It’s like ever since I got home you’ve been avoiding me, and I don’t get it. You’re mad at me, but I don’t see what I’ve done to you.”

  I can tell she doesn’t want to have this conversation. She’s already at the door when she spins around. “I’m not mad at you!! I feel sorry for you! You don’t see what’s going on!”

  “Like what? What am I not seeing?”

  “Like Sharon isn’t really your girlfriend! She’s been going out with someone else for months! Since last summer, at least.”

  I gasp. This is one of those times where I expect my lungs to fail me. I wait for the coughing to start, or the constriction in my chest to get so bad I have to sit down until the room stops spinning. It doesn’t happen. I keep breathing in and out.

  “What are you talking about? Who is she going out with?” This makes no sense. After my operation, Sharon visited me every day, for at least an hour, sometimes more. Since I went back to school, she spends all her free time making sure I’m okay. If anything, she pays too much attention to me.

  Eileen hesitates. It’s obvious she doesn’t want to tell me. “Nicolai.”

  “Nicolai?”

  I think back to the end of our dancing-school days. After the one episode where I had to sit out most of the night, Sharon went to one lesson without me. I remember her saying she didn’t like being there by herself, and a few days later, she said we shouldn’t take classes anymore. That it didn’t make sense when we had so many other responsibilities.

  I remember saying, “We’ve always been busy, and it doesn’t take that much time.” I wanted to keep going; she didn’t.

  “It just seems silly to me now,” she said. And that was it.

  I ask my sister, “How do you know this?”

  “They were at that party I went to in August. She didn’t see me. I was hiding in the pantry while they were in the kitchen making out.”

  The room starts to spin, but it doesn’t have anything to do with my oxygen levels. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You were sick all summer. I could tell something weird was happening. What was I supposed to say: ‘Sorry your lungs suck and, plus, you have this other problem you don’t even know about yet’?”

  She’s right. Last summer was pretty bad for me. I think back to when I waited for Sharon’s calls and she apologized every day for working so much. I don’t know why this possibility never occurred to me.

  “Who else knows?”

  She shrugs. “A few people. She’s not that careful. You haven’t been able to go to a party for a long time, so I think she meets him at those and pretends it’s a coincidence.”

  For a long time, I sit, breathing in and out.

  “I didn’t want to tell you. That’s why I agreed to go to Starlight. I wanted to find him and tell him to leave Sharon alone until the end of the school year.”

  It takes me a minute to understand what she’s saying. “So in case I didn’t make it, I could die thinking Sharon and I were fine?”

  “Well—I mean, you were really sick, and everyone kept saying you wouldn’t handle a breakup very well.”

  “Is she still going out with him?”

  Eileen doesn’t want to answer, which should be answer enough, but I want to hear her tell me the truth.

  “When you talked to Nick, what did he say?”

  “That he loves Sharon and he won’t stop seeing her. He was pretty dramatic about it. He said he’s loved her for a long time.”

  I think back to the kids we once were, inexperienced and awkward, equally dazzled by the new girl from Texas who arrived with new moves we’d never seen before. Geography was on my side—Nick went to the high school across town—but time was on his. Apparently, he’s been working this whole time to win her away from me.

  I can’t sleep after this, so I spend the rest of the night stalking everyone’s Instagram feeds for picture proof. Pathetically enough, it’s not hard to find. He’s in a few of the summer pictures of our group hanging out at cookouts and pool parties I didn’t go to. There’s Nick floating on a raft in one and standing behind a grill in another. By the fall, I see him in the corner of a homecoming dance picture.

  It’s one o’clock in the morning, and I feel like the biggest loser on earth.

  For an hour I feel sad and then, almost without any warning, I’m furious. WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME? I’m angry at Sharon, of course, but also with everyone else. I don’t know how much they know or just sensed, but it makes every friendship I have feel even phonier than it did four months ago. Why did I get out of surgery and think the most important thing I had to do was get back to school and all my class president responsibilities as soon as possible?

  It’s two thirty when I finally turn my phone off. For the first time in months I wish I had a nebulizer treatment or a vest session to get through. Those used to calm me down when Sharon had done or said something that made me mad. The buzzing/breathing combination always soothed my nerves. Which now makes me wonder: Did some part of me know the truth all along?

  Eileen asks if she can get a ride with me to school in the morning. I can tell she feels bad.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I hate Sharon, and I haven’t spoken to her once in over six months. Ev
en if she says hi, I don’t say hi back. It’s a point of pride.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better, sorry. I mean thanks, but this is kind of my whole life that sucks right now.”

  She makes a face. “Should I not have told you? Would it have been better to not know and get through prom and graduation and then find out the truth and break up?”

  I haven’t thought about prom. Weirdly, I haven’t thought about breaking up, either. For this whole sleepless, horrible night, I’ve assumed it’s already happened. That I’ll get to school and Sharon will know that I know and we’ll never talk about it and never talk again except when we have to for public events like, well, everything coming up over the next two months.

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “It would have been easier not to know.”

  Eileen gives me one of her sideways looks. “But would it have been better?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  Suddenly, it feels like I don’t have any real friends. I have a bunch of people who like the idea that we’re all friends—that we’re all headed to great schools and we’ll always be close—but none of it is true, really. We don’t know each other very well. We’re not there for each other when it matters. I hate realizing this. I don’t like hating all these people. “I don’t know what to think about my old friends.”

  “How about this? Who has been a good friend?” Eileen says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. Who was a good friend while you were in the hospital?”

  “You know the answer to that. Jamie.”

  “Right.”

  “What are you saying? That I should go sit with her friends at lunch today?”

  “You should think about the things you did with her. Like the origami and the old movies. You kept saying you wanted Jamie and me to be friends, but I think you’re the one who really liked her and wanted to be her friend. Maybe you wanted to be more than friends and you didn’t want to admit it.”

  I remember this thought crossing my mind, but I never let it linger for long. She was too young, I told myself. I had Sharon; the situation was too complicated. “She’s in tenth grade, Eileen.”

  “Yeah, but she doesn’t act like it. I don’t know what you’d call her. An old soul or something. She’s also a pretty good dancer. A lot of guys really liked her in class. She probably got asked to dance more than I did. I know, shockingly hard to believe, but true.”

  Suddenly, I’m flashing on a memory. Or a dream maybe. Where she and I are dancing. “Do you think I danced with her when we went to the social?”

  She stares at me. “Do you seriously not remember?”

  “None of it. I don’t remember asking her to take me there, or any of it. Did she tell you what happened?”

  “No, of course not. She doesn’t talk to me because our family is so screwed-up.”

  “You haven’t talked to her this whole time?”

  “No. I assumed she hates all of us. Then I saw her go up to you that day you came back and I watched your freaky little scene with her friends and I thought, wait a minute here. I wonder if David needs a little help getting in touch with some of his feelings.”

  “Shut up. You’re the freaky one.”

  “Fine, you’re right. That was completely normal, you going over to her lunch table and telling all her friends they should love her because you do.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Yeah, sorry, but it kind of was. ‘You should watch old movies with her sometime’? I think what you meant was ‘I want to watch old movies with her again.’ Even though I’m not sure there’s any left that you haven’t watched.”

  This is kind of crazy what she’s saying, and it’s also kind of not. I did love watching old movies with Jamie. It was by far the best part of my hospital stay, but I never thought of her as more than my hospital friend, did I?

  “We were friends, Lee-lee. That’s it. Apparently, I needed friends, and I didn’t even realize it.”

  “Yeah, so if this never occurred to you, why did you ask her to take you to the social?”

  I don’t know the answer to this. I really don’t. I remember being in the hospital and hearing the Smile Awhile cart in the hall and always hoping it was Jamie. I remember when she started stopping by more often, on her way to have dinner with her mom. I remember messaging her and laughing at night over things she wrote. I remember getting closer and talking about what I wanted to do with my life if it was going to be over soon. I remember feeling thankful that those conversations didn’t freak her out.

  We pull into the school parking lot. Eileen gets ready to fly out of the car as soon as it stops. “Look, all I’m saying is, you should think about it. But don’t screw with her head. Our family has already freaked her out enough.”

  With that she’s gone.

  I look up and see Sharon’s blue Elantra pull into a space ahead of me. She toots her horn and waves, but she doesn’t get out of her car. She must be reading a message on her phone, because she’s looking down and laughing even though she’s alone in the car.

  It’s strange, though—even as I wonder if she’s texting with Nick, I also realize that I really don’t care if she is.

  Chapter Eighteen

  DAVID

  I DON’T KNOW WHY IT’S taken me all this time to see it and remember. I also don’t know why Eileen had to remind me of everything Jamie and I wrote to each other. I know. I reread it all after my surgery. But I go back and read it again. And the more I read, the better I remember everything. How funny she was. And honest. How I could tell her what I was really thinking. How she was the only person I could do that with.

  Maybe I was scared to look too closely, afraid I would discover someone I liked more than my supposed girlfriend, but it’s as if getting new lungs returned me to the person I was before I got so sick. But that’s not who I want to be. I know that statistically I’ve extended my life, but not by that much. Five years, maybe. Ten if I’m lucky. Eileen is right. I don’t want to waste another minute pretending. I want to know the scary bottomless, crazy feeling of real.

  I read through the messages I wrote with Jamie and I think, This is the person I want to be for whatever time I have left with these lungs.

  I ask Sharon to meet me at morning break. She’s studying for a quiz this afternoon in AP Spanish. Our grades don’t matter anymore, and still she’s got index cards with vocabulary on them that she’s shuffling through.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Nick?” I say.

  She looks up from her cards. “What do you mean? Who told you? No one knows except Hannah, and she swore—”

  “It doesn’t matter who told me.”

  “We broke up after your surgery. I swear. I told him it was wrong—” There are tears in her eyes. I’m not sure who they’re for.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have. Maybe you’ve wanted to break up with me for a long time and you just didn’t know how, especially after I got so sick.”

  The tears spill over and run down her cheeks. I realize—in the years I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her cry.

  “I don’t know what I wanted. I still don’t,” she says.

  “Maybe we’re both in the same boat. Maybe we have to figure this out by ourselves.”

  She looks away. “It’s impossible to imagine going to prom without you. Everyone will be so confused.”

  I can’t help laughing. Is this really her first thought? What everyone thinks? “Why don’t we not worry about what other people think and do what we want? Do you want to go to prom with Nick?”

  “I don’t know anymore. What do you want?”

  “I definitely don’t want to go to prom with Nick.”

  She laughs a little.

  “I think we’ve both been afraid of being alone and maybe we shouldn’t be so scared of that.”

  She narrows her eyes. “Are you having a weird medication mood swing?”

  “Not at all. It’s like my brain is f
inally clear. I feel like I pushed us to stay together because I was scared of looking too closely at my own life. I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m sorry. Now we can stop all that. We’re free.”

  It feels great, I have to admit.

  I think this was Eileen’s point all along. A little rebellion doesn’t have to be scary. It can also be freeing. My new exuberant mood is only shadowed by the fact that I haven’t seen Jamie all morning. I keep expecting to catch a glimpse of her in the hallway. I’m ready to run over, grab her by the hand, and tell her we need to talk.

  At lunch I ask her sullen-faced lunch table if they know where Jamie is, and none of them do. She’s not responding to texts, and Eileen hasn’t seen her since first-period life science.

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  Eileen rolls her eyes. “We don’t talk, remember?”

  Oh, right.

  The secretaries in the main office let me look up Jamie’s locker number and schedule, which surprises me at first, and then I remember, as student council president, I’m given certain privileges like this. I’m tardy to all my own classes because I spend all afternoon walking back and forth to Jamie’s locker.

  I need to talk to you, I text. Did you leave school or something? I can’t find you.

  I get a little frantic.

  This is what happens when you realize what you want in life and you’re also taking thirteen different mood-affecting medications. Everything is heightened.

  I need to find her.

  I check my phone every thirty seconds. Nothing.

  When the final bell for the day rings, I stand next to her locker for twenty minutes. “Who doesn’t come to their locker at the end of the day?” I ask Eileen, who has apparently missed her bus and needs a ride, because she’s appeared out of nowhere and is standing beside me, reading her phone.

  “You need professional help,” she says, rolling her eyes, forgetting that I do see a psychiatrist once a week. “Two days ago, you were all, ‘I have to make this work with Sharon.’ Why don’t you give your love life a rest for a while? Calm down a little.”

  “Because I can’t. When you don’t have as much time as other people, taking time off doesn’t make a lot of sense, okay? I need to find her.”