Just Remember to Breathe

  Just Remember to Breathe

  Charles Sheehan-Miles

  Cincinnatus Press

  Atlanta, Georgia

  CHAPTER ONE

  Broken Hearts and Coffee Mugs (Alex)

  From the moment I put my mom’s car in drive, with my coffee mug still on the roof, I could tell it was going to be a rough day. The mug, which had been a really cute gift from Dylan, went flying off the car and smashed into a million pieces. I gasped as I saw it spinning in the rearview mirror, falling in what seemed like slow motion until it hit the street, splattering my coffee and tiny pieces of porcelain across the road.

  My eyes pricked into painful tears. Even though it had been more than six months since we’d spoken, even though he’d broken my heart, even though he’d refused all contact and ignored my letters, it still hurt. I pulled to the side and took a deep breath. Dylan bought the mug from a vendor in Jerusalem, who had printed it right on the spot from a digital photo: the two of us together, holding each other as we stood waist deep in the Mediterranean Sea. In the photo, I had an astonishingly vacant expression on my face as we gazed into each others eyes. In retrospect, I looked, and felt, as if I was on drugs.

  Of course, Kelly had been telling me for six months it was time to get rid of the mug. Time to move on. Time to forget about Dylan.

  I took a deep breath. Kelly was right. Yes, we’d had some problems. Yes, I’d gotten drunk, and said some things I regretted. But not anything unforgiveable. Not anything which warranted him literally disappearing off the face of the planet.

  I looked in the mirror and quickly repaired the damage from my involuntary tears, then put the car into drive. In two days, I was flying back to New York and my second year in college, and I’d damned well get a new coffee mug. I would just add that to the length, overly detailed to-do list my mother had oh-so-helpfully provided, which was now sitting on the passenger seat of the car. New coffee mug. One that didn’t have my past stamped all over it. Kelly would be proud.

  I started to put the car into drive, but my phone chose that instant to ring, and I’m not exactly very good at ignoring it, so I left mom’s car in park and answered the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Alexandra Thompson?”

  “Yes, this is Alex,” I said.

  “Hello … this is Sandra Barnhardt from the financial aid office.”

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly tense. Some people you don’t want to get calls from the day before school starts, and the financial aid office was way up at the head of that list. “Um… what can I do for you?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. Professor Allan is going on leave of absence, so your work study assignment has been cancelled.”

  Indefinite leave of absence? My guess was, Professor Allan was going into rehab. I was pretty sure she was a cokehead my first day working for her. Whatever.

  “So, um… what exactly does that mean?”

  “Well… the good news is, we’ve got you a new assignment.”

  I couldn’t wait to hear this. No doubt I’d be scrubbing pots in one of the dining halls. I waited, and then waited some more. “Um… maybe you could tell me what the assignment is?”

  Sandra Barnhardt from the financial office coughed, possibly a little embarrassed.

  “This is all last minute, you understand. But our author-in-residence this year has requested two research assistants. You’ll be working for him.”

  “Oh… I see. Well, at least that sounds interesting.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “Are you already back on campus?”

  “No, I’m in San Francisco, I fly back day after tomorrow.”

  “Oh, well then. Stop by when you get back, and I’ll get you the information about the assignment.”

  “Great,” I said. “See you in a couple days.”

  Okay. I’ll admit. It really did sound interesting. Author-in-residence. What exactly did that mean, anyway? Whatever it was, it had to be more interesting than doing Professor Allan’s filing.

  Whatever. I’d better get moving, I thought, or the cops would be along to move me along. I’d been sitting in front of someone’s driveway for nearly ten minutes. I pulled the car out to go finish my errands. Time to get supplied for the new year. Starting with a new coffee mug.

  ***

  “Alex!”

  Kelly’s cry was somewhere around 125 decibels and somewhere in the upper reaches of pitch possible to the human voice. That was compounded by the fact that she was bouncing up and down, as if she had tiny pogo sticks, or possibly jackhammers, attached to her feet.

  She bounced over to me and grabbed me in a huge hug.

  “Oh. My. God!” she shouted. “The summer was so boring with you gone. We are going out for drink. Right. Now.”

  I blinked my eyes, then said, “Um… can I get my bags inside first?”

  I’d gotten up at 5 am to catch the first flight out of San Francisco. Going east meant I basically lost an entire day: the flight landed at 4 pm at JFK. Then, the long wait to get my bags, and wait for a taxi, and fight the ridiculous traffic. I’d let myself into the dorm at 7 pm.

  “Well, of course!” she said. “But we can’t lose any time!”

  “Kelly...”

  “I so have to tell you what happened with Josh. Yesterday he showed up here with no shirt on, and …”

  “Kelly.”

  “…He’s got a new tattoo. Which would be fine, except…”

  “Kelly!” I finally shouted.

  She stopped, as if I’d stuffed a plug in her mouth.

  “Please,” I said. “I’ve been up and traveling since 5 this morning.”

  “You don’t have to yell at me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just… can we go out tomorrow? Or at least let me get a nap first? I’m seriously exhausted, and I need a shower.”

  She grinned. “Gotcha, of course. Nap. Sure. But then we are so going out. You need to meet Bryan.”

  What?

  “Who is Bryan?”

  “Good God, Alex, weren’t you listening to anything I said?”

  She continued on as I dragged my bags inside. I loved Kelly. And she would have fit in great with my tribe of sisters back home. But God, couldn’t she just shut up for one second? I finally dumped my bags on the floor, then navigated around her. My bed, stripped since I’d flown home at the beginning of summer, looked very inviting. I collapsed, feeling the weight of my body just sink in. Kelly kept talking, but I was having trouble making sense of her words. I tried to nod at the appropriate times, but slowly the world faded to black. The last thought I remember before losing consciousness was regret that I’d lost that damned mug.

  ***

  Kelly woke me up an hour later and hustled me into the shower.

  “I refuse to take no for an answer,” she shouted. “It’s time we cured you of your asshole ex-boyfriend!”

  God, it was like she had the volume stuck on MAX.

  I don’t want to give the wrong impression of Kelly. Yes, she talks way too much. She’s a girly-girl, in ways I’ve never been. Her side of the room is disgustingly pink, decorated with Twilight and Hunger Games posters, and she acts as if she’s had more experience with guys than one of the girls posting on the back pages of the Village Voice.

  My side of the room is mostly stacked in books. The truth is, I’m sort of a geek, and proud of it.

  Kelly, though: she’s shy as hell, and overcompensates by being super gregarious. She charges into the center of parties, dances like a wild woman, and does everything she can to drag me out of my shell.

  Problem is, sometimes I don’t really want to come out.

  Once I got out of the shower and changed int
o a pair of black skinny jeans and a long sleeved tee, she led me out. There was a party somewhere, she said, and we were going to go find it.

  A Bad Idea (Dylan)

  Coming here was a bad idea.

  If I could go back up the chain of “if-only’s” back to the source, I suppose the reason I was starting as a student at Columbia University is because one day when I was twelve Billy Naughton gave me a beer. Billy was a year older than me, and might have been a bad influence, if my parents hadn’t been somewhat worse. As it was, the effects of alcohol held little mystery for me, at least as viewed from the outside.

  Viewed from the inside, though… that was another thing.

  One thing led to another, and one drink led to another, and on my sixteenth birthday I dropped out of high school. Of course, by that time, Dad had left, and Mom had cleaned up her act. She laid down the law. If I wasn’t going to school, I could just get out. She wasn’t going to have her child turn out like her husband.

  I went couch surfing. I slept in the park a couple times. I got a job, lost it, got another one, lost that one too. And the damnedest thing was, Mom was right. I went back and registered for school. Then I showed up on her doorstep, showed her my registration and schedule, and she wept and let me back in the apartment.

  A lot of other things happened since, of course, including me getting blown up by some hajis in Afghanistan. But I don’t talk about that stuff so much. If you want to know, just read the papers.

  Screw that. The papers never covered it right anyway. If you really want to know what it was like, walk into your kitchen right now. Grab a handful of sand. Close your eyes, stick your hand in the garbage disposal, and turn it on. That should give you a pretty good idea of what Afghanistan is like.

  Anyway, long story short, Columbia apparently has a soft spot for reformed dropouts and combat veterans. So here I was, and it was the first day of classes, and I was pent up, tense as all hell, because the one person in the world I didn’t want to see, the one person I wanted to see the most, all at the same time, well, she was here.

  Thankfully, University Housing got me in with a couple of graduate engineering students. I don’t think I could have stood living in the dorms with a bunch of eighteen year old freshmen right out of high school. I was only two years older, but two years was a world of difference. Especially when you’d seen your best friends killed right before your eyes. When I got in town, I met my new roommates: Aiden, a bookish 24 year old mechanical engineering PhD candidate, and Ron, who introduced himself as “Ron White. Chemical engineering,” then disappeared back into his room.

  Perfect.

  So here I was, limping across the street like an old man, my cane helping me stay upright. Some asshole yuppie bumped into me, in a hurry to get to his business meeting or his mistress or whatever the fuck it was he was after. Whatever it was, it precluded any common courtesy.

  “Watch where the fuck you’re going, asshole!” I shouted after him.

  I was barely halfway across the street when the light changed. Jesus. Talk about humiliating. Most of the cars waited patiently, but a cabbie driven by what looked like the cousin of the guy who blew away Roberts kept honking his horn at me. I gave him the finger and kept going.

  Finally. Somewhere on the third floor of this building was my destination.

  I was early, but that was for the best. For one thing, I’d gotten lost several times already today, and was late to my first two classes. This, however, I could not be late for. Not if I wanted to be able to pay for college. Of course, the VA was footing most of the bill, but even with the GI Bill a college like Columbia cost a hell of a lot. It still didn’t even seem real that I was here. Like I really even belonged in college, much less in an Ivy. But every time I heard my Dad’s cheerful voice in my head saying I was a little shit who would never amount to anything, I pushed forward.

  The elevator, made sometime in the nineteenth century, finally made its way to the ground floor and I boarded. Most of the other students in the building were using the stairs, but I had to take this route if I wanted to get there before sunset.

  I patiently waited. First floor. Second floor. It seemed like the elevator took five minutes for each short trip. It finally stopped on the third floor, and I pushed my way between the other people crowded in the elevator.

  Out in the hall, it was crowded. Jesus. It was going to take a lot of getting used to being here. I looked around, trying to spot room numbers. 324. 326. Okay. I was oriented. I turned in the opposite direction, looking for room 301.

  I finally found it, tucked into a dark corner at the opposite side of the building. The hall down here was dark, one of the fluorescents burnt out. I reached for the door.

  Locked. I checked my phone. I was fifteen minutes early. Okay, I could live with that. Better than fifteen minutes late. Slowly, I slid my book bag to the floor, and tried to figure out how to get myself down there without ending up sideways or upside down or something. I inched my way down, leaving my gimp leg slack and in front of me. Halfway down, I felt a sharp pain and muttered a curse. I put my hands to my side, palms flat, and let myself drop.

  Seated. Now the only trick would be getting back up. Carefully, I kneaded the muscles above my right knee. The doctors at Walter Reed said it might be years before I regained full function. If ever. In the meantime, I went to physical therapy three times a week, took lots of pain killers, and kept going.

  I sighed. It had been a long, stressful day. I kept wondering if I should have stayed home, waited another year before trying to venture out. Doctor Kyne had urged me to go.

  You’ll never recover if you stay locked in at home. He wasn’t talking about the leg. Doctor Kyne was my psychiatrist at the VA in Atlanta.

  I suppose he knew what he was talking about. In the meantime, just take it a day at a time, an hour at a time, one minute at a time. This moment. Just get through now. Then the next now. I took out a book, a beat up, nearly shredded paperback Roberts loaned me before he got blown away. The Stand by Stephen King.

  It’s the best fucking book ever, Roberts had said.

  I’m not so sure it was all that, but I had to agree it was pretty good. I was buried in the midst of reading about the outbreak of the super-flu when I heard footsteps coming up the hall. They were clicking… a girl, wearing heels or wedges or something. I forced myself not to look up. I didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway. I wasn’t feeling very friendly. And besides, my instinct was to watch everyone, to keep my eyes on pockets and loose clothes and mounds of trash beside the road and anything else that might represent danger. The challenge was to not look. The challenge was to live my life just like everyone else. And everyone else didn’t look at approaching girls as a source of danger.

  What can I say? I was wrong.

  “Oh, my God,” I heard a murmur. Something inside me recognized the tone and timbre of that voice, and I looked up, my face suddenly flushing as my I felt my pulse in my forehead.

  Forgetting about the gimp leg, I tried to jump to my feet. Instead, I ended getting halfway up, then the leg gave out. As if it was cut off, not there. I fell down, hard on my right side, and let out a shout when the sharp, tearing pain shot up my right leg, straight up my spine.

  “Son of a bitch!” I muttered. I pushed myself more or less upright, then put a hand to the wall and the other hand on my cane and tried to lift myself.

  The girl of my nightmares darted forward and tried to help me get up.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said.

  She jerked back as if I’d slapped her.

  Finally, I was in a standing position. The pain didn’t go down, and I was sweating, hard. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t.

  “Dylan,” she said, her voice quavering.

  I grunted something. Not sure what, but it wasn’t terribly civilized.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  I finally looked up. Oh shit, that was a mistake. Her green eyes, which had always caught me like a
fucking whirlpool, were huge, like pools. The faintest scent of strawberry drifted from her, making me lightheaded, and her body still arrested attention: petite, curved hips and breasts; as always, she was like a fantasy.

  “I’m waiting for an appointment,” I said.

  “Here?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Work study assignment,” I said.

  She started to laugh, a bitter, sad laugh. I’d heard that laugh before. “You have got to be kidding me,” she said.

  Nothing significant at all (Alex)

  I was late when I got to the Arts and Sciences building, and ran up the six flights of step to the third floor, knowing the elevator would take forever. I checked my phone … it was three o’clock. I needed to get there right now.

  I counted down the room numbers, finally reaching a dark hall. The light was out at the end of the hall, casting the area in not quite darkness. There it was, room 301. Next to the door, a student sat, his head resting on his fist, face turned away from me. He was reading a book.

  I took a breath. His hair reminded me of Dylan’s, but shorter, of course. That, and his arms were… well, very muscular, and he was tanned. This guy looked like someone out of a catalog. Not that I went fainting over guys with big biceps, but seriously, a girl can look, right?

  As I approached though, I felt my heart begin to thump in my chest. Because the closer I got, the more he looked like Dylan. But what would he be doing here? Dylan, who had broken my heart, then disappeared as if he’d never existed, his email deleted, Facebook page closed, Skype account gone. Dylan, who had erased himself from my life, all because of a stupid conversation that shouldn’t have happened.

  I slowed down. It couldn’t be. It just… couldn’t be.

  He took a breath and shifted position slightly, and I gasped. Because sitting in front of me was the boy who broke my heart. Quietly, I said, “Oh, my God.”

  He jumped to his feet. Or rather tried to. He got about halfway up, and a look of excruciating pain swept across his face and he fell down, hard. I almost cried out, as he tried to force his way back up. I started forward to help, and he said his first words to me in six months: “Don’t touch me.”