Hold My Breath(14)

“It’s always easier to walk around life believing in bullshit,” my uncle says. I twist my neck, my face flat against my bed, and I stare at him. He’s not looking at me anymore, instead lost back in one of his projects.

“What time are we leaving in the morning?” he asks, his hands holding tweezers steady while his neck cranes forward, his eyeglass already back at home between his cheekbone and brow.

“Five,” I say.

“Dibs on showering first,” he says.

I lie there for the next several hours and watch my uncle work. He hardly moves, and I’m inspired by his level of concentration. I don’t think I have ever focused on something so minute—on the details and the parts. Maybe if I did I’d start to understand how things work. Maybe I need to take his magnifying glass and press it against pieces of my life.

And maybe if I hold it there long enough under the sun, I can just set all this shit on fire.





Chapter Four





Maddy





Will didn’t make practice today. Morning and afternoon.

It’s all I focused on during my entire swim. I was off. Everything about me was off. The fact that Will wasn’t here threw me off, which is screwing with me even more because I didn’t really want him here in the first place for that very reason. His presence was supposed to throw me, not his absence.

I asked my dad where Will was, but he didn’t have a real answer.

“He said something about estate papers, having to drive his uncle to the city. I questioned it at first, but his uncle backed it up. Seems legit,” my dad said.

That’s the thing, though. I never thought it could be anything more than something simple until my dad put that idea in my head. Then I lost focus. As much as I’ve tried to pretend that I don’t think about Will Hollister, because it’s a direct line to thinking about Evan, I do think about him. I have for years. Every time I read something about the State swimmer who blew it his senior year—the guy who drove his car into a tree just outside the city because he has, as the newspapers put it, a death wish—I thought about Will.

And I worried.

And then I hated him…just a little. He was the one spared, and here he was—wasting it. The last time I saw him in the news, in a short local spot that referenced the talented former swimmer and brother of the late, great Evan Hollister, he looked like a bum. His unshaven face poked out of an ill-fitting suit while his uncle walked him up some courthouse steps to deal with an extreme DUI. That was a little over a year ago, and I swore I would quit thinking about him, quit worrying.

He’s still in there, though. He’s always been in my head, rattling around. This nagging worry, this source of resentment—a symbol for all of my worst parts. It wasn’t fair that I begrudged him for his self-destruction. He was suffering, too. I just hated him for making it all so public. I didn’t want to see it, because no matter how much I worried about Will, in the end, all I was left doing was mourning Evan.

Yet here I am—worrying about him again.

I pull my phone into my lap and lean back into the deck chair, looking out on the quiet pool lanes of my parents’ swim club. It’s peaceful here at night. I like the quiet.

I’ve been waiting for Will to come back for about an hour, but now, with each minute that passes, I begin to feel more and more pathetic. It’s clear that he wasn’t lying. At least, his uncle is gone, so it seems reasonable that they did, in fact, go somewhere together. I still crave proof, though.

I send a short text to my friend to ease my whirling mind.

I think I need to get a job.

I wait for Holly to respond, and when my phone buzzes with her call, I’m happy. She speaks the second I answer.

“Why would you want to do something crazy like that?” she asks. I can hear the beeping noises around the nurses’ station behind her. I miss those sounds.

“Because…” I sigh, sliding lower in my lounger, pulling my knees up and swaying them side-to-side. “I have too much idle time. I swim all morning, then I work out. Then I watch shows about tiny homes, tree houses, biker life…Neilson should really hire me. I’d be a great ratings representative.”

“I don’t think Neilson ratings work like that,” she says, stopping to crunch through a snack.

“You on a break?” I ask.

“Yeah. Slow night. Not that I’m complaining,” she says.

Our conversation goes quiet for a second. It feels nice, like I’m sitting there next to her, watching people so we can make up stories about them later. Holly and I are comfortable with our quiet. Introverted soul mates.

“So…” she says finally. She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to. I know everything the so implies. Holly knows my sad story, and she was with me when my dad called to tell me about Will coming to train. Holly was the only person I could truly rant to and not sound like a heartless bitch. I told her that I didn’t want to see his face because it reminded me of Evan’s, and that I hoped he washed out right away or changed his mind. She never once judged.

“He’s still here,” I say.

She crunches something again. It sounds like celery.

“Oh,” she says, through a full mouth.

More silence.

“I’m actually at the pool right now waiting for him. He never showed today, and…”