Free How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

St. Maarten if you do finish the class,” my father says. “Otherwise it’ll just be me and Sage diving, while you and your mom play tennis.”
    “Don’t push her, Robert,” my mother says. “She knows what she can do.”
    “I’m not. I’m just stating the facts.”
    “Anyway,” says my mother, “what’s so bad about tennis?”
    “Nothing,” my father says. “But it doesn’t have quite the appeal, for some people, of seeing a coral reef with triggerfish and orange spiny tangs and things of that nature.”
    “It’s up to you, Maddy,” my mother says. “We’re not going to make you dive if don’t want to.”
    I tell them I’ll think about it, and that seems to satisfy them. We get up and they hug me goodnight. Then my mother goes up to check on Sage, who is undoubtedly sitting in his room thinking about Isabel, and my father kisses me on the top of my head and goes into his study.
    When I climb the stairs, I see a line of light at the bottom of my brother’s door. From inside I can hear the rise and fall of his voice and my mother’s. I stand still outside the door, listening. “It’s not my responsibility,” I hear my brother say, and my mother says something too quiet for me to make out. Very faintly, from the crack at the bottom of the door, come the fumes of cigarette smoke. I imagine them both in there smoking, my mom trying to blow it out the window so as not to smoke up the carpets and furniture, Sage not caring. I’m not much of a smoker. Once or twice I had puffs off Isabel’s cigarettes in the garage during band-practice afternoons, but it was never as great as she made it look. Sometimes my mom would come out and smoke a thin cigarette of her own, sitting there on the car bumper and telling us about high school and old boyfriends, stories that tended to embarrass me. But Isabel laughed like my mom was another high school girl, and my mom, who always secretly seemed to distrust Sage’s girl-friends, liked Isabel in return.
    Finally I hear Sage tell my mom he’s going to bed, and I skeet off down the hall before I am discovered. In my bedroom the fish are awake, making their rounds. The pink anemone is shut tight, and the purple one waves smoothly. The loaches are mouthing algae from the side of the freshwater tank. Beside them, my science-experiment fish seem to be sleeping in their plastic containers. Even when they’re still I could watch them all night—the red-purple of their bodies, the tiny flick of their gills. The control-group fish look particularly tired, their fins not even finning. Perhaps their natural aggressions have exhausted them. I’ve tried to learn everything they can teach me about the chemistry of anger, what makes it ebb and flow, how it can be controlled. Twice a day I give them their special food and make behavioral observations and take their blood pressure. It’s easier than you might think to take the blood pressure of a fish. Hewlett-Packard makes a sensor that can feel the force and rate of their pulse through the water. My father likes to ask me where’s the little cuff, where’s the little stethoscope. He thinks it’s a big joke that some fighting fish seem to die of heart attacks from so much aggression, but it’s no joke if you’re a fighting fish.
    To be professional I tried not to name my science experiment fish, but then I realized the coincidence of there being twenty-six of them, one for each letter of the alphabet, and now they all have names. Amy, Ben, Carl, Dan, and so forth. I won’t, of course, use any of their names in my report; they all have scientific tags like “Control 17.” The Isabel fish is in the experimental group, fed a calming drug a couple times a day. She has a blue mark at the center of her dorsal fin, a distinction I happen to know is very rare in members of her sex and species. The Sage fish is a control, reddish-brown in color, mean and small with high blood pressure. At times, when I have been particularly mad