Free How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer Page A

at my brother, I’ve been tempted to give the Sage fish little zaps with an electrode. As a scientist, though, I have refrained.
    I roll up my sleeve, put an arm down in the marine tank, and tear off a leaf from one of the underwater plants. After rinsing it in a stream of distilled water, I use it to stroke the backs of the experimental fish. No one pets fish, I know, but these fish seem to enjoy it. It calms
me,
anyhow. I pity these fish, them not knowing what’s going on and being in isolation except during the aggression trials. As I stroke them I think about the girl in the red bathing suit, the look she gave me as I lay coughing on the pool deck, and then later, in the locker room, how she said in her Romanian accent that she hoped I was
ollright.
That is the normal way of things, trying to make a person feel less bad about a stupid thing they’ve done, as opposed to Sage’s way, which is to make you feel worse.
    He wasn’t always that way, particularly when Isabel was around. One time the two of them caught me singing “Louie Louie” in the garage when I thought I was alone. Isabel laughed, but not in a mean way. She had her electric bass there in the garage beside Sage’s drum kit, and she picked it up and asked what other songs I knew and did I want to sing while she played. She was like that, taking something I considered embarrassing and trying to make it into something cool. She said I had a retro voice like girl bands in the sixties, and she convinced Sage to play the drums while she and I belted out a couple of verses of “Respect.” We sounded good. Even Sage said so. Nowadays he would sooner spit in my face than let me sing with him. I keep telling myself he cannot be angry at me forever, though maybe I am wrong.
    The next morning at the breakfast table, Sage does not appear. My father, eating oatmeal with honey, tells me Sage has one of his headaches and that I’ll have to catch the bus to school. Sage gets random migraines that lay him out flat for days.
    As I eat my Cheerios I feel bad for my brother, even though he’s been mean to me for months. Being sick is something he and I have tended to do together. Last spring, when neither of us could imagine anything like the accident ever happening in our lives, we both came down with mononucleosis. We spent a week at home by ourselves, ordering videos our parents would never have let us watch and shooting Chloraseptic into each other’s throats. Years before that, we had the chicken pox together. Sage made an oxygen chamber for us out of blankets and couch cushions and told me I was not allowed to leave. We stayed in there for hours, watching cartoons and sweating through our fevers, while our mother brought us soup and juice and Children’s Tylenol. This was in our house in Baltimore, with one very small room for both of us. We slept in bunk beds and played with the same toys and even wore some of the same clothes.
    When I finish breakfast my father asks me to take Sage some Imitrex and a glass of water. I go up to his room but he’s in the bathroom, so I leave the pills and water on his desk. As I’m leaving I see Isabel’s bass lying beside the bed. Her parents let Sage keep it after she died, which makes me think they must have known how much she loved him. I pick it up and touch the smooth neck and the polished black body. The name ISABEL is painted on the bass in silver paint, my brother’s work, the letters long and crooked and childlike. I pull the strap over my head, feeling the weight of the bass in my shoulders. Then the bathroom door opens. Sage comes out in just pajama pants, his hair wild. When he sees me with the bass he crosses the room in three swift steps, grabs the bass by the neck, and jerks the strap from around my shoulders.
    “Don’t
ever
come in here,” he says, his ribs pumping, his eyes glassed with hate and headache. “Get out, or I’ll fucking kill you.”
    I go to the door. “There’s some medicine on the