Free How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer Page B

desk.”
    He gives me a shove toward the hall. When he slams the door behind me, the whole wall shakes.
    I go into my bathroom, close the door, and sit down on the edge of the bathtub. Though I don’t have time to cry, I cry anyway. My father says goodbye to me through the bathroom door, and I say goodbye back, trying to make my voice sound normal. To my surprise, he buys it. I wait until I hear the garage door go down, and then I wash my face, say goodbye to the fish, and get my books and lunch money. I am late again. I have to run through the snow to catch the bus, and along the way my shoe comes off and I take one cold wet step. Everyone finds this hilarious, even the bus driver.
    School offers me no comfort today. In History we watch a movie about the Civil War, with cheerful fife music and reenactments of people being shot to pieces. During Biology there’s a fire drill. We all stand outside shivering for half an hour. In Math I find out that the two sisters I usually eat lunch with, Salma and Meena Padmanabhan, are out of school for a Hindu holiday. So at lunchtime I go down to the loading dock near Auto Shop to smoke a crushed cigarette stolen from Sage’s pack. It’s bent at the end and smells like raisins. I try to light it with someone’s thrown-away Bic, but the lighter won’t stay lit and the cigarette’s too wet and stale to do anything. I sit down on a milk crate and watch the wind blow dead leaves and bits of hard dirty snow.
    This afternoon there are only two other kids out smoking: Mike Milldow, a tall stringy kid in a plaid flannel shirt, and Althea London, a girl with chopped black hair and a purple eyebrow ring. Althea, a senior, used to be friends with Isabel. She’s talking to Mike about some band called Manila, which she likes and he hates. “They’re even worse than Hangtooth,” Mike says, and Althea says, “Hangtooth rocks.” She blows smoke and flicks ashes in my direction, her eyes narrow and green and ringed with black makeup.
    I know she’s thinking about Isabel when she looks at me, maybe wishing it had been me who died instead. Althea was one of the last people to see Isabel alive. She’d been with us earlier that night, when we sneaked into the backyard of a new house and used the hot tub. It was Ty Thibodeaux’s idea, a friend of my brother’s. Ty worked weekends as a hot tub installer and knew where all the tubs were, the places where people were building houses on the north side of town. Sometimes he got the tubs hooked up weeks before the owners moved in.
    I would never have gone along if I hadn’t been standing around in the garage with Sage and Isabel and Althea London when Ty drove up in his old Buick. He and a couple of other guys came into the garage to fool around with Sage’s equipment and smoke cigarettes. There was talk about going to check out a new hot tub. Everyone was excited except me. I’d been having a great time there in the garage, and now everyone was going to leave. I turned to go inside, and that was when Isabel said, “Hey, Maddy, you can come if you want.”
    “No she can’t,” Sage said, looking up from his drums.
    “Sure she can,” Isabel said.
    “Yeah, why not?” said Althea London, who had no reason to hate me then.
    “She’s just a kid,” Sage said. “She can’t.”
    “Go get your jacket, Maddy,” Isabel said, and that seemed to settle it. If Sage had been driving he probably would have fought harder, but this was before the black Pinto. So I ran inside to get a suit and towel, and then we were off, me and Sage and Isabel and Althea London, all piled in Isabel’s Toyota, Isabel singing along with the radio. I felt lucky and cool and older, and a little nervous. I wished Sage would stop sulking and act like it was okay for me to be there. He sat in the passenger seat with his feet up on the dashboard, scowling.
    “Sit normal,” Isabel said, but he refused.
    We followed Ty past broken-down farms and wooded hills and a water