Free What We Lost in the Dark by Jacquelyn Mitchard

doesn’t like to hear that your boyfriend is your breath. They want to still pretend they come first with you, like when you were six. That I sometimes did feel that way made me all the crankier.
    “Aside, obviously, from you guys,” I said. “I would give my life for you, Mom, or Angela, but I wouldn’t expect you to do the same …”
    “Oh,” Jackie said. “That’s droll.”
    I didn’t even know what “droll” meant.
    “But I have XP, too. It would be a waste of your … whatever. Your protective heroism.”
    Jackie slammed the salad bowl down on the table so hard that the salad dressings sloped to the sides of their containers like the water around those little ships in bottles. She clearly had been saving up for a fight since I’d flipped out in the street and stolen the poncho. If I went along with it, which I’ddecided I would, it would be a doozy. How patient and gentle my mother could be with some smelly woodsy drunk who’d split his head open trying to light a cigar while standing on a fire hydrant. But with me … She said, “Pardon me for my naïve belief that even people with chronic illnesses are worth saving, even risking your life for. If you love them. I’m in a medical field, you see.”
    I shrugged. “I guess it goes with the territory.”
    “And as for those old people? They took vows. I’m not saying a healthy person should take his own life because his partner is dying, but they took those vows seriously. Most people don’t.”
    By most people, she meant my father.
    Sometimes it’s just satisfying to piss your mother off, so she doesn’t get the idea that because you have a handicap and need to be around her most of the time, you’re best friends or something. My mother and I already got along uncomfortably well—although all I would need to do was to tip my hand about free diving and all those special moments would swiftly be Xed out and, almost-college freshman or not, I would find myself confined to base camp.
    Parkour was one thing. The previous night, Rob and I had watched a documentary about free diving in which divers sawed through foot-thick ice in Greenland to erect a little teepee thing that they used as their dive platform. Since she’d personally held together the edges of bellies torn out by the actions of people who actually had gone ballistic, Jackie didn’t appreciate that term much either, so I used it.
    I said, “Don’t go ballistic. That kind of love just seems obsessive.”
    “You’re not a mother,” said my mother in a voice that was too quiet.
    “And those old people, they … you know, they left the heat on. Which, why would you do if you were going to off yourself? They semi-decomposed and wrecked the whole cabin. Now their kids will never even be able to go there and remember the happy times. They’ll have to burn the place.”
    “You’re all heart, Allie,” Mom said. “And I don’t know that I appreciate this level of dinner conversation with Angela here. In fact, I’m not that hungry anymore either.”
    She got up and went upstairs to her office, slamming the door.
    I got up and grabbed my backpack, filled with diving gear. I called Rob to pick me up and slammed the door experimentally a couple of times to see if my mother noticed. I’d won, but I felt as though I’d lost. Angela got up gratefully because she hated tofu and pea pods.
    I went outside to wait. We were to meet Wesley at ten o’clock, when he finished Pilates or Sufi dancing or whatever he was teaching that week, so we had time to kill. Rob finally showed up, shortly before my lashes froze and broke off in little black commas of ice.
    We drove through town, all festive for Christmas, just four days away, looking as though someone had salted the whole place with a gigantic shaker filled with white twinkle lights.
    We went to Gitchee Gumee Pizza to eat a meat lover’s with extra onion—and the thought of how much it would piss off my mother was as much of a delight