Free Night Owls by Jenn Bennett Page A

against cement as someone approached, and before I could gather the strength to look up, a familiar voice lured me back to the present.

9
    JACK PULLED ME AWAY FROM MY PILE OF MORTIFICATION and into the lengthening shadow of a nearby tree.
    “Sit,” he instructed, taking my red bag as my shoulders slid down the bark.
    Pinpricks radiated through my hands and feet, and my head was still buzzing. He asked me a question, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words. Was I crying, or were my eyes watering from
throwing up? I wasn’t sure.
    The next thing I knew, Jack was squatting next to me and giving me instructions. “Slow breath in through your nose, long breath out of your mouth.” He repeated it several times until
I finally got the hang of it. “That’s it. Keep it up.”
    Slowly,
slowly
, the buzzing finally stopped. The world inflated back to normal size, and right in the center of it blinked Jack’s big brown eyes.
    “You with me?” he asked in a voice edged with concern.
    I nodded and wiped my face on my coat sleeve. My mouth. So gross.
    He uncapped a half-filled plastic bottle of water he’d been holding. “I don’t have any exotic diseases, promise. Swish and spit, preferably over there.”
    I leaned as far away as I could and rinsed my mouth. A couple of students striding down the sidewalk gave me the stink eye. Great. Hope they weren’t with Simon’s group.
    I rested awhile, eyes trained on the grass in front of me, until my stomach stopped cramping and I felt somewhat normal. He stared at me the entire time, but he didn’t say anything. I was
sort of thankful for that.
    I finally gulped down more water and held up the bottle. “Guess this is mine now.” My voice sounded scratchy. Throat hurt, too.
    He shifted out of his squat and sat back in the grass, balancing his elbows on his bent knees, and handed me the cap.
    “Thanks. Where’d you learn that breathing trick?”
    “Years of meditation. Works, right?”
    It really did. I tried a few more repetitions, just to be safe. “Why are you here?”
    “If you keep posting vague hints about where you are, I’m going to look for you.”
    “Is that a threat?”
    “Yes.”
    I pretended to be annoyed, but truth be told, I wanted him to find me.
    Jack crossed his arms over his knees. He was wearing faded olive-drab jeans and the vintage black leather jacket. Just under the jacket’s sleeve, carved wooden beads encircled his right
wrist, along with a crisscrossed stack of braided-leather bracelets and cords. “You want to share what brought all this on?” he asked.
    “Bad shellfish.”
    He squinted his disbelief. “Must’ve been really bad to make you cry like that.”
    “What do you want me to say? I’m a big coward, okay?” I sagged against the tree and sighed. “I’d never seen a dead body before. Not a human one, anyway. Unless you
count mummies in the de Young Museum.”
    “Not the same.”
    I appreciated the reassurance, but the whole thing was humiliating. “Go on—tell me how I made fun of you for being squeamish about dissecting a fetal pig, and now here I am, falling
apart.”
    “Are you kidding? My eighth-grade teacher died when I was fourteen—that was the first dead body I saw. I bawled my eyes out in front of the entire funeral home when I saw her in the
coffin. Then I did exactly what you did in the bushes back there, only I did it all over one of the standing floral displays. All my classmates were there, and my ball-less display of emotion
spread around school like wildfire. Took me a year to live that down.”
    “I think you’re exaggerating to make me feel better.”
    “I’m not, but is it working?”
    I took another swig of water. “Besides, it’s different. This is what I thought I wanted to do with my life. And I can’t illustrate how the lungs function if I can’t even
look
at lungs. It’s not like I can draw from other people’s illustrations.”
    “Why not?”
    “Do you think Albrecht Dürer