Just Remember to Breathe (2 page)

When I got in town, I met my new roommates: Aiden, a bookish twenty-four-year-old mechanical engineering PhD candidate, and Ron, who introduced himself as “Ron White. Chemical engineering,” then disappeared back into his room.

Perfect.

So here I was, limping across the street like an old man, my cane helping me stay upright. Some asshole yuppie bumped into me, in a hurry to get to his business meeting or his mistress or whatever the fuck it was he was after. Whatever it was, it precluded any common courtesy.

“Watch where the fuck you’re going, asshole!” I shouted after him.
 

I was barely halfway across the street when the light changed. Jesus. Talk about humiliating. Most of the cars waited patiently, but a cabbie who looked like the cousin of the guy who blew away Roberts kept honking his horn at me. I gave him the finger and kept going.

Finally.
Somewhere on the third floor of this building was my destination.

I was early, but that was for the best. For one thing, I’d gotten lost several times already today, and was late to my first two classes. This, however, I could not be late for. Not if I wanted to be able to pay for college. Of course, the VA was footing most of the bill, but even with the GI Bill a college like Columbia cost a hell of a lot. It still didn’t even seem real that I was here. Like I really even belonged in college, much less in an Ivy. But every time I heard my Dad’s cheerful voice in my head saying I was a little shit who would never amount to anything, I pushed forward.
 

The elevator, made sometime in the nineteenth century, finally made its way to the ground floor and I boarded. Most of the other students in the building were using the stairs, but I had to take this route if I wanted to get there before sunset.

I patiently waited. First floor. Second floor. It seemed like the elevator took five minutes for each short trip. It finally stopped on the third floor, and I pushed my way between the other people crowded in the elevator.

Out in the hall, it was crowded.
Jesus.
It was going to take a lot of getting used to being here. I looked around, trying to spot room numbers. 324. 326. Oriented, I turned in the opposite direction, looking for room 301.

I finally found it, tucked into a dark corner at the opposite side of the building. The hall down here was dark, one of the fluorescents burnt out. I reached for the door.

Locked. I checked my phone. I was fifteen minutes early. I could live with that. Better than fifteen minutes late. Slowly, I slid my book bag to the floor, and tried to figure out how to get myself down there without ending up sideways or upside down or something. I inched my way down, leaving my gimp leg slack and in front of me. Halfway down, I felt a sharp pain and muttered a curse. I put my hands to my sides, palms flat, and let myself drop.

Seated. Now the only trick would be getting back up. Carefully, I kneaded the muscles above my right knee. The doctors at Walter Reed said it might be years before I regained full function. If ever. In the meantime, I went to physical therapy three times a week, took lots of painkillers, and kept going.
 

I sighed. It had been a long, stressful day. I kept wondering if I should have stayed home, waited another year before trying to venture out. Doctor Kyne had urged me to go.
 

You’ll never recover if you stay locked in at home.
He wasn’t talking about the leg. Doctor Kyne was my psychiatrist at the VA in Atlanta.

I suppose he knew what he was talking about. In the meantime, just take it a day at a time, an hour at a time, one minute at a time. This moment. Just get through now. Then the next now. I took out a book, a beat-up, nearly shredded paperback Roberts loaned me before he got blown away.
The Stand
by Stephen King.
 

It’s the best fucking book ever,
Roberts had said.
 

I’m not so sure it was all that, but I had to agree it was pretty good. I was buried in the midst of reading about the outbreak of the super-flu when I heard footsteps coming up the hall. They were clicking. A girl, wearing heels or wedges or something. I forced myself not to look up. I didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway. I wasn’t feeling very friendly. And besides, my instinct was to watch everyone, to keep my eyes on pockets and loose clothes and mounds of trash beside the road and anything else that might represent danger. The challenge was to
not
look. The challenge was to live my life just like everyone else. And everyone else didn’t look at approaching girls as a source of danger.

What can I say? I was wrong.

“Oh, my God,” I heard a murmur. Something inside me recognized the tone and timbre of that voice, and I looked up, my face suddenly flushing as I felt my pulse in my forehead.
 

Forgetting about the gimp leg, I tried to jump to my feet. Instead, I ended getting halfway up, then the leg gave out. As if it was cut off, not there. I fell down, hard on my right side, and let out a shout when the sharp, tearing pain shot up my right leg, straight up my spine.
 

“Son of a bitch!” I muttered.
 

I pushed myself more or less upright, then put a hand to the wall and the other hand on my cane and tried to lift myself.
 

The girl of my nightmares darted forward and tried to help me get up.

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

She jerked back as if I’d slapped her.
 

Finally, I was in a standing position. The pain didn’t go down, and I was sweating, hard. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t.

“Dylan,” she said, her voice quavering.

I grunted something. Not sure what, but it wasn’t terribly civilized.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

I finally looked up. Oh shit, that was a mistake. Her green eyes, which had always caught me like a fucking whirlpool, were huge, like pools. The faintest scent of strawberry drifted from her, making me lightheaded, and her body still arrested attention: petite, curved hips and breasts; as always, she was like a fantasy.

“I’m waiting for an appointment,” I said.

“Here?” she asked.

I nodded. “Work-study assignment,” I said.

She started to laugh, a bitter, sad laugh. I’d heard that laugh before. “You have got to be kidding me,” she said.

Nothing significant at all (Alex)

I was late when I got to the Arts and Sciences building, and ran up the six flights of steps to the third floor, knowing the elevator would take forever. I checked my phone. It was three o’clock. I needed to get there right now.

I counted down the room numbers, finally reaching a dark hall. The light was out at the end of the hall, casting the area in not quite darkness. There it was, room 301. Next to the door, a student sat, his head resting on his fist, face turned away from me. He was reading a book.

I took a breath. His hair reminded me of Dylan’s, but shorter, of course. That, and his arms were… well, very muscular, and he was tanned. This guy looked like someone out of a catalog. Not that I went fainting over guys with big biceps, but seriously, a girl can look, right?

As I approached though, I felt my heart begin to thump in my chest. Because the closer I got, the more he looked like Dylan. But what would
he
be doing
here?
Dylan, who had broken my heart, then disappeared as if he’d never existed, his email deleted, Facebook page closed, Skype account gone. Dylan, who had erased himself from my life all because of a stupid conversation that shouldn’t have happened.

I slowed down. It couldn’t be. It just… couldn’t be.

He took a breath and shifted position slightly, and I gasped. Because sitting in front of me was the boy who’d broken my heart. Quietly, I said, “Oh, my God.”

He jumped to his feet. Or rather tried to. He got about halfway up, and a look of excruciating pain swept across his face and he fell down, hard. I almost cried out, as he tried to force his way back up. I started forward to help, and he said his first words to me in six months: “Don’t touch me.”

Typical. I had to stuff down the hurt that threatened to burst to the surface.

He looked… different. Indefinably different. We hadn’t seen each other face to face in almost two years, not since the summer before my senior year in high school. He’d filled out, of course. In all the right places. His arms, which I vividly remembered being held in, had doubled in size. The sleeves of his tee shirt looked like they were going to burst. I guess the Army does that for you. His eyes were still the same piercing blue. For a second I met them, then looked away. I didn’t want to get trapped in those eyes. And damn it, he still smelled the same. A hint of smoke and fresh ground coffee. Sometimes when I walked into a coffee shop in New York, I’d get an overwhelming sensation that he was there, just from the smell. Sometimes memory sucks.

“Dylan,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m waiting for an appointment.”

“
Here?”
I asked. That was crazy.

He shrugged. “Work-study assignment.”

No. No way.
 

“Wait a minute… are you saying you’re in school here?”

He nodded.
 

“What happened to the Army?” I asked.

He shrugged, looked away, then gestured toward the cane.

“So of all the schools you could have chosen, you came here? To the same place as me?”

Anger swept over his face. “I didn’t come here for you, Alex. I came here because it was the best school I could get in to. I came here for me.”

“What, did you think you could just show up and sweep me back into your arms after ignoring me for the last six months? After erasing me from your life?”

He narrowed his eyes, looked at me directly. In a cold voice, he said, “Actually, I was hoping I just wouldn’t run into you.”

I stifled a sob. I was
not
going to let him get to me. I spat back, “Well, looks like we both had some bad luck. Because I’m here for my work-study assignment, too.”

His eyes widened. “You’re going to be working for Forrester?”

“Is he the so-called
author in residence?
”

He nodded.

“Oh, God,” I said. “I’m going to be sick.”

“Thanks. It’s great to see you too, Alex.”

I almost shouted at him, but a jovial voice down the hall called to us. “Hello! You two must be my new research assistants!”

A ridiculous looking man, trying way too hard to look like an
author
with a capital A, walked toward us. He wore a tweed jacket, with leather patches on the elbows, and corduroy pants. He couldn’t have been much older than thirty-five, but he wore reading glasses perched halfway up his nose.
 

“Well, hello,” he said. “I’m Max Forrester.”

“Alex Thompson,” I said. I glanced at Dylan. He was glaring at me.

“Dylan Paris,” he said.

“Come in, Alex and Dylan. My apologies for being late. Sometimes I get lost in the throes of creation and forget the time.”

Forrester’s back was already to me as he unlocked his door. I rolled my eyes. Lost in the throes of creation, indeed. You could smell the whiskey on his breath from fifteen feet away. Smelled like he’d gotten lost in the nearest watering hole.

Dylan waved me ahead of him. He was leaning heavily on the cane.
What happened to him?
I walked in behind Forrester, and Dylan followed me, limping.

“Sit down, you two, sit down. Can I get you some tea? Water? Or something with a little more, um… life?”

“No thanks,” Dylan said, grimacing as he eased himself into his seat. Once seated, he leaned his cane against the wall. His expression was unreadable.

“I’ll take some water,” I said, just to contradict
him.

Forrester filled up a small glass with water at a tiny sink in the back of the office and brought it to me. My eyes narrowed a little when I got a look at the glass. It was filthy. Eww. And there was something oily floating on top of the water.
 

I pretended to take a sip, then set it on the edge of the desk.

“Well, let’s get down to business,” Forrester said. “Do you two know each other?”

“No,” I said, forcefully, just as Dylan said, “Yes.”

Forrester liked that. A smile lit up on his face, then he said, “I bet there’s a story there.”

“You’d be wrong,” I replied. I glanced at Dylan, and said, “Nothing significant at all.”

Dylan blinked, and he darted his eyes away from me.

Good.
Part of me wanted to hurt him just as badly as he had hurt me.

Unfortunately, Forrester picked up on it. He said, very slowly, “I trust there won’t be a problem.”

“No, no problem,” I said.

“No, sir,” Dylan responded, his voice cool.

“Well then,” Forrester said. “That’s good. So, let me tell you what you’ll be doing. I’m here for a year, and I’m working on a novel. Historical fiction, centered around the draft riots here in New York during the Civil War. Are you familiar with them?”

I shook my head, but Dylan said, “Yes. Sad story… some of it turned to lynch mobs.”

Forrester nodded, enthusiastically. “That’s right. Miss Thompson… the story is this. In July 1863, there was a series of riots here in the city. Mostly poor and working-class Irish, protesting because the rich could buy exemption from the draft. The protests turned ugly, then violent. A lot of people were killed.”

“They burned down the orphanage,” Dylan said. What a brown-noser.

“That’s right, Dylan! The colored orphanage burned to the ground. A dozen or more black men were lynched during the riots.”

“So…” I said. “What exactly will we be doing to help?”

“Well, you see, Columbia has a mass of historical material about the riots. Much of it primary sources. As I work on my outline and the actual manuscript, your job will be to help me with the details. The historical context, the source material, all of the information I’ll need to get the story just right.”

“That’s… incredible,” Dylan said. “No offense, Doctor Forrester, but this is way better than I expected as a work-study assignment.”