Breathing Underwater (4 page)

“Something,” I said, wondering if she’d noticed me or my car. I decided it didn’t matter
.

Tom suggested we discuss it on the way home
.

“Does Nick want to give me a ride home?” Caitlin asked. She said it to Tom but kept looking at me
.

Her eyes were blue. The room had cleared, and even the hallway was quiet. It dawned on me Tom hadn’t asked her out, he’d been holding my place while I found my nerve. Caitlin was into me, not him. The planets were orbiting in a different order. I stopped myself from grinning. Cool Nick took over. I said, “Sure, if you want.”

When we reached the car, Tom made a big deal of getting in back, legs bent up, so Caitlin could sit next to me. She chattered on about her defective tongue which, she swore, made it impossible to roll her r’s. Her tongue looked perfect to me. Finally, Tom changed the subject. “Caitlin, you know Zack Schaeffer? He’s giving a party Saturday, back-to-school. I’m taking Liana Castro. You two should go. We could double.”

“You’re taking Liana?” I said. She was one of the few girls not openly drooling over Tom
.

“Now, who are you taking?” he asked, grinning
.

Tom and Caitlin looked at me until I said, “You want to go?” hoping to sound like her answer didn’t matter. “With me, I mean?”

“I knew what you meant. I’d like that.”

And Caitlin smiled. I wanted to put her smile in my pocket to look at over and over
.

The second week of Mario’s class, I oversleep, awakened only by thunder roaring across the beach. I’m late. I dress and run down the marble stairs, my hand brushing the butt of the ridiculous naked woman–shaped pillar on the landing. When I pull the front door open, rain slaps me in the face.

Where the hell is my car?

I gape a second, unmoving. Then, I run into the downpour, searching, like maybe the car’s playing hide-and-seek with me. But it would be hard to miss a car that red. It’s gone. I stand there, getting wet. Finally, I sprint back upstairs to my father’s bedroom, planning to—I don’t know—tell him? Impossible. That would mean waking him. Instead, I dial the police, still clutching my journal for class.

“My car’s been stolen!” I start to describe it when I feel him standing over me. His familiar Greek accent is like nails on a blackboard.

“It was not stolen.”

I hang up. “What? Where is it?”

I turn. My father’s maybe an inch taller than me, which is short. Still, his voice fills the room, and he looks pretty happy for this early Saturday morning. That kind of happiness is a bad sign.

“I sold it,” he says. “Someone at the yacht club offered a good price.”

“But it was mine.” Even as I say it, I know his answer. My throat tenses, but I’m not surprised. The hallway clock chimes eight-thirty.

“I paid for it.” Like I knew he’d say. “It was my car.”

It was a birthday present
. But I don’t say it. Instead, I say, “I have class in half an hour. For court.”

“Have the housekeeper drive you to the Metrorail station.”

I leave my keys on the hallway table.

The train station is five minutes away, on the mainland. But half an hour later, I’m still waiting on its raised platform. The place is deserted, and the rain shows no signs of stopping. Gusts of water soak my face, rattle the tracks. I lean forward to search for the train’s white light against gray sky. Not there. I’ll probably have to take the class over, and it’s my father’s fault. The hollow in my stomach grows, and somehow, even my hunger becomes his fault. If he’d sold the car because of what happened with Caitlin, I’d understand. He didn’t, though. He sold it because he could. The train finally lumbers in, and I get on. The sagging seat hits my butt, and I stare through a dirty window.

I don’t know when I first knew my family was different, that I could never tell anyone about the silences and the rages in my father’s
Architectural Digest
house. I knew for sure when I was eleven, the year my father bought the Mustang. I came home one day to find my father smiling. Smiling. He was like a kid with a new toy, and for once, for once, he wanted me to play with him. I followed him to the garage, and there, beside his gleaming Mercedes, was a rusted-out carcass of a car.

“We will fix it together?” he said.

I nodded, though part of me—the smart part—knew it wouldn’t happen. Like I said, I was eleven. I knew stuff. It was a good day. There were some good days then. But the smart part of me knew. Working on that car was something other fathers and sons did, something Tom and his dad did, not us. Not me.

I was right. A week later, he hired some grease monkey to replace the engine and just about everything else until finally, the car was perfect. My father liked perfect. Then, he hardly drove it.

Father’s Day, I got the brainy idea of detailing it for him. I hitched a ride to the mainland for supplies then begged off the beach with my friends and spent the hotter part of a Saturday spreading Turtle Wax, rubbing it down with an old, soft shirt that still smelled of my father’s cologne. I remembered him smiling the day he got the car. When he came home, I showed him what I’d done.

In the garage’s fluorescent light, my father inspected my handiwork. Planets hesitated. He ran an index finger across the hood, opened doors, examined Armor All–coated rubber. Then, he circled the car to the other side, his entire body registering begrudging approval. On the passenger side, he stopped. He leaned over, eyes riveted to the door panel.

“What is this?” His green eyes barely flickering between the door and my face.

“What?” I stooped, saw nothing.

He jabbed his finger closer to the nothing. “That!”

A scratch. To call it a nick would grossly exaggerate its size. More like a paper cut, and one that must have been there to begin with. I’d been too careful. But my father wasn’t rounding up suspects, and my butt was there to kick.

He never drove the car again. It went into hiding, and so did I. From then on, I avoided him, made good grades, and kept my room clean enough to perform surgery. It worked except when it didn’t.

The car reappeared this past birthday. Birthdays are hit-and-miss with my father, but this year, he remembered only a week late. Possibly, he’d been waiting for the occasion to remind me of my screwup. I came to breakfast, and he tossed me the keys on his way upstairs. “You break it, you own it,” was his birthday greeting. It took me ten minutes to find the scratch before I drove to school, his words ringing in my ears.
You break it, you own it
.

Apparently not.

The train pulls into the Coconut Grove station. It’s raining too hard for an umbrella to help, and I’m walking too far. The wind pushes at me like a defensive lineman and, finally, I ditch the umbrella and run to class.

I get there at nine thirty-five. Leo’s standing, yelling at Mario. “Who are you to psychoanalyze me? I won’t even be here next week.”

Seeing me, Mario holds up a chubby paw and starts the standard teacher line, “Nice of you to join us—”

“Skip it,” I say. I can’t deal with this. “Just tell me where to retake the class. Better yet, throw me in jail. Who cares?”

I’m dripping bathtubs on the floor, so I turn to leave. Mario stops me. “You don’t have my permission to leave.”

I stop, glare at him.

“You’re disturbing the class.” He tosses me a roll of paper towels. “You’re required to be here, so dry the floor and yourself, and sit down. We’ll discuss your future here later.”

I tear off a wad of towels, throw them onto the linoleum, and move the sopping mess with my sneaker, feeling Leo’s black eyes on me. I glare back. Who does he think he is? I’m not towel-drying myself in front of this group, and I’m not explaining why I’m late, so I take a seat, feeling the blast of air-conditioning on my wet T-shirt. I shiver, and there’s Leo-the-cool smirking in his chair. Suddenly, I hate him, hate him because he’s got a girlfriend who’ll drop the charges. Mine won’t speak to me on a bet. Hate him because if we’d met in school, maybe we’d have been friends.

“Want a sweatshirt?” Mario gestures toward a Miami Hurricanes shirt draped across his chair.

“I don’t wear orange,” I say, and Mario turns back to the group. I sit, shivering through the rest of his lecture.

After class, I wait by Mario’s desk until everyone else leaves. Leo gives one final smirk. I manage a sneer back. I examine Mario’s photographs. There’s a smiling woman, a little boy. Mario’s family. What could he possibly know about my life? I’m about to ask him, but he speaks first.

“You want to talk about it?”

“I won’t be late again, okay?”

“Fair enough. I’m sure you had a good reason.” He smiles, fat cheeks spreading, and gestures toward my dripping notebook. “Are you writing in that?”

“Huh?” How’d I get off the hook so quickly?

“Your journal?”

“Oh. Yeah. Need to see it?”

“Maybe next week, when it’s dry.” Mario gathers his things, an umbrella, the sweatshirt, then turns. “My uncle Gustavo, a very wise man, used to say it doesn’t take a genius to come in from the rain.” I must look at him funny, because he adds, “Need a ride home, son?”

I’ve been looking out the window. It’s eleven o’clock, but outside is night, with rain pounding worse than before. Still, I say, “Someone’s picking me up.”

After he leaves, I walk to the train.

Much later that day, after I (and the journal) have dried off

I look at my journal, hoping Judge Lehman doesn’t require neatness. It’s trashed—wavy and bumpy and smudged, like it’s been through a shipwreck. Yet, I’ve dried it off with a hair dryer so I can write in it. Thinking of the car makes me think about Tom.

The day of Zack’s party, I spent most of the afternoon waxing my car. Tom even helped. Buffing worked his triceps or something, and we were getting tan, too. He’d given up on Ashley and me, possibly realizing, before I did, that I was in love with Caitlin. Sometimes, Tom knew me better than I knew myself
.

And sometimes, he didn’t
.

“Man, you’re so lucky to get this car,” Tom said. He was always saying stuff like that, and I never corrected him. I just sprayed Armor All and shrugged. Tom went on about what a perfect make-out machine it was
.

I hoped so. I’d sort of been obsessing about kissing Caitlin that night
.

Don’t get me wrong. I was hardly sweet sixteen and never been kissed. I’d probably swapped spit with a dozen girls if you counted Spin the Bottle and a botched attempt to cop a feel off of Peyton Berounsky playing Seven Minutes in Heaven in eighth grade. By ninth grade, everyone was pairing off, at least for the evening, and I’d spent many sticky nights playing tonsil hockey on someone’s parents’ unsupervised sofa. So I’d touched, kissed, and groped, and been touched, kissed, and groped, all meaningless so far. I had a feeling Caitlin’s would be the kiss that mattered
.

That night, we had dinner in the Carters’ dining room. Tom’s family always ate there on weekends. I’d been joining them since grade school. The first time, I’d stood, gaping at the china, silver, and flowers, and Tom and his brother, wet-combed and shining. It was the kind of spread my father had for clients, not for me. They even dressed for dinner, although Tom and I just wore khakis. Conversation was quiet, smooth as peanut butter
.

Like every time, Tom’s old cocker spaniel, Wimpy, played around my feet. Feeding him table scraps was firmly against the rules, but for some reason, it was important to me to be Wimpy’s favorite. I used to pretend he was my dog too. I listened to Mrs. C. describe the antics of Little Win, Tom’s brother’s baby, as I slipped Wimpy a huge bite of steak
.

I got nailed. “Nicky, that’s why that dog begs,” Mrs. Carter said. I knew she was thinking about Labor Day, when Wimpy had put his whole face in the potato salad
.

“And that’s why he always wants to sleep on your bed when you stay over,” Tom added. That always bugged Tom
.

I apologized, but when they glanced away, I accidentally dropped another piece
.

Over dinner, Tom’s dad tried to talk us into working after school at his office. Tom rolled his eyes. We went through this every month, Mr. Carter trying to encourage Tom’s interest in the family firm, and Tom avoiding the subject. Finally, Tom’s mother rescued him, saying she was sure Tom had the rest of his life to work at a law office
.