The Fine Art of Holding Your Breath by Charity Tahmaseb

Author:Charity Tahmaseb [Tahmaseb, Charity]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charity Tahmaseb

As I sat and watched everyone swim, I wasn’t sure about the consequences anymore. I shivered, wondering if that was shock, because every time I trembled, Patti twisted around to check on me. Applause drowned out the final strains of Singing in the Rain. The senior number was usually one of the best in the show, and this one, choreographed by Constance, was exceptional.

I waited until everyone had filed into the locker room. Truthfully, I waited for Nissa. She vanished through the door without looking back.

I stood, my legs shaky, and was about to hoist myself over the tile wall when Patti said my name. Her voice was quiet, the tone like something I wanted to call motherly.

“Can we talk?” she asked.

I nodded and sat back down.

“It’s about your essay,” she said but closed her eyes. She clenched her hands together, not exactly like she was praying, but pretty close. “Actually, it’s about your mother.”

I didn’t dare move, breathe, or speak.

“We were friends in high school.”

“I know,” I said, “I have her yearbooks. My Grandma Adele gave them to me a few years ago.”

Patti’s expression went from somber to a mixture of amused and mortified. “Oh, good Lord, the yearbooks! I can’t even imagine what I wrote. Wait—” She held up a hand. “I can imagine and I don’t want to remember.”

I’d read every last inscription in my mom’s yearbooks and Patti’s confused me the most. All in-jokes and shorthand, like the emails and texts Nissa and I sent (or used to send) to each other. You’d have to be one of us to decipher it.

“It’s been a long time.” Patti’s smile was the best thing I’d seen in days. She looked less frazzled, more like her team-mom self. “As I was saying, your mom and I were friends. When I saw that you wanted to join the Army.” She broke off and in the quiet pool area, her sigh traveled across the water. “It upset me.”

I got it. I mean, after all, it upset Dad, right? That didn’t stop me from wanting it, and despite Patti’s refusal to help, I’d been chipping away at the essay, a word here, a sentence there.

“But it wasn’t fair to take it out on you.” She studied me as if through me, she could somehow reach my mom. “I’m thinking this isn’t a whim, that it means something to you.”

“It does,” I said.

“Now, I try to keep my personal politics and beliefs out of the classroom, but you know I’m a pacifist, right?”

“So’s my Grandma Adele.”

Patti actually laughed. “In which case, I might not be the expert help you’re looking for.”

I needed help finessing words, not with the content. “I think you can help me. I know what I want to write, just not the how.” A thought struck me then, fast and hard. My mom had paid for college with an ROTC scholarship, and Patti might know something about that. “You wouldn’t know what my mom wrote, would you?”

“No. Beth kept some things to herself.

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