Read Online How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer - Free Book Online

imagine swimming, but now that I’m here at the Y it seems crazy. Sure, in St. Maarten there are a lot of fish you can see living their lives around coral reefs if you happen to know how to scuba. That kind of thing is attractive to an ichthyophile like me. But I am also a person who almost drowned. When my dad told us about St. Maarten, with its great diving, I wanted to ask if he and my mother were crazy. Did they think I would voluntarily walk into the ocean and let it close over my head? Before I could respond, my mother said she’d found us a scuba certification class at the Y. She and my father gave Sage and me these hopeful, anxious looks. I was speechless for a moment, and then I blurted, “Scuba?”
    “We think it’ll be good for you,” my mother said. “We think it’ll help you form positive associations with water.”
    “You don’t have to dive at all, of course,” my father said. “But we hope you’ll consider it.”
    After all their planning, how could I say no thanks? Even Sage, who for months had hated everything, seemed interested in the trip. The next day he called the Y and signed us up for scuba lessons, and the rest of the week he walked around with a strange half-smile on his face. Now I think he was already coming up with mean things to say to me, things that would make me feel as scared as I do now.
    As I get into my tank suit I cannot help noticing the mistakes of my body. The magazine look nowadays is breasts but no hips; I am the opposite. Thin, still, but with hipbones like cup handles. My chest is too flat, my legs too skinny, and there is a scar running the length of my left thigh. Under the water, car metal sliced me in a neat line. I didn’t even feel it. Only at the edge of the pond afterward did I look down and see the blood. One doctor sewed it badly in the emergency room, and another had to take the stitches out the next day and do it again. Meanwhile I was in a kind of trance, not wanting to believe what my parents had told me about Isabel. Now the scar is thin and white, like a dress seam. I turn my leg back and forth, looking. A dark-haired girl in a red suit notices, then glances away.
    “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s just a scar. You can look if you want to.”
    She bends down and looks, and when she meets my eyes again she seems unimpressed. “I also have a scar,” she says. She pulls her hair up to show me a jagged pink keloid at the back of her neck. It looks as if someone tried to cut her head off and failed.
    “Wow,” I say.
    The girl looks about my age, but she speaks like the Romanian women who work at the bakery near our house. “My sister threw a broken glass,” she says. “She was little, six years old.”
    “Ouch,” I say. “Are you in the scuba class?”
    “Yes,” she says. “You?”
    “Me and my brother.”
    I see her giving me a side-eye look, and it occurs to me that she might recognize my picture from the news or newspapers. Then I realize this is an extremely egotistical thought, given how many unfortunate things there are on the news and in newspapers over four months. She locks her locker and throws her towel over her shoulder, then adjusts the strap of her goggles. I realize there are probably only ten or fifteen minutes between me and the experience of getting underwater again. For a moment I wish my mother or father were here. Then I remember I am fourteen and lucky to be alive.
    “Ready?” the girl says. And I am, I think.
    But nothing has prepared me for the experience of actually seeing the pool. It seems to go on forever, lanes and lanes of water strung with red-and-white dividers. Lines of black tile stretch along the bottom, all the way to the diving part of the deep end, where the water darkens to a holy blue. Sage is nowhere to be seen. I sit down on a bench and put my head between my knees to feel better. All around, the echoes of voices bounce off the water and the high ceiling. I’m hoping Sage will come out and just sit