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

near me, and not say anything about messing with my tank, but when I look up again I see him talking to some guys at the other end of the bleachers, as far away from me as possible.
    The instructor is a college student, a girl with blond hair and muscular thighs. She wears two tank suits like they do on swim teams. My brother is obviously looking at her breasts, which surprises me because of how much I know he still misses Isabel. But I suppose certain things do not go on hold. As we learn the names of different parts of the gear, we are required to take notes in the small notebooks we bought for the class. The girl in the red suit sits beside me writing very neatly in her notebook. She writes
buoyancy control device,
pressure gauge, primary regulator, mouthpiece,
with small pictures next to each word. I try to make mine as neat as hers. We learn what seems to be a basic fact but one I never knew, that scuba stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Over on his end of the bleachers, Sage is writing fast and using a lot of pages. Later he won’t be able to read what he wrote and will come crawling to me for help. In my notes I write
Too bad your handwriting sucks so much, Sage!
but then I cross it out, thinking of how Isabel saved all of Sage’s notes to her, those scrawls on torn notebook paper that they found in a Japanese box under her bed.
    When we have gone through the basic principles of the equipment, the instructor invites us down to select a pair of flippers. At first it looks like there won’t be enough to go around. I wait until everyone has a pair, then take my own, realizing nothing will save me now from going in the water. The girl in the red suit clomps around with her toes turned out. “Like a duck,” she says, and smiles at me.
    We learn that the fins are supposed to fit snugly but without smashing our toes. Everyone puts them on and sits at the side of the pool to get the feel of them in the water. The instructor tells us we’ll have fifteen minutes of laps and then a water polo game to increase our agility. It sounds like fun, and it should be fun, but I look at my feet waving in the water and wonder if I’m going to brick. It’s one of the main reasons I didn’t want to take the class, the possibility of me freaking out and Sage having to take me home while everyone else learns deep dives and repressurization. Sage probably expects me to freak out too. I watch him moving his feet back and forth in the water with great concentration. Just to spite him I decide I will not brick. Cognitive therapy, like what my mother had me do to get comfortable in the bath again: I will not drown here with all these people watching, and me a good swimmer, and with fins on my feet. At least today there will be no tank for Sage to fuck with underwater. The girl in the red suit grins at me as we splash our feet in the pool. If I brick, I tell myself, this nice Romanian kid will think I’m an idiot.
    We all line up to swim laps, starting at the deep end of the pool. Why we have to start at the deep end is quickly explained: We’re practicing our roll entry, where we have to crouch down with our backs facing the water, the way you go backward off the boat with all your gear on. If the water were too shallow, people might clonk their heads. Once you fall in you’re supposed to orient yourself and swim down to the shallow end of the pool, kicking in the fast smooth way you do when you’re wearing fins, and then get out and wait by the starting blocks.
    This would be a good time to have a brother who cared if you were feeling shitty about getting into the water, but Sage is not that kind of brother. He won’t stand anywhere near me. I go to the back of my group, hoping to have more time to get calm, and I think about my sea anemones because they are the calmest of the fish, though technically they are not fish at all but flowerlike polyps of the order Actiniaria. My two anemones, a purple and a