He turns me gently and presses my back to his chest, wrapping both of his arms around my shoulders and holding me against him.
“Breathe with me,” he says. “Feel my breaths, try to match them.” His chest rises and falls, steady and deep. I grip his forearms, nails digging into his skin. He doesn’t protest. Just holds me, breathes with me, until our breaths sync up.
This has happened before. A few times that summer before freshman year and maybe once or twice since. Panic attacks, sudden and earthshattering. Most of the time, I can get control, breathe through them, but every now and then, they fall like a huge hammer on a very tiny nail. And every time, Owen gets me through them.
“You haven’t had one of those in a while,” he says after a few moments of steady breathing.
I nod, my eyes wet with the inevitable tears the attacks always pull up.
“You ever gonna tell me why they started?”
“I . . . they just did.”
He goes to release me, but I tighten my grip on his forearms. I need this—?this tiny moment where he’s my brother and I’m his sister and he helps me from getting bulldozed by this unseen anxiety.
He sighs and rests his cheek on the top of my head. “It’s me, Mara,” he says, reading my mind as usual. “Please. It’s still me. I’m just me.”
The desperation in his voice makes my breath stutter and jerk again. A thousand thoughts and doubts bloom to the surface of my skin, trickling out like blood. And I don’t understand why. Why Owen needs to sound so desperate. Why we’re even here, standing in our driveway in the middle of the night, belief and disbelief all tangled up with a connection I can never break.
“I love you, Owen,” I say, my voice a dry whisper. I say it because it’s true, because I need to say it. Because I know he needs to hear it.
“I love you too, Mar.”
I nod, and behind me, I feel his whole body relax. But my own muscles are tense, like those of a spooked animal, our reassurances to each other only adding to the mottled mess of truth and lies in my head.
Chapter Ten
THE NEXT DAY, Charlie slides into the chair next to mine, her guitar case thwunking onto the floor, but I don’t look up from my laptop. I’ve been sitting in Ms. Rodriguez’s choir room since the final bell, prepping for the Empower meeting. I successfully dragged myself through the day, avoiding Charlie, hiding in the library at lunch, and trying to close my ears and eyes to the incessant whispers and nosy glances.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
And that’s it. That’s literally it. She doesn’t ask how things are going. She doesn’t ask me anything. I can’t seem to push any questions out of my throat either, and we just sit there in a cloud of weird while I pretend to type on my computer and she pulls out the novel we’re reading for AP lit.
“Shmerda?” she asks after a few minutes.
“Huh?” I glance over at her to find her peering at my computer screen, where I have indeed typed shmerda. And also frenisk and mywot. “Oh.” I hit the delete button, the clacking echoing between the acoustic-paneled walls.
“Trying to multitask?” she asks.
“Something like that,” I mutter, hating this bullshit small talk.
She makes a hmm noise and goes back to her book, but she can’t have read more than a few sentences before she smacks it shut and drops it into her lap. “So, I need to ask you something.” She doesn’t turn to face me, just stares straight ahead and twists her fingers together.
“What is it?”
She blinks at the floor, filling her lungs with several deep breaths before releasing them.
“I’m playing a show at 3rd and Lindsley. Tomorrow night.”
“Oh my god. Really? Charlie, that’s huge!” 3rd and Lindsley is a pretty major music venue in Nashville.
She nods. “They’re having this young artists series where a few musicians play every night this month. You have to be between sixteen and twenty-two to do it, and I sent their booking person my demo a few months ago. I guess she liked it.”
“ ‘Guess’? Of course she did. It’s you.”
Charlie waves off the compliment, but crimson spills into her cheeks and she smiles. “I found out a couple weeks ago. Will you come with me?”
