Coming Up for Air Read online

  He narrows his eyes. “Why do I feel like you’re getting at something specific?”

  I shrug.

  “No, come on, spill. I can handle it,” he insists.

  I decide to just lay it out. It’s part of the reason I’m here; I can’t deny I want to know the truth. “All right. Well, if I’m being honest, I was thinking you might admit that you…I don’t know, could be an asshole to girls. Like how you broke up with Chrissy at Wyatt’s homecoming party.”

  He shakes his head, somehow amused. “Chrissy? Seriously? Have you been sitting on that one?”

  “Just wondering, is all,” I say innocently.

  Braden looks at me like he’s putting together a puzzle. Eventually, he asks, “Don’t you think you’re being a little hard on me, Hadley?”

  The contents of my stomach spin. I don’t know why, but I didn’t expect him to call me on it. I feel like I’ve been caught, and I hardly even know what I’m doing. Maybe I just thought he was too arrogant to care. I try for some bravado. “I thought you could handle it.”

  “I can.”

  “Well, good.”

  Thinking, Braden leans back in his chair, balancing it on two legs. “So that’s the type of answer you’d like for these questions?”

  I can’t exactly say that I want to put the details of his breakup in our yearbook. But I do want to establish that he might be the actual worst; give myself enough of a reason to get a grip and ignore him.

  “I mean, I’d like some actual honesty, yeah.”

  Suddenly his chair falls into its rightful position. “Look, I’ll make you a deal, okay? I’ll answer a couple of that French guy’s questions. But only because you have a really messed-up idea of who I am.” He pauses. “And only if you answer them too.” He’s radiating that same energy from Friday night, and something about it makes me want to lean into this. Into him.

  I swallow. “I’m not the one being interviewed.”

  “And I agreed to talk about swimming, not to be grilled about my greatest fears.”

  I mean, that’s sort of fair. “That doesn’t mean I have to tell you anything.”

  “You’re right. You don’t.” His brows furrow. “But will you explain one thing?”

  I give him a weary look, but then, knowing I haven’t exactly been especially nice, I nod.

  “How can just eating dinner with your family possibly be your idea of perfect happiness?”

  “I didn’t say it was.” My voice sounds sharp.

  He’s calm in return. “No, you didn’t, but you suggested it.”

  And maybe it’s an attempt to prove him wrong, or maybe it’s because his voice dropped into this low version of itself when he said suggested, but for whatever reason, I find myself answering honestly. “My mom had cancer. She’s okay now, but eating dinner with my family—my whole family—it’s not something I take for granted.”

  “Oh.”

  I find myself filling the awkward space with words. “My parents like to cook together. And it makes the whole house smell like onions and garlic, or whatever they’re making. And Remy and Judd, my siblings, fight over who gets to choose the music, and we set the table for everybody with these colorful dishes, and I just…I like it. It’s no Olympic medal. And I don’t know if it would be my exact answer for perfect happiness. But it’s not far off either.”

  I’m surprised to find his attention so focused. “What would make it perfect?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing’s perfect.”

  “Come on. Try.”

  “More family, I guess?” I meet his eye, uncomfortable with the sudden scrutiny. “Like, extended. And friends. And their families. More food.” He laughs a little, and it loosens up something inside me. “Maybe in the summer, on the patio? With some lights strung up. And Remy’s playlist. Not Judd’s.”

  “Those are your siblings?” He rests his elbows on the table, drink forgotten.

  “Yeah. They’re twins, actually. Seniors this year.”

  “Your family sounds fun.” He nods. “You’re kind of making me want to come to this dinner.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “But that would ruin the perfect part, right?”

  I bite my lip. “You’re right.”

  He laughs. “Whoa, I was joking, but—”

  “No, I mean, about before. Being hard on you. I was doing that. Sorry.”

  He lifts a shoulder. “I said I can handle it.”

  “I know, but…” I think about explaining, but decide against it. “Just…sorry. It wasn’t cool.”

  “Thanks.” His lips curve up.

  “All right,” I tell him, “now it’s your turn to answer something way too personal.”

  “Hey, I just asked you what you asked me.”

  “Hold on. Let me find a good one.”

  “Wait. You’re just going to choose your favorite? That doesn’t seem fair.” He moves closer to my side of the table, attempting to read the list. I pull my notebook in toward my chest, trying to ignore the smell of his leather jacket and his soap. “Can’t I just talk about happiness too?” he asks.

  “No, you already did that one, and I think you were actually telling the truth.”

  “I was….Okay.” He sits up taller. “All right, then, bring it on. Give me your worst.”

  “Okay.” I decide on a question, and read it out loud: “ ‘On what occasion do you lie?’ ”

  He scoffs. “That’s it?”

  I warn, “I don’t want some bullshit answer about how you lie when your mom asks if you’ve done your homework.”

  “I don’t think I really lie.”

  “Oh, please. Everybody lies.”

  Braden readjusts in his seat and thinks for a minute. “Okay, I guess I lie…when the truth isn’t good enough.”

  “ ‘When the truth isn’t good enough’?” I repeat, trying to understand. “What does that mean? Isn’t good enough for who?”

  “For me.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “Like, okay…If we have a brutal practice—which we do, all the time—and Coach asks me how I feel, after, I always say I feel great. No matter what, even if my tendinitis is killing me”—he rubs at his shoulder—“or my muscles are so tight they’re burning. I just…I stand up tall and tell him I feel awesome. The other guys on the team, they’ll show that they’re done. But I never do.” He pauses. “And it’s not a pride thing, even though that’s part of it. It’s because I shouldn’t be as tired as everybody else. Not if I want to be the best. Which I do. So I lie, and Coach gets to go home feeling confident about me, and I work harder, until the truth is good enough. Until I can tell him I feel great, and mean it.”

  I study him, watching his finger trace the lines in the table. “I think I get that.”

  He looks surprised. “That’s it? You’re not going to hassle me about it?”

  “Nope.”

  He laughs. “Man, you’re really hoping I’m going to tell you about Chrissy, huh?” He pauses again. “Wait, is that why you were so irritated with me on Friday? Do you know her or something?”

  I snort. “No, that was just my natural reaction to your charms.”

  “That good?” He shakes his head. “Well, I’m sure I was coming off like an asshole. I get all revved up after a meet.”

  After talking about lying, I decide to tell the truth. “If I’m being totally honest, my sister was Wyatt Coleman’s homecoming date. And she may have witnessed some things.”

  “Wait, that’s your sister?” I decide to ignore whatever he meant by that.

  I nod. “But they broke up.”

  “Oh, well, good.” He relaxes into his seat. “Wyatt’s…not the best guy.”

  All right, that’s surprising. “My sister said you were friends.”


  “Not really. But I mean, I’m new. It’s taken me a minute to figure out who’s actually cool. I hung out with him for a couple weeks. And he wasn’t.”

  Maybe that’s why Wyatt told Remy bad things about Braden, because he dropped him. “Um, yeah. Can’t say I disagree.”

  “Live and learn.” He looks at me. “About Chrissy, though. I’m curious. What makes you think I’ll tell you the truth? I just told you I lie.”

  “I don’t know, try me.”

  “All right.” But then his eyes flicker over to my camera, sitting at the corner of our table. “Wait—” He finds the strap and points at the pin he noticed at the swim meet: Brains Are the New Tits. “You said your sister had a dark sense of humor. This is for your mom.”

  Nobody has ever put that together before. I look up at him. “Oh, um, yeah. It is. We thought she might need a double mastectomy, so Remy got the pins for the three of us. She thought it was funny, I guess. But my mom only needed a lumpectomy; a smaller surgery. So now it’s just a weird pin from Remy.”

  “Your sister sounds cool. Way too cool for Wyatt.”

  “She is. Most of the time. When she isn’t a hot mess. Or moody.”

  “I can’t picture someone related to you being a mess. I mean, you’re the cofounder of the yearbook club.”

  I laugh, despite myself. “Yeah, Remy’s not really a joiner. She does her own thing. Kind of fearless. It gets messy sometimes.”

  “Messy can be fun,” he counters in a way that sounds like a challenge.

  “You would think that.”

  For reasons I still don’t understand, the air charges between us.

  “So, um, you were going to tell me about Chrissy?”

  “Oh right. Well. Okay. I might have accidentally led her on, like, a small amount.”

  Of course he did. “I thought this story was going to be redeeming.”

  “I never said that. But the thing is, when I’m into somebody, I’m direct. Like, there’s no speculating with me. I had two girlfriends at my old school—not at the same time, obviously—but they would back me up on this.” I find myself wanting to ask a bunch of questions, but I hold back. He continues, “And okay, I guess Chrissy didn’t know that. She had been texting me, and I was sort of responding, sort of not—just bare minimum to not be an asshole. And I guess that sort of made me an asshole, because she thought it was way more than it was.”

  I study him, skeptical.

  “Look, I’m not going to win any awards here for being the best guy in the world. At the party, she had a couple drinks, and I realized she had a totally different idea about what was going on than I did. I mean, she wasn’t my date or anything. We had never even hung out one-on-one. So I explained to her that I wasn’t really into it—very nicely; honestly. And, well, she was drunk and upset, and it turned into a…thing.”

  “Like her crying in the middle of the party?”

  “I mean, yes. And she was also yelling at me, a lot. And she hit me with her purse.”

  I choke on a laugh. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how I get the bad rep out of that night, but, you know, people assume.” He pauses in a way that’s heavy with meaning. Then he asks, “If I answer some more of those questions, do you think I could change your mind?”

  We look at each other, and it’s making me edgy, because I can’t figure him out.

  “Are you going to tell me the truth?”

  “Yeah.” He nods. “Yeah, I’ll tell you the truth.”

  And for whatever reason, I believe him.

  “Okay, then, maybe,” I admit.

  “Good.” He smiles. “Hey…this is kind of weird, but now that you maybe think I’m slightly less of a dick…” He looks at me like it’s a question.

  I assess him, and after a beat, I nod.

  He relaxes a little, continuing, “I’ve been wanting to ask: Can I see that picture you took of me?”

  I could show him; it’d be easy enough to scroll through on the view screen. “Um.” I hesitate, feeling like it’s personal. But the picture is of him. “Yeah, okay. I’ll show you.”

  I find it, and remember again how naked he was. I haven’t actually let myself look at it since that night. I hand my camera over. He takes it gingerly, holding it with both hands.

  “Oh.” It’s a short, small sound.

  My heart rate picks up. “It’s not exactly my best work. I mean, I took it so quickly, and just the one shot—”

  “No, it’s…it’s awesome. That night, your reaction was…I don’t know. I wasn’t sure what to expect.”

  “You seemed pretty confident at the time.”

  He looks at me doubtfully, before returning his attention to the screen. “You’re good at this. Can I look through a couple more?”

  Mentally, I run through my last few days of pictures; mostly just shots of my family. “Sure, and thanks. I like it.”

  “I can tell.”

  “You can tell?” I echo, surprised and unsure what he means.

  “Yeah, I don’t know.” He’s quiet for a minute, and then explains, “Like, when I’m swimming, I’m giving it everything I have because I love it. I want to be the best so that I can keep doing it. And I mean, sure, I’d love a scholarship—”

  “Or an Olympic medal?”

  His eyes spark. “Yeah, that too. But mostly, I just want to stay in the water. And that looks different from somebody who’s in the pool to check a box for a college app, you know?” His eyes find mine. “Not everybody gets what it feels like to throw yourself into something, but I think…it seems like you’ve thrown yourself into this. Like, these don’t look like snapshots. They look like art.”

  I’m suddenly at a loss for words.

  “Sorry, is that weird?” he asks.

  Only because it might be the nicest and most unexpected compliment I’ve ever gotten.

  I shake my head. “No. It’s not weird at all.”

  I let him look through the rest of my images, explaining my thoughts behind a couple of them, and we end up staying there for an hour longer than we were supposed to, abandoning the Proust’s Questionnaire entirely. And the longer we talk, the more I realize I might not have a good reason to hate this guy at all.

  Ms. Klein is talking about salivary glands, in humans this time instead of fetal pigs. Or, I guess, actual saliva. Whatever. I’m not really listening. I can’t stop thinking about something else.

  Someone else.

  All day I’ve been on edge, wondering if I might run into Braden in the hallways. I can’t seem to stop thinking up all the different ways it might happen, if I do see him. What he’d say, what I’d say. I keep getting deep into this whole fictional conversation before I realize what I’m doing and curse myself. I don’t know what’s going on with me. It’s like I’m being pulled in two directions at once. Sometimes I’m desperate to see him, and other times I want to avoid him until graduation. It’s unnerving. I was never like this about Noah.

  I sneak a glance at my phone, wondering how much longer I have until lunch, and I have a text from a random number. I slide my finger across the screen: I think I have late-onset frostbite.

  As I’m reading, another message appears. Don’t bother looking it up. It’s definitely a thing.

  What?

  Then it occurs to me.

  Except, it can’t be; I didn’t give him my phone number. I type frantically, heart racing: Who is this?

  Did you run around outside with more than one guy in a wet Speedo?

  Um, no. No, I did not. I answer: As a matter of fact…

  He replies: You owe me if I have frostbite.

  Late-onset frostbite is for sure not a thing. I struggle to keep my expression neutral as my thumbs form the words: Plus, that was a week ago! And it wasn’t even that cold. You’re fine. And b
tw, I totally saved you. You owe me!

  He answers in a series of messages: Oh, right. That’s what I meant. Buzz: I owe you. Buzz: I could make it up to you. Buzz: Do you like pizza?

  Is he asking me out on a date?

  Are there humans who don’t like pizza?

  I grin self-consciously into my lap as I watch him type: Fair point. How about tomorrow? 8pm? Holy shit. He is asking me out. Buzz: We can bicker in a new place.

  I stifle my laughter. Shit. I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this for a while. I think I’ve mostly recovered from when Noah broke up with me, but my stomach still drops whenever I think of him walking away.

  My heart hammers. The truth is that some part of me has already made up its mind. It’s not like it’s a full-blown relationship; it’s just one night. I can sort the rest out later.

  I type: Okay.

  Barely a second later: That’s a yes?

  Don’t make me regret it.

  I watch the ellipses form on my phone: I’ll pick you up this time.

  You could also maybe wear clothes this time, I tell him.

  He doesn’t even pause before retorting: You’ll just have to take your chances. Text me your address before then so I know where to go.

  Oh my god.

  I’m floating but also might be sick.

  Is dating still a thing? I guess he didn’t actually use the word date. But that’s what this is, right? I can’t think of anybody going on a date. Last year, when I started hanging out with Noah, it was at school stuff, NHS, and then we hung out in groups. I think we were official before we ever went out to eat together.

  Ms. Klein interrupts my thoughts. “Hadley, I’m giving you my best spit material. Would it kill you to pay attention?”

  “Sorry, Ms. Klein.” I slip my phone into my pocket, trying to calm myself down.

  There is no actual chance in hell that I will be paying attention to anything at all until I can go over every single detail of this with Becca.

  * * *

  “No, I’m sorry, but that’s a joke, right?” Remy’s eyebrows draw together.

  “What?” I look down at my flannel and jeans. “It’s October in Michigan! I can’t exactly wear a sundress.”