A Breath Too Late - Rocky Callen Page 0,33

department. I was tall. Really tall. Taller than all the girls in my class, and I was afraid that my clothes, being a size too small, would show things I didn’t want seen. So during the first couple weeks of school, I wore Momma’s shirts from the grocery store and an AREN’T MOMS GREAT? T-shirt that were both way too big on me. I missed my old band tees, but I couldn’t fit in them anymore, and even though other girls showed off the tops of their arms and their midriffs, I wouldn’t. Or couldn’t.

I felt lackluster and all I wanted to be was invisible.

August, you were so bright and vibrant and colorful. Literally. You had started painting and your jeans would have splatters of yellows, reds, and greens. You were a bright spot in my gray and I loved it. Even your ink and charcoal drawings felt alive in a way that I didn’t.

I wanted to live in your drawings. Your parents knew you loved art. They didn’t know that you wanted to go to art school one day. They didn’t know that you dreamed in color and brushstrokes. I did.

The girls kept laughing and then Britney said, “August is so right, your name should be ‘Boney.’”

I turned my head and looked at you. Obviously, you’d fix this. You’d make it better. Your saucer eyes blinked back at me and you were stammering, “No, I—I— mean…”

But your eyes shifted to Britney and you didn’t say another word.

See, even he won’t defend you anymore. You are alone. You’ll always be alone. The thoughts bit at my heels.

“Thanks,” I muttered at you. I had been so happy to see you after not seeing you most of the summer, but maybe I was a joke to you.

You came to my locker after class. “Ellie, I’m sorry. I should’ve—”

“Save it, Matthews.” I wouldn’t look at you. A lot can change over a summer. In a day. In a blink. I wasn’t going to grasp at something that was slipping away. “I don’t need your help.”

I had let bitterness settle into my bones. I had thought that the August who had once been my friend wouldn’t just sit in his seat and stutter a response in the face of Britney’s gorgeousness. He would have rescued me.

You didn’t.

After, you kept going to my locker, kept trying to pass notes to me in class. You drew me pictures and I threw them away.

The world was starting to shift to gray and I didn’t have any space for your brightness. I hadn’t wanted to stay close to you as you dated and kissed pretty girls. I hadn’t wanted to be close to you just so you could leave me behind.

That’s what I thought, at least. So I pulled our tether until it snapped.

As your last, desperate act, you asked a friend of yours to talk to me on your behalf until finally I wrote a note back:

I want a divorce from our unholy best friendship.

I didn’t talk to you for the rest of junior high.

* * *

Right now, I honestly can’t remember talking to you since that moment.

Now you are at our beloved bridge and are almost drunk.

I think about how we kneeled on scraped knees and were bound in holy best friendship. I remember what your lips felt like. Another memory tickles at my mind, but I can’t place it. Lips on mine. Lips that make me feel bright and whole and new.

I sigh and lean close to you. Too close. I bring my lips to yours. Just a whisper away. Just a touch too far.

While I’m there, you let out a breath that resembles a growl and a sigh. I think how the muscles of the throat can splice together sounds and make new ones that forge their own meaning. Breaths caught between one emotion and the next.

I stay close to you. I watch the way your slight muscles contract under your T-shirt. The way your breath is so close that if I were alive and in front of you, you could make my bangs fly. One thing is true—I feel awake, buzzing, tingling, and intoxicatingly alive.

I dare not reach out, dare not break the illusion that I am not a shadowless ghost and that I am in fact here with you and you aren’t staring through me, but at me, with those intensely gray eyes—eyes like storms that could sweep me away in their torrent. You growl-sigh again and back up, pressing against the