Breathe Me || Completed

4.1

4.1 - Ash

Samantha is rude and cold, but that doesn't change the fact that she is cool and sharp and disarmingly beautiful. People are attracted to her. I know that. It's human nature.

But part of me wishes -- well, no. All of me wishes that she would climb back into that cage called "Brooklyn" and stop terrorizing the visitors in the zoo of my life. I wish no one would talk to her. I wish no one would ask her questions or even look at her. When they look at her, when they smell her, listen to her, they are constructing thoughts about me. She is like my big, ugly fur coat. She means so much about who I am.

She's like an exotic bird. She's like a raging forest fire. She's like a movie star. She sits at my feet, fiddling with an unlit cigarette.

"So you're from New York?" asks a girl named Bella. "Brooklyn, like Sal?"

"Sure am," says the fur coat, the bear trap, the stone.

Summer has her smile back, and she asks Samantha, "What's New York like? I'm going there this summer, actually."

Samantha snorts. Right above her head, Rosie's marshmallow smolders like a torch, encased in bumpy black ash. Samantha waves for her to bring the flame down until it touches the mouth of her cigarette. She takes a long drag. She holds the smoke in her mouth. Then she says, "Have fun."

Summer blinks. "Thanks." She runs her fingers affectionately through Ivo's hair, seeming lost for words for a second. "Do you have any, like, favorite places there?" she asks. "Anywhere you think I should try to go?"

Samantha shrugs.

With a sigh, Summer turns her sweet smile on me. "What about you, Sal? Where do you recommend."

"Uhh . . ." It pains me to have to emulate Samantha's shrug. "Sorry. We never really traveled much. I'm sure you'll have a good time."

Ivo grins at me. I try to smile back. "Well," he says. "What's your favorite part of Brooklyn?"

"I don't know."

"How do you not know?" Samantha interjects. Her voice brings a sudden silence, almost a reverence. Smoke leaks out of her lips like steam from a lidded, boiling pot. "You grew up there."

Then everyone is looking at me. Why does this always happen to me? How do I tell them, Look away, nothing to see here. I'm empty. I'm all out already. "Um . . . I mean, I always liked DUMBO, I guess."

"That's a movie, not a place, Sal," Rosie snickers.

"I-it's a neighborhood," I explain. "DUMBO is an acronym, actually."

Summer looks intrigued. "What's it stand for?"

"I don't remember. Down Under something."

We're quiet. In the silence, I can hear some scuffling as someone in Jean's group stands up. They start to walk away. "You okay?" asks one girl, and "You alright, Ry?" asks another. Ryann mutters, "Yeah, yeah, be right back."

"So what was Sal like as a kid?" Tristan is asking Samantha, but I'm not listening to them. I'm listening to Ryann's sneakers kicking away dead leaves as she treads her way to Jasmine's back gate. Her shoulders are hunched and her walk is slow and somehow lacking the life she usually carries in her step. I feel my heart sink to the pit of my stomach like a skipped stone drops to the bottom of a lake.

Samantha shrugs, which is quickly becoming her signature move. She moves her cheeks like she's swishing water, but it's just smoke. "Fine."

"What?"

"Fine. I said she was fine. Are you slow?"

Tristan reddens but Rosie practically cackles. Samantha is sort of leaning on her legs, strangely enough, shifting as far away from me as she can without actually getting up.

"But really," says Ivo. "Was she always this shy?" He says it with a smile in my direction, but it doesn't stop me from feeling a pang in my chest at his words. This shy. Is that all he thinks of me? Is that who I am to him? The shy girl. Sally, hiding behind trees in the woods and stuttering over words and rushing off to the bathroom when the moment becomes too intense. Sally the shy girl.

Samantha says, "How would I know?"

That hurts even more.

Ivo frowns. "Well . . . aren't you guys friends?"

"We were friends," Samantha corrects him. "As kids. And yes, she was a little mouse back then. But was she always like this? I don't know what this is. Hard for me to say."

It's the most she's said all night. She punctuates her sentence with a long, hard stare at Ivo while she taps her cigarette with her pinkie finger, ash sprinkling out onto the ground.

She isn't wrong, though. Neither of us looks at anyone.

"So," says Summer. "Are you here just to visit Sal? Or do you have family in town?"

Samantha, I see out the corner of my eye, is grinning with malicious lips. "Just visiting dear old Sally," she chuckles.

I know it's not a compliment, but my heart only hears "dear" and "Sally". My stomach jumps and my heart beats like a hummingbird's wings flapping. Her shoulders hold the moonlight, shimmering like precious opal gemstones in the night.

"Well, welcome to Stone Harbor," Summer says. "I hope you have a nice time here."

Samantha snorts hard. "In this shithole? Yeah, okay. I'll try."

"Hey!" someone says. Someone else mutters, " . . .not a shithole . . ."

"Samantha," I mutter. She doesn't even look at me.

Tristan crosses his arms. "At least Stone Harbor's not the murder capital of the state."

"At least Brooklyn's not a dead-ass suburbia shitpool full of white-ass, punk-ass little shits like you thinking they know shit 'bout shit they ain't never seen before while they walking around with their heads up they own asses tryna pretend they know fucking squat about life." 

Samantha blows a flurry of smoke into the sky. Everyone is silent. Her eyes are like stormy deep sea trenches, the last unexplored depths of the world.