Breathe Me || Completed

17.0 - Sydney's House

Sydney's house is short and blue and pretty, flowers hanging out of petite baskets in the windows. There's a white picket fence around the front lawn and a glistening concrete path that leads straight to the front door.

There's no one outside -- in Syd's neighborhood, the houses are far apart. She's at the very end of a short street, down a little hill so that you can't even see the next house from her yard. Woods surround the house on the other three sides, lush and green. Still, we sneak around to the back. My hands shake as I jam the key into the lock and wrestle the sticky sliding door open.

We collapse into the house, stumbling like drunks. We're all three slick with sweat after our half-hour run to get here.

But Samantha won't let us sit at the long, mahogany table in the dining room. "C'mon," she insists, tugging me by the wrist. "Not here. Somewhere without windows."

"Sammy," I sigh. "You're being paranoid."

"Just come here."

She drags me down the hall of the one-story house, glancing into each room as we pass. There's a blue-tiled bathroom, a bedroom with a king sized-bed and deep brown walls. Then, at the end of the hall, two rooms, one light blue and the other yellow. Samantha yanks me into the yellow bedroom. Christina stumbles inside behind us.

The shades are pulled on the windows already. Samantha shuts the door behind us and flops down onto the bed, a downy yellow comforter sagging under her weight. I'm too tired to stay standing. I collapse next to her.

Christina frowns, looking around. "Are you sure this is Syd's room?" she asks.

Samantha nods. She points a picture on the wooden dresser: Kayla and Sydney both in sleeveless dresses, arms around each other as they grin at the camera. There's another beside it of the two of them on this very bed, an overweight cat nestled between Kayla's sleeping body and Sydney's smirking face. "Cute," I mutter.

I let Samantha pull me off the bed and onto the floor, too exhausted to resist. We sit cross-legged on the carpet, the three of us knee to knee. I breathe in and out, trying to stop feeling like I'm dying. Samantha opens her backpack and offers me her half-empty water bottle. I guzzle down the rest gratefully.

"No one'll see us here," Samantha says. "This room is facing the woods. We should be safe enough."

Christina leans her head back against the dresser, pale as a ghost with exhaustion. "You guys run fast . . ." she notes.

"Sorry. We don't usually do that," Samantha says. She smiles at me, her eyes tired, and strokes my cheek. "You're tired, too."

I nod. I am.

Samantha sighs at us. "Alright, I'm gonna go find us some food, okay? We'll hang out here for a little, but not too long. Police know we're in the area. And," she says, shooting a glance at Christina, "it's just a matter of time before they figure out you're missing, too."

So she gets up and goes to find us food, leaving Christina and me to stare at the white popcorn ceiling, wiping our sweaty foreheads on the collars of our shirts. Christina's still breathing hard. "Wow," she chuckles. "Haven't ever run for that long before."

"Me neither," I say.

She presses her lips together, looking at me. "So . . . you're not gonna ask what I'm doing here?"

"We just got here."

"Yeah. I know."

"But . . . you can tell me. If you want to."

Christina's eyes dart around the room as if someone might be eavesdropping through the walls. I watch her bury her face in her hands, sighing hard. "I don't have a very good reason," she says. "But if you want to hear it . . ."

"I do."

"Well." Christina fiddles with the zipper on her duffle bag, biting her lip. She averts her eyes from mine, suddenly bashful. "I guess I'm sort of like you guys," she says. "No one wants to accept me for who I am. Not even my own girlfriend."

I lean in. "Who you are? Well, who's that?"

Christina draws her knees to her chest. "You have to promise you won't . . . judge me or anything," she says.

Well, everyone's judging everyone all the time. We can't help that. "I won't," I tell her.

"Okay." Deep breath. Then she says, "I'm not a girl. I'm a guy. I'm . . . trans, I guess, is the word, but I'm just not this." She holds up a strand of her long, wavy brown hair, giving it a disdainful side-eye. "It's like God accidentally stuffed my soul in the wrong body."

"Oh." I should probably be shocked or fascinated or something, but I find that it doesn't actually matter to me that much. Christina, Chris. What difference does it make? But it does make me look at him in a new way, see his baggy t-shirt and giant glasses in a different light. If I squint hard enough, I can see him as a sixteen-year-old boy sitting in front of me, not a sixteen-year-old girl. "Alright," I say. "So should I call you Chris?"

He nods. "If you don't mind."

"No. I don't mind." I try to smile at him and he tries to smile back, both of us caught up in our own awkwardness. I dare to ask, "So, who else knows? Did you tell your parents?"

Chris shakes his head. "No, they would freak out. My brother came out as gay last year and now every time he comes home all my parents do is talk about it and all their opinions about gay people and the 'gay lifestyle'. It's gross." He sighs, crossing and uncrossing his legs. "The only person I told was Mae."

"And what did she say?"

"She sort of . . . brushed it off. She doesn't believe me. I guess she thinks I'm too young to know. But you're never too young to know how you feel." I see shiny tears painting over Chris's eyes. "I wish she would just accept me for who I am. It feels shitty when the world rejects you, but it feels even shittier when your best friend in the world does, too."

I feel a shiver go through me. I see Samantha inside her Brownsville apartment, her face compacting and closing as she slammed the door shut without a goodbye. I see the fear, the anger, the hurt in her eyes that has followed me around all these years since.

I swallow hard. "That sounds awful," I say.

"It is."

"Well, you're with us now," I tell him. "Sam and I, we don't care. You can be yourself with us."

A smile breaks over her face like clouds parting around the sun. She grins at me and says, "I was hoping you would say that."