--Breathless by Jessica Warman
“Even though she’s still barely willing to speak to me, it feels better than being all by myself. Sometimes I pretend she is Will, and that I know exactly where he is and what’s happening to him, right there above me. Sometimes I try not to think about it, and I don’t pretend anything. Mostly, though, I pretend that everything I’ve told everyone is true: my big brother is dead. In that scenario, at least, we all get some rest.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman
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“I feel awful. In this moment, I miss him more than ever. But I also feel relief, a kind of deep satisfaction now that I’ve managed to complete the lie I’ve been trying to tell for weeks. I feel, for the first time since I watched Will being driven away in the ambulance, like I can breathe on dry land again.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “When she asks about brothers and sisters, I stare down at our hands—at all of our hands, white gloves pulled tight and flawless over our fingers—and all I think about is Will and the blood everywhere the last time I saw him. I remember watching from my window as Donny George stood with a hose in his backyard, rinsing the blood from his kids’ swing set, spraying down the concrete walkway in his yard. It took him forever. As I’m thinking about it, I can feel my shin aching where I fell on the cinderblocks in the Georges’ yard and took a chunk out of my flesh. The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. ‘I had a brother,’ I say.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “I want to fight him for the sake of fighting. Because, I mean, who wants to get sent to boarding school? And then I think about the last few weeks, and what school will be like when I go back and everybody wants to know about Will and I won’t have anything to tell them, and depending on what they’ve heard I might have to fake a headache and spend the afternoon on a cot in the nurse’s office, waiting for the day to be over. And then I’ll come home to what? My mom. The pool in our yard. In a month or so, it will be too cold and they’ll have to cover it for the fall and winter, and all I’ll have is Rec swimming for days a week, two hours a day. Who wants to get sent away to boarding school? I do.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “It’s hard to believe he has been this sick for only a few years; it feels like this has been going on forever. When it started, they used to explain things to me more carefully. I’ve had it explained by guidance counselors, family therapists, and neighbors who don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. It got to the point where the same kind of things kept happening, over and over again, and there wasn’t any point in explaining anymore.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “I’ve always done well in school—I get all As—but the only thing I really love is swimming. Sometimes I feel like I don’t really exist outside the water.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “What’s wrong with Will, according to every doctor who’s ever seen him, is drug-induced schizophrenia. Without all the bullying, he might never have gotten into all the drugs. It took a few years before what was happening to him became clear; typically, schizophrenia doesn’t begin to show itself until later in a person’s adolescence or early twenties. But Will has never been typical, and people in this town were unusually cruel.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “If it weren’t for this town, and everything the people did to him, Will might not even be sick. He was smart as a kid—he still is—and it was too much for people here to handle. I think that seeing how smart he was, how successful our parents were becoming, made them realize how tiny and sad their own lives were.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “They get his head on straight again, and once he’s doing better, they send him home. After a while, he feels so good that he decides he can manage life himself, the he doesn’t need to be medicated. So he stops taking his pills, and then everything starts all over again.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “Right there, in his laugh, I can sense his emotional axis shifting a little, off-kilter. It’s something I’ve come to call privately the kaleidoscope of crazy—shimmering and beautiful in certain lights, paisley and horrifying in others. Will is almost twenty-one and in certain lights looks more like twelve, in others closer to thirty. I know him as well as myself and not at all. All I can figure to do is hold on. He is my only brother.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman |