Breathe
by
Michael Downing
Allison Taylor took his breath away so suddenly that Bobby Wade fell for her the first time she offered a smile and a quiet hello. Love snuck up on him, like a hard left to the gut, and he never recovered.
Fate.
Or something like it.
From that moment at the school bus stop he was convinced they were destined to be together. It was just a matter of time before it worked out the way he wanted it to.
He sat behind her in every class they shared throughout high school, and by senior year they were together in two classes as well as mornings in Home Room. Bobby studied everything about her; how she laughed at jokes, the way she raised a tentative hand to answer a teacher’s question, and how she held his stare when they talked. In Home Room he would breathe in the faint traces of perfume on her skin, and if he leaned forward far enough he could sometimes catch the soft smell of soap that lingered on her neck. Bobby absorbed himself in those details, holding on to the subtleties of every move she made and every breath she drew. He lived for the mornings when she turned around and talked with him, before the bell rang and the best part of his day slipped away.
Bobby embraced every word and every smile she threw off like they were meant for him and no one else.
Allison was one of those girls who had it all. A pretty face, long red hair, an infectious smile that lit up any room, and a personality that pulled in everyone who crossed her path. Life worked out that way for some people. Everyone wanted to be like her and everyone wanted to be with her. Bobby didn’t have that kind of popularity. Most days he was lost in the shadows of the hallways as he moved from class to class. Their lockers were adjacent to each other in B Wing, so most afternoons Bobby had to fight through cheerleaders, jocks, nerds, and burnouts crowding the space next to Allison. Guys who rarely spoke to him throughout grade school looked at him like he held the key to her heart.
At least at first.
Bobby didn’t mind, especially those times when she shot him a sympathetic smile as he struggled to pull his books from the locker and then disappeared down the hallway.
He was certain they shared a deep connection. More than anything she had with the guys hanging around her locker.
Some days he worked his way into a seat next to her on the bus ride home, and became part of the crowd that walked home together. One by one friends peeled off in different directions until it was just the two of them walking through the neighborhood. He imagined sliding his hand into hers and sharing something meaningful, at least more than talk about homework assignments or answers to the last algebra quiz. Bobby wanted to run his fingers along the soft parts of her body, pulling her close to feel the heat of her breath against his skin, staring into her eyes and hearing his name quietly on her lips.
He wanted to be more than friends.
Sometimes he watched her alone in the cafeteria, writing in that journal she carried everywhere, putting her words, feelings, and deepest emotions on paper. He wondered what she wrote about day after day. Wondered if it was about the monotony of school, or about hopes and dreams once she graduated and left their town behind.
He wondered if she ever wrote about him.
Bobby knew if he could have time alone with her to really talk about feelings and emotions, life would be different. He just couldn’t work up the courage to find the words. There was that week in English Lit when the class read “Romeo and Juliet” aloud, listening to her read Juliet’s part as if every word of dialogue was meant for him. Sideways glances between them. Sharing knowing looks no one else could see.
If only they could get to know each other.
Once when they were walking home he asked about her journal, joking that she should let him read it someday, but she gave a sharp no. After that they walked home in a silence so heavy it hurt.
Some nights Bobby would call her house, but he always lost his nerve when she answered. He did that a few times but never worked up his courage or found the words he wanted to say, and the “hello’s” lapsed into awkward silences before he hung up. Other nights he would slip out of his house with his hood pulled low over his head, making his way through the dark shadows of the neighborhood. Bobby would creep into Allison’s yard, hoping to catch a glimpse of her silhouette in a window as she moved from room to room, watching the house in silence. Her family’s small Cape Cod was bright and warm, unlike his own house, which was a cold, lifeless place where everything inside had died years earlier. He imagined her parents in the living room, making snacks, laughing together as they watched TV, calling her downstairs to sit with them. It was different than the life in his own house, where his father was buried in empty beer cans, asleep in a chair in front of the TV by nine and his mother was locked inside the bedroom with a bottle of wine and a pack of Virginia Slims keeping her company. Bobby stood in the yard for hours through the rain and snow, wishing he could be inside with Allison.
But in the small town where they lived, a town where everyone watched their neighbors from behind curtains and shuttered blinds, there was no way to find that privacy. No way to share those feelings.
In all the years Allison lived down the street, Bobby knew absolutely nothing about the things that mattered to her. Never knew what she really felt. Whenever he tried getting inside her world the jocks guarding her locker misunderstood his motives.
“See you talking to her. Chasing after her all the time,” they said. “Sure you want to do that?”
“We’re just friends,” he told them, as if they could understand the difference between friendship and something else.
“Think you need to leave her alone.”
“Did she tell you to say that?”
“We’re telling you to leave her alone,” they said.
His father kept a serrated hunting knife in the garage and Bobby thought about stuffing it in his backpack, bringing it out to scare them off but he never did.
Instead, he drifted back into the shadows of the hallway in silence.
That left him with only those moments before class and the time together walking home from the bus stop. But the talks before class happened less frequently as the years went on and by the end of Junior year Allison started riding home with friends after school. When their senior year started her locker was moved to A Wing and he rarely saw her in the halls.
Once any time he got with her was enough, but he ached for more. Ached to be someone more than her friend, and Bobby would have done anything to have that closeness.
Everything changed over Thanksgiving weekend.
When Allison didn’t come to school on Monday and Tuesday people started talking. She wasn’t the kind of girl who disappeared for hours without telling anyone where she was going, certainly not for days. There were whispers and rumors, and on Wednesday the police showed up at the high school. They questioned friends and classmates, wanting to know where she hung out and who she talked to, trying to reconnect the patterns of her life, and some of them pointed to Bobby like he knew something. Bobby didn’t have much to say to the cops when they brought him in; at least nothing he figured would help. He talked about those moments they shared and how much Allison meant to him, but there wasn’t much else to say.
Then the cops pulled out that journal and read him some of the pages. They kept coming back to the parts she had written about him.
“I don’t like the way he looks at me,” she wrote. “And sometimes I see him watching me late at night. Across the street or hiding behind trees for hours. Staring at my room.”
“It scares me,” she wrote. “He scares me.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Bobby said but nobody listened.
“So tell us what it was like,” the cops demanded. “Tell us what happened.”
The police wanted to know what he had done and where she was, but Bobby kept quiet and didn’t say another word no matter how hard they pressed. They told him neighbors saw him in Allison’s yard that weekend, standing outside her window. There were marks cut into the wooden sill and the police traced them back to a knife they found under Bobby’s mattress. Said they found his fingerprints in her bedroom and all over the window glass, but Bobby stayed quiet.
They wanted to know what had happened to her but the only thing Bobby wanted to talk about was how much Allison meant to him. How what they had was something nobody else could understand.
Even when they read her words to him again, connecting the dots, Bobby knew they didn’t understand what she meant or what she had written.
Nobody understood.
He sat in the holding cell, imagining his fingers running along the curve of her neck, letting his hands caress the soft parts of her skin. Feeling her breath on his face, saying his name, over and over again. That was how he pictured it.
They found her body dumped in the woods nearby a few days later. When the autopsy report came back it showed she had been strangled.
The police tried pinning it on him but Bobby told them they got it wrong. They didn’t understand. She took his breath away – not the other way around.
Bio:
Michael Downing is a writer originally from New Jersey, now living in a small college town in Georgia. Over the past fifteen years he has published a few books and his short stories have been featured in various publications and anthologies (some that have even been nominated for Pushcart Prizes). He is still everything New Jersey: attitude, edginess, and Bruce Springsteen … but not Bon Jovi.
Punk Noir Press 