Breakable Read Free

avalanche of tumbling boulders. Unstoppable.
    The following day, I wore a watch with a thick band on my left wrist, even though it chafed my still-raw skin. I stacked silicone wristbands on my right, banned unconditionally by the principal the previous spring. These became part of my daily uniform.
    No one made me take them off. No one mentioned them. But everybody stared, eager to catch a glimpse of what was underneath.
    Things I stopped doing:
Hockey
. I started playing when I was six, shortly after attending my first Capitals game with Dad. Mom wasn’t thrilled, but she tolerated it – maybe because it was a bonding point for Dad and me. Maybe because I loved playing so much.
    Though right-handed in every other situation, something happened when I laced my skates and took my left-wing position. Powering a puck to the goal, I was ambidextrous. Between breaths, I shifted positions to dig a puck from the corner or freaked out opponents by switching hands in the middle of a play, sinking goals before they could catch up. My select team didn’t win every time, but we’d made the finals lastyear. I began eighth grade certain this would be the year we’d take home the championship trophy. Like that was the most significant thing that could ever happen to me.
Participating in class
. I didn’t raise my hand. I wasn’t ever called on. Pretty simple termination.
Sleeping
. I still slept, sort of. But I woke up a lot. I had nightmares, but not obvious ones. Most often, I fell. Out of the sky. Off a building, a bridge, a cliff. Arms windmilling and legs kicking futilely. Sometimes, I dreamed about bears and sharks and carnivorous dinosaurs. Sometimes, I dreamed about drowning. One thing was constant: I was always alone.
LUCAS
    On hot days, I missed having the beach right outside my door. Even if the air had been saturated with humidity and the sand had been grassy and irregular, the gulf had always been there, cool waves lapping against the shore like a come-hither murmur.
    For the past three years, I’d lived four hours inland. If I had the desire to submerge myself in a body of water, I had two choices: the Hellers’ pool or the lake. There was little solitude to be found at either.
    The lake was perpetually crowded with tourists and townies alike, and Carlie’s friends still hung out at the house almost daily, lounging in the pool’s deckchairs asthey had all summer. The absolute last thing I needed was a gaggle of very underage girls trying to net my attention just because I was the only non-dad male in the vicinity. Cole had been the object of their interest all summer, much to his sister’s disgust. But he left two weeks ago to follow in his mom’s footsteps at Duke, and Caleb was only eleven – as young to all of them as they were to me.
    They failed to perceive the correlation.
    Growing progressively paler over the past few years made my ink stand out even more. I’d begun with the complex patterns that wrapped my wrists, and they’d become sleeves, primarily composed of my own designs. Combined with the pierced lip and the longish dark hair, I more closely resembled a guy who thrives on depressive music and darkness than the beach-dwelling adolescent I was when I first
got
the tattoos and piercings.
    In high school I’d sported multiple piercings – an ear stud, a barbell through an eyebrow and a nipple ring – in addition to the lip ring. Dad hated them, and my small-town high-school principal alleged they were all signs of deviance and an antisocial disposition. I didn’t bother arguing.
    Once I left home, I’d pulled them all out but the one through the edge of my lip – the most conspicuous one.
    I figured Heller would ask me,
Why leave
that
one?
But he never did. Maybe he’d known the answer without me vocalizing it – that I was categorically messed up and far from concerned with
fitting in
. To ordinary people, my lip piercing indicated the opposite of approachability. It was aself-erected