Breathless Read Free

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.
    I puff on my cigarette now while he watches. “How am I doing?”
    He takes a long, contemplative drag of his own smoke, shaking his head. “You’re inhaling okay, but you have to get used to keeping it in your mouth. Like this.” He demonstrates, keeping a loose hold on the cigarette between his dry lips. “So you look tough and nobody messes with you.”
    “I don’t want to look tough. I want to look sexy.”
    Will rolls his eyes, annoyed. “Why?” His gaze turns to the cat again. “So all the Hellsburg losers will want to take you out on the town?”
    “No!”
    He nods to himself, disgusted by the idea, determined to believe it. “Yeah, that’s why.”
    “I’m a girl, Will. I want boys to like me.”
    “All right. Well, you’ve gotta quit calling them cigarettes, for one thing.”
    “Why?”
    “ ’Cause they ain’t.” He removes the cigarette from his lips, holds it between stained fingers, stares at it. “They’re fags.”
    “I’ve never heard anybody call them fags.”
    “That’s what they call them in the city.”
    I snort. “Right.”
    “Shut up, Katie.”
    “Is that what they called them in the hospital?” Right away I know I shouldn’t have said it. He bares his teeth at me, and even in the shade I can see the heat rising from the tarred roof, willowing around his slight figure. Behind his braces, his teeth are yellow and mossy, stubbornly crooked. Our orthodontist says Will is the worst patient he’s had in thirty years of practice. Anytime his braces start bothering him, Will pries them from his teeth with a pair of pliers he keeps stashed in his room somewhere. My parents try to do sweeps of his bedroom every couple of weeks, looking for things that could get him in trouble, but somehow he manages to keep a lot hidden—random prescription pills; cigarettes by the carton; short stories that he writes about all kinds of awful, crazy things, scribbled on yellow legal paper; and his pliers. As a result of his stealth, he’s had braces on and off for something like ten years. Which is funny when you think about it, because what’s the point anymore? It isn’t like they’ll ever get him to wear his retainers.
    He flicks his cigarette into the gutter and we both watch while its cherry eats at a dead leaf. Then Will leans forward on his knees and hocks a wad of spit onto the burning edge, turning the leaves over with his hand to hide our evidence. We’ve learned that we have to be careful, that in many ways our parents are better sneaks than we are. They pretend to be clueless to what’s going on for a while, and then they seize on you.
    The Ghost is the worst. He is a big fan of procedural television dramas and forensics. He takes sick pleasure at family meetings from producing Ziploc bags of evidence, sealed and labeled, displaying the paraphernalia he’s discovered hidden around the house. Then he acts like he doesn’t know what’s going on until we get too bored or embarrassed and finally confess what we’ve been up to on the roof. He is good at almost everything. As far as I know, he’s never failed once.
    Well, maybe once. My mom says he’ll never know how to take care of himself; he eats too much junk food. “Healthy eating and raising kids,” he likes to say. “Those are two things I could never seem to get right.”
    At family meetings, he sits in an overstuffed recliner with a glass of wine at his side, obviously enjoying our misery. He clears his throat before speaking, holding up a bag so we can all get a good look at the evidence. “In the past week, I collected three handfuls of cigarette butts from the gutter, some of which had lipstick on