How to Breathe Underwater

How to Breathe Underwater Read Free

Book: How to Breathe Underwater Read Free
Author: Julie Orringer
Tags: Fiction
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    “It’s mine, it’s
my
tree house,” she said as Ella stared at her.
    “Is Mister Kaplan your dad?” Benjamin said.
    “My dat-
tee,
” the girl corrected him.
    “Where’s your mom?”
    “She died,” said the girl, and looked him fiercely in the eye.
    Benjamin sucked in his breath and glanced at Ella.
    Ella wanted to hit this girl. She bent down close to the girl’s face, making her eyes small and mean. “If this is so your tree house,” Ella said, “then how come you’re tied up?”
    “It’s
jail,
” the girl spat. “In jail you get tied up.”
    “We could untie you,” said Benjamin. He tugged at one of her bonds.
    The girl opened her mouth and let out a scream so shrill Ella’s eardrums buzzed. Once, as her father had pulled into the driveway at night, he had trapped a rabbit by the leg beneath the wheel of his car; the rabbit had made a sound like that. Benjamin dropped the string and moved against Ella, and the children with ragged hair laughed and jumped on the platform until it crackled and groaned. The boy in purple overalls cried in his corner.
    Benjamin put his lips to Ella’s ear. “I don’t understand it here,” he whispered.
    There was a scuffle at the door, and the skinny boy stepped into the hostage room. “All right,” he said. “Who gets killed?”
    “Kill those kids, Peter,” the girl said, pointing at Benjamin and Ella.
    “Us?” Benjamin said.
    “Who do you think?” said the boy.
    He poked them in the back with his suction-cup arrow and moved them toward the tree trunk, where rough boards formed a ladder to the next level. Ella and Benjamin climbed until they had reached a narrow platform, and then Peter pushed them to the edge. Ella looked down at the trampoline. It was a longer drop than the high dive at the public pool. She looked over her shoulder and Peter glared at her. Down below the collie barked and barked, his black nose pointed up at them.
    Benjamin took Ella’s hand and closed his eyes. Then Peter shoved them from behind, and they stumbled forward into space.
    There was a moment of terrifying emptiness, nothing but air beneath Ella’s feet. She could hear the collie’s bark getting closer as she fell. She slammed into the trampoline knees first, then flew, shrieking, back up into the air. When she hit the trampoline a second time, Benjamin’s head knocked against her chin. He stood up rubbing his head, and Ella tasted salt in her mouth. Her loose tooth had slipped its roots. She spat it into her palm and studied its jagged edge.
    “Move,” Peter called from above. The boy in purple overalls was just climbing up onto the platform. Peter pulled him forward until his toes curled over the edge.
    “I lost my tooth!” Ella yelled.
    “Get off!”
    Benjamin scrambled off the trampoline. Ella crawled to the edge, the tooth gleaming and red-rimmed between her fingers, and then the trampoline lurched with the weight of the boy in purple overalls. The tooth flew from her hand and into the bushes, too small to make a sound when it hit.
    When she burst into the house crying, blood streaming from her mouth, the longhaired men and women dropped their mixing spoons and went to her. She twisted away from them, looking frantically for her mother and father, but they were nowhere to be seen. There was no way to explain that she wasn’t hurt, that she was upset because her tooth was gone and because everything about that house made her want to run away and hide. The adults, their faces creased with worry, pulled her to the sink and held her mouth open. The woman with skewed eyes, Delilah, pressed a tissue against the space where her tooth had been. Ella could smell onions and apples on her hands.
    “The time was right,” she said. “The new tooth’s already coming in.”
    “Whose is she?” one of the men asked.
    Delilah told him the names of Ella’s parents. It was strange to hear those familiar words,
Ann
and
Gary,
in the mouths of these longhaired

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