Inland Read Free

opened its yawning blue mouth and swallowed my mother whole.

T HE MO U NT A I N S

C H A P T E R 3
    THE SUBSTITUTE GYM TEACHER is eyeing me suspiciously. We’ve met once before, but he doesn’t remember. I can’t even blame him; I wouldn’t remember me, either. I haven’t been in school for three weeks.
    “Last name is Morgan, you said?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And you’re sure it’s this class.”
    “Pretty sure,” I say, and he cringes. My voice is ragged and dry. They say that scar tissue has built up in my larynx, the souvenir of too many intubations. Too many hospital visits, too many times when my body has needed outside assistance to do the supposedly simple job of breathing on its own. When I talk, people flinch as though they want to lay a fast palm on my back—to knock loose that painful scrape from my throat. As though, if they just hit me hard enough, I’ll cough it up onto the carpet.
    I don’t talk often.
    “I don’t have a file for you. And nothing about an exemption, either.”
    “I haven’t been in school. It might have gotten lost.”
    His eyebrows go up another notch. They started climbing the moment I walked in; I can mark their movement by the number of folds in his forehead. He’s entirely bald, this man: shaved to the shiny limits, a head like a cannonball. The tag on his binder says MR . THICKE, and he is—built wide and strong like a bulldog, with taut, firm skin and a coiled spring of a body. Someone who’s moved all his life with the ease and fluidity and strength of a well-oiled machine. Someone who has never, I can tell just by looking at him, never struggled just to breathe.
    I struggle. I wheeze and I pant and I drag the air in, clawing at it with ragged gulps, while it fights to stay out of my lungs.
    Mr. Thicke looks at me, at the soft, unmuscled mass of my body, at the inhaler in my hand. I cough, and he winces.
    “All right,” he says. “I’ll have to check with the admins, but in the meantime, go on and sit this one out.”
    I’m not sure which one of us is more relieved.
    —
    I can count the number of gym classes I’ve taken on one hand, and they’ve all ended the same way: early, prostrate, with my head against a cot and the bitter taste of albuterol coating my tongue. In the past six years, I’ve come to understand that exercise is a luxury for the healthy. Even the doctors don’t push it. Even they, I suspect, don’t want to see what I look like in sweaty, ungainly motion.
    It’s not a pretty sight. I’m not a pretty girl. Not even average, even on my Real Person days—the ones where I successfully get out of bed, and eat cereal, and make it through all eight periods without an attack. I’m nothing like the girls I glimpsed when I passed through the locker room to see Mr. Thicke, the ones who were giggling and shimmying into swimsuits, with lean legs and taut stomachs and skin that still looks kissed by the summer sun.
    I can’t swim. Can’t run. Can’t even move, not like they do. My body is pale from disuse, soft and limp and with the flabby consistency of unbaked dough. I have hollows under my eyes and pits in my skin, cracked lips and a rough face. Last year, the corpse of a drowned dog washed out of the sewer near our house after a week of hard rain; the first thing I noticed was how much its bloated, misshapen gut looked just like mine.
    When I point to my gravelly ass and loose white flesh, the doctors remind me about priorities. They say that there’s plenty of time to be pretty, but first I have to be well.
    “I’m not getting any better,” I say.
    “You’re doing fine,” they say.
    My father says, “Do as they say.”
    —
    It’s only us, now. My father and I, navigating our old Subaru like a two-hand ship, moving in one-year increments toward the center of the country. Following orders, seeing doctors, installing ourselves in university housing with the efficiency of frequent movers. They all look the same: classy, cared-for,