Breathless 3 (Breathless #3) (2 page)

I watched her getting ready, darting in and out of her
room, going back and forth to the split bathroom: showering, putting on makeup,
changing outfits and asking for my approval on each piece she chose. The entire
time my stomach was in knots, and I could only barely pretend like I was
remotely okay as I kept my eyes on either the TV or the book in front of me.

By the time Georgia left, my skin was crawling and I
was more than happy to finally be alone again. I thought that if I was around
her for even a moment longer, the entire crazy, terrifying story would come
tumbling out of me.
Did he really just
want to have sex with me and that was why he got me into the closet or is it
some kind of crazy weird thing?
I had loved it when we’d done it — I had
been so pleased with myself putting it over on the Country Club, sticking a
metaphorical middle finger up at the stuffiness, at my own pretentious parents
and everyone they associated with. But knowing that Johnny was apparently
involved in some poor girl’s suicide — what had he done? — made me feel like
there was something else going on with that tryst.

My stomach was churning inside of me. My lunch hadn’t
done much for me; I had eaten because I knew I had to eat, but I hadn’t been
hungry at all. I had been nauseated. I still felt nauseated. I was on birth
control, my mother had insisted on it, but it had never bothered my stomach
before. I gulped as I thought about the possibility of Johnny knocking me up.
Any form of birth control could fail.
Oh
God, what if he already had?
My mind spun out of control with speculation
that I knew was sheer insanity. I was letting my imagination get the better of
me, as my mom would have said.

My phone rang and I nearly fell off of the couch,
startled out of my wheeling, rambling thoughts. It was Johnny. I bit my bottom
lip; could I dare not to answer it? I hadn’t answered his text messages from
before. If I avoided him, he might come to find me. It wasn’t quiet hours, and
I kind of thought that Johnny would have no problem talking himself into the
building, even if the RAs had a rule against it. Who could tell Johnny Steel
no? I swallowed against the rising anxiety I felt. I had to answer it. It would
be easier to talk to him over the phone than it would be in person if he
decided to come and see me. “Hey, Johnny,” I said, struggling to come up with a
smile.

“Becky-baby!” He sounded so normal. How could he sound
so normal, so sweet, and so kind? If he had driven a girl to suicide, how could
he act like such a great guy around me? Was he going to drive me to suicide?
Had it been a suicide at all? I heard Johnny talking and knew that I had to pay
attention to what he was saying. I shook my head as if that would stop my
reeling thoughts.

“Sorry, babe — what?” Johnny laughed.

“I said, aren’t you coming to dinner? I’ve been
waiting to see you all day. Going through withdrawals.” I smiled weakly.

“Oh, is it dinner?” Johnny chuckled again.

“What are you up to? You’re never this distracted.”
Part of me wanted to retort that Johnny hadn’t known me long enough to know how
distracted I could be. I was exhausted. I was more anxious than I had been in
years.

“I’m just not feeling very well. Kind of nauseated.
Probably have some kind of bug — you know how these dorms are.” I tried to make
my voice sound weak and it was much easier than I would have thought.

“Poor baby,” Johnny said, his voice so sympathetic, so
full of affection. It made no sense.
Sociopaths
are supposed to be so charismatic. Of course he’s sweet. Of course he’s
charming.
“I could come and bring you up some soup. I think the DH has
chicken noodle tonight.” I felt my eyes stinging. Was I totally wrong about
him? Was everyone wrong? I couldn’t believe that someone could be
so
horrible as the comments on Claire White’s memorial page
suggested, but so kind and so thoughtful. It just didn’t make sense.

“Gigi is taking care of me,” I said, looking around as
if I expected her to pop up out of nowhere and exclaim that I was lying. She
wouldn’t be back from her date for hours. I was losing my mind.

“Well as long as you’re not suffering alone, I guess
that’s okay,” Johnny said. “Just call me if you change your mind. I’ll come and
cuddle you and bring you anything you want to eat.” I smiled again, wishing
that I could just accept Johnny’s
kindness, that
I
wasn’t sitting on the couch, thinking of terrible things he might be involved
in. My life would be so much easier if I had never heard anything about Claire
White.

“I’ll totally call you right away,” I said. Johnny
said something else that I barely heard, something sweet and gentle and kind,
and I felt my heart skipping inside of my chest. I made an excuse and finally
got off of the phone, echoing Johnny’s parting,
affectionate
comment.

I looked around the living room, trying to decide what
I wanted to do. Eating anything seemed out of the question completely. Even the
thought of crackers was enough to make my stomach flop over inside of me and
give me a greasy, low feeling. I decided that I’d just go to bed. Obviously, I
wasn’t going to get any kind of practical studying done and there was nothing
on TV compelling enough to distract me from the bone-deep fatigue and the
whirling of my thoughts. I would just go to bed, hopefully succumb to the deep
need for sleep, and then in the morning, if I was lucky, this would all have
been some stupid fevered dream that never really happened. At least, maybe, I
would know what to think about all of it.

Stupid as it was, I climbed into my bed and found
myself wishing that Johnny was there. Part of me remembered his comfortable
sweetness and the kind gentleness he had shown me every time we had been
together. It was totally incompatible with the kind of guy who could torment a
girl to her death. I tossed and turned, trying to calm myself down, trying to
sort out just what I could — what I should — believe about Johnny. The
commenter had said that what he had done to her wasn’t love. Johnny had said
that he had been in love with her, that he hadn’t been able to save her from
herself.

I fell into a dizzy, uneasy sleep, with the muscles in
my legs twitching even as the blackness of exhaustion started to fill up my
mind. I didn’t know the moment that I had shifted between falling asleep and
being asleep, plunging into the darkness of oblivion.

I was back in the woods. Deep down the trail Johnny
had driven down, in the darkness, able to see without knowing where the light
was coming from. I heard dull, echoing thuds, groans, growls, and a sharp
scream.
Oh God, what’s happening?
My
heart started pounding in my chest. I ran, following the noises; I had to know
what was going on. Everything around me seemed unreal and terrifyingly vivid
all at once — trees whipping at me with their branches, and yet I didn’t feel
them. My legs moving underneath me as fast as I could manage, but somehow I was
moving along the trail as slowly as molasses, trying to reach the agonizing
screams.

I came into the clearing where Johnny had built the
fire and saw him standing there, in his hockey gear. Another scream ripped
through my ears, cutting through my brain, and I saw him bring his hockey stick
down onto someone, over and over again. That had been the thudding I had heard
— the sick sound of the wooden stick hitting a person. I staggered backwards,
staring at Johnny as he laughed, bringing his stick down again, blood
spattering across his uniform. He was singing something — words I didn’t know,
a song I couldn’t recognize — as he laid into whomever he was beating, and it
was so completely horrifying that I screamed.

“Oh hey, baby,” Johnny said, turning towards me. “Just
have to take care of this real quick.” He turned away and started beating the
person at his feet even more viciously, chuckling under his breath. Realizing
the screams were feminine, I looked down at the broken, bloody person, curled
in on herself. The next moment, the person’s face turned towards me and through
the streaming blood, I saw to my horror that it was Claire White. I screamed
again and again, trying to get away from the fire, from the sight of Johnny
beating the poor defenseless girl. My legs wouldn’t work and I thrashed around
me, trying to cover my face, trying not to see what was in front of me. It
couldn’t be Johnny. It couldn’t be Claire. It couldn’t be real — Claire had
killed herself, she hadn’t been murdered by Johnny. I heard a sickening crunch,
a thud, and turned away, trying to run, trying to escape.

I woke up all at once, dripping with cold sweat,
sitting up in my bed, my heart pounding in my chest.
God. God. What was that?
I shook from head to toe, reeling from the
vividness of the nightmare. My throat hurt — had I screamed for real or just in
the dream? I swallowed and tried to get a grip on myself. It had only been a
dream. It had been terrifying, but no matter what Johnny had done to drive a
girl to kill herself, he obviously hadn’t actually beaten her — not like that.
If he had, there would have been no way for him to escape punishment for it.

I climbed out of bed, deciding that I needed a drink
of water. I needed to talk to someone. But Georgia’s room was deserted — she
wasn’t back from her date. It wasn’t even midnight. I shook as I tried to open
a water bottle and spilled half of its contents all over myself.
I’m exhausted, I’m stressed out, and I went
to bed hungry,
I told myself firmly.
No
wonder I had a nightmare.
I fumbled in the darkness of the common area and
found a box of crackers, cramming them into my mouth and washing them down with
the last of the water. My stomach was still unsteady, but my heart started to
finally slow down and I climbed back into bed.

My mind still reeled with what my dream had shown me.
It wasn’t real. Johnny didn’t do that to her. Whatever else I could manage to
believe about him, I couldn’t believe that he could beat a girl to death and
then go on to college as if nothing had happened. I finished off the water and
tossed the bottle towards the recycling bin in my room without even caring
whether or not it actually landed inside. I decided the only thing I could do
was try and go back to sleep, as terrifying as the prospect of another
nightmare was. I was so tired. I was so confused. I closed my eyes and drifted
off gradually, telling myself that I would think of nothing but pleasant
things. I started to call up the nicest things I could think of. Kittens and
puppies. The cookies my grandmother had made when I was a kid. The smell of
laundry fresh out of the dryer. Eventually, I drifted off without knowing what
I was thinking of, without knowing I was actually falling asleep.

Chapter
Three

The next day, I had more or less shaken the nightmare
I’d had the night before. I was still anxious; I still didn’t know how to feel
about Johnny. I managed to get the sleep I had missed out on the night before,
so at least when I woke up in the morning — the interruption of my sleep
notwithstanding — I didn’t feel like a zombie. I got out of bed and got dressed,
still thinking about what I had discovered.

What had I really found, though? I had found out that
Johnny was somehow involved in Claire White’s suicide. There had been a group
of boys who were also involved.
How do a
group of boys drive a girl to suicide?
It could have been bullying. It
could have been hacking into her phone or somewhere and finding incriminating
pictures. But Johnny had admitted to me that he had been Claire’s boyfriend.
That she had been his first.
Had he been
her first?
I shivered, wondering. The words from the comments on Claire’s
page came back to me. The boys who had gone to jail had obviously done
something awful, but I couldn’t think of what Claire’s own boyfriend could
possibly have done that was as bad — unless Johnny was abusive.

I thought about what my high school health class
teacher had taught us about abusive boyfriends and girlfriends. At first they
tended to be very charming, very friendly and they often were even once the
abuse started, when they were in a “reconciliation” phase. The image of “The
Cycle of Abuse” appeared in my mind as I wandered aimlessly through the dining
hall to grab some breakfast. The abuser would be charm itself; they would be
sweet and kind and attentive. Gradually, as the relationship progressed, things
would start to go bad. They’d explode and become frighteningly angry and then,
just as suddenly, they’d back off and be sweet again, even kinder and gentler
than before, contrite and careful. They’d bring you gifts or go out of their
way to be kind to you. You would assume that the explosions were just an
isolated incident and that as long as things never worked up quite that
tensely…

But then over time, the teacher had told us with the
health counselor nodding solemn agreement, those isolated incidents would
happen more and more. The threshold for the explosions would get lower and
lower. What started out happening maybe once a month or even more rarely would
start to become a weekly event, sometimes even
daily.
The abuser would try to control more and more aspects of your life to
compensate for what was out of control in their own and try and make you stay
in spite of every impulse in your mind to go. If you let them, they would
convince you that the real person inside was the kind and gentle, sweet and
charming person they had shown you at first. The ugliness, the rage, was
something that you had caused — whether you meant to or not. That was why so
many battered men and women stayed; their abusers convinced them that they were
the ones who were wrong, not the abuser.