Page 45 of Room to Breathe

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Peeing.”

I gasped. “The rule!” I threw my fingers into my ears, yelling “La la la.” I also squeezed my eyes shut for some reason. I could only hear the sound of my own voice, so maybe he really couldn’t hear me earlier. My singing definitely wasn’t as pretty as his. In fact, it sounded screamy, desperate, and slurry as I tried to do it around the mint still in my mouth. Something brushed my arm and I yelped.

“Still just me,” he said when I dropped my hands and abruptly stopped my cover-up noise.

“Give a girl a warning next time.”

“I thought I did. But hopefully there won’t be a next time,” he said, drying his hands on a paper towel. He went back to the binder and ripped out some pages, which he started folding.

After folding them in thirds, he tore each page along the folds, then stacked the newly torn rectangles together. “I made cards.”

“Cards?”

“Playing cards.” He passed me the first two pages he’d torn into six rectangles and went back to tear more.

On the paper he’d drawn hearts in each of the corners with numbers or letters. And then another big version in the middle.

“Want to play Go Fish?” he asked.

I laughed. “Go Fish? That’s the game you’re choosing?”

His face broke into a crooked smile as well. He had a great smile. “I don’t know a lot of card games.”

“But you know Go Fish?”

“Everyone knows Go Fish. And had we met before seventh grade, we probably would’ve played it together many times by now.”

“I’ll play Go Fish with you, Beau Eubanks.”

“Good, Indy Blair,” he said, handing me a couple of pages to tear.

We sat on the floor to finish the task. We were always good at projects, at working together toward a goal. Until we weren’t.

“Do you have any jacks?” I asked.

“I have one.” He handed it across the middle to me.

That made four pairs for me. He had three. I sat with one knee up, my chin resting on that knee, my arms wrapped around it, the cards clasped in front of me.

“What games did you play in elementary?” he asked.

“At school?” I asked.

“Wherever.”

It was ironic he was asking, because I’d been trying to think of things from my childhood all day, all week, half the month, really. Activities we’d done as a family. But more than just the games, specific moments of playing them, specific things that happened, how I felt. “Mainly tag,” I said to him, because we may have been acting friendlier, but I knew that the second we were out of this bathroom we wouldn’t speak again. I couldn’t talk to him like I used to, ask him for advice or help.

“Tag is a good one,” he said.

“Do you have any sevens?” I asked.

“Go fish,” he said.

I drew one from the middle. It wasn’t a seven. I nodded for him to go.

“Do you have any fours?” he asked, staring at his floppy hand of cards.