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Chapter Sixteen
Julia’s eyes went wide at the impossible, her knees buckling under her weight as her skin filled with concrete putty. She fell hard into the back of her seat.
What unfolded before was a distant dream, like having a poster of the moon on the wall above your bed because you want to be an astronaut, knowing damn well you’re afraid of heights.
She can’t be here. Out of all the places in the world? Out of all the theaters in New York State? Today, of all the days? No, not right here. Panic flooded every cell in her body and she felt her bloodstream restricting with the fight-or-flight response that overtook every muscle.
Marin stared back at her, their gaze lasting even milliseconds too long. Her aquamarine eyes reflected the stage lights on the balcony above, glisteningly widely at the center of long fluttering lashes. Julia fell backwards back into her seat.
She was just as beautiful as Julia remembered. Her hair was shorter now, landing just at her shoulder blade when she tossed it just moments ago. She looked thinner, and Julia had to squash out the concern of whether or not she was eating right, whether or not she was being taken care of. Conversations flooded her mind of explaining that two coffees in the morning and a cup of tea at night, a meal did not make.
Marin placed her hand on the back of the seat of her companion, her eyes narrowing as if they deceived her, as if Julia was a figment of her imagination, as if one little blink could erase her existence. But it wasn’t a dream. God, Julia wished it was, but it wasn’t, and there she was.
Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no.
She didn’t want to be even more obvious, but she stood anyway, desperate to be as far away from this situation as she could get. The chair flipped closed behind her, the bottom thundering against the back, matching the stomping of her heartbeat.
She did her best not to cause a scene, not to move too fast or draw the attention of wandering eyes. She slid past the few students that were still left in the row, walking steadily up the aisle, never looking back. She was simply getting a bottle of water, that was all.
That is when she heard it. That voice cocooned around her like the last standing shelter in a hundred-year storm. “Jules?”
Marin called to her from the bottom row, that sound so familiar and distant at the same time. It was breathy–the voice of a runner who just finished a marathon–excited and in inexplicable awe at the same time, but what was that underneath it? That tremor that shattered the last note?
Julia was already at the door leading to where concessions were served. She knew she shouldn’t have–she tried not to, that voice in her head screaming no, no don’t do it–but she looked back anyway. The entire room spun into a million kaleidoscope hues.
Marin stood at the end of the row, one hand placed firmly on the back of her chair as if she needed its support. Her pale face was taunt, her eyes creased with worry. Her expression was full of remorse, full of something else entirely that Julia just couldn’t place.
Julia couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out how air was supposed to travel from the outside world, to her nostrils, into her lungs to circulate within her body, and then back out again. Do you know how hard it is to make something nonvoluntary, voluntary? The burning in your chest when the pressure becomes too much?
She walked past students huddled in groups gossiping about who held whose hand, past those in the concessions line waiting for soda or water. Erin stood at the end of the line, supervising students and grinning at their conversation. Julia blew past her without a second glance, heading straight for the doors leading to the sidewalk in front.
Air. I just need air.
Just as her left hand reached for the bronze plated door latch, the coldness stinging her aching flesh, she heard dozens of her students’ voices erupt all at once in shouts of laughter and surprise.
“Mrs. Jenner!”
“Mrs. Jenner! No way!”
“You’re here!”
Not knowing how to breathe didn’t describe the feeling. It was cancer, starting in the cell and taking down anything in its path until it’s the last thing standing. It was the feeling of drowning. The feeling of fear sinking so much into your consciousness that you know you can’t breathe, can’t open your mouth gasping for the very air that could save you, because you’ll only take on water. It gets to a point when the unconsciousness takes everything over; when the chemical need to breathe becomes so great that you take in the water. You welcome the water.
It was more than the fact that she couldn’t breathe; it was that she, in that very moment, didn’t know how to be. As if everything she had ever been told or shown before was a lie. The feeling of finding out that the Earth really isn’t round. The scientists and geniuses lied. It’s flat–it always has been–and Julia had just been thrown over the edge, falling towards certain death where her feelings will finally splatter around her in an indistinguishable red sunset.
She let the door slam behind her as she rushed to the concrete covered wall to her side. Cold air wrapped her all around, a noose to her already tight throat. She leaned against the building, tilting forward to grip her trembling knees.
She didn’t cry, didn’t scream. She stood there leaning over the cracked sidewalk gasping as if she spent the last hour under water, as if her lungs grew legs and walked from her chest.
She tried everything. She counted to ten. She listed everything she could see, hear, and taste just like she told any overwhelmed child she had to coax out of a corner. She told herself to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth, but nothing, absolutely nothing, would slow her steadily rising heart rate.
Nothing seemed to stop the feeling that this was it for her. This was the world’s last final aha before putting her out of her misery. Eventually, she would run out of gasps and fall to her knees right there on Broadway. She would die while clouded minds rushed past–the sound a falling tree makes in a forest when there’s no one to hear it.
Inside were her students, the ones she would lay her life on the line for. Inside was her everything. Wait, is Marin still everything? And there it all was, piling up so high it was sure to be the death of her. Her last breath would be outside the very play that made her life make sense. What was that called? Poetic irony?
Then Erin appeared in front of her, arms stretched wide, with eyes opened so vastly they looked like moons to Julia’s blurry vision. Her hair was disheveled, curls tangled into each other and sticking straight up on the top of her head. Her breath exhaled in puffs of smoky clouds above her, as if she ran around the entire block before finding Julia there.
“Oh,” she sighed, placing her hand on her stomach in relief, “there you are.”
