Those were Evan’s thoughts. The expected Congratulations!—or any sentiment of faked delight in Karen’s good fortune—was lodged deep in her pharynx, the critical organ for vocalization, digestion, and respiration. Not only could Evan not talk, she felt nauseated, bilious, and vomitous, and she could not breathe. She could not draw a full breath into her lungs, not even a repulsive cleansing breath, as Karen said to her now, aflutter, “Take a cleansing breath! I think it’s a panic attack, Evan.”
The boy’s name bestowed upon Evan was of various origins, but she preferred the Celtic translation: young warrior. She felt like a warrior, even as she stood sick of stomach, of lungs, of heart, of head, in the kitchen of the apartment she and Karen have shared since college and through their graduate school program nearing its end. She is ready to pick up the long sharp knife Karen was just using to slice into a loaf of French bread, but has put down, to retrieve for her best friend a paper bag into which Evan can inhale and exhale.
Karen paws the kitchen cabinets, rifles through the pantry, searching and searching, while she never stops talking. “You know a panic attack just feels like you can’t breathe. But it’s not lack of oxygen at all. It’s the carbon dioxide concentration in your blood decreasing below the normal level because you’re expelling more CO2 than your body—Oh, here’s a bag—”
Karen peels wide the mouth of the brown lunch sack and blows into it, filling it with an abundance of her mediocre air, and hands it to Evan, who starts to fill and conflate the bag herself, her own air livid and wrathful.
“So, as your blood’s pH value’s been rising,” Karen says, “the blood vessels to your brain are constricting. And that means oxygen for your nervous system can’t get through.”
That she, Evan, is experiencing her first-ever panic attack; that Karen labels her own such attacks as anxiety attacks when the well is dry and Evan rubs her best friend’s hands to arrest the spasms that crick her fingers into claws; that when Karen says, “My well is dry,” she means that she and Evan have a deadline for workshop and Karen is without a story to wend and she wants Evan to stop her own work, to open both a bottle of wine and the deep trove of Evan’s memories, and give Karen something to drink and something she can use; that Evan always does tap into her magnanimous nature and willingly hands over those true stories at which Karen grinds away until she has a few pages to pass among their fellow writers-in-training who, inevitably, discuss Karen’s work too nicely, giving Karen license to monkey around for another day or two before she gives up, turns to Evan again, and claims that her well is, as ever, dry; that Karen, the progeny of writers—a paternal award-winner and a maternal best seller—has caused Evan’s first-ever panic attack by waving through the air what Karen says is a contract for her first published collection—Nearly True by Karen Sweet—twelve never-workshopped stories, every one of which originated with Evan when Karen’s well was dry, and who says now to Evan, “You don’t mind, do you? After all, I did write the stories.”
Evan holds the bag to her mouth, breathes in and breathes out, sees flashes of her past, like slides shown for an instant on a white wall in a black room:
The babysitter on her bed, removing Evan’s little-girl pajamas, unicorns racing down her legs, across her flat chest, fingers thick as sausages pushed way in, “Ride, little girl, ride. Wait till you see what’s next.”
Her mother pulling from the garbage half-eaten slices of pizza, rats big as cats leaping out and sinking their fangs into her dirty arm.
Jethro, five men removed from the father she never knew, chasing after her with a belt in his hand, she bouncing off the walls, beaten for saying, “What?” when he asked her a question.
She was named Evan for a reason, every single year of her life proved that again and again, and now another betrayal, by someone she has trusted, a friend she has clung to, for whom she finally opened the trapdoor to her heart. Her life splayed out for all to read under another’s name. She wants to pick up the saw-toothed knife and kill Karen. God, if she could catch her breath, Evan would be brave enough to do just that.
Fuck, I thought, furious to be so instantly hooked, wanting to know more about Evan’s gruesome memories, her life stories stolen by Karen, the publishing contract Karen is waving around, whether Evan will follow through with her intention when her panic attack passes. I knew that feeling this way was unfair and unwarranted, but whenever I had spared the briefest glance at this book in my hands, and at the other one on my nightstand, I hoped to sigh in relief when at last I began to read. There was no sigh as I lay in my bed, lightheaded and suffocating, the dread returning then, viperish and oily, snaking through me. I had to look away from the page, away from Ashby’s words that left me exposed, naked, crushed once again.
Then I was in my bathroom, hands leaving sweaty palm prints on the mirror, eyes filled with tears because I knew I had wasted years of my life, had fooled myself into thinking I was fine with where I was in the world. The opening paragraphs of “Killing Close Friends” unnerved me, describing an instant hatred that felt natural and familiar. Faced with enormous betrayal, Evan wanted to slice, gut, poison, and smash this former best friend of hers. I could imagine her gnawing on Karen’s bones; an articulation of my own desires back when I was young, when I learned who my mother really was. And I felt mildly insane, fleetingly believing the preposterous—that Ashby had written this story with prophetic knowledge that, far in the future, she would hand over her books and I would read this story and feel certain that it contained a message specifically for me, her son. And I wondered—was I the male version of an Evan or a Karen?
I stood in front of the mirror until my eyes refocused and I saw that my shoulders were hunched up to my ears, my jaw slack.
Slack-jawed, is what I thought, slack, shocked, shell-shocked.
The systems of my body chugged back to sudden life, an engine turning over, the tears drying up, the dullness in my eyes receding, a weak light emanating from them once again.
I was exhausted and I had been up for only an hour.
When I returned to my bedroom, I turned the book over and looked at the author’s photograph. Even in black and white, she was luminous. Cheekbones high and sharp. Thick lashes framing eyes I knew to be a blistering blue, though they were nearly black in the picture. She was wearing the same special gaze she often wrapped me up in when I was young, our silent mode of communication. Her full mouth was shiny, but I couldn’t tell whether she was wearing some heart-dissecting shade.