Take a Deep Breath In
End briefing-Begin Document
“You’ve got a nosebleed, babe.”
Kevin runs a finger above his lip and actually looks surprised to see that Larissa’s right. Her eyebrow quirks in response.
He glances around the noisy corner they’ve stopped at and comments, “Nose must be dry.”
“Use Afrin,” Larissa mumbles as she digs her gloved hands around her purse for tissues; he blots the blood away with his sleeve in the meantime, and she shoots a glare at him as she holds a wad of tissues in front of his face. The traffic on their side of the intersection finally stops, the pedestrian crossing light flickers green, and the two sprint across the street.
They pass a strip of justice firms and Kevin asks her how her semester’s going as he glances back at her over his shoulders, still pinching his nose with the tissue.
“Not so bad,” she says with a hint of a smile, shrugging, “I’ve been reciting constitutional law in my sleep, though. And in the shower and at breakfast and lunch and dinner; everywhere.”
He grins at her in response, though she can’t really see it with the tissue obscuring his mouth. They walk several blocks in silence; the thin layer of snow forming on the sidewalk crunches under their boots, and a late-January wind switches apathetically at their uncovered faces from across a partially empty parking lot that they pass on the way. Larissa mumbles something that sounds like hate for Ohio and Kevin chuckles. They part ways at the Palace Theatre after Larissa shoves a handful of tissues into Kevin’s jacket pocket and hails a cab.
By the time Kevin drops his keys onto the countertop in his apartment, the nosebleed returns with enthusiasm. He swallows on reflex and winces as he realises how raw his throat feels suddenly; he goes to bed early and hopes it’s just a sinus problem.
---
“You look hot,” Larissa remarks contrarily on a crisp March afternoon. With a grin, she lifts her mug of coffee to her lips. Kevin slides into the booth across the table from Larissa wearing something of a frown, eyes red and heavy and his posture weary and he says, with a twitch of an eyebrow, “You know what? No one loves you.”
She shoots a complacent smirk in his direction before sobering up a bit, setting her cup down in afterthought and saying, “Seriously, though, you are looking a little peaky. You okay?”
He waves it off and blames it on a three-day headache and over a month of intermittent nosebleeds. He doesn’t mention that each nosebleed carried on longer than the last that first week and that he finds the accumulated blood loss from that week alone a bit worrisome; she doesn’t need to know. So he orders a coffee and a plate of hash browns as Larissa’s meal arrives and converses like he doesn’t know he’s changing.
It’s just a sinus infection, after all.
On the bus ride to the mall in North Canton, Larissa notices Kevin slipping incrementally down in his seat, his complexion pale and his hands shaking. She nudges him.
“Babe, you okay?” she asks for the second time that day. He grunts softly and tries to sit up.
“I’m just real dizzy, that’s all,” he says, “Just blood loss.”
“You really ought to get that checked out,” she says, and chews at the inside of her lip as she rifles through her purse, produces a butterscotch hard candy, and hands it to him.
“Works for hypoglycaemia,” she reasons when he gives her a questioning look.
---
In the three years they’ve known each other, Larissa’s never been to Kevin’s apartment. He never extends an invitation, and never really refers to it as home; she learned to stop asking about it sometime during the first year. Instead, when they don’t feel like going anywhere on their days off, Kevin finds his way over to Larissa’s house that she shares with two other Kent State students and they spend the day watching movies or playing cards.
The last day of April sees Kevin on Larissa’s front stoop, muscles aching and neck stiff. He doesn’t mention it to her, but she notices.
“Why won’t you go in and get this checked out?” she asks as she hands him a wad of dough to roll in flour. She leaves out the list of maladies he never has shed. No point telling him what he already knows.
He flattens the dough in a pile of flour and says, “Nothing they could fix.”
And her hands stop working. She stares at him a moment, takes a deep breath and asks, “What do you know?” as if he’s been hiding some great secret from her all this time.
“Just a feeling, that’s all,” he mumbles and takes the rolling pin to the dough.
Larissa sighs and begins mixing another bowl, reciting statutes under her breath. For a second, Kevin swears he saw the features of Larissa’s face shift.
Later that night, Kevin works through a stack of bills in the silence until the aches in his body become unbearable; he takes an ibuprofen at one. He goes to his room soon after, but instead of sleeping, he tunes into a station at the end of the dial and listens to big band tunes in the dark until the station signs off at three. The painkiller kicks in by then, and he drifts into a shallow sleep.
---
“Let’s go to Greenville,” Larissa announces over the phone without preamble early one morning in June. Kevin’s end of the line buzzes in the dead space before his response, which he collects a little slowly given the hour and the spontaneity of Larissa’s request.
“What’s in Greenville?” he manages to ask.
“My family,” she says, and he can almost picture a fond smile work at the corners of her mouth, “And Maid-Rite.”
“What’s Maid-Rite?”
He sees her smile growing as she replies, “You’ll find out. Let’s go on Friday.” And her line closes.
---
Come early Friday morning, Larissa pulls up at Kevin’s complex in a rental car with two foam cups of coffee waiting in the front cup holders. He trudges to the car, looking cold, bundled in heavy jacket, and seats himself with great effort, waving away the coffee Larissa offers.
“Burnt my tongue earlier,” he explains as he carefully settles in. In truth, his mouth has been burning like an ulcer since April.
Larissa regards the wheel before her intensely and whispers, “Do you really want to go anywhere?”
“Yes,” he answers, sleep still clinging to his voice, “Let’s get out of here.”
During the first two hours of the trip, Kevin sleeps and Larissa thinks. Her thoughts scatter, though, as every farm they pass and every hill they take begin to look and feel the same.
Kevin wakes up, gagging, as they pass a chicken farm in the last hour of the drive. Larissa glances his way and chuckles.
“Welcome to my end of the world,” she proclaims, bringing her hand over her nose.
“God, that’s terrible, what the hell is it?” he gasps and buries his nose into his jacket.
“Chicken farm,” she says, “Incinerators. You slept through the pig and cow farms.”
He responds with another gag.
“You know,” Larissa starts again, “I just realised, you never met my family.”
“Kind of hard to when they live out here,” he chokes out between coughs. She drops her head back against the seat momentarily.
“We’ve just known each other a while now, you know?” she says lowly, now keeping her eyes resolutely on the road, “I don’t know anything about your family… I don’t even really know if you’ve been in Canton all your life, or if you come from somewhere else.”
He doesn’t respond to that, and he certainly doesn’t think about the implications behind Larissa’s observation. He’s quiet for the duration of the ride while Larissa mumbles to herself what sounds like the Miranda warning jumbled in with “Hail Marys.”
---
The visit with Larissa’s parents is longer than Kevin expected, but he’s surprised that he’s retained so little from it. By six thirteen in the evening they find themselves seated at a window booth in Greenville’s Maid-Rite, each staring down half of a loose-meat sandwich.
Larissa clears her throat while Kevin subtly pokes through his sandwich, hoping to deflate it enough for it to give off the illusion of having been eaten.
“You gonna tell me what’s wrong, yet?” she asks evenly.
“It’s nothing, just a sinus problem,” he says.
She takes a deep breath-- again, he thinks her face looks a bit different for a fraction of a second-- and says with a voice now shaking, “Kevin. I’ve known you over three years and I don’t know a damn thing about you. I don’t know where you’re from, what you did in school, where your parents are, what your parents are like, are they even alive? I don’t know anything! We don’t talk about it, and I get that some people have issues with that stuff, so I don’t ask anymore, but for the love of everything! I know you know what’s wrong. Or you know something about it, at least… The thing is, something’s wrong… I’m not asking you to spill your life story… I just, I just want to know what’s wrong with my best friend. Okay? Please, give me a reason to trust you.”
He avoids her eyes and mutters, “Just give me a bit more time.”
She sits back, sighs, and nods wearily.
---
The ride home is easily as uneventful as the ride out. Kevin stirs painfully from his sleep in time to hear Larissa murmur, “I'm only ten miles from home, so why do I want to turn around and never come back?"
Kevin grunts in reply as best he can while his mind wakes up, “When we get to my place, come in with me.”
And she freezes.
“I’ll tell you,” he offers as clarification.
So Larissa seats herself in Kevin’s cluttered living room when they reach his place as he roots through his bedroom, gathering. He emerges with several manila folders and a shoebox and sits on the opposite end of the couch; pushing the shoebox over to Larissa, he flips through the folders and pulls out several stapled stacks.
“Pictures of you?” she asks as she shuffles through the photos that fill the box, “You played football?”
“I didn’t, Kevin Phelps did,” and before Larissa can speak the question forming at her lips, Kevin places the stacks of papers on Larissa’s lap and sits back, continuing, “Kevin Phelps died seven years ago. He played football, died from concussive trauma, and his parents were filthy rich enough to pay science to try and bring their baby back: they cloned him.
“It took a year to actually get things started and about a year for me to grow and learn. I never talk about my life because I don’t have a history. Kevin Phelps has a history. I don’t remember anything he would; I don’t like the same things he did… I don’t think I’m anything like him. Point is, I don’t talk about what I don’t know.
“I’m not sure why, but his family let me keep his face and his first name. So I don’t have a history and I don’t have a family and I don’t have much of an education to speak of. I’ve got nothing.”
Larissa stares at the paperwork in her hands as she chokes out, “So, why are you sick?”
“I’m a bust,” he says without much emotion, “I’m genetically unsound. It’s been trying to happen for a few years now, but the lab’s been able to hold it off. After the nosebleeds started again, I went back in, but the medications they’ve kept me on haven’t done anything. I’ve been back a few times since then, but nothing works anymore.”
Larissa nods dumbly and gathers the paperwork back into a neat stack, offering it back to him; he tells her to take it all home with her for the night.
“Give it some time to sink in,” he says and she hugs him tightly.
When she reaches her house, she avoids her roommates and locks herself in her room, tossing the folders onto her bed. Walking in front of the full-length mirror, she watches her reflection slowly shift into the face of a stranger, and it’s then that she remembers that her life isn’t mainstream normal and, yes, this sort of thing is entirely possible. She takes a breath and her own features fall back into place. She shivers suddenly and wonders when her life began to feel so isolated.
She prays her rosary for the first time in months before turning in and falls asleep against her bed to the sound of late night stand-up on Comedy Central.
---
From July on, Kevin deteriorates more, little by little, and all Larissa can do is watch and wait. They discuss his fate now and again, first with Larissa in denial or foreseeing it too far in the future, but then more accepting and resigned as degenerating vision leads to faulty memory and spastic muscular contractions and a perpetually low body temperature. He asks what she’ll do after he dies and she really can’t think beyond getting as far from Ohio as she can.
---
Losing is an easy art.
January of the new year sees the end of Kevin Jernigan. In the remaining months between her reluctant acceptance and the morning of his death, Larissa had hoped like hell that he’d at least pass in the spring; then everything could wrap up quickly and she wouldn’t dwell. With the January ground frozen through, no burial follows the private funeral, so as she awaits the thawing of the ground in spring, Larissa moves into a stasis, muttering more “Hail, Holy Queens” in her spare moments than federal law.
In the spring, the interment falls on an inappropriately sunny day.
As she walks out of the cemetery, she takes a deep breath, squeezes her eyes shut, and Larissa Burns reinvents herself one last time.
End Document
“You’ve got a nosebleed, babe.”
Kevin runs a finger above his lip and actually looks surprised to see that Larissa’s right. Her eyebrow quirks in response.
He glances around the noisy corner they’ve stopped at and comments, “Nose must be dry.”
“Use Afrin,” Larissa mumbles as she digs her gloved hands around her purse for tissues; he blots the blood away with his sleeve in the meantime, and she shoots a glare at him as she holds a wad of tissues in front of his face. The traffic on their side of the intersection finally stops, the pedestrian crossing light flickers green, and the two sprint across the street.
They pass a strip of justice firms and Kevin asks her how her semester’s going as he glances back at her over his shoulders, still pinching his nose with the tissue.
“Not so bad,” she says with a hint of a smile, shrugging, “I’ve been reciting constitutional law in my sleep, though. And in the shower and at breakfast and lunch and dinner; everywhere.”
He grins at her in response, though she can’t really see it with the tissue obscuring his mouth. They walk several blocks in silence; the thin layer of snow forming on the sidewalk crunches under their boots, and a late-January wind switches apathetically at their uncovered faces from across a partially empty parking lot that they pass on the way. Larissa mumbles something that sounds like hate for Ohio and Kevin chuckles. They part ways at the Palace Theatre after Larissa shoves a handful of tissues into Kevin’s jacket pocket and hails a cab.
By the time Kevin drops his keys onto the countertop in his apartment, the nosebleed returns with enthusiasm. He swallows on reflex and winces as he realises how raw his throat feels suddenly; he goes to bed early and hopes it’s just a sinus problem.
---
“You look hot,” Larissa remarks contrarily on a crisp March afternoon. With a grin, she lifts her mug of coffee to her lips. Kevin slides into the booth across the table from Larissa wearing something of a frown, eyes red and heavy and his posture weary and he says, with a twitch of an eyebrow, “You know what? No one loves you.”
She shoots a complacent smirk in his direction before sobering up a bit, setting her cup down in afterthought and saying, “Seriously, though, you are looking a little peaky. You okay?”
He waves it off and blames it on a three-day headache and over a month of intermittent nosebleeds. He doesn’t mention that each nosebleed carried on longer than the last that first week and that he finds the accumulated blood loss from that week alone a bit worrisome; she doesn’t need to know. So he orders a coffee and a plate of hash browns as Larissa’s meal arrives and converses like he doesn’t know he’s changing.
It’s just a sinus infection, after all.
On the bus ride to the mall in North Canton, Larissa notices Kevin slipping incrementally down in his seat, his complexion pale and his hands shaking. She nudges him.
“Babe, you okay?” she asks for the second time that day. He grunts softly and tries to sit up.
“I’m just real dizzy, that’s all,” he says, “Just blood loss.”
“You really ought to get that checked out,” she says, and chews at the inside of her lip as she rifles through her purse, produces a butterscotch hard candy, and hands it to him.
“Works for hypoglycaemia,” she reasons when he gives her a questioning look.
---
In the three years they’ve known each other, Larissa’s never been to Kevin’s apartment. He never extends an invitation, and never really refers to it as home; she learned to stop asking about it sometime during the first year. Instead, when they don’t feel like going anywhere on their days off, Kevin finds his way over to Larissa’s house that she shares with two other Kent State students and they spend the day watching movies or playing cards.
The last day of April sees Kevin on Larissa’s front stoop, muscles aching and neck stiff. He doesn’t mention it to her, but she notices.
“Why won’t you go in and get this checked out?” she asks as she hands him a wad of dough to roll in flour. She leaves out the list of maladies he never has shed. No point telling him what he already knows.
He flattens the dough in a pile of flour and says, “Nothing they could fix.”
And her hands stop working. She stares at him a moment, takes a deep breath and asks, “What do you know?” as if he’s been hiding some great secret from her all this time.
“Just a feeling, that’s all,” he mumbles and takes the rolling pin to the dough.
Larissa sighs and begins mixing another bowl, reciting statutes under her breath. For a second, Kevin swears he saw the features of Larissa’s face shift.
Later that night, Kevin works through a stack of bills in the silence until the aches in his body become unbearable; he takes an ibuprofen at one. He goes to his room soon after, but instead of sleeping, he tunes into a station at the end of the dial and listens to big band tunes in the dark until the station signs off at three. The painkiller kicks in by then, and he drifts into a shallow sleep.
---
“Let’s go to Greenville,” Larissa announces over the phone without preamble early one morning in June. Kevin’s end of the line buzzes in the dead space before his response, which he collects a little slowly given the hour and the spontaneity of Larissa’s request.
“What’s in Greenville?” he manages to ask.
“My family,” she says, and he can almost picture a fond smile work at the corners of her mouth, “And Maid-Rite.”
“What’s Maid-Rite?”
He sees her smile growing as she replies, “You’ll find out. Let’s go on Friday.” And her line closes.
---
Come early Friday morning, Larissa pulls up at Kevin’s complex in a rental car with two foam cups of coffee waiting in the front cup holders. He trudges to the car, looking cold, bundled in heavy jacket, and seats himself with great effort, waving away the coffee Larissa offers.
“Burnt my tongue earlier,” he explains as he carefully settles in. In truth, his mouth has been burning like an ulcer since April.
Larissa regards the wheel before her intensely and whispers, “Do you really want to go anywhere?”
“Yes,” he answers, sleep still clinging to his voice, “Let’s get out of here.”
During the first two hours of the trip, Kevin sleeps and Larissa thinks. Her thoughts scatter, though, as every farm they pass and every hill they take begin to look and feel the same.
Kevin wakes up, gagging, as they pass a chicken farm in the last hour of the drive. Larissa glances his way and chuckles.
“Welcome to my end of the world,” she proclaims, bringing her hand over her nose.
“God, that’s terrible, what the hell is it?” he gasps and buries his nose into his jacket.
“Chicken farm,” she says, “Incinerators. You slept through the pig and cow farms.”
He responds with another gag.
“You know,” Larissa starts again, “I just realised, you never met my family.”
“Kind of hard to when they live out here,” he chokes out between coughs. She drops her head back against the seat momentarily.
“We’ve just known each other a while now, you know?” she says lowly, now keeping her eyes resolutely on the road, “I don’t know anything about your family… I don’t even really know if you’ve been in Canton all your life, or if you come from somewhere else.”
He doesn’t respond to that, and he certainly doesn’t think about the implications behind Larissa’s observation. He’s quiet for the duration of the ride while Larissa mumbles to herself what sounds like the Miranda warning jumbled in with “Hail Marys.”
---
The visit with Larissa’s parents is longer than Kevin expected, but he’s surprised that he’s retained so little from it. By six thirteen in the evening they find themselves seated at a window booth in Greenville’s Maid-Rite, each staring down half of a loose-meat sandwich.
Larissa clears her throat while Kevin subtly pokes through his sandwich, hoping to deflate it enough for it to give off the illusion of having been eaten.
“You gonna tell me what’s wrong, yet?” she asks evenly.
“It’s nothing, just a sinus problem,” he says.
She takes a deep breath-- again, he thinks her face looks a bit different for a fraction of a second-- and says with a voice now shaking, “Kevin. I’ve known you over three years and I don’t know a damn thing about you. I don’t know where you’re from, what you did in school, where your parents are, what your parents are like, are they even alive? I don’t know anything! We don’t talk about it, and I get that some people have issues with that stuff, so I don’t ask anymore, but for the love of everything! I know you know what’s wrong. Or you know something about it, at least… The thing is, something’s wrong… I’m not asking you to spill your life story… I just, I just want to know what’s wrong with my best friend. Okay? Please, give me a reason to trust you.”
He avoids her eyes and mutters, “Just give me a bit more time.”
She sits back, sighs, and nods wearily.
---
The ride home is easily as uneventful as the ride out. Kevin stirs painfully from his sleep in time to hear Larissa murmur, “I'm only ten miles from home, so why do I want to turn around and never come back?"
Kevin grunts in reply as best he can while his mind wakes up, “When we get to my place, come in with me.”
And she freezes.
“I’ll tell you,” he offers as clarification.
So Larissa seats herself in Kevin’s cluttered living room when they reach his place as he roots through his bedroom, gathering. He emerges with several manila folders and a shoebox and sits on the opposite end of the couch; pushing the shoebox over to Larissa, he flips through the folders and pulls out several stapled stacks.
“Pictures of you?” she asks as she shuffles through the photos that fill the box, “You played football?”
“I didn’t, Kevin Phelps did,” and before Larissa can speak the question forming at her lips, Kevin places the stacks of papers on Larissa’s lap and sits back, continuing, “Kevin Phelps died seven years ago. He played football, died from concussive trauma, and his parents were filthy rich enough to pay science to try and bring their baby back: they cloned him.
“It took a year to actually get things started and about a year for me to grow and learn. I never talk about my life because I don’t have a history. Kevin Phelps has a history. I don’t remember anything he would; I don’t like the same things he did… I don’t think I’m anything like him. Point is, I don’t talk about what I don’t know.
“I’m not sure why, but his family let me keep his face and his first name. So I don’t have a history and I don’t have a family and I don’t have much of an education to speak of. I’ve got nothing.”
Larissa stares at the paperwork in her hands as she chokes out, “So, why are you sick?”
“I’m a bust,” he says without much emotion, “I’m genetically unsound. It’s been trying to happen for a few years now, but the lab’s been able to hold it off. After the nosebleeds started again, I went back in, but the medications they’ve kept me on haven’t done anything. I’ve been back a few times since then, but nothing works anymore.”
Larissa nods dumbly and gathers the paperwork back into a neat stack, offering it back to him; he tells her to take it all home with her for the night.
“Give it some time to sink in,” he says and she hugs him tightly.
When she reaches her house, she avoids her roommates and locks herself in her room, tossing the folders onto her bed. Walking in front of the full-length mirror, she watches her reflection slowly shift into the face of a stranger, and it’s then that she remembers that her life isn’t mainstream normal and, yes, this sort of thing is entirely possible. She takes a breath and her own features fall back into place. She shivers suddenly and wonders when her life began to feel so isolated.
She prays her rosary for the first time in months before turning in and falls asleep against her bed to the sound of late night stand-up on Comedy Central.
---
From July on, Kevin deteriorates more, little by little, and all Larissa can do is watch and wait. They discuss his fate now and again, first with Larissa in denial or foreseeing it too far in the future, but then more accepting and resigned as degenerating vision leads to faulty memory and spastic muscular contractions and a perpetually low body temperature. He asks what she’ll do after he dies and she really can’t think beyond getting as far from Ohio as she can.
---
Losing is an easy art.
January of the new year sees the end of Kevin Jernigan. In the remaining months between her reluctant acceptance and the morning of his death, Larissa had hoped like hell that he’d at least pass in the spring; then everything could wrap up quickly and she wouldn’t dwell. With the January ground frozen through, no burial follows the private funeral, so as she awaits the thawing of the ground in spring, Larissa moves into a stasis, muttering more “Hail, Holy Queens” in her spare moments than federal law.
In the spring, the interment falls on an inappropriately sunny day.
As she walks out of the cemetery, she takes a deep breath, squeezes her eyes shut, and Larissa Burns reinvents herself one last time.
End Document