The Air We Breathe Read Online Free

the nape of her neck. Though Hanna was eleven, her mother still babied her hair, combed it, blow-dried it, and called it corn silk.
    She fumbled around the top drawer of her dresser, the one that kept her underpants and socks and half undershirts she pretended were real bras, and found her favorite pair of cotton tights. A rainbow wrapped around each leg from ankle until just above the knee, six thick colored stripes starting with red and ending with purple, skipping indigo completely. That’s what her father told her each time she wore them. “So much for Roy G. Biv.” Hanna didn’t care. She liked stripes even more than polka dots.
    “You look like the gypsies dressed you,” her mother told her as she twirled into the kitchen. Susan crammed a handful of spinach into the blender on the counter in front of her, shook in some frozen blueberries.
    “Nuh-uh,” Hanna said, slipping on her fat, squishy beach clogs. Bright green. “Where’s Daddy?”
    “Here. Here,” her father said.
    “Well, let’s go,” Hanna said.
    “It’s warm out there. Like summer. You may not want your missing-indigo tights.”
    Hanna opened the back door. It was hot. “Okay, hold on a minute.” She peeled off the tights in the downstairs bathroom, leaving them hanging over the shower bar.
    Her mother hated that.
    “Now I’m ready,” Hanna said, pirouetting back into the kitchen. She grabbed her father’s hand, tugged it. “Come on.”
    “So, I’ll see you at Peg’s for lunch?” Susan asked.
    “We’ll be there,” Henry said, and before Hanna could get the words past her teeth, he lifted her arm above her head and twirled her down the hall and through the front door. “Let’s make like a bee and buzz off.”
    “Dad.”
    “Sorry, Hanna-Bee. Scientists and funny do not mix.”
    The sun shone sharp and white, reflecting off most of the outside surfaces—mailboxes, car hoods, the thick, leathery leaves of her mother’s azaleas. Hanna squinted, the light overwhelming her. Blue eyes were more sensitive than brown—she knew that, but she despised sunglasses. They pinched behind her ears and slid down her sweaty nose, and worse, they made everything around her look dull and dirty. Her mother tried all the time to get her to wear them, saying she should protect her eyes. Susan’s baby blues were bothered by the sun, too, and she walked around with saucer-sized brown lenses dwarfing her thin face whenever she went outdoors.
    “Why’s she coming?” Hanna clamped her arms across her chest. She loved her mother, but so did Henry, and Hanna got lost in the shuffle of his attention toward Susan. She wanted her time alone with him.
    “We want to talk to you. Together.”
    “You talk to me all the time.” She paused and then said, in a puffed, almost teenaged voice, “Together.”
    “Don’t get fresh.”
    “Sorry,” Hanna mumbled. She kicked a stone off the sidewalk; it fell through the grate in the road. She looked through as she walked over it, but of course couldn’t see the rock down there. All the grays and blacks blended together.
    Divorce.
    The word bloomed somewhere in the center of her mind—if she concentrated on it, she could see it, a seedling pushing through black dirt, right in the space behind where her nose and forehead met, that heavy space, the one that filled up first when she had a cold and never completely cleared away. She tried to visually stop the intrusion, but the idea grew larger, like watching time-lapse photography; the green plant-word unfurling toward the light, leaves stretching out, reaching, stem thickening, growing tall.
    Don’t be stupid. They never fight. Then again, Charlotte Conrad’s parents split last fall, and she said she’d never heard them argue, never ever. Not even when they went into the bedroom for privacy; she knew because she listened at the heating vent that connected their room and hers. “They said they still loved each other but just grew apart, whatever that