“Two panic attacks in one day is a little excessive, don’t you think?” he says, but there’s no bite to his words. I can’t reply. I can’t even shake my head. I can only keep trying to breathe. He squats down in front of me.
“You need to slow down your breaths,” he says. But I can’t. It feels like I’m running a marathon at a sprinter’s pace. He sighs. “C’mon, Percy. We can do it together.” His hands come around my face so his thumbs are on my cheeks and his fingers are in my hair.
“Look at me,” he says, and tilts my face up to his. He starts breathing slowly, counting the breaths, like he did earlier, his forehead creased. It takes me a minute to focus, but eventually I can breathe a little easier, then a bit slower, and my heart follows not long after.
“Better now?” he asks. But it’s not better, not even close, because now that the fog has started to clear, I remember what stirred this tornado of anxiety in the first place.
“No,” I croak. I look at him, my chin trembling, his hands still around my face, and force myself to say the words. “You already knew.”
He swallows and presses his lips together. “Yeah,” he rasps. “I knew.”
I close my eyes and collapse into a heap on the dirt, silent sobs shaking my body. I hear him say something, but all I can focus on is how long he’s known and how deeply he must have hated me all that time.
First I feel his hands on my back and his arms coming around me, and then everything goes black.
18
Winter, Twelve Years Ago
Delilah took a taxi from the train station straight to my house as soon as she got home for Christmas break, dragging her suitcase behind her. She threw her arms around me as soon as I opened the door. I can still remember the smell of her as I pressed my face into her shoulder—a mix of her wool coat, damp from the heavy snowfall, and her Herbal Essences shampoo.
“You look like a piece of shit,” she said when she released me. “We’re not supposed to let men do this to us.”
“I did this to myself,” I replied, and her face crumpled with sympathy.
“I know you did,” she whispered, and then hauled her suitcase up to my room and lay with me on my bed while I recounted everything I had already told her on the phone, including the many messages I had left for Sam that he never returned.
“I haven’t spotted him on campus,” she told me when I’d asked. “But I promise I won’t keep it from you if I do.”
Having Delilah back in Toronto for those short weeks of winter break was the first slice of normal I’d had since summer. She and Patel had gotten back together （for the hundredth time）。 Delilah said it was a purely casual hookup relationship, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. They had plans to get together over the holiday, but Delilah spent almost all her time with me. We took the subway downtown and bummed around the mall, eating poutine in the food court and sprawling out in the movie theater when our feet got sore.
We sat together on my bedroom floor one day, digging into a whole cheesecake with our forks, and I told her how I’d been struggling at school, how the words weren’t coming to me as easily as they used to when I wrote.
“I miss his feedback,” I told her through a chocolaty mouthful. “I don’t know who I’m writing for anymore.”
“You write for you, Percy, just like you always did,” she said. “I’ll be a reader for you. I promise to keep sex-related requests to a minimum.”
“Is that even possible?” I asked, feeling a rare smile creep across my mouth.
“For you, I’d do anything,” she said with a wink. “Even give up erotic literature.”
On New Year’s Eve, we went to the big concert and countdown in the square outside city hall, huddling against the icy wind and taking covert sips of vodka from her dad’s flask. We didn’t talk about Sam, and when we were together, I felt like I could see past the haze I’d been stumbling through for months. But when she left for Kingston, the fog descended again, draining me of my energy, my appetite, and any ambition I’d once had for excelling at school.
Delilah kept her promise. She called me in early March.
“I saw him,” she said when I picked up. No hello. No small talk.
I was walking between buildings at the university, and sat down on the nearest bench.
“Okay.” I said, exhaling loudly.
“It was at a party.” She paused. “Percy, he was really drunk.”