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"Try Not to Breathe" • R.E.M. (by Ioanna Mavrou)


We are driving around town. I'm the driver, but she's the boss. She barks directions, tells me where to go. We are not so much friends as much as the last two people from our class who are still around. All the boys are in the army, all the girls left for college. For a while she was away too, but in Florence she couldn't cross the street by herself to get a slice of pizza, so she had to come home. So I humor her. I pretend not to know. Maybe I feel bad for her. Maybe I'm lonely. Maybe I made the mistake of saying once: “Hey, my college doesn't start till fall, sure we can hang out,” and then I'm stuck. I don't know yet that there are two kinds of people, the ones who you do something nice for and they say thank you and maybe do something nice back, and the ones who take the gesture as a sign of you being a doormat. So all spring I find myself driving a clown car full of people I hardly know around town. Go here, she says, pick them up, take us there and if I say no she makes a face and says something like Okay, maybe I'll walk, even though it's dark out and who knows what will happen to me, which is exactly what she is saying now. 


So I keep driving, cross-town, until finally we park outside the house of a guy she has a crush on. I'm tired, but she is relentless. We sit there for hours and she offers me one cigarette after another, even though I'm trying to quit. She says: Come on, I hate smoking alone. What are friends for? 


The car fills with smoke and passive aggressiveness. It's still spring. By the summer I will stop answering the phone but right now I have no idea how to get out of this. This isn’t a friendship, it’s a hostage situation, and I have no one to come save me. 


“Maybe he’s not home,” I say and point at the dark house. “Maybe he’s asleep, it’s late.”


“Maybe he’s sleeping with someone else,” she says and kicks the dashboard. “Fuck, I’m out of cigarettes, let’s drive to the store and get some.” 


I look at her boot prints on the dashboard and take a deep breath.


“I think I’m just gonna go home,” I say, and start the car, not looking at her. “I’ll drop you off at your house.”


“No,” she says. “Drop me downtown. I’ll go find the others since you’re tired.”


We continue to drive without talking. For the next ten minutes I don’t say anything and she doesn’t say anything. I hate driving in silence but I don’t dare turn the car stereo on. 


When we finally arrive she gets out of the car with a scowl—“Call me tomorrow.”



Ioanna Mavrou is a writer from Nicosia, Cyprus. Her stories have appeared in Electric Literature, Wigleaf, HAD, The Bureau Dispatch, and elsewhere. https://ioannamavrou.com/

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