Breathless by V. J. Chambers Read Free Book Online

Cameron and Jason instead.

    They were on either side of me. Cameron was inspecting his fingernails, looking about as guilty as I felt. Jason however, held my parents' gaze, his face blank. He didn't look worried or guilty. Then, of course, he didn't know my parents. They were pretty good at making you feel the way they wanted you to feel. They didn't tell you how to feel or that you were wrong. Instead, they just laid out all the possible consequences of your actions. I hated that. It made me feel so... responsible.

    I just wished they'd get it over with already. All this sitting in silence was getting to me. I knew my parents weren't talking because they wanted me to contemplate what I'd done wrong. It was working. I felt wretched.

    Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore. "I was the one who made Jason come to the party," I blurted out.

    My mother and father just looked at me.

    "He wouldn't have even been there if it wasn't for me," I said. "I totally talked him into it."

    Seeming to follow my lead, Cameron spoke up. "I'm the reason that Jason got in the fight with Eric. I kind of picked a fight with him. It's not Jason's fault."

    "None of this is Jason's fault," I said.

    Jason looked down the table at us, raising his eyebrows. "Well," he said, looking at my parents, "I did consent to go to the party. And I am the one who broke Eric's nose.
    So, I guess some it is my fault."

    What was Jason's problem? Cameron and I were trying to take the fall for him.
    Couldn't he see that?

    "I'll understand if you guys don't want me to stay here anymore," said Jason. "That might be the best thing for everyone."

    "Jason," said my mother, "let's not get drastic."

    "Of course we want you to stay," said my father. "Believe me, this isn't the first time one of our boys has gotten in a fight."

    "Right," said Cameron. "And this one didn't even involve knives."

    Aaron, a boy who'd lived with us a year ago, had gotten in a knife fight at school once. He'd gotten expelled. My parents fought to keep him, but the state took him away anyhow. He still kept in touch sometimes. We all visited him in jail last Christmas. Apparently, he got in a bad bar fight (amazing, since he wasn't even eighteen, let alone twenty-one) and the other guy didn't survive. Aaron was serving time for manslaughter. Poor Aaron. If my parents had been able to keep him, maybe...

    "Thanks for the perspective, Cameron," said my father.

    "Listen," said my mother, "you all know—well, Cameron and Azazel know—that we want to encourage you to make your own decisions. We're not here to impose a rigid order on your lives. These are your lives, and it's your job to make them into whatever you want them to be. However, we do try to provide boundaries for you."

    Oh, God. Not this speech. Please not this speech.

    My mother continued, "We feel that these boundaries can help guide you. We feel that they can open you up to options that you might not consider otherwise. While it's a perfectly valid choice to live in the moment, and to live for fun, we feel that there are other valid choices, and we feel that since you're very young, you might not think of those choices."

    "And," said my father, picking up where my mother left off, "once you've made a series of certain kinds of choices, it can be difficult to decide to make different ones.
    You can rack up all kinds of nonproductive consequences that get in the way of a productive life."

    My head was swimming. Why couldn't they just be like normal parents and say that what we'd done was wrong and now we were going to get punished? It all amounted to the same thing anyway. This was just psychobabble. It was rationalization.

    I stole a glance at Jason. His forehead was wrinkled as if he was trying very hard to concentrate, or if he was very, very confused. I didn't blame him. My parents'
    reasoning was complicated.

    "I feel," I said, "that we've all seen what kind of nonproductive consequences happen when we sneak out. Jason got