Breathing With Trees

By Donna Costa

What if your best friend kept a secret from you? What if your mom refused to tell you who your father was? This coming-of-age story rides the ups and downs of Lucy's rollercoaster emotions resulting from too many secrets and too many rules.

Lucy has just turned 14 and is starting Grade 8. She lives with her mom and grandmother, both free

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donna Costa
• Release date: Dec 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228801146

Book preview

Prologue

I never imagined it would end like it did. I can still hear the wail of the siren and the screech of a hawk overhead.

The whole thing wouldn’t have happened if April hadn’t issued her challenge. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t gotten that new teacher or if I hadn’t gotten so furious or…

Maybe this, maybe that. Sometimes I wonder how it all came together to happen in the first place. But it did. I thought I was going to die.

Not just some teen exaggeration.

Not just something you say when you laugh so hard you snort milk out your nose.

Not just something you say after you slay the enemy in a video game, or scream to your friends after your first concert when you tell them how the singer — Axel or Justin or Xavier — looked in your direction, then pointed right at you and sang about love. Maybe you managed to get a spot in the crowd right at the front and you reached out and touched his fingers when he slapped hands with the front row of the audience, and afterward you told everyone who’d listen, I thought I was gonna die.

But I’m not into screaming about singers or boy bands. Actually, I prefer country. So when I say, I thought I was going to die, I mean it. I broke a rule. And I almost died.

September

Chapter 1

The day it all began, my best friend, April, and I were walking home from the mall after shopping for new school clothes. It was the last weekend of summer before the start of grade eight.

Who do you think we’ll get for a teacher this year, Luce? April asked. Her blonde hair, extra curly from the humidity, bounced with each step. I hope it’s not Mr. Munro. I heard he’s mean.

Hmm, I replied, tucking my straight dark hair behind my ear. April liked to talk and talk. It was one of the things I loved best about her. But after hours at a noisy mall, I was exhausted and hungry.

I heard the boy that moved into Marisa’s old house will be in our grade, she said. I wonder if he’s cute?

I snorted, but didn’t say anything.

Maybe we should knock on his door and introduce ourselves. She giggled.

I prayed she was only joking. Uh, April… I began, ready to object.

Geez, I’m kidding, she said, giving my shoulder a nudge. Then her green eyes opened wide as she remembered something. Hey, did you know…

She began telling me some obscure fact about the latest artist she was into, but I zoned out and focused on other things. Her ankle bracelet with a star that jiggled as she walked. A flock of geese honking above our heads. A gob of chewing gum on the sidewalk beside the handprints pressed into the cement.

You get your period yet?

April’s words filtered through my haze. I’m fifteen now, but I was thirteen then. Even though I was older than April by six months, her figure was curvy while my shape was boyish and straight — although I had filled out some over the summer.

The year before, at the beginning of seventh grade, I’d gone into the school washroom to find the senior grade eight girls huddled together around Marisa, their fearless leader. They looked me over, head to toe, then stared at my chest.

"She wouldn’t know anything about it, Marisa had said. She’s only got itty bitties."

I turned and walked out, but I could still hear them.

A late bloomer, someone called as the door closed with a soft whoosh.

I shook my head in response to April’s question. Still only brown spotting, I said.

Remember how my mom handed me a book about it and told me to ask my dad if I had any questions? She laughed. As if.

At least she didn’t sit you down and have The Talk, like my mom, I countered.

Mom had taught me the grown-up words for body parts as soon as I was able to talk. Toes, tongue, nipple, breast. In school, I discovered not everyone said penis, vulva, or anus. I had to learn the slang to use with my friends. With them, I whispered and used code words. Awkward.

How come your mom will talk about sex and periods and stuff, April asked, but won’t tell you anything about your dad? You ask lately?

I shook my head.

You need to keep asking, Luce. Wear her down.

I didn’t know Dad’s name because Mom wouldn’t tell me. When I was little, I used to badger her a lot. She’d purse her lips together, then shake her head and say, I’ll tell you when you’re older. No amount of pleading ever changed her mind.

She never says anything about my dad, I whined once to Nan, my grandma, and watched her face as she debated telling me.

If there’s ever a need for you to know, I’ll tell you, Nan said. For now, it’s up to her.

But I do need to know.

"No, you want to know. That’s not the same as needing to know," Nan said.

Why won’t you tell me?

Because I promised.

Maybe Mom will never talk about him.

That could be. Nan chewed her bottom lip. Look, if she hasn’t told you by the time you turn eighteen, I’ll tell you then.

The way things were going, I figured I’d be waiting years to find out.

April droned on. I was only half listening, tuning in to my own thoughts, my own world.

We’d arrived at the creek. April lived along the narrow waterway and her dad had put giant slabs of rock across it so she would have a shortcut to go to school. We were standing on the bank, enjoying a gentle breeze on our arms, skin tanned from a summer of swimming, biking, and goofing around in the backyard. The sun brought out the freckles on April’s fair skin, while my skin turned as dark as my Italian cousins’, the ones who worked construction all summer, not the pale ones with that Mediterranean anemia.

Our plastic shopping bags pressed against our bare legs. It felt cool at first, but quickly became sticky from the sweat of our bodies. I daydreamed, make-believing the creek was a charging station for humans and I was a hybrid car with an invisible cord that plugged into the trees.

Some kids call you a suck-up, a Goody Two-shoes, April blurted.

What! I am not. I whacked her with my shopping bag, crossed my arms, and turned away.

Whatever. She shrugged.

Well, you’re one to talk, Little Miss Perfect. I kicked some rocks off the bank and they plopped into the water, startling some ducks into noisy flight.

Hey, April said, raising her hands in surrender, shopping bag dangling from her arm. Don’t get mad at me. I’m just telling you what they said.

Well, it’s not true.

She grabbed both my shoulders and leaned in. "Okay then. Prove it. Do one thing to prove them wrong." She stared at me for a few seconds, then turned and walked across the flat rocks toward home.

As I watched her go, I wondered what kid had said it. I wished she would take back the words, but they hung in the air amidst the screams of the blue jays and the chatter of the squirrels until the words seeped into my head and started eating away at my brain. I tried to think of something to yell to her, something to let her know I wasn’t a suck-up, something to defy her dare. But the chance passed.

Okay then, I will, I hollered.

She raised her arm and waved without even looking back. Don’t bother asking who said it, she shouted. I won’t tell.

I didn’t know which name hurt more — suck-up or Goody Two-shoes. I knew what the words meant. A suck-up never disagreed or argued, no matter what, because she wanted to be liked. A Goody Two-shoes never did anything wrong, always followed the rules, maybe squealed on others, maybe even thought she was above everyone else.

Okay, so I usually didn’t speak up, but that’s because people were always in a rush for an answer and didn’t give me the time I needed to think about what I wanted to say. Or when I did get the words out, they didn’t listen to the details and I felt dissed. There’s a difference between being shy and being gutless. They just didn’t get what it was like to be me. I knew I wasn’t perfect. Far from it. In fact, that was another reason I didn’t speak up. Because I made mistakes. Because I messed up.

I knew I was different, but I certainly didn’t think I was better than anyone else. So what if I didn’t do things I wasn’t supposed to do? When did being good become bad, anyway? The worst thing was that I knew both names meant kids thought I was boring, and nobody wanted to hang with that kind of kid.

After April disappeared from view, I stood alone at the water’s edge amidst the trees — the best place for sorting out my thoughts. I tuned in to the rhythm of the creek spilling over its banks to swirl around me, through me. I felt a hum from the trees that gently pulsated into my body.

I walked out onto the slabs in the middle of the creek. On one side, the water was clear and still. Through it, I could see the rocks, algae, and mud of the creek bottom. At the same time, I could see the reflection of the trees, the sky, and the sun. As I gazed, the two worlds became one, like an alternate universe in a video game.

Energy is everywhere, if you take time to notice, and I could feel it. Back then, I’d never told anyone, not even April. I’d hinted to my mom once. She was a homeopath, so I thought she’d understand. It was when I’d been sick and gone to the medicine cabinet to get a natural remedy. As I was trying to choose, a buzzing started in my hand when I was holding one of the tubes, as if my cells were saying, Yes, yes, give us this one. So I took it and got better.

When I told Mom about it, she was furious. No! That’s not homeopathy. You must be scientific, know the purpose of each medicine and analyze carefully.

But if you know from the feeling your body gets, why not listen to it? It wasn’t the first time I’d felt energy in my hands. After Mom’s reaction, it was the last time for a long while that I tried to tell anyone about it.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t a demon, witch, or zombie, but I didn’t really know what I was. Was I a freak, a total loser, as well as a suck-up?

I didn’t know what it was or who I was. It took almost dying to figure it out.

Chapter 2

All my life, teachers had been writing on my report cards:

Lucy needs to speak up more in class; Lucy is shy and doesn’t play much with others; Lucy is so serious. She needs to be more outgoing, come out of her shell.

No teacher ever wrote:

Lucy is a great observer and thinker. She is creative and plays well when alone without the need to be constantly entertained by others. It’s a pleasure to have such a calm, quiet child in class. The world needs more introverted kids, more deep thinkers like Lucy.

I’d always been an observer. When I was little, I would crawl under the Christmas tree and sit in the corner behind it, peering out at Mom and Nan through its branches, inhaling the green scent of balsam fir. When people asked, What do you want to be when you grow up? I would answer, A tree. Imagine not having to talk, not having to be sociable or force a laugh, but just being…being quiet, being still, being me.

But being called those names got me thinking. Did I want to be the kid who follows the rules and is so boring she spends every weekend alone or, worse, at home with her mother? Did I want to be a tree, quiet and alone in the forest forever? Ignored and unnoticed. Invisible.

I wished I could be bright and bubbly, like April. I wished I could be bold and daring. I wished I could be all the things teachers told me I should be.

April and I sat on the floor in her room, surrounded by her emoji pillows. She was cross-legged; I leaned against her bed. A dome-covered tray rested on the floor between us.

Think of this as a trial run, April said, just before the door burst open and her younger brother barged in.

What are you doing? he asked.

Get out of here, Shawn! April shouted, throwing a pillow at him, then scrambling up to shove him into the hallway and slam the door behind him. Baby brothers are such a pain, she groaned as she sat back down. You’re so lucky you don’t have one.

Shawn wasn’t exactly a baby; he was seven. He was a pest, but I still wished I had a brother. There was this guy — Luke — who worked weekends with me at the farmer’s market and I thought of him as my older brother, the kind who gives advice, the kind of brother you can ask questions that you can’t ask your mother. Especially when listening to your mother and doing what she says is the source of your problems.

When I asked Luke how to deal with being called those names, he said, "Do one thing that’s the opposite of what you always do. Something that you’ve never done before, something the kids wouldn’t figure in a million years you would do."

I decided to start by breaking a family rule and April was helping me practice. My family ate health food religiously. It was our numero uno rule. Everyone at school knew it, so I figured breaking the rule would prove I was a rebel, not a Goody Two-shoes.

Rule #1: Eat a Wise Traditions diet.

That meant food like organic grass-fed meat, homemade yogurt, and cultured vegetables. It’s the way people ate a long time ago. Back even before Nan was born, some dentist named Weston Price went around the world and studied what people were eating to be healthy. He was from Canada, like me. After he travelled for ten years, he wrote a book with pictures showing who had straight teeth, whose teeth were crooked, and described what everybody ate.

Price discovered that the healthiest people (with the straightest teeth) ate a balance of plant and animal food, and no junk food. Liver was practically sacred. Butter, too. We ate lots of that and I spread it on my bread so thick I would leave teeth marks when I bit it.

Wise Traditions wasn’t only about what you ate. It was also about how you prepared your food. Grains and nuts were always soaked overnight. Bread was leavened with sourdough starter. Soup was made from bone broth, veggies were fermented, and dairy was often cultured. I knew how to make all that stuff. How pathetic was that.

In grade six, I even did a science project on fermentation, explaining how lactic acid breaks down the sugars while increasing vitamin C. I thought the chemistry was interesting. I thought the kids liked my samples of cream soda kefir and garlic carrot pickles. I learned later that they were expecting beer or wine. I’m sure that project raised my dorkometer several notches.

April lifted the lid like an experienced maître d’ and waved her hand over the buffet — a white bread sandwich, a plastic-wrapped slice of processed cheese, mini carrots, a bunch of purple grapes, and an assortment of beverages. You have to eat all of it. It’s what any kid would bring for lunch. Well, any kid but you, she said.

Silently, I held up the green hurl emoji pillow and wiggled it.

If you practice, you’ll be able to do it without gagging, she said.

I reached out and grabbed a carrot, wondering if it was organic.

You’re so…FIRPO, April said.

I didn’t know what the word meant, but I wasn’t going to ask. Maybe she made it up. She did that sometimes. But when she said it, she looked cute, with her wavy blonde hair and apple cheeks. Who wants to be called cute? I’m not two years old or a furry puppy, she often said. Even though she looked cute when she said it, her words hurt.

I flicked my long hair over my shoulder and started on the grapes, knowing they were on the Nasty Nine list of produce with the highest levels of pesticide residue. April flashed me a smile of sympathy that lit up her green eyes. I wanted to tell her how cute she looked, to get back at her for calling me a FIRPO. Instead, I swallowed the rest of the grapes.

April handed me half a sandwich. Between the white bread slices was a sliver of processed ham and a smear of yellow that looked like margarine or some other fake spread. I didn’t ask. It was easier if I didn’t know.

Just do it, already, April insisted.

I held the sandwich with two hands. The bread was soft and, without my even trying, it squished between my fingers. I squeezed it in and out, in and out, like one of those stress balls.

You look like you’re going to die. Smile, April urged.

I grinned, but it was more of a grimace. I took a small bite. The bread didn’t taste like anything. It was bland and boring. Bleh. I chewed till it became paste in my mouth. The texture was revolting.

Not too bad, huh? she said.

Keeping up my fake smile, I extended my hand as if holding an empty glass and wiggled it to indicate I needed a drink.

You have a choice — pop, juice, or chocolate milk.

I scrunched up my nose.

You can’t do that when it’s for real in front of the others, April said.

I nodded and picked up the pop can to read the nutritional label. She slapped my hand.

Geez, Luce. Stop it. Kids don’t read labels.

I dropped the soda, selected the juice box, stabbed the straw through the foil, and slurped.

Dessert time. April tossed me a bag of spicy nacho chips, a two-finger KitKat, and a small bag of Swedish berries and jujubes. Halloween is next month. There’ll be lots of this stuff hidden in pockets and backpacks so the lunch room supervisor can’t see.

I forced it all down.

When I got home later, my stomach felt queasy. As I sat with Mom and Nan in the living room watching Dancing with the Stars, one of those commercials for cholesterol medicines came on. Nan started to rant, saying cholesterol was good for the brain, every cell in our body needed it, and we couldn’t make hormones without it. She went on and on, talking about a conspiracy, until I tuned her out. La-la-la. The ad ended with someone talking crazy fast as they listed the side effects: May cause fever, muscle pain and weakness, kidney failure, liver problems, or brain impairment and has not been proven effective at preventing a heart attack.

Nan had it memorized and whenever the commercial came on, she tried to say it super fast, so we’d time her. A new record: 5.52 seconds.

After the show, Mom brought me an evening snack — einkorn toast with mashed avocado and a sprinkle of sea salt, plus a glass of cold raw milk. My stomach churned. I set the untouched food on the coffee table and burped, tasting bitter bile in the back of my throat. I ran from the room and puked in the toilet. The spicy flavour was nasty coming back up, burning my throat. I decided to never, ever eat nacho chips again.

I thought it would be easy to show I wasn’t a suck-up, but clearly breaking our numero uno rule wasn’t going to work. I didn’t know what else to do. But Mom always said when you least expect it, the universe will surprise you with opportunities.

Chapter 3

The next morning after the food fiasco, smack dab in the middle of my chin was a zit. And another one on the side of my nose. Crap!

I looked in the bathroom mirror, searching for others. The one on my nose was hidden behind the nasal wing, so I could pretend it didn’t exist. But the one on my chin was red and angry, and the first thing anyone would see when they looked at me. Crap, crap, crap. I touched it; it felt hard and tender. April used liquid makeup to cover her zits, but I didn’t wear makeup. Geez. My first zits ever. Just what I didn’t need for the start of school.

I stared into the mirror. Nan said I looked like Nonno, my grandpa, because of my dark hair and Roman nose, but I didn’t think we looked the same. My hair was straight; his was wavy. Plus, I barely had a bump on my Roman nose. Would it get wider and bumpier and become more like his as I got older? I hoped not. Nonno died when I was only one. I couldn’t remember him, but I had pictures of him holding me and kissing me. His name was Luciano and I was named after him.

I ran my tongue over my teeth. There was a slimy film on them. Ick. I stuck out my tongue. It was white and furry, and my mouth tasted like the toilet bowl, stale nachos, and puke. Gross. I opened the cabinet for my toothbrush. After wetting it, I added three citrus-flavoured drops of liquid dental soap and scrubbed until my teeth felt smooth and my tongue was pink.

Mom rapped on the door, startling me out of my gloom. Lucy, hurry up in there.

If I had only one word to describe my mom, it would be a pain, but I guess that’s two words. What bugged me most was her questioning.

Why do you want that? she’d ask when we were shopping.

Because I like it.

What do you like about it?

I dunno.

If you did know, what would it be? That’s when I’d know I wasn’t going to get what I wanted until I played along.

It’s soft and comfortable, I’d say to get her to stop.

But she wouldn’t.

What’s important to you about that?

Aaarrgh. Please just make it end.

But all the shouting in my head never stopped her. It was a technique she used called a rollover, a way of getting her clients to dig deeper into their feelings. But I wasn’t a client and sometimes I just didn’t want to share. I needed to simmer in my emotions, to find the right words. I would share when I was ready.

I tried once to use the technique on her.

Mom, tell me about my dad, I said.

This again? she sighed, looking up from writing notes for work. Wisps of strawberry-blonde hair had escaped from her ballerina bun and framed her oval face. I told you, he lives up north somewhere. She waved her hand