It’s a panic attack. I know them. I don’t have them often, only when I let myself really stop and think about…well…my life. Usually, I’m just working hard, studying, applying for something—pushing. Always pushing. It’s when I stop that I realize—holy shit, I’m alive.
I’m sitting in a chair at the end of the row, so as Dr. Wheaton begins her talk, I excuse myself to the small curtained area to the side of the stage, and around to the wall behind the rows of dinner tables. There’s a water station, and my hand is shaking as I guzzle cup after cup.
“You probably need to breathe more than you need to drink,” he says. My IT guy is also my emergency medic. So far, he’s getting all the hero roles, and I’m only technically-inept and skittish. I should be more embarrassed, but I’m to overwhelmed, so I nod in agreement, handing the small paper cup to him and raising my arms above my head to open up my lungs.
“Breathe in until she looks to the left,” he whispers, now leaning against the wall next to me. I glance from him back up to Miranda, noticing that he’s right—she has a pattern to her speech. She starts at one side of the room, then switches topics, takes a breath and moves to the other.
I breathe with her on every turn—in several seconds, out several more. Eventually, this routine becomes kind of funny, and it makes me giggle. I breathe through it though, still feeling flutters in my belly from nerves. Unless…the flutters are from something else.
“When I had to give my first dissertation…this is how she told me to deal with the room,” he whispers next to me. “Divide it in half to make the crowd smaller. Thing is, I gave my dissertation to a table of seven people. Not a lot to divide, and frankly…I would have given anything for it to have been more crowded or noisier.”
I look at him, still breathing, but now on my own.
“When it’s a small room like that, you can totally hear when someone writes something down. Screws with your head,” he smirks. He’s playing it cool as if we’re just two people who like to stand off to the side—as if this is where we’re supposed to be.
I turn my head to watch the end of Miranda’s speech. She touches on the topic of me once more—at the end—when she lets everyone know about how I wrote her a second letter, after my surgery, telling her I had every intention of walking in her footsteps. She makes a joke of it, of how I was right, and it didn’t live up to the first one I wrote. But then she talks about how I beat out more than seven hundred other applicants for her mentorship, and my smile slips, because I’m sure everyone’s thinking about how I probably didn’t deserve the slot, that she picked me because she felt bad, or she thought I had a great story. Sometimes I let that doubt eat at me, and I feel a little inadequate. It gets a lot of applause today, though, and most of the room turns to look at me, so I plaster the smile back in place.
“Just keep breathing,” my mystery friend whispers from behind his hand as he pretends to run it over his beard. When the dean takes over at the podium again and begins recognizing others in the audience, my friend nudges me to get my attention, then nods over his shoulder, toward the double doors to the right of us. I follow him out quietly, and allow myself to sigh loudly, my lips flapping and making a motorcycle sound.
“Wow, you were really holding a lot of that in, huh?” he chuckles.
“I guess I was,” I say, feeling the threat of my chest tightening again now that we’re out in the hallway alone. I look down at my hands, which are clutching my purse hard, my knuckles white. I breathe out a short laugh and relax my hold.
“I’m Graham, by the way,” he says, his palm out, waiting for mine, which is clammy, and I’m embarrassed to touch him, but I do anyhow. When our hands meet, I notice more than I probably should just from shaking someone’s hand—like the fact that there’s a callus at the base of his fingers, and his nails are kept short, and his palms are unusually warm for the coldness of the room.
“Hi, Graham. I’m…Emma,” I start, squinting my eyes as I cut myself off with a shake of my head. “You know that already though, I guess.”
“Yeah, I got that from your speech,” he chuckles, leaning into me enough that his arm brushes against mine. “Which…nice job, by the way. I think you might have stolen her thunder.”
“Thanks,” I say, my face flushing and my lips twitching with the pressure to smile. The doors next to us push open before I can say anything else, and the crowd begins to exit a few people at a time, many stopping to congratulate me along the way. I’m not sure why—I didn’t win the award. I’m gracious anyhow, though, and Graham stands next to me the entire time.