The Doves that Strut

3

"Where—are we—heading?" I gasped, by the skin of my teeth heaving the question out of my lungs, my left hand nearly yanked out of its socket by her right. My palms had begun to sweat, excessively, but she didn't mention a word about it.

After dragging me across the long parking lot lined with dozens of second-hand vehicles, Claire took a sharp right turn instead of crossing the road as I usually did outside the school front gate after school. Alongside us were the kale-colored fences, about eight feet tall, enclosing our school's football pitch which stretched out to nowhere like a green sea.

"As I've said, anywhere is a better place, so don't you worry," she assured, shrinking her pace into sauntering. Thank God. "But sure, if you really need to know that bad, my haven." I still didn't know where we'd be doing our version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but I had a bad intuition about further inquiries (and I had desperately run out of breath), so I just kept my mouth shut this time.

I squeezed her hand with what remaining strength I possessed, and she finally turned around to look at me. Her expression turned from amusement to shock, faster than I could register. "Oh my god, are you okay?" she screamed, staring at me in dismay like I was having a heart attack. "You look so pale!"

Physically, I was beat. There was no way I could recover quickly from this ordeal. Nonetheless, I was mentally feeling finer than ever. Running along with her, I felt so free, so emancipated as the gusts of wind seeped through my disheveled hair, as the rays of the sun shone on my skin, as we had escaped the place where Dad thought was the one place I belonged in. "Yes!" I shouted ecstatically, but what came out was merely a wheeze. I turned to her. She was smiling at me, faintly. She didn't speak a word, just amusedly staring at me, as we stopped walking and I tried to reinflate my lungs. It was something intricately special that I felt, some extraordinary emotion no words I found in our language could fittingly describe. A moment later, I realized I was still holding her hand. "Sorry," I promptly apologized and awkwardly loosened my grip.

"That's alright." She closed her eyes for a brief while, shaking her head. I noticed the lean black lines of eyeshadow under her eyelashes. They glistened in fading grey that reemerged every time she moved and the sunlight shone upon them at a different angle. "So it's true, you having breathing problems?"

"Yeah. You thought I was faking it?"

"I just thought you were using it as some sort of a wimpy excuse to skip Phys Ed," she grimaced a bit. Although our hands were apart, we were standing close to each other, shoulder to shoulder. I was still trying to catch my breath, while she gazed absentmindedly into the distance.

"Have you ever worried about your sex life?" she asked point-blank, curiously.

"What?" I went off-key. I think I overreacted.

"Because, you know, you have asthma. You lose control of your breathing doing exercise, so wouldn't sex get you killed or something?" she explained, as if serious.

"I've... never thought of it that way," I stammered.

"Ever tried wanking?" she guilefully smiled, giving her brows a lift and comically imitating male masturbation by swaying her coiled-up fingers up and down. "If you have, that'd be a good sign."

"Um..." I hesitated, sinking my eyes to the light-grey tarmac we were on.

"Relax, I'm just joking," she laughed and clapped her hands. "But look at what our education has done to you—so intimidated by this topic. I mean, sex is rightly our biological measure of procreation, right? I don't get the reason why the adults avoid it like it's some state secret." She lightly yanked my arm, for agreement, I comprehended. We headed off along the long stretch of this manless road again, to her haven, whatever that was supposed to mean.