"Okay, now, from the diaphragm. Ready?"

I nodded, the back of my head rubbing the old carpet. My hands were on my stomach, so I could where I was breathing from.

"Okay, now on the count of three, we'll do it together," he said from his position on the floor, just a few feet away. We'd had to move the chairs against the wall to make room for us lying flat on the ground.

"Three...two...one...go!" He sent the air pushing from his belly, making an odd sound somewhere between a foghorn and a Buddhist monk in meditation. I followed suit, trying not to laugh. With him being ridiculous, I didn't feel as ridiculous myself. My sound was less convincing, though, and he said, "Again, again. Really feel it!"

I sucked in a breath, pushing out my stomach muscles rather than my lungs, the way Dr Grant
had shown me. I pushed out all the air again, this time louder, but now as loud as him.

"Again!" We honked again. "Again!" And again.

"Bet you twenty bucks I can do it louder!" He sucked in his breath, then pushed out a sound like Babe the Blue Ox. I was a second behind him, matching him in volume.

"Can't just tie with me, Price, you've gotta try and beat me. Twenty bucks says you can't!"

"I don't have twenty bucks!" I said, laughing, before breathing in again and honking as loud as I could, louder than I had ever been in my life. Dr Grant scoffed, "Gotta do better than that, Price. Much, much better. I'm a honking champion. Gold Medal. Turin Olympics. Bet you didn't know that."

We honked again. "Honking's a winter sport?"

We honked. "What else do you have to do in winter? Better than eating cake and getting really fat."

We honked. "I don't know. I like cake."

We honked. "Okay, Price, last one. Winner takes all?"

I nodded, panting slightly. "No cheating."

"I would never!" I laughed at his tone.

"No letting me win?"

"Now that I would never do."

"Okay. Three...two...one...go!" We honked, and then the honking turned into more of a shout as we pushed the last of the air out of our lungs. I ended up laughing hysterically, coughing a little as I pulled air back into my lungs.

"Whoo!" Dr Grant pulled himself up on his feet, panting. "I think I owe you twenty dollars, Fawn. Personally, though I think you have an unfair advantage."

"Oh really?" I used a chair to help pull me to my feet. "What's that?"

"Young lungs. Strengthened by exercise."

"But not by talking,so you have the real advantage."

"You seem to be doing just fine, considering the first words you've ever said
to me were 'I don't have twenty bucks.'"

I blinked, surprised, and he raised his eyebrows in amusement. "I know, right? Pretty cool." He grinned at me as I grinned at him.

"Pretty cool," I agreed.

"So tell me a little bit about yourself, Fawn Price. I've been dying to know. Come, spin me a tale. Weave me a narrative."

"What do you want to know?"

"Oh, the usual. Where you were born, what ice cream's your favorite, which Ninja Turtle you like the best. Your hopes, dreams, aspirations. The little stuff."

"Boston, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, I never watched the Ninja Turtles, so I don't know."

"Wait, when were you born?" I told him. He pretended to die of a heart attack. He straightened up as I laughed out loud. "And the other stuff? Hopes, dreams, aspirations?"

I paused, uncertain. But we'd been having such a good time, and I didn't want to be the one who ruined it. "Umm, well, my dreams are..." For a moment, I remembered Tom, floating in the bathtub. I shook the thought away. "It depends. Yesterday I dreamed that cats took over the world, and then the king of the cats burst into a thousand eyeballs, so..."

"Nice. Cats into eyeballs. That's pretty classic. Of course Freud would say that it means that you're in love with your mother, but..."

"Who's Freud?"

This time it was him who blinked. He shook his head a second later, waving his hand in an 'and so on and so on' motion, "German psychologist, had a thing about everything being sexual and weird. Sorry," he went on, "sometimes I forget that normal people didn't go study people's inner urges."

I watched him a few seconds more, certain, somehow, that I'd messed up, but not sure how. He leaned in, like a child hearing an exciting story.

"So? Hopes? Aspirations?"

I cleared my throat, stalling for time. My throat was hard to clear. I cleared it again, and said, "Well, I aspire to be...It's kind of..." I teetered for a moment, undecided. Should I tell him that the night before my nightmare, I had snuck onto Ned's laptop and Googled Antoni Gaudi and Brunelleschi and Hausmann, that I'd looked at building after building after building? How could I tell him that I wanted to build buildings when I could barely do math, and I didn't know who this Freud person was. How could I tell him that? He was nicer than other people, and he liked me well enough. I didn't think I could bear him laughing at me. "I...don't really know," I finished weakly.

He sat and waited for me to keep going, and I stammered, "W-w-well, it's just that until now I didn't know that I'd even get a chance to do anything. Since you kind of need to speak to be someone."

"Actually, that's not true. Mutism isn't that rare, to be honest. And disabilities don't always have to be debilitating. Amputees can be bodybuilders, you know. Wheelchair-bound guys can be fantastic basketball players. You don't really need to speak. But do you want to?"

I watched him for a few moments, then watched my fingers interlace. "Yes."

"Why?"

I looked up at him. He regarded me evenly, not hinting at any thought or emotion, and waited.

"Well...I mean...it's a thing that people do. And I don't. And it's not that I can't, because if I couldn't, that would be one thing, but..."

"But?"

I pushed my fingers back and forth, then pulled them apart, flexing my hands, then laced them together again, taking a moment to breathe. I could feel my throat closing again, and the more I fought against it, the more it tightened. Dr Grant watched my hands in silence, waiting for me to answer. When I didn't, he turned away and picked up a magazine, then handed it to me, followed closely by a pen. It was open to the crossword section. He picked up another magazine for himself, and quietly went to work.

I had never liked crosswords, since I didn't know any complicated words and I never got the clues, but Sudoku was a different story. Trying to breathe naturally around the lump in my throat, I pushed numbers around in the squares, waiting for inspiration to come. Finally, after five or ten minutes, my throat relaxed, my breathing slowed, and my brain calm, I said, "But I don't want to be crazy. I don't want to be a freak. I can speak, I just won't speak. That's weird. I don't want to be weird."

He had turned his eyes to me, his head still tilted down from where he'd been staring down at the page. The trademark humor in his eyes that I had come to expect was gone, and he watched me gravely for a moment. I started to worry that he wasn't going to say anything, and somehow the thought made me anxious enough to twist my pen between my fingers nervously.

His eyes went back down to the page, and when he spoke, his tone was brusque. "If that's what you want." He didn't continue, didn't elaborate.

Strangely disappointed, I finished the Sudoku and left, the happiness that had permeated our meeting seeping slowly away.