She probably took three breaths, Vic thought.

That’d be what Vic would’ve done. Take three long, deep breaths so the air enters the lungs, the bloodstream, and then the brain. Serena told him that it would clear his thoughts for better decision-making. So she probably did it too before she tore apart her report card from the entrance exam.

Vic couldn’t stop thinking about it, Serena’s report card, while he was drunk on the dripping Manhattan cocktail dusk. The next breath drew in the bitter aftertaste of the dimmed Geneva skyline mixed with the faint sweetness emanating from the lamp posts. Vic yearned to bottle this drink and share it with the girl who hid from her remaining parent her successful acceptance to a foreign dream school so that her family wouldn’t have accepted it, and she couldn’t accept burdening them with her ambition. The report card was an attempt to escape, but the plan could never materialize.

So the shreds of her dream never saw the day of light. They languished in the dustbin, crinkling under the weight of life she shoved in every passing day. No one else had seen them. No one else had seen her. But Vic did. Vic saw her when she was inebriated from the cheap red wine easily found in supermarkets. He saw her when she placed her bet on him when no one else did. He saw her when she made him promise not to let anyone discourage him. He saw her when she bit her lips at the airport the day he left. He saw her when she told him to take three deep breaths and not to look back like she did. So he took three deep breaths—

The drunkenness must’ve gotten to him because the halos were growing larger. What Vic was breathing in now must’ve been distinctively different from the air Serena inhaled. All Vic wanted was to bottle up this night sky and drink it with her.