Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “What did you think it meant?”

  “I don’t know. It’s your father, not mine.”

  She pressed on the gas, and the bouncing got so violent I thought my head would pop off the end of my neck. We wallowed a minute in the mud near the entrance, then shot up onto the more level surface of the dirt road. Nicki sped down the street, the tires spitting gravel.

  We hadn’t gone far before she pulled into the lot of a little gas station–deli place. “I need ice cream,” she said. “I must’ve melted off two pounds in that house, and I’m roasting.”

  We got big ice-cream sandwiches filled with chocolate ice cream and ate them in the parking lot. They began to drip the second we unwrapped them. I was glad we couldn’t talk, that we needed all our concentration to lick the fast-melting sandwiches. When we were done, I went back into the store and bought a big bottle of water. I poured some over our sticky hands, let Nicki drink from it, and drank some myself.

  “I feel almost human again,” Nicki said. She took another swallow of water and burst into tears.

  I didn’t know what to do. I’d thought she was calm now, that the crisis had passed. I stood there stupidly while she clutched the bottle and sobbed and swiped at her cheeks.

  “Nicki—” I took the bottle and tried to pat her back. I was terrible at touching people, afraid to do it too softly or too harshly, afraid she would shake off my hand. My hand hovered an inch above the damp cloth of her shirt.

  She snuffled, choked down her tears. “I’m all right,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “You okay to drive?”

  She nodded, and we got back in the truck. But we only went a couple of miles before she pulled off the road again, this time into the parking lot of a local cemetery. The lot consisted of just a few spaces, dirt and pebbles surrounded by blond weeds, and ours was the only vehicle there. Nicki walked straight into the graveyard and lay on her back in the shade of an enormous maple. I sat next to her.

  “My dad isn’t buried,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, for lack of a better answer.

  “He was cremated. We threw his ashes off the top of Mount Pembroke.”

  At Patterson I’d met kids who had thought a lot about what they wanted done with their bodies after they died. I hadn’t cared much about what happened to mine—I only wanted to rush to the ending, where I wouldn’t have to make any more decisions. Burn me or bury me; what did I care?

  “If we’d buried him instead, and I could visit his grave, do you think I’d feel closer to him? I don’t feel anything at Mount Pembroke.”

  “I don’t know. Two of my grandparents are buried, but we don’t go to their graves. They’re kind of far away.”

  Nicki turned her head toward me. “Celestia said the same things about you that I said.”

  “What?”

  “It didn’t occur to me at first—but she said practically the same thing I told you when we left Paula’s. That you’re the connection to my father.”

  Sweat collected on my forehead and inside my collar. “She didn’t say that.”

  “She said you were a spiritual messenger. Same thing, right?”

  “I don’t think I have any spiritual messages.” I wanted to smooth her hair where stray curls stuck up above her forehead, but I was scared to touch her. I was very aware of her breasts against the white fabric of her shirt, the curve of her hips, and the way her skirt had ridden up her thighs. I tried to forget the glimpse of her underwear I’d gotten earlier. And I hated myself for noticing any of this when we were, for God’s sake, in a cemetery talking about her dead father.

  “You do. You just won’t tell me!”

  “Nicki, what do you think I can say? I already told you what happened in the garage.”

  “You told me what you did, but you didn’t say why. I want to know why.” Her eyes fixed on mine, the pupils small black holes trying to draw me in.

  What could I tell her? That some of the things she was asking for, I hadn’t told Dr. Briggs, or even admitted to myself yet? That sometimes I didn’t understand what the hell had driven me, and other times I thought it was way too obvious?

  “What do you want to know?”

  “How you felt. Were you mad? Or sad? Were you sorry?”

  I didn’t want to tell Nicki how it had been. I was afraid of going back into that mindspace, I realized. Afraid of going back in and not coming out.

  I rubbed the sweat off my forehead. I didn’t see how anything I could tell her would help, but after watching her lay herself out for these psychics, I was willing to try. I was tired of seeing her come up empty every place she’d hunted for answers. I wanted to give her something.

  Or maybe I was kidding myself; maybe I was the one who wanted something. Maybe I even needed her to know.

  “Okay,” I said, and I began to tell her about it.

  I’d already told her about last winter, about moving and getting mono. About our fancy house that was supposed to be the perfect place to live, the house that leaked at the seams.

  Now I told her about stockpiling the painkillers, and the way I used to run my hands over the sealed caps of the containers, savoring the whole collection with its multiple lethal doses.

  “I heard guys like guns better than pills,” Nicki said. I thought of her father, and I would bet she did, too, though neither of us said so.

  “My family’s never had any guns. I didn’t know where to get one—and if I did get one, I wouldn’t know how to use it.” To get a gun, I would’ve had to talk to strangers, ask questions—which was becoming impossible through my ever-thickening pane of glass. I would’ve had to find a gun shop and maybe get a permit, for all I knew—if they’d even sell to a minor, which I also didn’t know. If I got that far, I’d have to figure out what ammunition to get, and find somebody to show me how to shoot the damn thing. Just thinking about all those steps exhausted me, and I was barely getting through the day as it was. But with the medicine, all I had to do was get a bottle and plunk it on the drugstore counter and pay the cashier. No talking, no stupid questions required.

  “Not that I think you should’ve gotten a gun,” Nicki said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I know. I didn’t take it that way.”

  My voice ran dry. Nicki went to the truck. She returned barefoot, carrying the rest of the water, and I drank. The tree’s shadow stretched longer.

  “Ryan, I hope you know what I mean here, but I still don’t know why you wanted to die.”

  I took another mouthful of water. Then I told her about the fiasco with Serena, the way we’d used each other, my guilt. The way I’d left her puking in the bedroom and sent her friend in to deal with her, while I took off into the night.

  Nicki’s face still showed questions. I pushed on—wanting, now, to finish what I’d started. Wanting to keep on, since she’d absorbed everything I’d said with sympathetic blinks and a face that asked for more, always more, every last secret, because nothing she’d heard yet was bad enough.

  I told her, choking, about Amy Trillis, about the chill I got when she looked through me. About how she’d laughed at me, and I had shriveled.

  I was getting closer to the pink bundle in my closet, creeping up on it now.

  The sky had begun to darken above us, to glow at the horizon. I drank more water to stall, to keep from telling the next part. Nicki lay on her side, facing me, head propped up on her hand, elbow in the grass. Green juices stained her shirt and skirt.

  She rested her hand on my knee. I’d gone hoarse; my throat felt like I’d tried to swallow a cheese grater. I had never talked so much at once in my life—not even to Val and Jake. Each tap of Nicki’s fingers set off invisible sparks, sparks that traveled up and down my leg, swarms of electrical pulses. I put one finger on the back of her hand, and she didn’t flinch.

  “Why do you go to the waterfall?” she said.

  She’d asked me that before,
but I guessed she thought I might give her a different answer here, now. “It feels good,” I said. “You can’t think about anything else while you’re under there.” Even talking about it filled my head with its rush and roar for a few seconds. I decided to turn the question back on her. “Why do you go?”

  She shifted, her clothes rustling. “I know you don’t believe in this, but I feel like I’m supposed to, like I’m meant to go there.”

  “I think you like it,” I said. I remembered the first day I’d seen her there, the way she’d marched right into that pounding spray.

  “I was scared of it. Each time I went I would stand closer, and then I put my arm under, then both arms, and finally I went under. I made myself go under because I was scared.”

  “Are you scared when you go under it now?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Well, yeah. It wouldn’t be as good if I weren’t.” I stopped then, because I’d never realized that before—at least I’d never put it into words.

  • • • • •

  Mosquitoes began to whine in our ears, but we didn’t leave. My sweaty shirt had dried on my back. A breeze blew over us, and I felt like I had nowhere to go for the rest of my life.

  “I wonder what my father wanted,” Nicki said. Her voice was quiet, without the fever she usually had when she mentioned him.

  I rested my whole hand on hers. Not asking for anything more than that, just feeling her warmth, the reminder that she was alive and real and not pulling away from me.

  There was never a magic moment when I knew why dying had called to me, just like there was never a magic moment when I decided I wanted to live instead. My mother had been looking for the magic reason, I knew. She wanted an explanation. Hell, she deserved one, too.

  Nicki also wanted the magic reason—more for her dad than for me—but what I’d told her was all I had to give, this spewing of the worst that was inside me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. My knee ached and burned under her hand.

  “For what?”

  Where would I begin?

  • • • • •

  I had one big secret left, the one about Amy Trillis and the library.

  Nicki licked her thumb and rubbed at a green smear on her skirt. “This is my mother’s suit,” she said. “She’s going to kill me.”

  I handed her the water, but she sighed and said, “Forget it. I’ll see what I can do with soap when I get home.”

  We let the darkness settle on us, and my one remaining story sat in the center of my stomach. I’d never told Dr. Briggs. I’d never told anyone at Patterson. But now this secret wanted to follow the rest, up my throat and over my tongue, out my mouth. Something in me wanted to see if Nicki could stand it, if maybe she could stand to hear this, too, since she’d heard everything else.

  My throat worked, but nothing came out. Nicki sat up and put her lips next to my ear. “What is it?” she whispered, and I was glad the darkness masked us.

  • • • • •

  Last year at West Seaton, before we moved, I had fifth period study hall. By Thanksgiving, I couldn’t stand to be around other people, to try to talk to them. It was easier to get a pass to the library and sit at a table by myself.

  Amy Trillis and her friends went to the library, too. They pulled their chairs into a circle and giggled, texted their boyfriends, and passed lip gloss around—at least, as far as I could tell, that’s what they seemed to be doing. I could see and hear them from where I sat, but I never looked directly at them. After Amy had laughed at me, I didn’t want her to notice me. She seemed to have forgotten about me by now. But I couldn’t stop watching her and listening to her and giving a damn about what she thought. Even though I kind of hated her at the same time.

  One day she and her friends got up to cluster around the windows, to look at some guys walking past. They left their jackets and book bags and notebooks and pencils and lip gloss behind, littering the chairs and the floor. Amy left a pink sweater hanging off the edge of her chair. The girls had their backs to me.

  That sweater seemed to carry the motion and scent of Amy. My stomach rumbled as if I were hungry for it. For a minute, a hot buzz roared in my ears, and then the numbness took over. Nothing mattered.

  I didn’t plan; I didn’t think. I took two steps with my backpack in one hand, scooped the sweater into my pack, zipped it up, and went behind the bookshelf nearest the door. When they returned to their chairs, Amy didn’t notice at first, but when she did she stood up, bent over, searched all around.

  “My sweater! Did you see it? What happened to it? No, it was pink—no, I had it right here—”

  And then they started looking around, beyond their circle. “Someone took it! Can you believe someone took it? Did anyone see anything?” The librarian came over to see what all the fuss was, and they fanned out through the library, asking people if they’d seen anything. I slipped out the door. Nobody stopped me.

  And here’s the thing: Nobody asked me about it later. They hadn’t noticed I was even there. I saw a list Amy and her friends made of people who’d been in the library when the sweater was taken; they posted it outside the office. My name wasn’t on it. I’d been right in the middle of the library, obvious to anyone who might’ve wanted to glance up, but nobody ever glanced up when I moved, and so nobody had seen me or paid any attention to what I was doing. I was worse than behind glass now; I’d gone invisible.

  • • • • •

  In the graveyard, now, I talked faster, not wanting to pause, not wanting to give Nicki the chance to speak. Because if I stopped now and she didn’t say anything, or said the wrong thing, I didn’t think I could take it.

  • • • • •

  I may have been invisible, but the pink sweater was way too visible. It reeked of perfume, and it was the pinkest pink I’d ever seen. I already hated it by the time I got it home. It was so obviously not mine that anyone who saw it would ask where I’d gotten it. I wrapped it in the grocery bag and stowed it on the top shelf of my closet, first at our old house and then at the new house. When we moved temporarily to Seaton to get away from the leaks, I left it in my closet at the house in the woods, hoping it would magically disappear before we came back. But when I came home from Patterson, it was waiting for me. I couldn’t get away from what it meant.

  When I took it, I had crossed some kind of line. I had the sweater, and Amy didn’t know I had the sweater. This was the kind of thing a pathetic stalker guy would do.

  I was more ashamed of this than of almost anything else I’d ever done. I was the pathetic stalker guy.

  These were the kinds of secrets I had. Not the big secrets where anyone would feel sorry for you, would understand your pain—like losing a parent or getting a serious illness. Mine were the shameful, horrible kind. The grubby little twisted secrets, the ones where people would shrink away from me if they knew how pathetic I was.

  I lived in this big fancy house like my family thought it was better than everyone else’s, but in reality I was a creepy guy who stole girls’ clothes. Well, one girl and one piece of clothing. But still.

  • • • • •

  “What did you do with it?” Nicki said.

  “I still have it. I don’t know what to do with it.”

  She didn’t move or speak. I wished she would. I wished she would push me away and get this over with. I thought of the way Amy had laughed at me, of how Val had pulled back from me.

  Nicki rubbed my knee lightly, absently. Exhausted, I wanted to prop myself against the trunk of the maple, but at the same time I didn’t want to move away from her hand on my knee. As long as she was willing to touch me, which surely couldn’t be much longer, I wouldn’t move away.

  “I know it’s sick,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That I took her sweater.”

  “Well—sad is what I think. Like, you must have wanted something so bad, but what you ended up taking was a sweater.” Her fingers
fluttered, tapped my skin through my jeans. “You keep saying how numb you were, but I don’t think you were numb if you could want something that bad.”

  She didn’t seem to think the sweater thing was as horrifying as I’d always thought, and I wasn’t sure which of us was right. Because whenever I looked at that sweater, I saw myself in the future, a full-blown Crazy Stalker Guy, huddled in alleys, leering at people. The guy whose eyes nobody meets on the street. The guy who talks to himself because nobody else will talk to him. The guy who hoards other people’s clothing because it’s the best he can do, the closest he can come to actual human contact.

  “What did your doctor say about it?” she asked.

  “I never told her.”

  “Why not? I think you should.”

  “Maybe I will.” Before today, I couldn’t imagine telling anyone. But I’d managed to tell Nicki, and here she still was, not screaming or even cringing away from me. “I wanted to get rid of it, but—”

  I stopped there, because I knew that what came next sounded crazy. I hadn’t wanted to throw it out because I thought my fingerprints or the DNA from my skin cells might be on it. As if anyone who saw it in the trash would instantly know that it was stolen. As if they would spend money on forensic tests that probably wouldn’t even work. Obviously I was watching too many crime shows on TV. But guilt doesn’t exactly make a person rational.

  I hadn’t wanted to mail it back to Amy anonymously for the same reason—my guilt was all over it. I was even afraid to turn it in to the school lost and found, or to drop it at school where someone else could find it.

  So I hid the sweater in my closet and wished it would melt, disintegrate, unravel into nothing. I hoped someday I would open the brown bag and not even find a single pink fiber or ball of fuzz left.

  “You could burn it,” Nicki said.

  Burn it where? Our white marble fireplace had never been used. Any whiff of smoke would set my mother on the case worse than a detective. I couldn’t do it outdoors, either, in case I accidentally set the woods on fire. I could see myself trying to explain that one to my family and the fire marshal. Some choice that would be: whether I’d rather have them think I was a stalker or an arsonist. If the thought of skydiving had sent my parents into a panic, imagine what a forest fire would do.