Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  Try Not to Breathe

  JENNIFER R. HUBBARD

  VIKING

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  VIKING

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Jennifer R. Hubbard, 2012

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hubbard, Jennifer R.

  Try not to breathe by Jennifer Hubbard.

  p. cm.

  Summary: The summer Ryan is released from a mental hospital following his suicide attempt, he meets Nicki, who gets him to share his darkest secrets while hiding secrets of her own.

  ISBN 978-1-101-56690-9

  [1. Suicide—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H8582Try 2012

  [Fic]—dc22

  2011012203

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is for those who survived, and in memory of those who did not.

  ONE

  It was dangerous to stand under the waterfall, but some kids did it anyway, and I was one of them. The water pounded my mind blank, stung my skin. It hit my naked back, chest, and shoulders so hard I couldn’t think. That water could knock me over, force the breath out of me, pin me to the rock, and I knew it.

  But I kept doing it.

  My parents’ heads would’ve shot through the roof if they’d known. They’d done their best to wrap me in cotton since I’d gotten out of Patterson Hospital a few months before. My mother panicked if I missed a dose of my meds, so I sure wasn’t going to tell her about the waterfall. How could I explain it, anyway?

  Because I needed it. The roaring water shot over the ledge and beat down on my shoulders and head, a thunder I felt even through the slick stones under my feet. My nerves crackled and buzzed. It was all I could do to stand still against the water.

  Whatever else I had messed up in my life, I could do that much: stand still. Okay, so I wasn’t setting the bar too high.

  • • • • •

  There were rumors that a guy had drowned here once, or that he’d fallen from the cliff and smashed his head on the rocks, his brains spilling into the pool below. Each version of the story was bloodier and less believable than the last.

  There were rumors about me, about what I’d done back in the spring. Everyone snuck looks at me in the school halls after I got out of Patterson. Sometimes I was tempted to foam at the mouth and babble to invisible people, because the other kids seemed so disappointed that I didn’t. But I couldn’t be sure they would realize it was a joke. The few times I’d tried to make anyone laugh, all I got were nervous glances and squirming. Nobody expected me to have a sense of humor, and it was safer for me to let them think I might be crazy than to give them proof.

  So I knew about rumors, how they were 95 percent bullshit with maybe one kernel of truth. I wasn’t sure where the kernel was in the story about the dead guy at the waterfall.

  • • • • •

  I first went under the waterfall in May, and I kept it up all summer. July was so hot, I imagined steam pouring off me whenever the icy rush hit my skin.

  Early in August, we got rain. I watched the waterfall from the stream bank, waiting for the cool stormy weather to pass, for the heat to return.

  I was sitting there one day when Kent Thornton’s sister came by. Kent was going into eleventh grade like me, and I knew his sister was a year younger, but I’d never talked to her much. Last year she’d been at the junior high, since Seaton High didn’t start until tenth grade.

  “Hey, Ryan,” she said, planting her feet in the moss.

  “Hey.” I tried to remember her name, but couldn’t.

  She stood watching the water charge over the cliff. Ferns waved in the breeze. “Are you going in?” she asked.

  “No, not today.” All that rain had swelled the creek and the waterfall. I was tempted to see if I could stand up under the cold weight of that water, but I wasn’t completely insane, no matter what kids at school might whisper about me.

  “I do it all the time.” She grinned. “My friend Angie won’t even stick her foot in the water. She says the rocks are too slippery.”

  “They are slippery.” Not that it had ever stopped me.

  Kent’s sister wiped sweat off the back of her neck. “You live up at the glass house, don’t you?”

  “It’s not glass.” I hated when people called it that. It sounded like we were expecting some TV show to feature us in our architectural wonder of a home. Lifestyles of People Who Have Way More Money Than You. “It just has a lot of windows.”

  “Whatever. That’s your house, right?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  Her face flushed pink. “Just wondered.” She waved at the waterfall. “Dare me to go under there?”

  “Nah, it’s too cold today. And strong. It’s kind of dangerous.”

  She stepped into the water. Ripples spread out from her foot. She wore a tank top and shorts, which she didn’t take off. She walked toward the waterfall, slipping once on the mossy rocks.

  I followed her with my eyes. Dread squeezed my stomach and wedged a lump at the back of my throat. I didn’t even know this girl, but I had no desire to see her crushed, drowned. She disappeared under the silver curtain of water.

  I stood up because I couldn’t see her anymore. I squinted at the foaming water, trying to see into it, through it.

  My fingers tapped the sides of my thighs as if counting the seconds she’d been
under. How long should I wait before going in after her? If I should go in at all—there being a narrow line between heroes and idiots.

  Kent’s sister ducked out, spitting, hair glued flat to her head. I exhaled. She lifted a handful of wet hair off her face, shook herself like a dog, and laughed. She splashed toward me.

  “You all right?” I said.

  Her lips were purple; her skin prickled with goose bumps. Her teeth hammered against each other.

  “I should’ve brought a towel,” she said.

  I’d done that before—remembered the towel only after I was wet. “I can get you one.”

  “Okay.” She rubbed her arms. “That sounds fantastic.”

  • • • • •

  I led her to my house, a ten-minute walk through the woods. I didn’t know how to act: whether to make eye contact, how long to look at her, how close to walk. I didn’t talk to people much, except Jake and Val, and with them I could talk about anything. What were you supposed to say to people you barely knew? That was the kind of thing I needed lessons in—forget algebra and history.

  Her wet clothes dripped on the evergreen needles covering the path. A few times, she reached out to brush the white-pine needles that hung in soft bunches from the trees along the trail. “So I get to see the glass house,” she said, through chattering teeth.

  “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not that exciting.”

  “It’s got to be more exciting than my house.”

  What was she expecting—champagne fountains? A private theater? I tripped over a root, staggered a couple of steps, and decided to glue my eyes to the ground from now on.

  “I think I saw you at the waterfall yesterday,” she went on. “Reading. But you left while I was coming up the trail.”

  “Oh, yeah—I was there.”

  “What were you reading?”

  “This book about some guys who tried to cross the Pacific Ocean on a handmade raft.”

  “The Pacific? On a raft?” She shook her head. “That’s wild.”

  That was why I’d wanted to read it, but nobody else I knew seemed impressed. My dad had said, “Huh, how about that”—exactly the same response he’d used when my mother told him the price of asparagus had gone up. Val had said, “God, some people have to do everything the hard way.” My friend Jake didn’t seem entirely clear on which ocean was the Pacific.

  “Did they make it?” Kent’s sister asked. I was wishing I could remember her name now, wishing I hadn’t waited too long to ask. Not only because she cared about the guys on the raft, but because she didn’t choose every word as if she had to wrap it in tissue paper before she gave it to me—as if I might snap if she said the wrong thing. Which was the way practically everyone else at school talked to me.

  “Not all the way,” I told her. “The raft was falling apart, so they had to quit.”

  “That would’ve been amazing.” After a pause: “If they’d made it, I mean.”

  • • • • •

  Our house hid among the trees. It consisted mostly of vertical boards and glass. Mom said it had “clean, modern lines.” She said we needed all those windows to “bring nature inside.” My grandmother always told her it was hideous, too big and too stark, but nothing anyone said could dent Mom’s obsession with this place. It had taken three years and an army of contractors to build. I’d spent more afternoons than I liked to remember in this yard, breathing paint and turpentine, brushing sawdust out of my hair. Mom used to chase plumbers, electricians, and carpenters around the lot while I did my homework under the trees. I developed incredible powers of concentration from studying to the background noise of hammers clanging and saws tearing through wood.

  Kent’s sister stood on the tiles in the front hall while I brought her two big white towels.

  “Fluffy,” she said. She wrung out her hair and rubbed herself with them.

  “‘Fresh and soft as a springtime morning,’” I drawled, quoting an asinine fabric-softener commercial that was on all the time lately, and she laughed.

  • • • • •

  I wanted to say more about the guys on the Pacific raft, because for days that story had filled my head, and I’d imagined I was out there on the ocean with them. But now I was thinking maybe she really hadn’t cared after all; maybe she was just being polite.

  “Could I look around?” she asked.

  “I guess so.” Mom had given tours of the house to all her friends and relatives, but I’d never paid much attention, beyond noticing how their eyes glazed over after the third room. Still, if this girl actually wanted to look through the house (to search for the nonexistent champagne fountains?), it was okay with me. “Do you want dry clothes? I could give you a T-shirt or something.”

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  She followed me through the living room, where one wall was made entirely of windows. The carpeting and furniture were a blank color, like vanilla, because my mother said the view should be the “focal point” of the room. Not that I mentioned focal points to Kent’s sister. Not that I said anything at all, in case she was taking notes so she could tell the neighborhood what it was like inside the crazy guy’s place. But all she said was “The trees are right there,” stretching her arms toward them. “It’s like living in the forest.”

  She wanted to see everything, from the bathrooms to the broom closet. Maybe the broom closet was interesting in a bizarre way, as evidence that someone in our family was a little too compulsive—the brooms and mops and sponges all lined up, the dust rags folded in a neat pile on the shelf—but otherwise I didn’t see the fascination.

  She marched into my room, not even pausing on the threshold. Could she tell she was the first female under the age of forty to set foot in there? With a flip of her hand, she spun the globe on my desk. I stopped it, my fingers landing on Greenland. She studied my hand as it rested on the stopped planet, and I sensed she wasn’t just inspecting the house—she was inspecting me, too. I was suddenly aware of the sound of my own breathing. Was it louder than usual, and if so, did she notice it?

  I followed her eyes as they took in my computer, my bookshelves, the walls that were empty except for one painting Val had done in therapy—an abstract of blue and purple swirls. I often traced those satiny swirls as if I could touch Val’s skin through them, as if she’d left part of her flesh in the painting.

  “So what’s the verdict?” I asked Kent’s sister, tired of trying to read every blink of her eyelashes, every twitch of her mouth. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was searching for something, though I couldn’t imagine what it was.

  “Compared to you, my brothers are slobs. But then—compared to anyone, they’re slobs.”

  The one thing I didn’t want her to see was the package on the upper shelf in my closet. I tried to think of an excuse to keep her out of there—as if I owed her an explanation for why she couldn’t see inside every drawer and cubbyhole. But she just glanced at the partly opened door. Apparently my clothes weren’t as riveting as our mops and brooms, and she didn’t inspect the closet after all.

  She lifted a corner of the window shade and peered out. “I love your room. You are so lucky.”

  • • • • •

  The only door I wouldn’t open was the one to my mother’s office. Aside from the problem of introducing Mom to a girl whose name I couldn’t remember, I didn’t want to go through the whole who is Ryan’s little friend interrogation. My mother could squeeze an entire biography out of anyone, complete with blood type and the names of first-grade teachers. So I said, “My mom’s in there, working.”

  Kent’s sister put her ear to the door. “Really?” she whispered. “I don’t hear anything.”

  I laughed. “She’s on the computer. What do you expect?” For a minute I thought she suspected me of hiding dismembered bodies in there or something. I could imagine what the kids at school would say if Kent’s sister told them we had a mysterious door we never opened. But she pulled away from the door and s
hrugged.

  • • • • •

  We ended the tour in the basement. “Holy crap, it’s like a gym down here,” she said. “Do you use all this equipment?”

  “I used to—especially the treadmill. Now it’s mostly my mom.”

  Kent’s sister threaded her way between the machines. She sat on the rowing machine. “Hey, we can row across the Pacific.” She rowed a couple of strokes, stopped, and tilted her head up at me. “How come you don’t use this stuff anymore?”

  I ran my hand along the treadmill’s control panel. “Last winter I got mono. I had to stop everything for a while. I used to play baseball, and run . . . and I never got back into it.”

  “Mono,” she repeated, as if weighing that story against whatever rumors she’d heard. Her eyes were pale gray, almost light enough to see through.

  “Yes,” I said, not blinking. “Mono.”

  She stood up and headed for the far wall. Along that side of the room was a bar we never used. My parents had had a fantasy, when we moved in, that they would host regular parties down here. I wasn’t sure where that idea had come from, since they’d never had parties before, and they didn’t now. Kent’s sister sat on a bar stool, crossed her legs, and crooked an arm, holding up an imaginary wineglass. She draped one of the towels around her neck as if it were a mink.

  “Chah-ming, dah-ling,” she boomed, waving her pretend glass. “Won’t you pour me anoth-ah?”

  I stepped behind the bar. “The booze is locked up. Not that there’s much of it to begin with. But you can have all the tonic water you want.”

  She stuck out her tongue and gagged.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “The only thing I like about tonic is that it turns blue under black lights.”

  She leaned on the bar and fiddled with one end of the towel. “Did you really have mono?”