Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

Back at Patterson I sometimes used to think—when I wasn’t busy plotting my own obliteration, or trying to stop plotting it—that Val might like me. Nothing had happened between us in the hospital. Nothing except the spark when she circled my wrist with her hand. Now that we were out, I sometimes thought I should take a chance and tell her what I wanted. I might’ve done it already if she didn’t live so far away.

  And what if she wasn’t interested? It would wreck what we had, and I’d end up with nothing. I couldn’t help remembering what had happened with Amy Trillis—even though Val was nothing like Amy. So tonight, again, I signed off without saying anything to Val.

  • • • • •

  Looking back now, I’m not sure why I ever liked Amy Trillis. I fell hard at the beginning of sophomore year: my head full of her, my pulse jumping every time we were in the same room. I didn’t talk to her, but everyone knew who she was. She was a junior, class vice president, a star on the girls’ soccer team, one of the editors of the student Web page. She always seemed to know exactly who she was.

  I liked her laugh, too. There was something warm about it, something that made me want to curl myself around her.

  We had the same history class. She sat in front of me and one row to the right, perfect for me to watch her without being too obvious about it. She used a sparkly green pen, and she was always chewing on the cap. Sometimes her black curls fell down the left side of her face and I couldn’t see her expression. My eyes would follow the curve of her shoulder and the line of her sweater. She didn’t wear low-cut shirts or anything that was painted-on tight, but you could see her body. Everything she wore fit her, outlined her.

  I watched her, but I didn’t have the nerve to talk to her. Watching her was like watching someone on TV, that’s how far away she seemed.

  One day we were both absent when people had to pair up for group projects. The teacher caught me in homeroom the next day and told me Amy and I were the only two left, so I found Amy in the hall before class. I’d rehearsed what to say, because it was the first time I’d ever spoken directly to her. “Mrs. Bruno says we should work together on this project. Everyone else already has partners.”

  Amy took a step back, looked me up and down as if I had mold sprouting from my pores, and said, “No thanks.”

  Her two best friends, the girls who trailed her through the halls, giggled. My face began to heat up.

  “We’re the only two left,” I said. It wasn’t like I was asking her to have my children. This was a history project. An assignment.

  She tossed her head. “I’ll switch with somebody.” Turning, she gripped the arm of her nearest friend, and all three of them burst into laughter. That laugh hit me right in the stomach. “God, he’s the creepy guy who’s always staring at me in class,” Amy said, without bothering to lower her voice. Heat flashed over me, and I seemed to have a swarm of bees inside my head, a roaring buzz that almost—but not quite—drowned out the girls’ giggling. They walked away, laughing so hard they staggered and bumped into one another. I went to my locker, sweat thick on my skin, feeling like everyone in school must’ve heard what had happened. The words she’d said played over and over in my head, drawing blood each time, cutting into my nerves.

  And then the pane of glass came up, and the world seemed to move one step back from me, so at least I could breathe again.

  In history, Martin Reyes came up and told me he’d switched with Amy so Amy could work with Dave Shaw. I said fine, I didn’t care. I didn’t look in Amy’s direction—not then, and not ever again in that class. I hated when the teacher stood on the right side of the room, where Amy would’ve been in my line of sight. I refused to look in that direction, so Mrs. Bruno accused me of not paying attention.

  Moving out of West Seaton, away from Amy Trillis, was a relief. But the shame about everything to do with her lived in the bottom of my stomach. I never really left any of it behind.

  NINE

  The morning after Nicki and I went to the psychic, I ran on the trails through the woods, splattering mud and skidding on slippery tree roots. Early as it was, steam was already filling the forest, dew dripping from the branches of pines and hemlocks. I hadn’t run since the winter and I was in crappy shape; running pounded the breath out of me. But I didn’t mind. I liked the blood roaring through my veins. I even liked sweating.

  I followed the trail up and away from the waterfall, to the rim of an old quarry. There the path died and left me looking down a cliff wall, at scooped-out rock and dusty rubble on the ground below.

  I walked the lip of the quarry, legs shaking, sweat streaming down my back. The vertical rock face stretched far beneath my feet. I kicked a rock out over the rim and watched it bounce in the dust below, remembering the day when I’d told Val I wished I could fly.

  Someone had once strung a wire fence here, but it had rusted and sagged. The wires had curled and sprung free, and the fence no longer went all the way across. I wrapped my hand around the rusty wire.

  Nicki’s latest messages seeped through my brain. I didn’t know how she managed to do that, to invade my head with her whispery lowercase letters, but I couldn’t get rid of her. I kept hearing, “i’m glad you didn’t kill yourself . . . i’m kind of mad at you too now . . .”

  I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know how. She always seemed to think I knew more than I did, that I was hiding the one secret she needed to learn.

  I had secrets, but they had nothing to do with Nicki’s father.

  I held the loose wire, wanting to lean over the edge. I did lean forward, then pulled myself back. Something about heights pulled on me like a vortex. It wasn’t a death wish, though. Every cell in my body breathed and pulsed, the opposite of the numbness that had sent me to Patterson.

  I kicked another rock off the edge.

  I wasn’t done with Nicki yet, I knew. Maybe I couldn’t give her the answers she wanted, but we weren’t finished with each other.

  • • • • •

  I passed the waterfall on the way back, but Nicki wasn’t there. I showered at home and walked down to her house, my legs trembling on the steep downhill.

  Kent sat in the driveway, smoking—cigarettes this time. “Nicki here?” I asked him.

  His eyebrows rose. “What’s up with you two?”

  “I just need to talk to her.”

  “Well, like I said, be careful with her.” He stared at my wet hair. “You been under that fucking waterfall again?”

  “Not today.” I didn’t get why it bothered him so much, unless maybe he thought it set a bad example for Nicki. “Why do you care?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t. Knock your brains loose if you want.” He blew out a huge cloud of smoke, which I thought was a pretty ironic thing to do while giving me a safety lecture. Then he jerked his head toward the house. “Nicki’s up in her room.”

  I picked my way over an empty motor-oil container, a pile of stones, and a broken rake and knocked at the front door. Kent said, “Just go in. Nobody else is home. She’s upstairs.”

  I felt weird opening the door and walking in like I belonged there, but Kent was watching me, so I did it. The living room had such a low ceiling that my throat closed up. The room was filled with couches and rugs and tables and magazines and tools and coffee cups and I don’t know what else; I just had the impression of stuff crowding me, stealing the air. It smelled like pepper and cabbage and cinnamon, dog and gasoline and mildew. I realized why else the air was so heavy: they didn’t have the air conditioning on or the windows open.

  I headed straight up the stairs, which thudded hollowly under my feet. In the middle of each step, white fibers showed through the mud-colored carpet. I stopped at the top.

  “Nicki!” I called.

  She opened one of the doors along the hall. “What are you doing here?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  She stuck out one hip, and I thought she was about to tell me to go to hell, but then she pulled the door open wider and stepp
ed back. I walked in. This room was even more crowded than downstairs: a bed piled with pillows and twisted sheets and more magazines; a dresser squeezed in between the end of the bed and the wall, its top smothered in nail-polish bottles, juice glasses, markers, batteries—

  “What do you want?” Nicki plunked down on a stool in front of the dresser, which had a big mirror behind it. “The pants? They’re in the wash.”

  I’d forgotten all about the pants Nicki had borrowed the day before. “Oh—no hurry.” I sat on the bed behind her, and we met each other’s eyes in the mirror. I was sitting on an open magazine, but I didn’t want to move yet. I wanted to be steady, not squirming, when I said what I’d come to say.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “For what?”

  “That I didn’t answer your messages yesterday.”

  She uncapped a bottle of nail polish. The smell filled the room. I liked it but figured it was probably bad for us, a chemical smell we shouldn’t inhale too deeply. She took the tiny brush and swiped it down over a thumbnail: silver. “Why’d you get so—suspicious? What’d you think I was trying to do?”

  I ran a hand through my hair, saw it sticking up in the mirror, and smoothed it back down. “I don’t talk about this stuff with too many people, you know.”

  “I haven’t told anybody what you’ve told me.” She finished painting her thumbnail and blew on it. She capped the bottle and stared at her single silver nail. “I always planned to talk to you about my dad, but that doesn’t mean I just want to—squeeze some information out of you and disappear.” Nicki met my eyes in the mirror again, blowing on her thumbnail. “I like hanging out with you, and talking. My brothers and a lot of the kids at school don’t think I’m smart enough to talk about anything that matters.”

  I believed her—though it was hard to see how anyone could make the mistake of underestimating Nicki.

  “You must trust me a little, right?” she went on. “Since you’re here?”

  I did. It was something about the way she always seemed ready to burst through her skin, as if she couldn’t hide even if she wanted to. Something about the way she’d listened to my garage story without telling me what I should’ve done instead, how I should have been stronger. But before I could get the answer out of my mouth, she went on.

  “Do you trust anybody?”

  “Well, yeah.” I swallowed. “My dad. My friend Jake. And Val.”

  “Is Val your girlfriend?”

  “Not exactly.” I pulled the magazine out from under my butt and set it on the shelf next to me, which held a volleyball and a soccer ball. Above the shelf, Nicki had plastered a poster of some guy with a movie-star tan riding a surfboard, glistening in the sun and spray. Feeling a lot paler and even more out of shape than I’d felt five minutes ago, I wrenched my eyes away from that picture.

  Nicki opened another bottle and began to paint her pointer finger light blue. “What do you mean? Is she or isn’t she?”

  Might as well say it. “No.”

  “Why not?” She raised her eyes from her nails to my face. “Did she turn you down, or did you never ask?” She pointed the nail brush at me in the mirror. “Wait, let me guess. You never asked.”

  She was starting to know me, all right.

  “It was hard to find the right moment, in between electroshock and basket weaving.” Not that I’d ever had electroshock or basket weaving. But Nicki barreled on as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “You should ask her,” she said.

  “Forget it.”

  “Why not? Is she already with someone? Into girls? Does she want to be a nun?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then.” She held out her hand, admiring her two colored nails.

  I was beginning to regret that I’d come over here. Did I need her dissecting my nonexistent love life? How had we gotten on this topic anyway? “She lives too far away.”

  “Where?”

  “Brookfield.”

  Nicki frowned. “That’s only, like, three hours away.”

  “By car. Which I don’t have.”

  She sighed. “You give up too easily.” Her voice took on a teacherish tone, in bizarre contrast to her dirty bare feet, too-small T-shirt with cartoon rabbits on the front, and gaudy nail polish. “If you want to get anywhere in life, you have to take charge. Be persistent.” She picked out a bottle of polish and shook it. “Take me—I’m looking for another psychic.”

  I groaned.

  “No, I’m serious. I’ll find a better one. I mean, I was kind of stupid to think a great psychic would be living in Seaton, the ass pimple of the country.”

  “Nicki—” I softened my voice as much as I could. “Why don’t you give up on that?”

  “Because I loved my dad. And I want to talk to him. Like I just finished telling you, I don’t give up.”

  Well, that was simple enough. Too bad it was also impossible.

  She slathered the next shade of polish on her middle fingernail, a grayish color this time. I made out the word “pewter” on the bottle, which was a good name for something so ugly.

  “I’m going to take you to see Val,” she announced.

  “What?”

  “We’ll take Matt’s truck. I’ll drive, because I’ll bet anything you can’t drive a truck. All you need to do is buy the gas. And when we get there, I’ll even tell you what to say to Val, if you can’t handle that part, either.” She waved her hand, with its wet nail, in the air.

  “You can’t drive.”

  “I’m not old enough to get a license, but I can drive. Everybody in my family learns to drive when they’re, like, thirteen. I do it all the time.”

  “We’re not going to see Val.” I wanted to see her so badly that my nerves buzzed, sizzled, nearly shorted out when Nicki announced her plan. But I wasn’t crazy enough to jump into Matt Thornton’s wreck for an illegal six-hour round trip with a girl who would apparently have fingernails in ten different colors by then and whose main interest in life was hunting down the spirit of her late father.

  “Yeah, we are.”

  “Why do you even care?”

  “For one thing, I owe you for coming to the psychic with me. And I like driving. It’s fun.”

  “But—”

  “Besides, you need to stop secretly pining away for this girl. It’s agonizing to watch.”

  “I’m not ‘secretly pining away.’” God, I hated that. It reminded me of Amy Trillis. My face stung, and I almost threw a pillow at Nicki. “Geez, stick to running your own life.”

  “Don’t you want to go?” She turned to face me. “How long can you keep wanting something and not asking for it? It’s like—”

  She stopped, and her words hung in the air. Maybe she was starting to guess that my whole life was about wanting and not asking. Wanting and not doing. Holding back.

  TEN

  A thudding woke me in the middle of the night. I turned over, willing it to stop, but it didn’t. Layer after layer of sleep peeled off until finally I was staring at the ceiling. The noise was familiar but I couldn’t place it, and I didn’t know why I would be hearing it at—I rolled over to look at the glowing numbers on my clock—1:12 in the morning.

  I climbed out of bed and followed the noise out of my room, down the hall, down the stairs. I paused in the living room, where moonlight poured in the giant windows and silvered the furniture. The noise was below me, and louder, coming from the workout room. My dad was snoring away upstairs, so I knew who must be down there. I asked myself if I really wanted to know why she was jogging in the middle of the night, and then I took the stairs down.

  Mom pounded away on the treadmill, sweat shining on her skin, earbuds blocking out everything around her. She must have felt my eyes on her, because she glanced back at me and pulled one ear free. “What are you doing up at this hour?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “I didn’t get my workout in yet today. Long day.”

  I didn’t ask why
she hadn’t just gone to bed, said screw the treadmill. My mother worked out on her workout days, no matter what. If it took her until 1:12 in the morning to reach that item on her to-do list, then she ran at 1:12. She didn’t even break stride as she looked at me.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  Other than my mother exercising like a maniac in the middle of the night? “No.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah, I just got up to see what the noise was.” I realized the longer I stayed down here, the more she would worry, and she’d snare me in an endless loop of are you really okay questions. “Good night,” I said and went back upstairs.

  • • • • •

  It was chokingly hot the next morning, but I ran anyway. Heat rash speckled my arms, and I kept running. When you start training, it’s too easy to find excuses not to do it. The trick is to forget about excuses and decide to run no matter what.

  On the other hand, maybe you can take “no excuses” too far—since it’s probably the same attitude that puts people on treadmills in the middle of the night.

  I ran to the quarry and walked along its edge, kicking a few stones into the pit below. I thought about falling, flying through the air. Landing, of course, was the problem. If only I could have that drop, the wind against my skin, without the splat at the bottom. It reminded me of a T-shirt Jake used to wear sometimes: GRAVITY’S A BITCH.

  I’d read books about people who flew small planes and gliders and hot-air balloons, but none of those things would give me exactly what I wanted. Maybe bungee jumping? Parachuting?

  Back home, I got online and started looking up skydiving places. There were a few not too far away; they let you make tandem jumps with only one day’s training.

  I sent Jake a message (“You there?”) because I wanted to kick around the skydiving idea, but he didn’t answer. Which was strange, because Jake was always there. On the other hand, maybe it was good that he wasn’t. Maybe he’d finally left his room.