Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  Jake came in, holding the mushy soccer ball that served as one of our pieces of “recreational equipment.” “I signed out the ball,” he said. “You guys want to kick it around the yard?”

  Val lifted her chin. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I want to kick the hell out of that ball.”

  Jake and I gaped, and then we broke into laughter at the same moment.

  It stuck in my mind because, as terrible as that day had been, in some ways it was a great day. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Val’s hand on my chair was one of the things that kept me going, that made me think I could stand to keep living.

  • • • • •

  Nicki drove well, never speeding, eyes laser sharp on the road. “Time for some music,” she announced, clicking on the radio. While I was answering my mother’s second inane text of the day (“Do you want oranges or peaches when I go to the market?”), Nicki found a country station and sang along. Loudly. Just when I was about to overdose on cowboys and heartbreak, she turned down the music and said, “What’s this girl’s name again?”

  “Val.”

  “Val.” She repeated it as if tasting the name. “Does she know you like her?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Have you ever kissed her?”

  I laughed. “No.”

  “Have you ever kissed anyone?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her lips puckered as she concentrated on the road. Or maybe on the next question, which was “Have you ever had sex?”

  “What? Why do you want to know that?”

  “Just wondering. We’ve got at least another hour to kill; we might as well talk about something.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me about your sex life.”

  She frowned. “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah, why not.” I rolled down the window and let the breeze hit me full force.

  “Well, I had a boyfriend last year. He was a few years older than I was—my mother hated him.”

  “I bet she did.”

  “I slept with him, though I probably shouldn’t have. At the time I thought he was so great and we had this tremendous love and all—and it turned out he was hooking up with his old girlfriend the whole time I was seeing him.”

  “Where’d you find an asshole like that?”

  She rolled her eyes. “He lived next door to one of my friends.”

  “No, I mean, what made you go with him in the first place? You could do a lot better.”

  She gave an embarrassed half-laugh. “He had these amazing eyes. And he would drop his voice when he talked to me”—she demonstrated—“like this.” She cleared her throat and went on in her regular voice. “Like he was telling secrets, and everything was just between us. Now I know it was all bullshit, but he seemed so sincere. And he had this great shaggy beard—”

  “Beard! How old was this guy?”

  “Eighteen,” she said softly, her eyes on the road.

  I knew she was fifteen now, which meant this guy must’ve been older than her by three or four years. “Isn’t that kind of—”

  “Don’t say it.” Her mouth twisted. “My mother and my brothers said it already. Matt almost beat the guy up. Anyway—” She flapped a hand, apparently trying for casualness, but whacked the rearview mirror. “Ouch. Anyway, it seems like a long time ago now. I was such a stupid little kid back then.”

  I didn’t know what to say at first. I let the highway miles roll by. Then: “Did you like him because he was older, or in spite of it?”

  “Um . . . because, I think. Yeah, because. The guys my age are all so gawky and stupid.”

  I became very aware of my left knee then, which was practically sticking into the gearshift, and my right knee bumping the glove compartment, and my elbows jutting out. But since I was about a year and a half older than she was, I didn’t know if I counted as “older” or “her age.” I was in no danger of growing a full beard yet, that was for sure. I checked to see if my hair was sticking up, but it was blowing all around from the open window.

  “Well, he sounds like a prick to me,” I said.

  She laughed. “I told you he was. So—your turn. Are you a virgin or not?”

  I’d been hoping she would forget about that question. “No.”

  “Who was the lucky girl?”

  “Nobody you know.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “She went to my old school.”

  “Come on, Ryan. I want details.” She snapped her fingers. “Names, dates, who made the first move—”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on. I told you mine!”

  “I’ll say this much. It was only one time, it wasn’t the best night of my life, and she never talked to me again.”

  “Sheesh,” Nicki said after a long pause, during which the tires ate up several miles of road. “What’d we do to deserve such crappy first times?”

  I had no idea what Nicki might’ve done. But I was pretty sure I knew what I had done wrong.

  • • • • •

  It happened after the whole fiasco with Amy Trillis, right before we moved out of West Seaton to come live in the house in the woods. Some guys from the baseball team talked me into going with them to this Christmas party. I barely knew the person whose house it was, and the guys from the team went off to play a drinking game in the kitchen a few minutes after we got there.

  I roamed through the house with a giant plastic cup in my hand. At first I drank because I didn’t know what else to do, because it kept my hands and mouth busy. And then I drank because it made everything fuzzy, out of focus, less real. It wasn’t that I was happier, but I no longer gave a damn about whether I was happy or not. Finally I propped myself against a wall, and drank, and watched everyone else through my haze.

  “Hiii,” this girl named Serena said, grinning at me, her face shiny with the heat of the room. She was in my math class, but I’d never talked much to her. I was a little vague on her last name—Hunter? Huntington?

  “Hi,” I said.

  “If you move, will that wall fall down?” She giggled and rubbed my shoulder.

  “Where should I move to?”

  “Upstairs?” She turned her head to glance at Bret Jackson, her on-again, off-again boyfriend. He was hanging all over a girl from my English class who I’d always sort of liked myself.

  Serena’s fingers slithered down the front of my shirt. I knew what game she was playing, but between my depression and the drinks I’d had, I didn’t care. I gulped what was left in my plastic cup and dropped it on the floor. I touched Serena’s arm, tentatively, expecting that would call her bluff. But she tossed her head and snuggled closer. And then her mouth was on mine, wet and beer flavored, her tongue thrust into my mouth. I kissed her back, not because it felt good but because I was hoping to get to the point where it did feel good. I was hoping it was just the shock of her sudden attack that made kissing her seem like making out with an old sponge used to mop beer off the floor. She threw another look at Bret and tugged on my shirt. “Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

  When we were alone in an empty bedroom, with no Bret to impress, I expected her to stop, but she didn’t. She lay on the striped spread of a narrow twin bed and pulled me down on top of her. My body responded to the contact, but my mind seemed to hover somewhere around the ceiling. Her breath scorched my ear. “Do you have anything?” she murmured, unzipping my pants.

  “No.”

  She grunted and squirmed to reach into her own pocket. “It’s okay; I do.”

  I couldn’t believe she was still playing the game, forging ahead. I couldn’t believe I was following her down this road, either. I knew I didn’t like her much.

  I didn’t dislike her, either. She was nothing. But then, I was nothing, too. Nothing I did mattered. I could have sex with her or not have sex with her; it didn’t matter either way.

  Except maybe if I did, my numbness would break. Something would change. Losing your virginity is
a big change, right? It should feel like something. It should be different, carry you across the bridge to some other place. Anywhere else.

  I fumbled with Serena’s clothes, and I fumbled with her. I struggled with the condom. I didn’t have to tell her it was my first time; it was pathetically obvious. When she finally helped me into place, she turned her face away. All I could see was her clenched jaw and the strands of hair that fell across her ear. I closed my eyes and got the whole thing over with as fast as I could.

  When it was done and I was trying to figure out what to do with the condom (Throw it in the wastebasket? Would whoever owned this room care?), she groaned, “Oh, God,” and puked beer over the side of the bed. Then she stumbled over to the wastebasket and started gagging and puking in there. I dropped the condom into the basket and touched her back. “Are you okay?”

  She kept retching. I hadn’t known she was drunk, hadn’t let that fact seep into my own drunken fog. My legs started to shake, partly with guilt and partly with the queasiness of watching all that puking. I found my clothes and put them on, getting my pants backward before I finally figured out the right way. I sat on the bed, staring at my hands and listening to her puke, for I don’t know how long. When she stopped heaving, I brought her her clothes, but she slapped me away.

  “Leave me alone,” she moaned.

  “I don’t think I should.”

  “Where’s Bret?”

  “I don’t know. Downstairs, I guess.”

  She began sobbing, makeup running down her face. I wanted to go home. I wanted to get into my own bed and pull up the covers and stay there for a hundred years. I wanted to rewind the last however-many-hours I had been in this room. If this was what it felt like not to be a virgin anymore, well—all I could say was, it didn’t live up to the hype.

  I found a friend of hers who was sober because she was driving. She sighed and went to babysit Serena, and I headed down the stairs. I hesitated on the landing when I saw Bret at the foot of the stairs, with a few of his buddies. They didn’t see me.

  “Did you see Serena go off with that guy?” one of them was saying.

  “What guy?” Bret growled.

  “That—what’s his name. He’s on the baseball team. That Taylor kid?”

  My name is Turner.

  Bret laughed. “So what?” he said, and it wasn’t an I don’t give a damn about Serena laugh, it was a who cares about the “Taylor” kid laugh. It was a laugh that meant nothing I did could possibly threaten or worry him. I didn’t exist to him.

  Would his laugh hold up if I came down the stairs in front of him, right now, with Serena’s makeup smeared all over my face and shirt, with her perfume rubbed off on me, and the smell of her on my skin? Or would he just look through me? I never got to find out, because his group moved into the living room.

  I escaped down the stairs and out into the night, gulping cold air, looking up at the winter stars that seemed forever far away. I was running out of options. The pane of glass had been with me for weeks now, the longest time ever. If drinking didn’t make anything better, and sex didn’t help, then what would?

  I knew we were moving to Seaton in a couple of weeks, and I would never have to see Amy Trillis or Serena again. Surely things would get better when we moved, I told myself. We’d be living in my mother’s dream house, and I’d get to start all over at a new school, and things would get better. They had to.

  Except they hadn’t.

  • • • • •

  As Nicki and I got closer to Brookfield, my nerves began to vibrate, shooting out random pulses that made me want to jump out of the truck. I told myself Val had already seen me at my worst. This time I would not be mute or hiding under my bed or crumpled on the floor. I was no longer living in a hospital. Whatever happened now, at least I would be starting a few notches ahead of where she’d seen me last.

  She was my friend, no matter what else did or didn’t happen. She wasn’t Amy Trillis. But my hands shook, and I pressed them against the thighs of my jeans so Nicki wouldn’t notice.

  As much as I wanted to see Val, I wasn’t ready when we pulled up in front of her house. I needed more time, I thought—but time for what? Was I ever going to be ready?

  “Wow,” Nicki said as the truck wheezed to a halt. “Her house is even bigger than yours.”

  It was true, but the main thing I noticed was that the Ishiharas had trimmed their bushes into corkscrew shapes. I had no doubt my mother would do the same thing if we had hedges around our house.

  Val’s mother, whom I’d met a couple of times at Patterson, let us in. “Come in, come in,” she said, beaming at me. “Val’s finishing her practicing. How are you, Ryan?”

  “Good,” I answered, thinking how much more loaded that question was when people knew you’d been in a place like Patterson. But what I liked most about her was that she never seemed to be waiting for me to break apart in front of her. She never tiptoed around me, the way Jake’s mom did sometimes. “This is my friend Nicki. Nicki, this is Dr. Ishihara.”

  “So nice to meet you.” Dr. Ishihara shook Nicki’s hand as if she’d been waiting all her life to meet her. Yes, Val’s mom was practically the nicest person I’d ever met. Another case of blame-the-parents-for-the-psycho-kid not exactly working. Not that she was perfect. From listening to Val in Group, I knew the kind of pressure she put on Val to be good at everything—not just good: superior. Whether she meant to or not, she leaned on Val.

  Dr. Ishihara gave us lemonade and dragged random facts about school from us. My phone buzzed in my pocket and I pulled it out, jabbed at the keys, and sent a one-word lie in response to my mom’s latest text (“It looks like rain. Do you have your raincoat?”). Nicki swung her legs under the kitchen table and studied the paintings on the wall, abstracts painted by Val: cubes and angles in one picture, green swirls in another—swirls that reminded me of the painting in my own room. All the while, I listened to Val’s playing. It was the violin just now, something dark and complicated that sounded as if the strings were living nerves, part of Val’s body. It was all I could do to stay at that table, making polite small talk with her mother, instead of tearing upstairs and throwing myself at her.

  The music stopped, and a couple of minutes later Val bounded down the steps.

  “Why didn’t you tell me Ryan was here?” she said, running into the room, her eyes on me. Finally, Val.

  TWELVE

  Val made us sandwiches, and we sat around the kitchen table. We talked about Nicki’s imaginary cousin, our excuse for being in Brookfield in the first place. We talked about how Nicki looked young to have a driver’s license (“I get that all the time,” Nicki said, in a bored drawl that made her suddenly sound thirty). We talked about Val’s haircut. She turned to show us the back, where the triangular piece was cut out.

  “That’s so cool,” Nicki said, biting a potato chip. “I wish my hair was straight so I could do that.”

  Val sat across from me, and I watched every bite of food she took, though I tried not to—flashing back to Amy, and what she’d said about “the creepy guy who’s always staring at me.” But unlike Amy, Val watched me, too. Her whole face seemed to hold back a smile, as if she didn’t want her mom and Nicki to see everything she wished she could say to me.

  She took small, precise nibbles of her sandwich. I tried not to slop chicken salad on the table or crunch the chips too loudly. Nicki rattled on to Val’s mom, and I was grateful for every syllable that kept Dr. Ishihara’s eyes anywhere but on Val and me. I had the feeling that Nicki had taken on my connecting with Val as a personal project; she was going to make this match or die trying.

  Once Val’s foot brushed my leg under the table. The table was so broad she had to reach, to stretch her leg out in a slow-motion kick, so I knew it wasn’t an accident. Her toes touched my shin for an instant. My hand jerked, and I dropped a pickle round. A smile flashed across Val’s face, and I smiled back.

  Nicki noticed. She asked Val’s mom about the pai
ntings on the wall, pointing at the side of the room farthest from Val and me. I licked salt off my lips. Val dabbed mayo from the corner of her mouth.

  “Well,” Nicki said, after inhaling two tuna sandwiches, “I’d better go see my cousin now, if I’m gonna. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  I followed her to the front door to whisper, “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll just drive around. We passed a park on the way in, and a bunch of stores—I’ll hang out somewhere. Be back at four.” Then she crooked a finger at me, beckoning until I bent forward, until my ear was right in front of her mouth. “Tell her,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare chicken out.” Then, grinning, she slipped out the door. I stood alone in the front hall for a minute, gathering myself to face Val again, to take the chance Nicki had driven me out here to take.

  When I returned to the kitchen, I found that Dr. Ishihara had vanished, too.

  “Mom said she’d let us catch up.” Val stretched, lifting her arms above her head and curving her body toward me. All I wanted was to look at her. It had been so long since we’d been in the same room. And for a few minutes, that’s all I could do: stand there drinking her in, without saying a word.

  “It’s good to see you,” Val said at last. “I miss hanging with you and Jake.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How are you, really?” She picked at her place mat, pulled at loose threads.

  “I’m good. You?”

  She nodded and ducked her head, so that her hair bounced against her cheek in one glossy sheet. I had forgotten that she did that, ducked her head when she got self-conscious. Then she lifted her chin again.

  “Have you heard from Jake lately?” Val asked.

  I sat across from her. “Yeah. Almost every day.”

  She frowned. “I’m worried about him. He’s so nervous about school starting.” She twirled a strand of hair. “He has a tough time at school.”