Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  I took the COOZ’S FARM SUPPLY hat off her and dropped it on the table. She watched, saying nothing, so I took a breath and leaned in.

  She didn’t pull back. Her head tilted toward me, and I kissed her. She opened her mouth to mine, pressed into me.

  I’d never had a girl kiss me like this. I’d had a few awkward kisses at parties, and then the whole disaster with Serena, where she wasn’t kissing me so much as acting for the benefit of Bret Jackson.

  But Nicki wrapped her arms around me and kissed me, over and over and over. We lay on the top of the picnic table together, so that I felt all of her body against all of mine. I ran my hands down her arms and her back, where the humid air had glued her shirt to her skin. I was scared to touch her anywhere else even though she pressed her chest, hips, thighs, into me.

  I kissed her neck, which was salty from the heat. I kept expecting her to shove me away, even though she sighed and murmured in my ear. Whenever I came back to her mouth she opened hers and let me taste the cola on her tongue, again and again. I rolled on top of her and she took my weight; she never stopped kissing me back. I hadn’t thought of kissing Nicki before, but now kissing her just seemed to be one of many things I hadn’t even known I’d wanted.

  • • • • •

  A car drove up and parked next to our truck, its headlights glaring into the picnic shelter. The lights weren’t directly on us, but a dim yellow shine washed over us, and it felt like someone had ripped my skin off. Of all the empty spaces in the lot, the driver had to choose that spot? I lifted my head, annoyed, and Nicki panted for breath beneath me.

  In that moment, I wanted to protect her, to tell her she shouldn’t be making out at a highway rest stop with an ex–mental patient who was in love with someone else. I also wanted to dip my head back down and keep kissing her. Torn exactly in half, I stayed where I was, until she said, “What is it? Are they cops or something?”

  Her voice snapped me out of it. “Nicki,” I said, sitting up all the way. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry about what?” She sat up, too, her hair wild around her face. I swept a tangle of it back, tried to smooth it for her. I replayed the last few minutes in my head. Why had I kissed Nicki? Why had she kissed me back? What the hell was I doing? Was there a person on earth as clueless about girls as I was?

  She scooped up her hat, crushed now, and set it back on her head. “This place has no ambience,” she announced. She grabbed her soda and led me back to the truck.

  “Ambience,” I repeated. Her attitude, the arch of her back as she jammed the cap back over her hair, and the word she’d used, shot through my confused fog the way a single shaft of light sometimes punches through a cloud, and I laughed.

  FOURTEEN

  Nicki hummed as she put the truck in gear. I had no idea what she was thinking. I had no idea what I was thinking, because my legs still wobbled and the heat under my skin hadn’t ebbed yet. I wiped my mouth, sliding my eyes sideways to watch her.

  “Well,” she said, slurping more of her soda, “I didn’t expect that to happen.”

  “Me, either.” My mouth had gone dry, and I wanted a drink myself. I’d left my half-full can on the picnic table. But I couldn’t reach out and ask for hers. Something about drinking from the same can, putting my mouth where hers had been, would make it seem like I was continuing what we’d started. Whatever that was.

  She held out her soda. “Want some?”

  I flinched.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It was like you just read my mind.” I took the can with the tips of my fingers, as if the metal might singe me.

  She laughed. “I thought you didn’t believe in mind reading.”

  “Ha ha.” I drank the soda, stopping myself from gulping the whole rest of the can.

  “Anyway, believe me, I definitely cannot read your mind right now.”

  “I wish you could,” I said. “You could let me know what the hell’s going on in there.” I rubbed my scalp and watched the stream of headlights in the oncoming lanes, concentrated on them so I wouldn’t have to listen to my own thoughts.

  “Ryan, I don’t even know what’s going on in my mind. I’m—confused.”

  “Hey, I spend my whole life confused.” I tugged at the seat belt and readjusted my legs, trying not to whack my knees against the glove compartment.

  Another long pause, headlights reflecting off the shiny wet road. I calculated the distance between Nicki and me—then recalculated it, again and again. One foot? Two? Sometimes it felt closer, and my breathing sped up. Sometimes it felt like miles from the steering wheel to where I sat.

  “Well,” she said finally, “sometimes it’s okay to be confused.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “It’s one of the few things I’m good at.”

  She tapped the steering wheel. “Don’t laugh at this, but—I got this book out of the library one time, about this Buddhist teacher, and he kept telling his students it’s okay not to know. I guess he meant that you don’t have to force answers.”

  “Why would I laugh at that?”

  “I don’t know, Kent always makes fun of me if he sees me reading or thinking about stuff like that. Like he thinks I’m too stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid.” I watched the wipers clear speckles from the windshield.

  Nicki let a few more miles of road slide by, rain hissing under the tires, wipers smoothing rain off the glass in front of us, before she clicked on the radio. She hummed along, although she didn’t sing the way she had this morning.

  I handed back her soda. “Thanks,” I said.

  I had started to feel almost okay again, but the whole mess with Val lurked underneath everything. When I thought of her, my stomach dropped down a pit, so I stopped thinking of her. I rolled down the window in spite of the rain and let the breeze from the open window stream over me, let it blow all the thoughts out of my head.

  • • • • •

  Nicki dropped me off at the end of my street, so that I could let some rain fall on me to support my cover story, and so Mom wouldn’t ask awkward questions about whose truck I’d gotten out of. “See ya,” Nicki said, as if the rest stop hadn’t happened, and I said, “Uh, yeah, thanks for the ride,” whacking my arm against the door and tripping over my shoelaces in the dark.

  I stumbled into my house and into the kitchen to hunt up some kind of dinner. Dad had left on another trip earlier that day, and Mom was upstairs on her computer. I microwaved a dinner and ate it out of the plastic tray, standing up by the sink. Then I checked in with Mom. “You look a little pale,” she said, but I passed inspection.

  Finally alone in my room, I had a message from Val: “I hope you’re OK. I hope you understand.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I sent back.

  I went to bed with my mind a tangle of Val and Nicki. Val pulling away, Nicki wrapping her arms around me. I dreamed of them and kept waking up thinking of them. I thought I heard the phone ring, though I wasn’t sure if I’d dreamed that. At one point, my mother’s thumping on the treadmill woke me, and I stuck the pillow over my head, but I couldn’t sleep that way. It was too much like suffocating.

  I woke up at six with my eyeballs feeling like they’d been marinating in Tabasco sauce, but I wasn’t tired. All I wanted was to go to the waterfall and let it pound my head clear. I slipped out of the house. My mother wasn’t even on her computer yet, that’s how early it was.

  • • • • •

  The world was wet, but the rain had stopped. A heavy gray sky pressed against the tops of the trees, and everything dripped. My feet squeezed liquid from the mud of the trail. When I got to the waterfall, I realized I’d forgotten to bring a towel, but I stripped off my shirt anyway. Then someone on the bank sat up, and I jumped.

  “Hey,” Nicki said.

  “What are you doing here so early?”

  “I could ask you that.” She tossed an acorn at me.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me, either.
”

  God, she wasn’t going to talk about it, was she, what had happened last night? She bit her lip, gazing at a point somewhere around my kneecaps, and I kicked off my shoes.

  “Too cold to go in,” she said as I crept up to the edge.

  “No, it’s not.” I sweated and shivered at the same time. I plunged into the pool, slipped and skidded on the polished rocks, slipped and skidded my way over to the cascade. Nicki yelled something at me, but I couldn’t hear her words over the thundering water. I went under.

  I’d forgotten about all the rain we’d had over the past few days.

  I hadn’t looked closely at the curtain of water before stepping into it, hadn’t stopped to think about why it was stronger and louder than the last time I’d been here.

  It smacked me on the head and roared in my ears, beat my shoulders raw. And then it knocked my legs from under me. I clutched at rock, at water. My face was full of water and my own hair. I got clear somehow—desperate clawing mostly—and rose on my hands and knees, dripping, gasping.

  Nicki splashed in and gripped my hair. When I could, I reached up and unloosed her fingers. “Just wanted to make sure you could keep your head above water,” she shouted over the roar. “You okay now?”

  I nodded and crawled to the bank, where I collapsed, facedown. She flopped down next to me. When my ears stopped ringing, when my brain cleared, I said, “Water’s rough today.”

  She laughed. “No shit.” Then she rested a hand on my back. “Are you really okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t just mean is your body okay. I mean—it was a little bit crazy to go under there today.”

  “Well.” I rolled over. “I happen to be a little bit crazy.”

  “I’ll say.” She pried a pebble out of the mud. “I’m glad you came up here, because I wanted to ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Can you come with me tomorrow? I’m going to see another psychic.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course. I told you I was going to find another one.”

  “Nicki, I don’t know what you think they’re going to tell you.”

  She rolled the pebble in her fingers. I saw a purplish spot on her neck, got a twang in my gut as I recognized what it was, flicked my eyes away from it as fast as I could. “I have to try,” she said.

  “It’s a waste of money,” I said. “Where are you getting the money, anyway?”

  Long pause. Maybe I’d overstepped. We didn’t talk about it, the difference in the size of our houses, the difference in our allowances. Nicki had accepted the gas money from me the day before because she had done the driving, and since it was my friend we were seeing in the first place, that was only fair. Yet I knew we weren’t equal when it came to money, no matter what Nicki wanted to pretend.

  “My grandmother started a bank account for each of us when we were little,” she said. “Her idea was, we could use it to go to college.” She snorted. “Yeah, like putting in a few hundred bucks a year is gonna buy us four years at Harvard.”

  “You’re using your college money?”

  “Just some of it. It’s not like there’s a whole lot there to begin with. I’ll be lucky if that account ends up buying my textbooks. Matt’s taking two classes at community college, and he can barely afford that with what he makes at his job.” She shrugged. “I’ll do the same thing, work and take classes when I can.”

  “Your dad would probably rather have you use the money for school than visit all these—”

  “Shut up!” She took a sharp breath. “I told you, it’s not either-or, and besides, it’s none of your business.”

  I wiped water off my neck, where my hair had dripped. “Okay.”

  “I’m going to this psychic with or without you, but I wish you’d come. After all, you owe me. I took you all the way to see—” She stopped before she said Val’s name.

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll go with you. What time?” So what if I didn’t believe in psychics, if I didn’t think Nicki’s father could explain himself to her satisfaction even if we could somehow talk to him? I wasn’t going because I believed we could talk to a ghost; I was going for Nicki. Because I had the feeling she was going to need somebody.

  • • • • •

  My mother waited for me in the kitchen. She jumped forward, coffee splashing from the mug in her hand, the instant I walked in. “Where have you been?”

  “Swimming in the stream.”

  “At this hour? Never mind. I need to talk to you.”

  She must really need to talk to me, if she didn’t even comment on my soggy clothes. Her hair bristled dryly around her face; I realized with a shock that she hadn’t combed it. Here it was after seven, and she hadn’t washed her face or even changed out of her bathrobe yet.

  “What’s the matter?” I said, remembering the phone ringing in the middle of the night. Was it Dad? He flew all the time—a plane crash?

  “April Carson called. They had to take Jake back to Patterson.” She searched my face, leaning forward, as if she expected to have to catch me.

  My stomach curled up. “Is he okay?”

  “That depends. Physically, he’s—all right, from what I understand. But he’s not okay.”

  I thought about how Val and I had discussed this only yesterday, read Jake’s messages, said how worried we were. But then the mess between us had pushed all that to the background.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee. “Can I go see him?”

  Mom gripped her mug so hard that her hands looked like claws. “I don’t know if I should let you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I wish I knew what Dr. Briggs would think. Who’s on call for her this month, Dr. Solomon? Maybe I should talk to him. But he doesn’t know you nearly as well—”

  “I don’t care who you talk to. I want to see Jake.”

  “At least I’ll be there with you . . . I just wish I knew if it’s good for you to go at all.” She rested her lips on the rim of her cup without drinking, then lifted her mouth again. “April said they had no idea he was having problems again. Did you know?”

  “Sort of.”

  Her voice scaled up. “‘Sort of’? What does that mean?”

  “I knew he wasn’t too happy about school starting.” I ran a hand through my wet hair.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell his parents?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “That Jake was in trouble.”

  “I couldn’t tell if—I mean, just not wanting to go to school doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in trouble.”

  “If he was anything but happy, you should have told us immediately! Parents need to know these things. Do you know how dangerous it is for someone who’s been depressed—”

  “Anything but happy?” I gulped black coffee. It scalded my tongue, but somehow that felt almost good. “Nobody’s happy all the time. If I went running to you every time somebody wasn’t happy—”

  I shut up. Her eyes bulged to the point of scaring me; her witchy hair only added to the effect.

  “What? What are you saying? Are you trying to tell me you aren’t happy, either?”

  “No, I—”

  She banged her cup down on the counter. “I don’t know what to do with you. You have every reason to be happy, everything to live for—”

  “I know.” I did know, and I was sorry. Sorrier, probably, than she would believe.

  She wheezed, gripping the handle of her cup. I took another mouthful of coffee because I didn’t know what else to do.

  “I blame myself,” she said, her voice low now, barely squeezing out of her throat. “I should’ve gotten you help earlier.”

  “How?” I said. “You didn’t know.”

  “I should’ve seen there was something wrong with you. I thought you were recovering from the mono, that you were tired from that. But I should’ve known it was more. I should’ve realized.”

  “Stop,” I said, rubbin
g one eye. My other hand trembled, splashing coffee on the floor. That was usually a major offense in my mother’s sterile kitchen, but today she didn’t even notice. “Forget about me, okay? I’m fine.”

  “I hope so, Ryan. We’re happy that you’re getting out of the house again, getting some exercise, making friends. But then something like this happens, with Jake—and I wonder if we would know if you weren’t all right.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I wonder,” she repeated, as if I hadn’t said anything.

  “Yes, you would know,” I said. “I would tell you this time.”

  Maybe it was true. I wasn’t sure. But it was what she needed to hear, and I couldn’t let her put me on suicide watch. “Can we please go see Jake?”

  She swallowed. “If Dr. Briggs—”

  “She would say it’s okay.”

  I held my mother’s eyes. I would stand there without blinking all day if I had to.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll go to Patterson.”

  “Thanks.” And then I remembered something else. “Do you have my pill? I haven’t had it yet today.”

  She walked out of the kitchen, off to unlock the stash of medication they kept from me, and I pressed my wet back against the refrigerator door.

  • • • • •

  I’d started seeing Dr. Briggs in May, when I got out of Patterson. She had frizzy hair and round thick glasses. She wore bright dresses shaped like long smocks. Her office was cool green and brown, with a giant fern in the corner that always seemed ready to take over the rest of the office.

  She smiled at me when we met. Not a million-dollar smile like she was trying to sell me something, but a lighter version that seemed to mean, Yes, I see you. She sat at the desk, but she always swiveled her chair away from it and toward me. I sat in the brown chair next to her desk. Whenever I had trouble talking, when the words clotted up in my throat, she’d lean forward, as if her energy, her extra attention, could help bring up the words. And sometimes it worked.