Hold Still by Nina Lacour Read Free Book Online Page B

stupid—because even though I was always joking, it might have hurt.
    The morning fog spreads from tree to tree like a blanket of regret. I take my camera out of my backpack. I want so badly to take a picture. But I don’t.

18
    I walk into my precalc class and surprise myself by sliding into the seat behind Taylor.
    “She slit her wrists,” I say.
    Taylor turns around to face me. He looks uncertain, the way he does when he can’t find the value of x . I make sure to lock eyes with him. Anger is tying knots in my stomach.
    “What?” he asks.
    “Slit her wrists, bled to death. That’s how she did it. Usually it doesn’t work, I guess, but she meant it.”
    He looks uncomfortable, pale. His eyes dart away from mine.
    “Now you know,” I say.
    I lean back in the chair, away from him. Mr. James reviews the homework on his ancient overhead projector, but I can’t concentrate. I just see her. I blink hard, then stare at the desk, hoping the blankness will push the image away. Someone has written YOU SUCK in ugly black marker on the top right corner. I rub the letters so hard that my thumb cramps. The words don’t get any lighter. I’m breathing hard and I think Taylor turns to face me again, but I choose not to look.
    “I have to change desks,” I mutter to no one, and grab my backpack and walk down the aisle until I find a desk with a clear surface, no marks.
    But I still see her as if I were there in her house that morning. Like it was me instead of her mom who pushed Ingrid’s bathroom door open and saw her naked in the bathtub, eyes shut, head heavy, arms floating in that red water. I look up at Mr. James’s projector, but what I see are the gashes in her arms, along the veins. I can’t hear what he is saying. First the sounds go away and then everything loses shape.
    Slowly, slowly, I lower my head until my face is flat against the cold desktop. I concentrate on breathing, feel my heart working hard. I can hear the clock faintly ticking. I look to the wall, to the spot where I know it is, and through the buzz of Mr. James’s voice, I wait for it to come back in focus.

19
    Ingrid’s skin was the smoothest texture, so pale that it was transparent. I could see the blue veins that ran down her arms, and they made her seem fragile somehow. The way Eric Daniels, my first boyfriend, seemed fragile when I laid my head on his chest and heard his heart beating and thought, Oh . People don’t always remember about the blood and the heartbeat. The lungs. But whenever I looked at Ingrid, I was reminded of the things that kept her alive.
    The first time she carved something into her skin, she used the sharp tip of an X-Acto knife. She lifted her shirt up to show me after the cuts had scabbed over. She had scrawled FUCK YOU on her stomach. I stood quiet for a moment, feeling the breath get knocked out of me. I should have grabbed her arm and taken her straight to the nurse’s office, into that small room with two cots covered in paper sheets and the sweet, stale medicine smell.
    I should have lifted Ingrid’s shirt to show the cuts. Look, I would’ve said to the nurse at her little desk, eyeglasses perched on her pointed nose. Help her .
    Instead, I reached my hand out and traced the words. The cuts were shallow, so the scabs only stood out a little bit. They were rough and brown. I knew that a lot of girls at our school cut themselves. They wore their long sleeves pulled down past their wrists and made slits for their thumbs so that the scars on their arms wouldn’t show. I wanted to ask Ingrid if it hurt to do that to herself, but I felt stupid, like I must have been missing something, so what I said was, Fuck you, too, Bitch. Ingrid giggled, and I tried to ignore the feeling that something good between us was changing.

20
    Dad greets me at the bottom of the stairs, dangling my favorite pair of sneakers by their laces.
    “Look at these,” he commands. “These are shocking.”
    He shows me the bottoms, where