Try Not to Breathe by Jennifer R. Hubbard Read Free Book Online Page A

couldn’t even pretend to believe her.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    “I bet.”
    “No, I mean—I thought it would turn out like this, but I didn’t want it to. I wish you’d gotten what you wanted.”
    I let her wipe her face on my T-shirt sleeve. She turned runny pink eyes on me. “Why did you feed her that stuff, anyway?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Did you think you were fooling me? I’m not stupid!”
    “I didn’t think it through. It just—came out.”
    “Now I’ll never know why he did it.”
    “He probably couldn’t tell you that even if he was right here.”
    She sniffled. “He could’ve left a note or something. Why didn’t he? God!”
    She rubbed my damp sleeve. I was thinking about why , and how complicated that question was, when she spoke again.
    “Did you write a note?”
    “What?”
    “Did you write a note ?”
    The steamy weather wrung sweat out of me, but somehow my mouth was dry. “No.”
    “Why not? Why the hell not?” She got up and paced in a tight circle, kicked the wall I was sitting on.
    “Look, this isn’t about me.”
    “You made it about you, didn’t you? You sure as hell made it about you in there.” She pointed back at the psychic’s house.
    “I wanted you to get something out of going there. Andrea was flopping like a dying fish. I told you, I didn’t think it through.”
    “Yeah, you sure didn’t.” She wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt, giving me a flash of dark-blue bra. She didn’t seem to notice or care. “So you gave my father—excuse me, the imaginary ghost of my father—all your reasons.”
    “Who says they were my reasons?”
    She snorted. “What else would they be? You didn’t pull all that stuff out of nowhere.”
    Everything drained out of me then; I could hardly hold my head up. I bent over and rested my elbows on my knees. She frowned, turned away, and kicked a chunk of brick down the sidewalk. I didn’t let myself think about whether she was right, whether the words I’d put in Andrea’s mouth had been my own. After all, Nicki’s father couldn’t possibly have made the same mistakes I’d made, couldn’t have lugged around the same shame I carried. Maybe he’d felt what I’d felt—that bleak pit of numbness—but he hadn’t had an Amy Trillis or a Serena. He’d never hidden a pink sweater in his closet. He hadn’t done the things I’d done; I would bet on that.

FIVE
    We had another half hour before Kent picked us up. Nicki bought a grape juice and I bought a Coke and we sat on a bench outside the post office, watching people run in and out. The corners of Nicki’s mouth turned purple from the juice, but the pink in her face and eyes was fading. She would look normal by the time Kent met us.
    I wanted to ask about her father, to know more about the person whose spirit we had tried to raise, but I didn’t want to set her off again now that she’d stopped crying. I couldn’t picture my own father not being around. Even though he traveled all the time, at least I knew he was somewhere on the planet, walking around and talking and thinking. Somewhere he was in a business meeting, pushing his glasses up his nose and smoothing his tie, or else he was sitting in a foreign restaurant clearing his throat and blinking the way he did when he had to eat food he didn’t like. Or maybe he was in an airport, checking baseball scores from his computer—he was supposedly coming home today. But if I wanted to hear his voice, all I needed was a phone. I didn’t need psychics to call him up.
    I looked sideways at Nicki. She tilted her bottle, and the last purple inch of juice rippled back and forth.
    “I can’t believe school starts in a couple of weeks,” she said. “You’re gonna be a junior, right?”
    “Yeah.” If she wanted to back away from talking about dead fathers, that was okay with me. Val and Jake and I used to do that at Patterson, let one another talk about nothing when something was too much. You could