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

scratched her arm, staring at my knees instead of my face. “I went up to the waterfall all the time anyway. A couple of times, people said you’d just left when I got there, so I started going earlier. I wanted to talk to you about my dad. Didn’t you know that?”
    “I never thought about it,” I said slowly. “I figured I just reminded you of your dad; I didn’t know you came looking for me.”
    “Well, we talked about him anyway, so what’s the difference?” She raised her eyes, met mine for a second. “Are you going to throw the ball?”
    “No difference,” I said, but it did make a difference, and it made my stomach burn that I couldn’t figure out what the hell the difference was.
    “Throw the ball,” she said.
    I stood there, my mouth drying by the second, the glove hiding the ball in my hand. “So you only used me for my suicide stories, but hey, I knew that all along, right?”
    Nicki shook her head. “That’s not it.”
    Clouds pushed down on the tops of the trees. Pressure built above me, inside me. I tasted panic. I told myself there was nothing to panic about, but I tasted it anyway.
    I hurled the ball. Her hand snapped up, and the ball thwacked into her glove. She pulled her hand out of the glove and shook it. “What, are you trying to knock my fingers off?”
    “What else do people say about me?”
    “Nothing.” She wiggled her fingers.
    “Are you going to tell them all about me now? My lame-ass night in the garage, and how I couldn’t even turn the key?”
    She walked up to me, and I took one step back. I couldn’t stand her being so close, couldn’t believe I’d let her rest her hand on my skin earlier. The heavy humid air filled my throat, made it hard to breathe.
    “What is your problem?” she said.
    “I don’t like people knowing shit about me.”
    Wind stirred the treetops, not yet reaching us on the ground. She stretched a hand toward me. I smelled my own sweat and couldn’t understand why she didn’t gag from the stink of it. Her fingertips brushed my arm, and I flinched away.
    “Don’t touch me.”
    “Ryan, you’re acting like an idiot. Listen to me.”
    “I am an idiot, for telling you all that shit.” I needed a good dousing in the waterfall. I needed the roar, the smack in the face when I tilted my head upward into the spray. “Why don’t you go have a laugh with your friends? Tell them how I hang around the waterfall, and how I didn’t have the guts to turn the key.”
    “Ryan—”
    “And how I talk too much to the wrong fucking people.”
    She froze.
    “Go on. Get out of here; it’s going to rain any minute.”
    Cold wind rushed through the trees. Her drying shorts blew off the deck railing. The low plants growing around our house, the ferns and bushes, bowed and touched the ground. Nicki eyed the sky.
    “We are not done here,” she said. She tossed the ball and glove on the ground and grabbed her shorts. She ran into the woods, into the dimness of the coming storm.

SEVEN
    A few minutes after Nicki left, fat raindrops began to splat down. I went inside and raised the kitchen windows to let in the smell of rain on hot ground. I opened the door to the deck, and wind poured in. It blew a magazine off the coffee table and knocked a vase from the kitchen counter. The vase broke but no water spilled, since Mom never put anything in it.
    “Ryan!” My mother ran in and slammed everything shut. She never liked outside air, with its dirt and pollen; she preferred filtered air. “What on earth were you thinking?”
    “I was cooling off the house.”
    “The air conditioning’s on. What’s the matter with you?”
    Rain thundered down, hammered on the roof and the window glass, drummed on the deck. The living-room windows turned liquid.
    Mom ran her finger around the edge of a windowpane, as she often did when it rained, testing for leaks. We hadn’t had any problems since moving back in after the repairs, but she kept testing anyway. “What have you