Free Panic Attack by Jason Starr Page A

about you.”
“I’m fine,” Gabriela said, crying. “But please, please don’t say anything to the policía . I’m begging to you.”
Gabriela was scared, even more scared than she was when she found out she had HIV. At least there was medicine she could take for HIV, but she couldn’t think of any way to make this okay. So many people knew that Carlos was her exboyfriend. The Blooms and the other people she worked for didn’t know because she never wanted them to find out about the drugs and the HIV, but Beatrice and her whole family knew, and Manuela knew, and neighbors in Gabriela’s building knew. And what about all the times over the last couple of weeks that Gabriela had talked to Carlos on his cell phone? There was no way the policía wouldn’t find out.
Gabriela was thinking about killing herself again— she could jump off a bridge or take pills. Pills would be very easy. She had a new bottle of sleeping pills and could take all of them and be dead very quickly. If she was dead it would probably be better for Manuela, too. It wasn’t going to do her any good having a mother in jail. Beatrice could raise her good and give her a happy life.
At seven thirty, after Manuela left for school, Gabriela got the sleeping pills out of the cabinet. She was planning to text- message Beatrice, to tell her what she was going to do, so Beatrice could discover her body and not Manuela. She just hoped that she died before Beatrice arrived at her apartment. The worst thing would be if she woke up alive in some hospital bed.
She was about to type the text message when the doorbell rang. She looked through the peephole and saw a man with dark hair.
“Who’s there?” she asked, and the man said, “Police.”
She was surprised. She knew the police would come, but she didn’t think they would come this fast. She was going to lock the door and take the pills, but she was afraid the police would break the door down and call an ambulance and save her.
She opened the door, hoping she could convince him to go away so she could have a chance to kill herself.
“Yes?” she said.
“You Gabriela?” he asked.
He was in a leather jacket and was wearing dark sunglasses. He didn’t look like police.
“Yes,” she said. She couldn’t remember ever being so scared.
The man reached into his jacket for something. She thought she’d see a badge, but it was a gun. She looked into the dark hole and saw her poor papi ’s face.
six
    Marissa got out of bed at around noon and headed down the main staircase. She was about halfway down when she suddenly stopped and couldn’t get herself to go any farther. Although it looked like the blood was all gone, she remembered what that guy had looked like, with that big piece of his jaw missing and all the blood, and got so grossed out she felt like she was going to throw up. She took the back stairs instead and went right into the kitchen. She was planning to ignore her father, give him the silent treatment after their argument last night. She didn’t see him downstairs, and her mother wasn’t around either.
“Ma!” she called.
    No answer. Usually she loved it when she had the house all to herself, but after last night the idea of being alone kind of freaked her out.
“Mom! Dad!”
Her dad came out of the den, finishing a call on his BlackBerry. “Okay, Lauren, I’ll check back with you later on that. Bye- bye now.”
At first Marissa was kind of surprised that her dad was acting so normal, that he was able to get back to work so quickly after going through so much trauma, but then she decided it made perfect sense. After all, he wasn’t exactly in touch with his emotions. She remembered how he didn’t cry at all at his father’s funeral— even at the cemetery, when they lowered his father into the ground, he was stone- faced—and then a few months later he was a mess, snapping at everybody all the time, drinking too much. It would probably take him a few weeks before he realized how he actually felt about the shooting, and in the