Try Not to Breathe by Jennifer R. Hubbard Page A

water hammered down on me and I stood there longer than I’d ever managed before, realizing that Nicki was right: the dryness of August had cut the power of the cascade a little. But when I pulled out, its roaring still filled my head.
    “I was getting ready to go in after you,” Nicki said, rubbing her arms. I handed her my T-shirt to dry off with, then put it on damp. She wriggled into her dry shirt and squeezed her hair out over the moss.
    “Are you okay?” I asked her.
    “No.”
    • • • • •

    We went to my place. The basement workout room had a closet full of Mom’s gym clothes, and I gave Nicki a pair of exercise pants to wear while we spread her shorts on the deck railing. I dumped my wet clothes in the washer so Mom wouldn’t see them.
    My parents knew I swam in the stream, but they didn’t know I stood under the waterfall. When we’d first moved here, they’d told me the waterfall was dangerous, but they had never forbidden me to go under it—I guess because it never occurred to them that I would. I didn’t plan to tell them, either, and the fewer chances they had to see my wet clothes, the fewer questions they would ever think to ask.
    Nicki and I sat on the living-room floor with the sunlight, filtered through evergreen needles, shining in on us.
    “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Nicki said, “but I don’t see why somebody who lives in a place like this would want to kill himself.” She glanced at me, but I stared out the window. She probably didn’t realize I’d heard that one, or variations on it, a hundred times before—and that I’d even said it to myself. I often thought I had nothing to complain about, compared to some of the stories I’d heard at Patterson. There were kids who’d been raped by their own parents, kids who’d been beaten or burned or choked, kids whose brains were so fucked up by drugs that I didn’t know how they managed to feed themselves. There were kids who never knew which parent they’d be staying with on any given day, or when they’d be traded for a chunk of money in some divorce fight. Knowing all those stories confused me more, because I didn’t have any of that going on. So I didn’t know why the hell I kept falling into the pit, why I could never see what was pushing me down there.
    • • • • •

    Nicki and I sat awhile longer. At one point I got up and brought in a bowl of nuts and sunflower seeds and cranberries. We gorged on it, licking the salt off our fingers.
    “This isn’t—bird food, is it?” she said once, pausing in midcrunch.
    I laughed. “What if I said yes, now that we’ve eaten half the bowl?”
    She squeaked.
    “No,” I said, grinning at her, and she swallowed. “It’s just this healthy-snack crap my mother likes to buy. Anyway, I’m eating it, too, right?”
    “Yeah, but you have a death wish.”
    I laughed again. Her face had frozen the second after she said it, as if she wanted to bite the words right out of the air and take them back into her mouth. But I was okay. In fact, I wished more kids at school would say things like that to me, instead of sneaking glances from twenty feet away like they usually did. Not that I knew how to let them know it was okay.
    I couldn’t stop thinking about the session at Andrea’s, the weird waiting while we’d tried to contact Nicki’s father. “What was your dad like?” I asked. I lay on the couch, while she sat on the floor scooping up the last nuts and berries.
    She stopped with her fingers in her mouth and stared at me. Then she pulled her hand free and said, “I had this doll that used to be Kent’s. Well, it was a boy doll; Kent called it an action figure. I named him Slade because I thought it was the coolest name ever.” She ran her fingers along the bottom of the bowl, coating them with salt. “One day I left Slade down in Seaton Park, and I didn’t realize it till we got home. I was hysterical. Matt and Kent told me he would get stolen or rained on