Try Not to Breathe by Jennifer R. Hubbard Page B

or chewed up by wild animals. And my dad drove down to the park to get him, even though dinner was ready. That’s the kind of person Dad was.” She put her fingers in her mouth again, to suck off the salt. I watched her lips.
    She seemed to be waiting for me to speak, but when I didn’t, she took her hand out of her mouth and shook it, drying it in the air. “He used to bet on the horses at Sandford, and sometimes he took me. I love seeing the horses run, especially when they run right past where you’re standing, like thunder. We used to plan what we’d do with the money he won, except he hardly ever won any. Once he won, like, a hundred bucks and we had a big dinner and I ordered crème brûlée for dessert.” She laughed. “I didn’t even know what it was. I called it ‘cream brooley.’”
    I rested my chin on my hands. “What else?” I felt a little like Dr. Briggs. It was nice to be the listener for once, not to have to scrape things out of my own brain to talk about.
    “He used to fight with my mom. About money, and how late he stayed out with his buddies.” She tried to spin the bowl, but it didn’t work well on the carpet. “He never talked about suicide. As far as I know.”
    I’d never talked about it, either—at least, not beforehand.
    She looked up at me. “He shot himself in the woods behind the house. My brother Matt and I found him.”
    My stomach jumped. I squashed down mental images of blood and brains, shattered bone. I could not imagine how horrible that would be, to find anyone who’d shot himself, let alone your own father. Especially since she’d also seen that kid drown at the waterfall. God, how had she made it to fifteen without her mind cracking, without ending up at a place like Patterson? “That sucks. I’m sorry, Nicki.”
    “Easy for you to say. Who would’ve found you ?”
    “We’re not talking about me.”
    “I just want to know why he did it.” She held her eyes steady on mine. “Why did you do it? And don’t tell me you’re not my dad. I don’t care. He’s not here to ask, and you are.”
    “You should ask your mom,” I said. “After all—I didn’t know your dad, and she did.”
    “She can’t talk about him. If the subject ever gets near to coming up, she gets this sick look on her face. And anyway, you do know him. I mean, you know what it’s like to feel the way he felt.”
    “It’s not the same for everyone,” I said. “In my Group, at the hospital, everybody’s stories were different.”
    “That’s not what I mean. I want to know how you get to the point where—killing yourself is something you can take seriously. Where you think, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’”
    I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at her anymore.
    “Tell me,” she said.
    Maybe I wouldn’t have told her if we hadn’t gone together to Andrea’s house. If I hadn’t tried to help Andrea conjure up the ghost of Nicki’s father, if I hadn’t seen Nicki cry, if she hadn’t just joked with me as if I were a normal person instead of some fragile unbalanced psycho. If she hadn’t been the one to find her father.
    But all those things had happened. So I took a breath and began to talk.
    • • • • •

    We moved into this house, my mother’s dream house, halfway through my sophomore year. I’d never been the new kid in school before. I hadn’t realized how weird it would be when you can’t even find the bathrooms—never mind figuring out the “right” tables in the cafeteria and the “right” seats on the bus. When you’re new, you’re really alone.
    And then the house started leaking.
    It happened during the storms of February, when a weird thaw hit us with warm rains. Water poured down, gushed over the gutters, and pounded on the roof.
    It also dribbled into the house.
    The edges of the windows leaked. The roof leaked. One night, lightning flashed like a strobe while we ran around the house spreading pots to catch the rainwater. I laughed because