Try Not to Breathe (13 page)

I fumbled with Serena’s clothes, and I fumbled with her. I struggled with the condom. I didn’t have to tell her it was my first time; it was pathetically obvious. When she finally helped me into place, she turned her face away. All I could see was her clenched jaw and the strands of hair that fell across her ear. I closed my eyes and got the whole thing over with as fast as I could.

When it was done and I was trying to figure out what to do with the condom (Throw it in the wastebasket? Would whoever owned this room care?), she groaned, “Oh, God,” and puked beer over the side of the bed. Then she stumbled over to the wastebasket and started gagging and puking in there. I dropped the condom into the basket and touched her back. “Are you okay?”

She kept retching. I hadn’t known she was drunk, hadn’t let that fact seep into my own drunken fog. My legs started to shake, partly with guilt and partly with the queasiness of watching all that puking. I found my clothes and put them on, getting my pants backward before I finally figured out the right way. I sat on the bed, staring at my hands and listening to her puke, for I don’t know how long. When she stopped heaving, I brought her her clothes, but she slapped me away.

“Leave me alone,” she moaned.

“I don’t think I should.”

“Where’s Bret?”

“I don’t know. Downstairs, I guess.”

She began sobbing, makeup running down her face. I wanted to go home. I wanted to get into my own bed and pull up the covers and stay there for a hundred years. I wanted to rewind the last however-many-hours I had been in this room. If this was what it felt like not to be a virgin anymore, well—all I could say was, it didn’t live up to the hype.

I found a friend of hers who was sober because she was driving. She sighed and went to babysit Serena, and I headed down the stairs. I hesitated on the landing when I saw Bret at the foot of the stairs, with a few of his buddies. They didn’t see me.

“Did you see Serena go off with that guy?” one of them was saying.

“What guy?” Bret growled.

“That—what’s his name. He’s on the baseball team. That Taylor kid?”

My name is Turner.

Bret laughed. “So what?” he said, and it wasn’t an
I don’t give a damn about Serena
laugh, it was a
who cares about the “Taylor” kid
laugh. It was a laugh that meant nothing I did could possibly threaten or worry him. I didn’t exist to him.

Would his laugh hold up if I came down the stairs in front of him, right now, with Serena’s makeup smeared all over my face and shirt, with her perfume rubbed off on me, and the smell of her on my skin? Or would he just look through me? I never got to find out, because his group moved into the living room.

I escaped down the stairs and out into the night, gulping cold air, looking up at the winter stars that seemed forever far away. I was running out of options. The pane of glass had been with me for weeks now, the longest time ever. If drinking didn’t make anything better, and sex didn’t help, then what would?

I knew we were moving to Seaton in a couple of weeks, and I would never have to see Amy Trillis or Serena again. Surely things would get better when we moved, I told myself. We’d be living in my mother’s dream house, and I’d get to start all over at a new school, and things would get better. They
had
to.

Except they hadn’t.

• • • • •

As Nicki and I got closer to Brookfield, my nerves began to vibrate, shooting out random pulses that made me want to jump out of the truck. I told myself Val had already seen me at my worst. This time I would not be mute or hiding under my bed or crumpled on the floor. I was no longer living in a hospital. Whatever happened now, at least I would be starting a few notches ahead of where she’d seen me last.

She was my friend, no matter what else did or didn’t happen. She wasn’t Amy Trillis. But my hands shook, and I pressed them against the thighs of my jeans so Nicki wouldn’t notice.

As much as I wanted to see Val, I wasn’t ready when we pulled up in front of her house. I needed more time, I thought—but time for what? Was I ever going to be ready?

“Wow,” Nicki said as the truck wheezed to a halt. “Her house is even bigger than yours.”

It was true, but the main thing I noticed was that the Ishiharas had trimmed their bushes into corkscrew shapes. I had no doubt my mother would do the same thing if we had hedges around our house.

Val’s mother, whom I’d met a couple of times at Patterson, let us in. “Come in, come in,” she said, beaming at me. “Val’s finishing her practicing. How are you, Ryan?”

“Good,” I answered, thinking how much more loaded that question was when people knew you’d been in a place like Patterson. But what I liked most about her was that she never seemed to be waiting for me to break apart in front of her. She never tiptoed around me, the way Jake’s mom did sometimes. “This is my friend Nicki. Nicki, this is Dr. Ishihara.”

“So nice to meet you.” Dr. Ishihara shook Nicki’s hand as if she’d been waiting all her life to meet her. Yes, Val’s mom was practically the nicest person I’d ever met. Another case of blame-the-parents-for-the-psycho-kid not exactly working. Not that she was perfect. From listening to Val in Group, I knew the kind of pressure she put on Val to be good at everything—not just good: superior. Whether she meant to or not, she leaned on Val.

Dr. Ishihara gave us lemonade and dragged random facts about school from us. My phone buzzed in my pocket and I pulled it out, jabbed at the keys, and sent a one-word lie in response to my mom’s latest text (“It looks like rain. Do you have your raincoat?”). Nicki swung her legs under the kitchen table and studied the paintings on the wall, abstracts painted by Val: cubes and angles in one picture, green swirls in another—swirls that reminded me of the painting in my own room. All the while, I listened to Val’s playing. It was the violin just now, something dark and complicated that sounded as if the strings were living nerves, part of Val’s body. It was all I could do to stay at that table, making polite small talk with her mother, instead of tearing upstairs and throwing myself at her.

The music stopped, and a couple of minutes later Val bounded down the steps.

“Why didn’t you tell me Ryan was here?” she said, running into the room, her eyes on me. Finally, Val.

TWELVE

Val made us sandwiches,
and we sat around the kitchen table. We talked about Nicki’s imaginary cousin, our excuse for being in Brookfield in the first place. We talked about how Nicki looked young to have a driver’s license (“I get that all the time,” Nicki said, in a bored drawl that made her suddenly sound thirty). We talked about Val’s haircut. She turned to show us the back, where the triangular piece was cut out.

“That’s so cool,” Nicki said, biting a potato chip. “I wish my hair was straight so I could do that.”

Val sat across from me, and I watched every bite of food she took, though I tried not to—flashing back to Amy, and what she’d said about “the creepy guy who’s always staring at me.” But unlike Amy, Val watched me, too. Her whole face seemed to hold back a smile, as if she didn’t want her mom and Nicki to see everything she wished she could say to me.

She took small, precise nibbles of her sandwich. I tried not to slop chicken salad on the table or crunch the chips too loudly. Nicki rattled on to Val’s mom, and I was grateful for every syllable that kept Dr. Ishihara’s eyes anywhere but on Val and me. I had the feeling that Nicki had taken on my connecting with Val as a personal project; she was going to make this match or die trying.

Once Val’s foot brushed my leg under the table. The table was so broad she had to reach, to stretch her leg out in a slow-motion kick, so I knew it wasn’t an accident. Her toes touched my shin for an instant. My hand jerked, and I dropped a pickle round. A smile flashed across Val’s face, and I smiled back.

Nicki noticed. She asked Val’s mom about the paintings on the wall, pointing at the side of the room farthest from Val and me. I licked salt off my lips. Val dabbed mayo from the corner of her mouth.

“Well,” Nicki said, after inhaling two tuna sandwiches, “I’d better go see my cousin now, if I’m gonna. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

I followed her to the front door to whisper, “Where are you going?”

“I’ll just drive around. We passed a park on the way in, and a bunch of stores—I’ll hang out somewhere. Be back at four.” Then she crooked a finger at me, beckoning until I bent forward, until my ear was right in front of her mouth. “Tell her,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare chicken out.” Then, grinning, she slipped out the door. I stood alone in the front hall for a minute, gathering myself to face Val again, to take the chance Nicki had driven me out here to take.

When I returned to the kitchen, I found that Dr. Ishihara had vanished, too.

“Mom said she’d let us catch up.” Val stretched, lifting her arms above her head and curving her body toward me. All I wanted was to look at her. It had been so long since we’d been in the same room. And for a few minutes, that’s all I could do: stand there drinking her in, without saying a word.

“It’s good to see you,” Val said at last. “I miss hanging with you and Jake.”

“Me, too.”

“How are you, really?” She picked at her place mat, pulled at loose threads.

“I’m good. You?”

She nodded and ducked her head, so that her hair bounced against her cheek in one glossy sheet. I had forgotten that she did that, ducked her head when she got self-conscious. Then she lifted her chin again.

“Have you heard from Jake lately?” Val asked.

I sat across from her. “Yeah. Almost every day.”

She frowned. “I’m worried about him. He’s so nervous about school starting.” She twirled a strand of hair. “He has a tough time at school.”

“How do you know?”

“He writes me about it all the time. Hasn’t he told you? How the kids make fun of him, steal his gym shorts, dunk his head in the toilet—you know. The standard crapfest. And now he’s worried it’ll be worse, since they know about Patterson.” She ran a fingertip along the edge of her bottom lip. I wished I could put my own fingertip there, or my mouth.

“Is it like that for you, too?” she asked, and I forced my mind back to school troubles, to Jake.

“Nah, mostly people leave me alone. Kind of like I’m carrying smallpox.” But if I had to be totally honest, I avoided people as much as they avoided me. “Jake didn’t tell me all that. He kind of hinted at it, but—”

“I’m not surprised he didn’t tell you the worst. He looks up to you.”

I choked on my last mouthful of lemonade. “Jake looks up to me? Why?”

“Oh, you know. Because you got out of the hospital before he did. But more than that—you changed at Patterson.” She stared over my shoulder, as if seeing a film of my earlier self projected on the wall behind me. “When you first got there, you were always talking about how you wanted to die. And you had this—kind of a shield around you. But you broke out of that. Not all the time, but you had your moments.”

I pressed the cold glass between my hands.

Her eyes refocused on me. “And you still—you look good, Ryan. You had this way of checking out—I’d be sitting with you or you’d be talking in Group, and all of a sudden it was like you turned into a statue. Your body was there, but you weren’t. Now you’re really here.”

She’d told me that at Patterson, too. Before Val, I hadn’t realized that other people could tell when I went numb. I found it hard to believe that people noticed anything about me at all. But Val always noticed, and so did Jake.

“I want to show you some messages Jake sent me.” Val put our empty glasses in the sink and reached out a hand to me. I didn’t know if I was supposed to take it or if she just meant it as a
follow me
gesture. So I kept my hands at my sides and followed her.

• • • • •

Val’s room. I’d tried to imagine it, and her in it, a million times. It fit her perfectly. Pale green walls—not the hospital green of Patterson, but the color of new ferns. A wooden floor, and a wooden desk in front of the window. Posters of abstract art on the walls, bold shapes with sharp edges, snarls and tangles of black lines. One corner of the room held a music stand and her instrument cases.

So this was where Val sent messages to me. And practiced her music. And slept. And undressed.

She sat down at her computer. I stood over her, trying not to breathe on her neck, while she brought up an old message from Jake:

“Val, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t. At this school I was a loser & that’s all I’ll ever be. They all know why I left before finals last year, and now I have to repeat some classes & the whole thing’s a mess. September’s going to suck so bad. You’re doing OK because of your music, Ryan seems to be doing OK, but I’m not. I don’t know why I always have to be the loser, the one who can’t get his shit together, & I’m sick of it.”

I was sorry then I hadn’t told Jake more about what May and June had been like for me, the way I’d moved in a people-free zone at school. Maybe he would’ve felt less alone if I’d told him more of the truth.

“My folks keep nagging me,” Jake’s message went on. “Nagging me to ‘go to parties’ and ‘join teams.’ Like, HELLO, nobody’s inviting me! Do they not get that?”

“Shit,” I muttered. Val clicked to scroll down, so I could read more.

“Some days I don’t even get out of bed. I hate this place. I hate my life. It’s worse than at Patterson cuz at least then I had you guys.”

“Did you write him back?” I asked Val.

“Of course. I was worried to death. But he backtracked, said he was sorry for ‘whining,’ that he was just in a bad mood.”

“Maybe he was.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No.”

“Exactly. Me, either.”

We stared at the computer, at Jake’s misery seared into the screen. I swallowed and the sound of it seemed to bounce off the walls, echo like a crack of thunder.

She sighed. She clicked on something, and dark piano music poured from her computer. It reminded me of the music she’d played for us when she came back to Patterson—reminded me of that night, and her hand circling my wrist.