Try Not to Breathe (21 page)

I tried not to picture the scene with Amy. I ran over my planned speech for the millionth time, but I tried not to imagine what she might say, and what I might say in return. I would just have to let it happen. If she laughed, if she screamed at me, if she shrank away, if she made fun of me—no, I had to stop thinking about it.

This sweater had been weighing on me for months; I couldn’t believe that today was the day I would get rid of it. Unless I changed my mind. This didn’t
have
to be the day. I could go home right now and never talk to Amy—

Enough.

I was finished hiding the sweater, agonizing about someone finding it. I was finished with reliving the day I’d taken it and cringing every time. After all, Nicki knew the truth, and she hadn’t told me I should be locked up.

Of course, it wasn’t her sweater I’d taken.

To steer my mind off this crazy circular track, I pulled out my phone. First I had to answer a text from my mother and reassure her that I was still alive. Then I thought I could break the tension of waiting by texting something stupid to Jake—until I remembered where he was. Maybe I should send a message to Val? No. She didn’t have much in common with Amy otherwise, but they’d both rejected me, and I couldn’t reach out to Val right now.

What about Nicki? Maybe. Except that I wanted to wait and talk to her when this was all over. I wanted to be able to tell her I’d given back the sweater.

The brown paper bag sat on the table in front of me. I couldn’t imagine how it would be not to have it anymore. It would be like an amputation, except that the sweater was more of a tumor than a limb.

• • • • •

I waited outside the Gingerbread Café at ten of two. I sat by the bike rack, trying to look natural, feeling as if my elbows and knees stuck out. People snuck looks at me, and I knew they thought I was planning to steal their bikes, but I gazed past them to show I had bigger, more important matters on my mind. I took deep breaths to calm myself down, inhaling the rubbery smell of bike tires.

Twenty minutes later, Amy finally came out, checking her phone as she walked. She wore less makeup than she had last year, but she had the same dark curls I remembered. My eyes used to trace the curves of her face, shoulder, and body. But today I marched up to her without savoring the sight of her—legs quivering, wanting to run in the other direction.

“Amy? Excuse me.”

She turned her head toward me, no flash of recognition in her eyes. And yet, she didn’t seem surprised that I knew her name. Maybe girls like her were just used to everyone knowing who they were.

“I’m Ryan Turner. I used to go to school with you,” I said. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

“I guess.” She glanced at her phone and clicked something.

“This won’t take long.”

“Okay.”

The Gingerbread had a couple of outdoor picnic tables and benches. The ones in the shade were filled, but I sat on the sunniest bench, where nobody was close enough to overhear us. Amy hovered, not sitting. “I have something that belongs to you.” I pulled the grocery bag out of my backpack, opened the top of it, and showed it to her. She peeked in.

“What’s that?”

“A sweater.”

She blinked. It amazed me that she didn’t grab it right away—I wasn’t sure she recognized it. To me it had loomed so huge, had seemed to glow with neon brightness on my shelf, even through the brown covering. I’d pictured her searching for it every day, missing it, wondering where it had gone. Only now did I see how stupid that was.

“I took it from the library at West Seaton High last year.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember! It just disappeared.” She reached into the bag and pulled it out. I cringed, wishing she wouldn’t hold it up in broad daylight where everyone around us could see it, forgetting that to them it would be an ordinary piece of clothing. “Yes, this is it. Wow.” Her eyes flicked back to me. “You said you took it? Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said automatically, but I had vowed to tell the truth today, so I tried again. “It was a dumb thing to do. I guess—I had a crush on you back then.” Whatever I’d felt for her had dried up so long ago that I heard the flatness in my own voice. Ever since December, when I’d taken it, that sweater had been nothing but an embarrassment to me.

“Oh.” She took a step back and rolled up the sweater. “I—didn’t know.” I could’ve told her she had known, she’d once guessed how much I had liked her, but she’d obviously forgotten. It didn’t matter. “Why are you bringing it back now?”

“I always felt bad about taking it, and I’m sorry.”

“Well.” She nodded, but without meeting my eyes. Glancing off to the side, as if checking for escape routes. “Is that all?”

“Yeah.”

She stuffed the sweater back in the bag, frowning. “You know what? Would you mind if—could you put this in a Goodwill box or something?”

I almost groaned. Having finally gotten the damn thing off my hands, the last thing I wanted was to take it back. But I had to see this through. I could understand why she wouldn’t want it back. So I said, “All right. If that’s what you want.”

“Good.” She dropped the bag on the bench next to me. “Thanks,” she said and walked away.

• • • • •

I biked over to a place on Nichols Avenue where I always used to see a clothes-drop box. It was still there. I pulled down the metal door and heaved the sweater in, bag and all. And I turned for home, with my hands empty at last.

TWENTY

I'd expected that
giving up the sweater would practically make me float home. And I had minutes like that, minutes where a grin stretched my face and the pedals whipped around with no effort at all, but then dread crept over me. Amy Trillis knew my secret now. Amy Trillis, of all people. I could picture her telling everyone in West Seaton. “You’ll never believe the weird thing that just happened,” she could say, and the whole world would know me as Pathetic Stalker Guy.

Or—I thought, as the elation returned—she might not bother to say anything. It obviously hadn’t mattered that much to her. She hadn’t even wanted to take back the sweater. She seemed to want to forget the whole thing.

I realized I no longer cared if Amy Trillis thought I was weird. I’d looked her in the eye and, though I’d told her the truth, she hadn’t laughed at me. I didn’t especially want the world to know I’d taken her sweater, but if they did find out, I would deal with it.

I stopped in Seaton for a drink, chugging down one of those blue energy drinks in the parking lot of a minimart, with my bike leaning against me. In front of the store, five kids from my neighborhood had gathered. I knew some of their names, but I hadn’t talked much to them. They were a little younger than me.

“Is that the psycho kid?” one of them said, and I knew they were talking about me, but I kept guzzling blue fluid and staring out at the horizon. I was listening now, though.

“Yeah, I think so. Isn’t he the one Nicki’s always with lately?”

“Uh-huh. Man, what’s wrong with her?”

They laughed. Then a girl with skinny legs and long shining hair said, “Don’t worry, she promised me she’s not going out with him or anything. She’s just being nice to the local loser.”

More laughter. “Maybe so, but what for?”

I swung my leg over the bike and pedaled off, dropping my empty bottle in a green bin on my way out of the lot. The asphalt shimmered in the heat, and their laughter dissolved behind me. But the words “local loser” were branded into my brain.

• • • • •

Even though I’d biked all the way home and wanted to collapse on my bed, I decided to run up to the waterfall. I had a few words for Nicki.

But Nicki wasn’t there. Kent was, smoking as usual.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I bent over for a minute, panting, wishing I were in better shape. “Where’s your sister?”

“I don’t know.” He blew smoke into the mist and waved at a new sign on one of the trees: NO SWIMMING OR DIVING. I hated the man-made look of the sign, its starkness and sharp corners in the middle of all this lush green, but I could understand why they’d put it up.

“Look at that,” Kent said. “They keep trying, but it’ll get torn down in a couple of days.”

“I guess they do that because of the kid who died here. Liability or something.”

Kent stared at me. “Kid? What kid?”

“Bruce what’s-his-name. Nicki told me. She said she was here the day it happened.”

Kent barked; you couldn’t call it a laugh. “It wasn’t any kid. It was our dad.”

“What?”

I stepped closer. With the roar of the waterfall, I couldn’t hear him too well. I thought he’d said,
It was our dad.

“Our dad died here.” Kent pointed his cigarette at the top of the cascade. “Walked out there—jumped—” The cigarette traced a path in the air. “Landed down there, headfirst. Nicki wasn’t even here. Just me and Matt.”

I stared, a chill and then a burn running through my whole body. “Your father?”

“I thought for sure she woulda told you. You’re hanging with her all the time lately.”

I wiped mist from the waterfall off my face.

“They woulda thought it was an accident, but me and Matt saw him jump. Hell, he did a fuckin’ dive. Besides, he left a note.”

“He left a note?” After all Nicki’s wailing about
Why didn’t he leave a note?
Then what—why—

“Well, not much of a note. ‘I can’t take it anymore, I’m sorry.’ Like that was supposed to tell us something we couldn’t figure out ourselves.” Kent took a drag on his cigarette. “I didn’t watch him land, but Matt did. I shut my eyes. I heard him land, though, like
thunk
!” Kent shuddered. “Fucked me up pretty good for a while. Matt, too. Nicki was mad because Dad didn’t let her come with us that day. She shoulda been glad.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I can’t believe she didn’t tell you,” he said. “I can’t figure her out sometimes.”

• • • • •

I went home, to my computer. I couldn’t be sure that Nicki had lied; how did I know Kent was telling the truth? And so I started searching.

The articles weren’t hard to find. LOCAL MAN DIES IN SWIMMING-HOLE ACCIDENT, said the very first article. But the second article called it suicide and reported the existence, though not the contents, of the note.

Philip Thornton had jumped from the top of a waterfall while his two sons watched. His wife and daughter were at home. He broke his neck and died at the scene. The township had put sawhorse barriers and signs around the waterfall. I wondered how long it had taken the barriers to disappear.

I clicked around the computer in a haze. I checked my messages. Val wanted to know if I could meet her at Patterson next weekend to visit Jake. I told her I would. The thought of Val hurt, but it was a muffled, old-feeling ache, as if she were a broken bone that had healed and now just bothered me in the rain. I could handle seeing her if Jake needed us.

I had a message from Jake’s mother, thanking me for the card and telling me he wanted to see me. I wrote her back, saying Val and I would go next weekend.

I had nothing else but spam. I got off the computer and walked over to my closet. My gut lurched when I saw that the place where the bag had always been was empty. Then I remembered: it was empty for good. The meeting with Amy seemed to have happened years ago.

I lay down and pressed my face into my pillow. I tried to forget Nicki, to erase the words “just being nice to the local loser” from my brain, along with the snickers of her friends. I wanted to forget everything she’d ever told me, but I couldn’t stop it anymore, her words rushing over me—what she’d said about a boy named Bruce dying at the waterfall, and about her father having a gun, and how she needed to know why he’d done it because he hadn’t even written a note—God, had she ever told me the truth about anything?

If I hadn’t cut myself off from everyone at school, maybe I would’ve known the truth sooner. Somebody would’ve told me about Kent and Nicki’s father before now. But I’d kept myself so insulated that only the rumor of a dead guy at the waterfall had leaked through, and I didn’t trust rumors. China could envy the Great Wall I’d built around myself.

Until Nicki had come over the wall—

And I’d told her everything. My stomach folded in on itself when I thought of how much I’d spilled the night before. She already knew how I felt about Val. She knew about the garage. And now I’d told her about
Amy and the sweater
.

I flopped over and glared at the ceiling. I remembered the picnic table at the rest stop. The way she’d kissed me after that terrible day at Val’s, and again when I spewed out all my worst secrets in the graveyard. I could feel the warmth of her mouth, and the way she’d pressed against me.

And I could feel her whispering her secret in my ear, last night under the tree. Had the day at Funworld with her father been real? Or had she made that up, too? What the hell had she been doing—playing with me? And why hadn’t she ever told me the truth about the waterfall?

• • • • •

I’d met pathological liars at Patterson. Of course we all lied a little, about things we couldn’t stand to admit. But there were only a few who told big lies, like the ones Nicki had told me.

• • • • •

I rolled over again, every word she had said to me echoing in my ears.

• • • • •

Something built inside me, a roar like static. I began to scratch at my skin. Whenever I felt this way at Patterson, they told me to talk it out. (“Don’t act it out; talk it out,” they said to the kids who liked to throw chairs; and to the kids like me they said, “Don’t hold it in; talk it out.”) But who did I have now? Dr. Briggs was away; I’d talked to Dr. Solomon only once.

Jake was in the hospital.

I couldn’t face Val with this. I couldn’t tell her that less than a week after she’d pulled away from me, another girl had made a fool out of me. I couldn’t lose the last scrap of pride I had with Val, the pride of not having imploded in front of her when she rejected me.

My dad was away. I couldn’t talk to my mother, not after what she’d said at the diner the other day. Not unless I wanted her to die of anxiety.