Try Not to Breathe by Jennifer R. Hubbard Page B

exercise. Nowhere special.”
    She’d insisted on coming with me. I had to wait for her to find a sweater, and good walking shoes, and the house keys, and finally we set out. I wanted to be alone, but I knew I shouldn’t push it when I’d barely come in the door. For all she knew, I was planning to off myself in the forest.
    “I’m okay, Mom,” I told her as we walked. I wasn’t completely okay. But I wasn’t on the verge of suicide, which was the part she needed to know.
    She tried to laugh, an I’m not worried lie. “I know, but—”
    I bent to pick up a pinecone. She eyed it in my hands as if it were a clue, a sign of where I stood on the crazy/sane meter. I turned the cone, studying its spiral shape, and tossed it back into the woods.
    We’d barely left the house behind when she said, “How much farther are you going to walk?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “We shouldn’t go too far.”
    “We just got started. I need some exercise.”
    “But, Ryan, you have a whole workout room in the basement.”
    “I want to be outside. I’ve been cooped up forever.”
    “Well, we’ve been outside.”
    “Only for ten minutes!”
    “Please don’t fight me on this,” she said, and I let her turn us around. I would get my time alone, I told myself. It would just take longer than I’d expected.
    • • • • •

    Since that day, my parents had loosened their grip on me, but only by inches. During the commercials in the baseball game, my father looked over at me like he wanted to say something, but whatever it was, he didn’t say it.
    Before I went to bed, I rooted around the bottom of my closet until I found the trail runners Dad had gotten me at the beginning of the summer. I’d told him back in June that I was thinking of running again, and he’d driven me into Seaton to get the shoes. “It’s good to see you taking an interest in things again,” he’d said, hanging over me in the store while I’d laced them up, beaming as if I’d brought home an Olympic medal. But I hadn’t used the shoes; buying them had been a big enough step.
    Now I pulled them out of the box, out of the tissue paper, and set them on the floor next to my bed. They smelled of rubber and new plastic. They smelled like the beginning of something.
    • • • • •

    Val was online, answering a message I’d left her earlier. “You rang, sir?”
    I typed back: “Yeah. I had a shitty day. I said several shitty things to people & I’m not even sure why.”
    “Like who?”
    “You know that girl I told you about? She wanted to hear my whole garage story.”
    “Did you tell her?”
    “Yup.”
    “You must be getting pretty close if you’re telling her about the garage.”
    “It was because she told me all this stuff about her father. Next thing I knew I was telling her.” I paused, then typed more: “The weird thing is, when you think about it, I never went that far in the garage. Remember how Alex always said it shouldn’t even count as a real attempt? That I didn’t try to kill myself, I tried to try?”
    “What is this, a competition? Who’s more serious about offing himself? The winner ends up in a box. Some victory!”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Alex was always trying to prove he was more fucked up than anyone else. Like he would get some prize for being the worst one. I think he was jealous of you,” Val wrote.
    “What for?”
    “Because you worked hard. And you knew how to listen to people, which he never did.”
    “No, if he was jealous it was because I had you and Jake.”
    “He was jealous because I never painted his portrait.”
    I laughed at that. Val had painted a lot at Patterson, but one thing she’d done for fun was “abstract portraits” of Jake and me, using finger paint. Jake was a bunch of skinny black lines. I was a blue cloud with orange and purple flashes. The whole thing was kind of a joke—when Jake saw his, he said, “I think of myself more as a green triangle.” It made us laugh, even