Read Online Try Not to Breathe by Jennifer R. Hubbard - Free Book Online

this fancy house, my mother’s obsession for years, had been slapped together so sloppily that it literally leaked at the seams.
    “I don’t see anything funny,” my mother snapped, dropping towels to absorb the water that had already puddled on the floors and soaked the carpet.
    “It’s crazy,” I managed to say, catching my breath. I couldn’t believe she didn’t see a little bit of irony or gallows humor or whatever in the situation. Here we were running around like maniacs, trying to catch each new mini-waterfall as it sprang to life. I was in my shorts, since that’s what I wore to bed. My parents wore robes over their pajamas, and their hair stuck out all over their heads, and we kept tripping as we raced from one leak to another.
    The house was supposed to be perfect, and it wasn’t. Something about that made me feel better than I’d felt in weeks, eased the pressure on my chest. It had been a long time since I’d laughed and it would be a long time until I laughed again, but that night I couldn’t stop.
    • • • • •

    We rented a house in Seaton while this house got reroofed and recaulked and whatever else they had to do to seal it up. My mother was furious, documenting every step for the lawsuit she eventually filed against the builder. We lived out of boxes and suitcases, with most of our own furniture left up here under plastic tarps. Everything in the rented house was strange. I bumped into walls when I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Nothing belonged to me.
    Since Seaton High was still pretty new to me, too, I didn’t fit anywhere. I stumbled through the days always a little lost, a little behind. Because I didn’t know the team schedules, I missed baseball tryouts. When I talked to the coach, he agreed to let me come to practice and show him what I could do. But before I made it, I got the worst sore throat of my life, with chills and fever.
    It turned out I had mono, and I was so sick I could just about crawl to the bathroom. I used to stop at a certain spot midway down the hall, where my mother had plugged in a nightlight shaped like a scallop shell. I would lie there with my face against the carpet, inhaling crumbs and dirt specks the vacuum had missed, staring at the plastic shell and gathering my strength to make the second half of the trip. Mostly that’s what I remember from two weeks of sickness: that nightlight.
    The coach sent me a message to forget about baseball. He said I was only a sophomore anyway and could try out next year, but I found it hard to believe I would ever play again. I’d also had to stop running—the running I’d done for fun, not for a team. I never tracked my times or distances but did it because I liked it, because it sent the blood racing through me and made me feel less like I was living behind a pane of glass.
    • • • • •

    “What do you mean by a pane of glass?” Nicki asked.
    “It’s like I can see and hear everyone, but I’m not really there with them. It comes and goes—I mean, it always did. Until last year, when it stuck around.”
    Dr. Briggs once asked me how long I’d felt it. I thought maybe it started when I was eight, the first time I went off the high dive at my swim class. Nobody else had acted scared of the diving board, so I marched right off it like it was nothing. I only got the shakes afterward, in the locker room.
    “There’s a numbness that goes with it,” I told Nicki. “It’s like being dead but not officially dead. I mean, that’s the way I always thought of it.”
    She nodded as if that made some kind of sense, touching my hand. I forced myself to look through her, to keep talking, because if I stopped and let myself feel her hand on my skin, I was never going to get through the part about the garage.
    • • • • •

    This hollow numbness seemed to go on forever. My mother was obsessed with the house. The contractors kept stopping work on the roof and windows for no reason,