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

disappearing for days and leaving things half done, tarps flapping in the wind. My father went on the road, came back, and said, “They’re not done yet ?”
    It never seemed to stop raining. I had no friends at school. I was over the mono—at least I could go to classes again—but I couldn’t run. I came home from school every day and went to bed.
    There’s nothing like mono exhaustion. It’s not like being tired after a good workout or missing a night of sleep. With those kinds of tired, you’re spent, but as soon as you stop moving, you start filling back up. With mono, you don’t recharge. You feel like you never had energy and never will. This would be scary, except it takes energy to care and you don’t have energy.
    I didn’t know how to change things. All I knew was that everything felt wrong, and I felt wrong, like I shouldn’t even exist. I hated getting up in the morning. I hated slogging through the motions at school. I hated my mother’s anxious nagging and my father’s disappearing. I hated having nothing to look forward to, ever.
    Our rented house had a garage. One night I went down to start my mother’s car. She had gone to bed; my father was out at a late meeting. I didn’t have a license or anything, but I knew how to start an engine. I rolled down the car windows and left the garage door closed. I had heard that in just a few minutes you could fill a garage with fumes strong enough to kill. I turned the key and let the engine chug for a minute, maybe less.
    I turned it off because I suddenly remembered something else I’d heard, about the fumes getting into the house, too, and killing people there. I got out of the car, found a sheet that someone had used as a drop cloth, and spread it along the crack under the door that led from the garage to the house.
    I got back into the car, but this time I couldn’t turn the key. What if the sheet wasn’t enough? It was just cotton, probably not gas-tight. What if the fumes got through? What if I killed my mother?
    And did I really want to do this to myself?
    I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do, any way that life was going to get better, any way this dead blackness was going to leave, but at the same time turning the key seemed like a lot of trouble.
    I sat there arguing with myself, my hand on the key but not turning it. I sat there and sat there and sat there.
    Finally the garage door rumbled open, and my father drove in. He got out of his own car and began to cross in front of my mother’s. “What the hell are you doing?” he said when he saw me. “You don’t have a license, mister. What are you doing in that car?”
    I just blinked at him. He thought I was getting ready for a joyride. He might’ve gone on thinking that if he hadn’t seen the sheet under the door. When he saw it, his head swung back to me, took in the open window, the sight of me in the driver’s seat. His eyes flicked back to the garage door, which had been closed until he opened it.
    • • • • •

    Nicki squeezed my hand, crunched down on it, and I almost stopped speaking. But having come this far, I figured I might as well go the rest of the way. Tell everything.
    • • • • •

    “Did you start this car?” my dad said. “Don’t you know you can’t run a car in a closed space?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I know that.” It was the closest I could come to telling him the truth. We stared at each other. I think he was waiting for me to tell him I wasn’t trying to do what we both knew I was trying to do.
    “Did you run the engine?”
    “Only for a minute,” I said.
    “Where the hell is your mother?”
    I pointed at the door to the house.
    “Get out of the car.”
    But I couldn’t move. I put my head down on the steering wheel and he ran inside, calling for my mother.
    • • • • •

    “I wonder if my dad put his hand on the trigger first without pulling it,” Nicki whispered. “If he started to and stopped, you know.”
    I