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

didn’t know. But if I had to bet, I would bet yes. He may have sat there with his finger on the trigger as long as I sat in that stupid garage with my hand on the key.
    • • • • •

    My father took me to the emergency room, where they checked me out for carbon-monoxide poisoning. Which, of course, I didn’t have. But the nurse asked me if I had tried to hurt myself.
    “Yes,” I said. “But I’m not very good at it.”
    My own words struck me as hilarious, the funniest thing I’d heard since the night we ran around trying to plug up our leaking house, but the nurse didn’t laugh. She called for other people to talk to me. They asked me more questions like that and then they told my father I couldn’t go home because I was a danger to myself.
    “I don’t feel dangerous,” I told someone, a nurse or intern or whoever it was. But they checked me in anyway.
    I told the psych resident who saw me the next day that I hadn’t even really done anything; I had only turned the key for a minute. She told me my parents had searched my room at home and found ten bottles of painkillers, way more than I would need for any headache, and way more than I would need to kill myself. She asked me why I had it.
    I knew the medicine could kill me. I’d bought it because it made me feel better every time I bought a new bottle. A little better, for a little while. But I hadn’t used the bottles because I knew an overdose would destroy my liver, and if I failed I didn’t want to be alive with a screwed-up liver.
    Not that I told the psych resident any of that. She asked me why I had all that medicine and I said I kept forgetting I already had it, and buying a new bottle. She asked why it had been hidden under the bed. I said it wasn’t hidden; that was just where I wanted to keep it. She managed not to roll her eyes.
    Later that day, after my parents had telephoned God knows how many hospitals and the insurance company, they found a place for me at Patterson, which was only an hour outside of Seaton.
    “We’re lucky they have such a good facility for adolescents right here,” my mother said as we waited in the hospital lobby for my father to bring the car around, so they could drive me over there.
    “Yeah,” I said. “We’re lucky to have so many screwed-up teenagers close by.”
    She whirled on me, her hand raised. Neither of my parents had hit me since I was about five, when they used to give me a swat on the butt for such crimes as drawing on the walls with ketchup. I closed my eyes, waiting for the slap, but it didn’t come.
    She didn’t say a word. When I opened my eyes, she was no longer facing me. She stared at a vending machine, at candy bars trapped behind glass and coiled wire, gripping her purse with both hands. She was quiet when my father pulled up, quiet while we got into the car and drove out on the highway. Then she burst into tears and bent over in the front seat—wailing, smearing her lipstick and black eye makeup on her hands and sleeve.
    “Melissa, don’t; it’ll be okay,” my father said, one hand darting over to pat her shoulder. His head swiveled, checking the lanes around us. He tried to pull the car over to the right, but nobody would let him over. They sped past, punching their horns whenever our car edged into the next lane.
    “Damn it,” he said, as another one blared at us. “Help me here. Watch your side of the car and tell me when it’s clear.” His voice rose. “Melissa. I need you to do this.”
    She sobbed and the car kept going forward at sixty-five miles an hour, forward because nobody would let us stop.
    “Can you keep yourself together for a few minutes?”
    “I’m trying.”
    “Can you please—”
    “Forget it!” She straightened her back, black streaks shining on her cheeks. “Nobody’s going to let you over. Nobody gives a damn. Our heads could be on fire, and nobody would slow down for half a minute to let us get off the road. Just keep driving,