Breathless Read Online Free PDF

house, we have to climb over a pile of broken cinderblocks at the edge of her yard. Other neighbors are already there. I can hear them trying to talk to him, saying things like, “Come on, Will, your parents are coming any minute, everything’s going to be okay.”
    Someone—it sounds like one of the older George girls—yelps. “Mom!” she screams. “He won’t stop, he’s doing it . . . MOM!”
    In my rush to reach my brother, I slip on the edge of a cinderblock and fall forward. My hands and knees break my fall, but I can feel pain tearing through my shin as it makes contact with the edge of the block. Nobody moves to help me; they’re all crowded around my brother. Some people have turned to look away. I see Henry Reuben, one of the local fire-fighters, pushing through everyone to reach my brother.
    I hear my mom screaming before I see Will. She screams, “Ambulance! Someone call an ambulance, now!”
    “They’re coming,” Donny George—Beth’s husband—tells my mother. “Don’t worry. We already called. They’re on their way.” He looks at me for a moment as I try to make my way past him, and says, “You know you’re bleedin’, don’t you, Katie?”
    But I don’t anymore. My mother is on top of my brother like a blanket, my father is kneeling at his side. On the ground beside them is the serrated knife that my mom uses to carve turkeys and ham on the holidays, blood all over the blade and the white handle. Even before I reach him, I can tell that the wounds are very deep, that Will was not messing around. He usually isn’t.
    He seems unconscious. There is blood everywhere, coming from his arm, following the beating of his heart, and my mother holds his arm in the air while my father takes off his necktie and knots it so tightly around Will’s bicep that my brother opens his eyes and screams. But when that only slows the blood, my father takes off his shirt and then my mother takes off her shirt, and the two of them are there beside him, my mom wearing only a worn-out white bra, my neighbors standing there murmuring to themselves, but none of them—not one—moving to help. I am amazed the Georges thought to call an ambulance at all.
    When the ambulance comes, they get him inside and I try to follow and come along with my parents, and for a minute I think I’ll get away with it, but then the Ghost sees me trying to climb into the back and says, “Kathryn, no. ”
    Will is conscious, barely, upright on the gurney, his arm held in the air by one of the EMTs.
    It’s like a nightmare—the kind where you want to scream, but you can’t make any noise. “Will,” I try to shout, and my voice comes out barely above a hoarse whisper. He doesn’t hear me.
    I try it again. “Will.” Nothing. Again, I scream, “Will,” and his eyelids flutter, his gaze takes its time focusing on me, and before I say anything, he says, to me and my parents, “I had to do it. You wanted me to. Everyone wanted me to.”
    My mom chokes on a sob. One of the EMTs hands her a gown to put over her bra, just as his partner is cutting off my brother’s shirt. The doors are pulled shut, the lights go on, loud and red and spinning down the otherwise empty street, and I stand there with the rest of the crowd watching my family drive away, me and the whole town left to gaze at my brother’s blood all over the George family swing set.
    When I was a little girl, until I was eight or nine, I used to crawl into bed with my parents when I got scared at night. After it gets dark tonight, when I still haven’t heard from my parents, I lie on Will’s unmade bed and stare up at his ceiling. The paint is old, cracking in places, and the ceiling is still covered in stick-on, glow-in-the-dark stars that our mom put up in both of our bedrooms when we were kids. It was a careful task for her, with great attention given to detail. There is nothing random in the stars’ arrangements. I stare at the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, at