Try Not to Breathe Read Online Free PDF Page A

said: to be unique, to be different. Who said hair had to be symmetrical, anyway?
    She sent me pictures: front and back. From the front I thought she’d cut it all to chin length, but in the back, a big triangular piece had been cut out. It looked like a very pointy-nosed shark had taken a bite out of her hair. I saved the pictures to look at again later.
    “My dad says it looks like my hair went through a giant ticket-puncher,” she wrote.
    “That’s what’s nice about it.”
    She sent me a laughing face.
    “What else is going on?” I asked.
    “Like what?”
    “Your family. Guys.” Sweat welled out of my skin when I wrote “guys.” I couldn’t help thinking of Amy Trillis whenever I talked to a girl. Not that Val would deliberately knock me down the way Amy had—at least I didn’t think so—but if Val liked someone else, it would be a knockdown whether she meant it that way or not.
    But Val answered, “Family’s same as always. Mom nagging. No time for guys.”
    I exhaled.
    “You?” she wrote.
    “No time for guys here either.”
    “Ha. Girlz? Cmon, gimme details. I will live vicariously thru your adventures!”
    My adventures—that was a laugh. “Nothing to tell.” But then I thought of Nicki—not as a girl girl, in the way Val meant, but because I couldn’t forget her last message.
    “There’s this girl,” I wrote.
    “Yesssssss . . . do tell . . .”
    “I found out her father killed himself, & she wants to talk to me about it.”
    “Does she know about you?”
    “The whole school knows about me.”
    Before Val could reply, I wrote: “She asked why I did it.”
    Since I’d left Patterson, nobody besides Dr. Briggs had ever asked me the questions Nicki had. At least, they’d never asked straight out. Sometimes people hinted, as if to say they wouldn’t mind hearing gory details if I felt like puking out a few. But nobody had asked about that day in the garage.
    Now I wrote, about Nicki, “What does she want from me, anyway?”
    And Val answered, “Maybe she just needs a friend.”
    • • • • •

    Val Ishihara knew about people needing friends. She was the first person I’d spoken to back at Patterson, other than the counselors. I’d been there maybe a week, and she talked to me every day. She always left an opening for me to answer, but if I didn’t, she went right on carrying her side of the conversation.
    “What are you doing here?” I asked her, when I finally began to speak. We were sitting in Patterson’s dayroom, where she leafed through stacks of stained sheet music, trying to organize the pages. “You seem too normal for this place.” Val had little tics: she picked at her nails and scalp, played with her hair, jiggled her foot. She ducked her head and talked to the floor when she got nervous. But she wasn’t like the kids who thought the government had planted spy devices in their brains. She didn’t curl up in a ball under her bed, the way I had done my first day.
    She laughed. “You should’ve seen me when I first got here. I was a walking anxiety attack. I could barely even make up my mind to go to the bathroom.”
    In Group she always talked about panic attacks, obsessive worry, getting stuck in repetitive movements. She’d pulled out her eyebrows and half her eyelashes one year in junior high. She’d bitten the skin around her fingernails, peeled it back to show the raw red underlayer, gnawed until she bled. If she wanted to cross the room but couldn’t decide whether to step first with her left foot or her right, she would stand frozen for hours. She came to Patterson when her anxious obsessions kept her from showering, eating, and even using the bathroom. That’s what she said. Watching her, I wasn’t sure I believed it.
    “Why?” I said. “I mean, why did you get that way in the first place?”
    She shrugged. “I’m only starting to figure it out. It’s never going to be like a math equation: a plus b equals anxiety attack; c minus d equals