Try Not to Breathe Read Online Free PDF

I’m cured.”
    “I know,” I said. “My mother’s been looking for the magic formula ever since I came here. She thinks she can find the Moment Where It All Went Wrong.”
    “And what are you looking for?”
    I could’ve said I didn’t know, or that I was looking for a way to die, or that I was looking to feel okay again—all of which were true, and all of which I’d told the counselors there. But I wanted to tell Val something different—just as true, but different. Keeping my eyes on her hands, on her bitten nails and calloused fingers, I said, “I used to want to fly.”
    “What, like a pilot? Fly a plane?”
    “No, not a plane.” You had to stay behind glass and metal when you flew a plane. “I mean, really fly.”
    The minute I said it, I felt like an idiot. She would think I wanted to be a bird or a superhero, both of which sounded exactly like I belonged here in a mental hospital. But she stopped shuffling pages and said, “That would be so cool.” She closed her eyes for a second, as if to feel the wind in her face.
    For months I’d lived behind what felt like a pane of glass, separated from the world, but the transparent shield began to crack then. Maybe it was my new meds kicking in, or maybe it was the way Val listened without judging whether what I said was what she expected me to say. But we stuck together after that. And when Jake arrived a few days later, looking as panic-frozen as I’d been when I first got there, we took him in, too.
    Only once did I see Val act like she belonged at Patterson. One day on our hall, she erupted. I never found out why. I was in the dayroom with Jake when we heard a crashing and banging in the hall. Jake hid under a chair—he was still at the point where he couldn’t handle any turbulence—but I stuck my head out the door and saw kids fleeing from Val. A plastic tray from the cafeteria lay on the floor, and I guessed she’d thrown it. The aides crept up to her, talking in low soothing voices, the way you’d talk to a wild animal. I knew they would drag her to the Quiet Room when they caught her.
    But she burst into tears and collapsed onto one of the orange-flowered couches in the hall. When the aides approached her, she held up a hand to ward them off. The rule was that if you weren’t being violent, if you weren’t damaging anything or anyone, you didn’t have to let people touch you. Some kids stared and some giggled and some ran. Some folded into their own world. I edged up to Val’s couch, expecting her to hold me off with that upraised hand, but she let me sit on the cushion, next to her head.
    I held my palm over her hair, but not touching. She didn’t flinch. I lowered my palm by millimeters, watching her. She sobbed as if her insides were shredding. I touched her shiny black hair, and she let me.
    She cried so hard it made my own throat hurt, a sound like metal scraping asphalt. It shook me to see Val like this, because she’d always seemed so together.
    All I did was pat her head. I didn’t know what else to do. I was ready to sit on that couch with her for a hundred years if I had to. And she cried until nothing else would come out.
    Later I asked why she had let me near her. “Because you were the only one who didn’t just want me to shut up,” she said.
    • • • • •

    “We used to talk every day,” I typed now, to Val. “I think I miss you.” In fact I knew I missed her, but it was hard enough to say it the way I had.
    “I miss you too, but you live there and I live here, so . . .”
    Yeah, there was the problem: the miles stretching out between us. “How’s your music going?” I typed, which set her off for a long time. I sat back and watched her words scroll by, loving every one of them, wanting to pluck them off the screen and put them in my mouth.
    • • • • •

    After I got off the computer with Val, I threw myself on my bed, thinking of that day I’d stroked her hair while she cried. And later, the time