Ian and I stretch out on the grass. I pick at the tab on my beer can. Ian’s already had a taste and said he didn’t like it, and I called him a prissy princess who didn’t appreciate the manlier things in life, so now we’re adequately annoyed with each other. He pouts while I drink. It’s four beers before I feel like talking and four more before I wonder who’s going to drive us home.
“So who’s the girl?” I ask.
He turns red. “Don’t want to talk about it.”
“At least tell me her name, man.”
He fights it for a long time, torn between wanting me to know—every guy wants to share when they’ve found someone worth jerking off to—and knowing nothing truly good can come from me having the information. Just more big-brother ammunition.
“Susanna,” he finally says. “Susanna Byrd.”
“Byron Byrd’s little sister?”
“Yeah. Remember, you wrecked her scooter?”
I shrug like it doesn’t matter to me one way or another. Ian makes a disgusted face. I remember. Of course I remember it now. Me and Jackson, holding her arms. Rick Harris pretending like he was going to run her over. But Rick was the one who smashed the scooter against the monkey bars, not me. He was the kind of guy the world answered to. So fucking cool. I wanted to be that guy. When he moved a couple of months after that, I was.
Christ. I haven’t thought of him in a long time.
“Huh,” I finally say. “Susanna Byrd.”
“What?” A challenge.
I shrug. “She could do worse and you could do better.”
Mom and Dad are not fans of the Byrds. The Byrds are a little too outside of our income bracket. My parents come from the good old school of never trusting people with less than what you have, because they’re looking for ways to take it from you. It’s an ugly philosophy, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. They never liked the Mathesons, either, and look how that turned out.
“I never said I liked her,” Ian snaps, because he never really gets when I’m giving him a compliment.
“Sure, right.”
“Fuck off,” he grumbles.
I like the way he hates me. It’s familiar. Nice.
“Ian,” I say after a minute. “Can I ask you something?”
“What?” He sounds wary.
“You tell Mom and Dad I was acting weird?” As soon as it’s out of my mouth, he tenses and I’m not so buzzed that I can’t see it. I angle myself up on my elbows. “Really?”
“I didn’t tell them you were acting weird,” he says.
“You sure about that? Because I found a letter from Dr. Howard by the phone today. Did you know about it?” He looks even more uncomfortable. “Oh, fuck. Seriously, Ian? And you didn’t tell me?”
“They were only talking about it,” he says defensively. I groan, lie back, and cover my face with my hands. “They’ve been talking about it. Maybe more since they got the letter last week. You can’t blame them, I mean . . . you saw Jackson die, man. Right in front of you. And it was Matheson who did it, of all people. Come on. What makes you think they wouldn’t want to send you to a shrink?”
“A shrink. A shrink is one thing,” I say. “But Dr. Howard? What the fuck do they need to call her haggard ass for? Just because she saw me one summer, she thinks she knows me? That she’s an expert on what went down with Matheson?”
“They didn’t say they were going to send you to her specifically,” he says, which isn’t what I want him to say. He’s supposed to say what a couple of idiots our parents are, thinking I can’t handle this. He’s supposed to side with me on this one, just grunt the affirmative if words escape him, but he doesn’t. God, he sucks.
“If they set up an appointment behind my back,” I say, “you gotta tell me.” He still doesn’t say anything. I kick him in the leg, hard. “Ian.”
He sighs. “Yeah, sure.”
“That’s real convincing, man. I don’t fucking believe you.”
I finish off the beer in my hand and crack open a new one. It’s warm but I don’t care. Doesn’t have to be cold to get you drunk. And I think I’m pretty much there because being pissed at Ian already feels not that important.
“First time I got wasted was out here,” I tell him, and he looks slightly relieved that I’m changing the subject. “Me and Jackson. And we were exactly your age too. Summer we were thirteen.”
“Jackson did that with you?” he asks. “That doesn’t sound like Jackson.”
“Well, it was.” Jackson had a million reasons not to do things but he only needed one to change his mind, and I could usually provide it. I smile thinking about it, that day. It was good, like—just simple. It was simple when everything else that summer wasn’t. “We stole some peach schnapps from his mom’s liquor cabinet and just—”
“Peach schnapps? Who’s the prissy princess now?” Ian demands, and I laugh because every time he’s funny, I’m never expecting it. I know he’s smart but I never really think of him as clever.
“Anyway, we liked it so much we did it again.” Because that first time was amazing. Magic. Exactly the right amount of alcohol between us. We soared on it for a while, came home bright-eyed and red-faced, but our parents didn’t notice a thing. The second time, well. Not so much. We thought we could only feel more amazing on more booze. Gross miscalculation. We were beyond seeing straight that day. Stumbling all over each other and freaking because we had no cover. That’s when Matheson found us and helped us out, made sure we didn’t drown in the river, called home for us, made our excuses, pretended we were all friends. And then Jackson got it into his dumb fucking skull that there was no reason we couldn’t be.
He didn’t know about Kirby like I did.
Ian clears his throat. “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.” Bad choice of word.
“Kirby,” Ian says. I stare at the sky and the sky is still gray. He says, “You’re the one who beat him bloody.”
“Yeah.” I crumple up my now-empty can and toss it in the river, and something sparks in me a little, because I think if anyone’s going to get it, it’s Ian. He’s smart. He’ll tell me about my amazing foresight.
“So why wasn’t it you? Why didn’t he kill you?”
I stare at the moving water until it seems to stop.
“What the fuck, Ian?” I ask. “Why the fuck would you say that to me?”
Ian looks to the water and shrugs.
* * *
I’m in Katy’s car and I mostly remember getting there. My head is against the cold window and my eyes are open and it feels like they’ve been open for a while, but they only just now decided to start seeing. I’m still drunk, I think, or else I’d be in a world of pain—I am not looking forward to this hangover. I listen to the wheels on the road, an aimless drive through town. The first signs of life I give her, she asks if I’m going to puke. I shake my head. My chin and neck are wet, which means I’ve been drooling on myself. Great.
“Where’s Ian?” I ask thickly.
“After he helped me drag your ass into the car, I dropped him off at your place.”
“Where’s my car?”
“Where you left it.”
“Okay.” I close my eyes again and drift for a while until another question floats to my head and I can’t seem to not ask it out loud. “What’ve I got to be sorry for?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Baby.” She reaches over and squeezes my shoulder. “What’d you say?”
I shift away from her touch as much as I can in the small space. “Everyone acts like I’ve got something to be sorry for. You. My mom. She told me I can’t blame myself for it. Blame myself for what? I didn’t do anything. You know what Ian said to me?”
“What?”
“He wanted to know why Matheson didn’t kill me.” I open my eyes and turn my head to her, give her a lazy grin. “I think my brother wants me dead. But I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be.” She doesn’t r
eturn the smile. “It was a joke.”
“It’s not funny,” she says.
I straighten. The seat belt’s a little tight on me. “Oh, what? What the fuck, you think he should’ve killed me too?”
“That’s a pretty big leap you just made there.”
“And that’s not an answer.”
“You beat the shit out of Kirby when you were thirteen,” she says, and it’s true, I did. Bloodied my knuckles on his face. It felt good. “And then you never let him forget it—”
“Oh, and you’re some saint, huh?” I demand. Her eyes stay on the road. “Hey, Katy, tell me what the last thing you said to Billie Palermo was.”
Silence, just like I knew there would be.
“I keep thinking about her,” she says after a while.
“Gross,” I say, and it’s meant to make her laugh, but it doesn’t.
“We were total assholes to her.”
“We were kidding around.” I don’t like thinking about Billie Palermo. It’s one of those things that has become bigger now that she’s dead than it was at the time. “And you didn’t answer my question. You think he should’ve killed me?”
“Jesus, Nate. No,” she says. “It just means you gave Kirby Matheson a lot of shit, and when he came to school he had a shot at you and he didn’t take it. That’s all.”
She takes her eyes off the road long enough to give me one of those looks that made me like her. That no-bullshit, this-girl-could-finish-my-insults look. Katy’s a lot smarter than she lets people in on, and she says it’s because the way she looks, no one’s going to take her seriously anyway. But for just this second, I wish she were as dumb as she pretended to be, because between Ian and her, I got this thought in my head and it’s that I gave Kirby Matheson shit and he had a shot at me and he didn’t take it.
* * *
When she’s sure I’m sober enough, Katy drops me back off at the river. I thank her for the ride. After she’s gone, I sit on the hood of my car, the taste of her still on my lips. That’s something I usually like, but now it just feels wrong.
I listen to the cars on the street, a little ways away, some group of people laughing. It’s a startling sound. I feel like I’ve been living in a bubble where nobody laughs anymore, and if they do, they don’t really mean it. I miss Jackson’s laugh, stupid as that sounds. It was easy to make him laugh, and it’s hard not to feel good about that kind of shit. I rest my arm over my eyes because my eyes are burning. Last thing I’m going to do is cry like a bitch next to the river, so I bump my head against the windshield until it’s the only thing I feel. I don’t want to go home, so I doze for a while, until the sun goes down and the streetlights turn on.
Until I hear this noise somewhere on the street behind me.
It takes me a moment to place it; the rubbery rhythm of a basketball hitting the ground. It draws my arm away from my eyes and makes me sit up.
The sound gets closer.
I slide off my car and face the street.
I see him.
A shadow on the sidewalk. I can’t make out his face, but I know the shape of him, that gangly, awkward body. And there it is again: I know you. He’s got that basketball—my basketball—in his hands, dribbling it against the pavement, and I say, “Hey!” before I really know what I’m doing or if I want to be doing it. He turns. A car goes by, washing his face in light, and it’s like getting sucker punched because that’s Matheson, somehow, I swear. It has to be because there can’t be two of him, can’t be more of him . . .
“Where’d you get that basketball?” I ask.
Of all the fucking things I could say.
And like that he drops the ball and tears off running, and before I know it, I’m after him, scrambling up the grass. My feet hit the pavement hard. He’s halfway across the street by the time I’m where he was, but I can catch him. He’s only a kid now. I can catch him.
I bridge the gap between us, getting so close. I reach out and my fingers nearly grasp his shirt, but he slips away, twisting between two cars parked on the curb. I maneuver my way between them, catching my shirt on the grille of one, hearing the material tear. I run into the road at the same time a car rounds the corner and clips me in the side—
—and the impact sprawls me across its hood. The sudden stop of the car hurls me to the ground. I land on my side, the wind knocked out of me so bad I’m afraid it’ll kill me, the inability to get air back into my lungs. But after an agonizing moment, it happens, and once I can breathe, there’s room enough inside me to feel all the rest of it. My aching shoulder and ribs. Jesus Christ. Fuck. Somebody says something about calling an ambulance even though I’m not anywhere close to dead. Jackson’s dead and I’m so far from it. I clutch my stomach as the crowd grows and grows around me and all I see are legs, and through them I see him again, hovering just outside the scene before he disappears.
* * *
I got bruised ribs, a bruised hip, but no broken bones, which in my opinion means I faced off with a car and won. Except my parents think this is a sign of something, think I threw myself in front of an oncoming vehicle in a fit of grief. So that’s how I find myself in Miri Howard’s office a week later while my mom waits outside in the car, as close to the front door as she can possibly get just in case I decide to take off.
Miri Howard talks to kids as young as six and as old as nineteen. Her office is a mess of plastic toys and teenybopper magazines I wouldn’t want any six-year-old reading. I sit in a hard plastic chair, staring at a pile of tiny metal cars that have been shoved into an empty room in an old Barbie Dreamhouse. After a while Miri’s silhouette fills out the frosted glass door to her office, and if that’s anything to go by, she’s gotten dumpier. The door swings open and I’m right. There she is, as grandmotherly as she’s always aspired to be, her hair all silvered, more wrinkles than seem necessary lining her face. She smiles at me like we’re old friends.
“Nate, why don’t you come in?”
I get to my feet, sort of at a loss for how I should commandeer this. Throw one of those panty-dropping smiles her way so I can get mine? I shudder.
“You got tall,” she says as I pass her.
“It happens,” I reply. She closes the door behind me and I take a seat across from her desk in an even more uncomfortable chair than the one that was in the waiting room. It’s hell on my beat-up body. She settles in her chair, pushing some papers aside to smooth her hands across the polished wooden surface in front of her. She meets my eyes.
“I’m so very sorry for your loss,” she says, and she really sounds it and sometimes it’s hard to know what to do about that. It’s hard not to feel every part of Jackson’s absence in that kind of sincerity.
“Thank you.”
“I hear you got in a fight with a car. How’d that go for you?”
“I’m sitting in your office, aren’t I?” I ask, and she smiles and it’s freaky, the ease of this. I shrug and look at the dying fern in the corner. “Drunk boys will be drunk boys.”
“I see,” she says. “And how are your parents doing?”
I hesitate, not sure what she means by the question. The summer I was here because of the thing with Matheson, my dad had walked out. Temporarily. Left us for this walking, talking, midlife crisis named Grace until Grace realized how pathetic he really was. Before he came back, my mom spent most of her time locked in her bedroom while I had to look after Ian. If Matheson hadn’t happened, that summer’s highlights would have only been those moments of escape by the river with my best friend.
“Smooth sailing” is what I finally settle on.
“That’s good.”
An uncomfortable silence follows, and I wonder if she remembers how I don’t do well with it, how there are only, like, two people I can stand to be quiet around and one of them’s dead. I dig my fingers into the arms of the chair and I resist opening my mouth until I can’t anymore.
“I knew,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“About
Matheson. I knew.”
She leans forward, just slightly.
“You knew he’d—did he tell you his plans to—”
“No, no, no,” I say quickly, shaking my head. “Nothing like that. Just. I knew there was something fucked up about him, since we were kids. I tried to tell you guys. You didn’t get it. But I knew what he was capable of then. I did.”
Her gaze gets just a little too intense and makes me squirm. “You thought then that he was capable of something like this?”
“That’s what I said.” I hate this. Everything feels like—it’s getting smaller, or something. My clothes feel tight. I swallow. “He died in my arms, you know.”
“I know. I’m very sorry. That must have been unbelievably hard.” Her voice is kitten-soft. I don’t trust a voice like that. “Nate, do you think about that often? About when you were kids and what happened between you and Kirby?” I don’t say anything, just shrug. “Why do you think that is, that you’re focused on that?”
“You guys thought I was the fuckup. You thought I was dangerous for kicking his ass—everyone got so scared I’d do something like that again—but I didn’t and I was right about Matheson because look at what happened—”
“You have some excellent hindsight,” she says.
“Yeah, and I’m still not the one who brought the fucking gun to school.” I glare at her. “Everyone wants to know why but I’ve always known the answer. Kirby Matheson has always had a gun in his hands. You just weren’t looking closely enough. I was.”
“Have you considered the possibility that this is your defense against what happened, Nate?” she asks. “A little revisionist history? Because I don’t—”
“Why am I the revisionist?” I ask. “Maybe it’s the rest of you.”
“Okay, fair enough. Tell me about what Jackson was like back then,” she says, and I blink. It’s not what I was expecting her to say at all.