I had finished reading a minute before Zoe did. My hands and feet felt numb, and I was having trouble swallowing. Tears streaked down my face. Zoe handed me a tissue and took one for herself.
“How did you hear about this?” I asked while trying to clean my face off.
“He went to the same school as Zack.” She paused for a moment. “I remember he came home from school, and he looked all, like, weird. So I grabbed his backpack from him and threatened to pour paint all over his books — you know to mess with him, normal sister stuff — and he didn’t even flinch. That’s when he told me about the principal making the announcement to everyone. They had an assembly about it.” She had a far-off look in her eyes. “I’ve never seen Zacky look so sad.”
The sound of the knock on my bedroom door made us both jump. I closed the laptop and shoved the limp balloon and envelope under my pillow. “Come in.”
Gram opened the door slowly. “Marissa… oh, hi Zoe, how are you?”
“Good. How are you?”
My grandmother stretched her back out a bit. “Oh, I’m getting along, I suppose. Rissa, I came to ask if you want chicken or fish for dinner.” Neither, I thought to myself.
“Would it be okay if we ordered a pizza?” I asked.
“Oh yum, I’ll pitch in a few bucks.” Zoe said.
My grandmother tucked a few silver loose strands that had fallen out of her braid behind her ears. “Pizza?” Her hands went to her hips. “I can’t tell you the last time I ate pizza. Probably only when Rose would request it.” Immediately, her eyes got glassy, the way they always did at the mere mention of my mother’s name. She shook her body as if to erase the memory that was haunting her before she said, “One cheese and one pepperoni sound good to you girls?”
“Perfect,” we said in unison. Gram gave me a little wink before exiting my room.
“So, what now?” I pulled the envelope out from under my pillow.
Zoe got up off my bed. “Now, I’m going to go downstairs to make sure your grandmother orders the pizza from Pizza Express and not Pizza Pronto. I hate their sauce.” She made a disgusted face and headed out of my room.
After she closed the door, I looked at the envelope again. I traced the lettering with my index finger. The crayon felt bumpy and the letters weren’t perfectly formed, but I could feel the love running through them. My thoughts drifted, and I wondered if the other family members that were out riding with him that day were his brothers. How incredibly horrible it would be to see your brother get hit by a car and thrown across the road. I wondered how many times the family had already been to the grave. Early April was just about a month ago. Maybe that was the first time the little boy had been there. On the day of my mom’s funeral Marc didn’t want to go, and Gram had to practically disown him before he begrudgingly came along. He was so angry. I guess he still is. If he ever calls me back maybe I’ll be able to find out.
“Okay, everything’s good.” Zoe said upon return.
I grabbed my pink blanket with the white stars and wrapped it around my legs. “Everything is not good.”
Zoe sat down at my desk. “Right, I know. I mean the pizza. The pizza will be awesome. Now you, we need to work on. So okay, let me think.” She picked a pencil up off my desk and started gnawing on the end of it. “Oh wait! How old was the guy you saw at the cemetery?”
“The older one looked like our age. Seventeen, eighteen, I don’t know maybe a little older. Why?”
She stopped chewing the eraser. “If the boy who got killed went to Zack’s middle school, maybe that guy who’s our age goes to our school. There isn’t any other high school near us. We live in the middle of nowhere.”
Her arms thrust up as if to indicate we were nowhere. Sadly, she was right. Our town was in what most people would refer to as “the boonies.” We boasted sixteen hundred residents. In that type of town you would think everyone knows everyone else’s business, right? That’s pretty much right. But because we are a small town surrounded by small towns, there are a whole bunch of kids that go to the regional high school, three towns away. So we get bused in as far out as about fifteen miles away, making the high school we attend quite large. Now that I finally had my license (third time’s the charm), I loved being able to drive myself instead of sitting in that stinky bus with the other kids from our town, all of us annoyed at our living arrangements.
“Wait,” I began, “how could he go to our school? We would’ve heard about something this major.”
Zoe contemplated that for a minute while picking at her fuchsia nail polish. “Not necessarily. I mean, what if he’s a senior? And it’s not like it happened to someone in our school. It happened to his brother. Hey, wait a second. Where’s your sophomore yearbook?”
I rolled my eyes as I thought of the photo from last year. It was horrible, and I looked like a deer caught in headlights. My smile was all crooked, and the stupid photographer forced herself on me and tried to comb out my
