I looked up from my hands to see why he was not reacting to my discovery. He was looking down, still tucking in his shirt.
I said nothing.
A moment later he looked up.
We both just stood there for a minute, almost meeting each other’s eyes but not quite. It was one of those near misses we’d learned to do so well.
The moment stretched out.
The cat began to wiggle in my shirt.
“I know you might not believe this,” Connor said. His voice sounded like half himself, half somebody else. Like Connor fully grown, maybe. “But I haven’t been lying to you about any other things. This is the first lie I told you since we were, like, ten.”
I looked directly into his face. He looked away.
“What did you lie to me about when we were ten?”
He surprised me by laughing. Not the way we laughed at the kitten and her wild hunting antics. There was nothing merry about it. It sounded more like a comment on the ridiculousness of our situation.
“I don’t even remember,” he said. “Can we stay with what’s important here?”
“Promise me you won’t lie to me for the rest of this talk.”
“Okay. I promise.”
“You were serious about this.”
“At one point, I think . . . yeah.”
“But that’s over now?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
He actually stopped to think for a minute. That was interesting. I guess it could have meant he wasn’t completely sure. But I took it to mean he was taking seriously his promise to tell me the truth.
The kitten thrashed violently in my shirt, scratching my belly.
“Ow!” I shouted, and tried to fish her out of there. But she was on the move.
“Why is the cat in your shirt?”
“It’s a long story. Now who’s having trouble staying with what’s important?”
The kitten had scrambled around to my back side, and her thrashing was untucking my shirt in the back. I tried to catch her with one hand—the other one was full—but she was too fast for me. She leapt to her freedom, landed on her feet on the rug . . . and ran under the bed.
“Okay,” Connor said. “You’re right. And the answer is yes.”
“I think I forgot the question now.”
What I really meant was that I had lost track of how it had been phrased. Whether a yes answer was the good news or the bad news.
“Yes, that’s over now.”
I breathed out a boatload of tension and anxiety, and felt like overcooked noodles without it. I sank down onto his bed, still holding those alarming items. I could feel my hands shaking. I guess the shock was wearing off. I guess it was finally dawning on me that I was holding something in my hand that kills people. Something that almost took my friend Connor right out of the world.
“So . . . ,” I began. I think my voice might’ve been a little shaky, too. “If we get rid of this, you won’t just find another way?”
“No,” he said. “I won’t. I promise.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed with me, but not too close. A respectful distance away. I say respectful because he was giving me space to be angry. I could tell. I could feel him braced against my possible anger.
I didn’t answer. I was just staring at the polished wood handle of his father’s gun.
“When I came over to your house the other morning . . . ,” he began. “When was that? When I came over to talk to you about how it was going over at Zoe’s? I’d already changed my mind by then.”
I breathed for a minute. Deeply. Trying to feel less shaken.
It’s weird how you know something, but you don’t really know it. You have a sense of it inside your gut. And then all of a sudden you find out it’s real. You see it, right in front of your eyes. And part of you thinks, What are you so shocked about? You knew this all along. But when the gun is lying in your hands, let me tell you . . . that’s a whole different brand of knowing.
It cuts right through the middle of you.
“So we get rid of this,” I said.
“Okay, yeah. That would be good.”
“You want to give it back to your dad?”
“No! He can’t know I had it. My mom can’t know I had it either. Let him think he lost it, or it got stolen. He can buy another one. He can afford it. He probably already did.”
“Okay, fine. So we dump it. Get me some kind of bag or something. To put it in. I can’t just carry it down the street like this.”
For a minute he rummaged around. Opening drawers, staring into his closet. I think he was a little bit in shock, too. Bottom line, most people don’t keep bags in their bedroom.
“Use the pillowcase,” he said, pulling it off his bed pillow. “I’ll tell my mom the cat shredded it and I threw it away.”
I took it from him, and put the gun and the box of bullets in the bottom of it. And I tied the whole thing in a big, soft knot.
I stood there staring at it for a minute. The kitten peeked out from under the bed, maybe wondering why nobody was trying to catch her.
“That’ll look too weird,” Connor said.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
He hurried over to his closet and took his school backpack down off a hook on the inside of the door. It was empty because it was summer. I put the weird knot of pillowcase into the bottom of it and shrugged the pack onto my back.
“Thanks for doing this for me,” he said.
“Thanks for not using it on yourself.”
It was a pretty direct statement. It burned coming out. Probably burned him to hear it. It hit me that I had been talking around the thing. With both Connor and Mrs. Dinsmore. Using soft, not very exact words, like “not staying.” But damn it all to hell, sometimes you just have to call a thing what it is. And if they’re harsh words, maybe it’s because it’s a harsh
