“One more to be safe,” he said, and snapped another shot with the flash on. I was blinded for a moment, blinking furiously, suddenly overcome with fear.
“Robbie,” I called out. “Robbie?”
And then I felt Robbie’s hand take mine. “It’s okay,” he said. “We got it.” He pulled me up and guided me back to the window. We ran all the way home. Robbie never let go of my hand.
My breathing intensified even now, as I sat in that first-period math lab, remembering that night. The cool air hitting our faces as we ran, the feel of Robbie’s hand in mine. Running and running for our lives.
Kieren never paid us that twenty dollars. We knew he wouldn’t, of course. None of us had any money. Our parents couldn’t afford allowances. But that was never the point. We had done it, Robbie and I. We had done it together. We were a good team then. It was a great night.
But nothing lasts forever.
The piercing shriek of the bell jolted me out of my seat. I dropped my pencil case, and as I squatted down to pick it up, I could hear Macy and her friends laughing at me. I offered them a weak smile, but they had already dismissed me and were on their way out the door.
I spent the rest of the day looking for Brady. Just hoping to see a friendly face, I guess. And if I’m being totally honest, a cute friendly face. But I didn’t see him. I did see a couple more kids that I vaguely remembered from the sixth grade, before St. Joe’s, when I was still at Sanderson Middle School, but by the time I remembered their names (Jonathan and Casey), it was too late to say hi. It was jarring to see them here, in these strange surroundings and in totally different bodies. It was as though someone had borrowed some faces from a dream I had once and transplanted them onto the necks of complete strangers. I wondered if I looked the same way to them.
When school ended, I headed out front to where the buses waited, but I just couldn’t bring myself to get on. I needed some time to think, to be on my own and to feel a breeze in my face.
It was a nice day, the kind of crisp fall weather that used to make me wake up early, excited to get out and see where the day would take me. I crossed the street to start my walk home, and that’s when I saw Kieren. I hadn’t seen him in years, either, of course, and just like the kids in the hallway, it was like his face was sitting on the wrong body—a tall, broad-shouldered body that bore no resemblance to the skinny kid Robbie and I used to play Super Mario Kart with. He looked like his father, who had always scared me just a little bit, with his military haircut and quiet demeanor that often seemed on the verge of exploding.
Kieren just stared at me, and I suppose I just stared back. No one ever told us that we weren’t allowed to talk to each other after what happened to Robbie; I think we both just assumed it. There was almost an unspoken rule in our house: we needed an enemy and Kieren was all we had to work with. Kieren, who had been like a second brother to Robbie and me. Who once gave me a penny flattened by a passing train. A penny that I kept in a pocket sewn into my diary, just so my mother wouldn’t mistake it for garbage and throw it away.
Kieren blinked twice, as though trying to make out my face in the sunlight. He was holding a skateboard, which he now threw on the sidewalk and hopped onto. He rode away so fast I wondered for a second if I had really seen him. Kieren must be seventeen now, I realized. A senior, like Robbie would have been. So in a year he would be gone for good, and I could go back to thinking of him as a ghost.
The walk home took longer than I had anticipated, the late summer sun still high in the sky. Talk radio wafted from the houses as I passed, with men’s and women’s voices, tightly wound after too long in each other’s company, arguing about unpaid electrical bills or unkempt living rooms.
When I was a kid, most parents were never home during the day. But that was before Proxit Tech closed. Before the hospital lost a key grant, cutting back my father’s hours and making him decide it was “a good time” for me to go back to public school. My mother wasn’t happy about that, of course. I always knew she had transferred me to St. Joe’s to keep me away from Kieren, and he was still around. But even she couldn’t ignore the numbers in the bank account.
I walked faster, just wanting to get back to my kitchen and make myself a cup of hot cocoa, watch some cartoons in the TV room, and let my mind turn off for a bit.
As soon as I reached the house, though, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I entered the kitchen through the garage and could tell by the first sight of my mother that she was in one of her moods. I watched her for a solid minute, furiously scrubbing the kitchen tile on her hands and knees, before she paused and looked up, acknowledging my presence.
“Hey,” she said, and returned to her work.
It was my cue to keep myself quiet and helpful, to grab a rag and start cleaning with her, so she could know that someone was on her side. That her life wasn’t just doing for others, wasn’t all a chore. The fifteenth birthday card from
