Wing Jones(41)

“I don’t know if I’ve ever been here without him,” says Aaron. He’s poured himself a glass of milk, and after he takes a sip he has a milk mustache. I want to point it out but I don’t want him to wipe it away. He looks so much like he did when he was younger. Softer. More innocent.

Then he frowns and the image is spoiled.

“I’m sorry, Wing. About Heather. The things she was saying…”

“It’s fine.” I open the refrigerator door and pretend to look for something to drink so Aaron can’t see my face. I don’t want him to rehash what she was saying. I don’t want to relive it. I want to forget about it as fast as I can. I grab a jug of sweet iced tea that Granny Dee made last night and pour myself a glass.

“I wish Marcus was here,” he says. He’s wiped off his milk mustache.

“Me too.”

We sit in silence at the table, him with his milk, me with my glass of watered-down sweet tea. It isn’t a comfortable silence. It’s thick, the kind that makes you choke when you breathe it in.

Aaron suddenly slams his fist on our table, making the glasses jump. It makes me jump too. I’m up and backing away before I even realize what I’m doing.

“Goddamn it!” he shouts, punching the table again. This is too much for the glass of milk. It topples over and lands on the ground, shattering and spilling milk everywhere. Neither of us moves to clean it up.

“Why, Wing? Why’d he go and do that? I told him…” Aaron’s voice breaks as he stands and goes to lean against the fridge, his forehead pressed against it. “I told him he’d had too much and that we could sleep at Trey’s place or we could even spring for a cab or go with someone else, but he said he was fine, he said he could drive, and I didn’t argue with him! But I didn’t go with him either. I don’t even remember why now. I lay back down on the couch and closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew everyone was screaming that there’d been an accident and I sat up and I knew. Wing, I knew.”

I want to tell him that it isn’t his fault, but my mouth feels like it’s filled with cotton balls and my tongue feels fat and I struggle to say the words. I don’t know if I believe them.

Aaron looks up at me, his eyes fierce. “I was drinking with him that night, Wing. I did shots with him. Hell, I even held him up to do a keg stand.” He shakes his head. “The goddamn keg stand.”

I’m not exactly sure what a keg stand is, but I’ve seen enough teen movies to have a basic idea. Thinking of Marcus, my Marcus, upside down, guzzling beer, makes my stomach churn.

“What about Monica?” I say. The other person complicit in all this.

“Mon? She was trying to get him to stop. She always does. But after a while she started drinking too. Girly shit. Kahlua and flavored Smirnoff. Started flirting with some of the other guys, trying to get Marcus riled, get him jealous, get him to notice her. But Marcus was so gone he barely noticed. He’d just pull her in for a kiss every time he went by her, and after a while she got bored with flirting and was hanging over him like she does. Everyone was going to go get some food or something. Two different cars. Mon went in Roddy’s car with Tash. Tash was drunk and crying and Mon was trying to be a good friend. Trying to be there for Tash. Thank God,” he says, shaking his head again.

“Why didn’t you stop him?” I say, finally voicing what I’ve thought since that night. “You or Monica. Someone should have stopped him!”

Aaron moves away from his position by the fridge and sits down next to me, hand raised as if he wants to stroke my back, but then he suddenly puts it in his lap.

“It’s no one’s fault,” he says, and his voice is just as much of a dead thing as my own. “Wing. It isn’t our fault.”

“If there hadn’t been that other car,” I say in a whisper, and immediately feel ashamed for even whispering it. Because the other car wasn’t in the wrong. The other car didn’t run the red light.

The woman in the other car died. And no matter what Aaron says, it was someone’s fault.

It was Marcus’s fault.

He’ll have to live with that. Two people are dead. He’ll have that on his conscience for ever.

If he ever wakes up.





CHAPTER 25


I didn’t run last night. After we cleaned up the milk and broken glass, Aaron and I came to some unspoken agreement that we weren’t going to run. I thought about going on my own, but then I forgot to set my alarm, and for the first time in over two months, I slept through the night. But I’m paying for it this morning. My blood is sizzling in protest at missing the run and my whole body is thrumming with energy. I feel restless, wild; every step is a challenge. I feel like the whole world is going too slow.

At breakfast I slosh milk into my cereal bowl and it spills over the edge, pooling on the table, reminding me of the milk Aaron spilled yesterday.

“Careful,” snaps Granny Dee. She’s next to the coffee-maker. “Don’t you know milk is expensive? Don’t be wasteful. And clean that up quick. Don’t dawdle like you always do.”

If Marcus were here, he’d look at me and roll his eyes and make me feel better.

But he’s not here.

I shouldn’t care. I know Granny Dee is feeling tense because her and LaoLao got in another fight this morning. Right before my mom and LaoLao left to go to the Chinese grocery store down Buford Highway to get some kind of sauce they ran out of at the restaurant.