The Truth About Alice(4)

After I’d been awake for an hour or so, Officer Daniels of the Healy Police came in to ask me some questions. I’d seen him through the doorway of my hospital room, talking things over with my parents. When he came in my mom followed, and she sat down next to me on a green vinyl chair.

“You and Brandon had a few beers before you took off?” Officer Daniels said real casually, thumbing through his little notepad and not looking at me. He didn’t even sit down.

I didn’t answer him right away. The room smelled like pee and bleach, and it made me kind of queasy.

“Son, we have your blood alcohol content and Brandon’s, too,” he said, “and both were above the legal limit. So there’s no need to play coy.” I guess I felt a little relieved when he told me that. So I said that yeah, me and Brandon had downed a couple of beers before Brandon’s mom had asked us to head to Seller Brothers to get some diapers for his little sister.

Officer Daniels scratched his notepad with his pencil a couple of times.

“Any other reason Brandon might have been distracted?” he asked.

I wasn’t expecting that follow-up question. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to clear my mind. I remembered the screech of the brakes before we ran off the road. I remembered how I’d bit down hard on my tongue when we crashed, and my mouth had filled up with blood. Like it was full of nickels and dimes.

I guess a while passed because my mom spoke up. “Josh? Is there anything else Officer Daniels needs to know about what happened?”

I stared at the chew marks on Officer Daniels’s pencil. It looked like a rat had been gnawing on it. I tried not to think about the throbbing pain in my shoulder. I tried not to think about anything, actually.

“Well, Brandon was sort of fooling around with his phone,” I said finally. “You know, like messing with it?”

Officer Daniels shook his head. “Too common these days,” he announced to my mother, like I wasn’t even there. He wrote down a few more things in his notepad, told me that he had everything he needed, and said he hoped I’d get better real fast.

“By the way,” he said just before he turned around to leave, “great win at Homecoming, son.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

My mom and I just sat there for a little while in silence. Then she came over and kissed me on the forehead. She sniffed a little like maybe she was trying not to cry.




It’s been almost a month since the accident and Brandon dying, and my body still isn’t totally back to normal, but the doctor says I could probably be back on the football field with enough time to make the last few games of the season.

That’s what he told me anyway, like that was what I was supposed to be the most concerned with. When I could play football again. Not my best friend dying or anything.

My mom and dad and younger brother keep looking at me like they think I’m going to disappear or something if they stop staring at me. Like maybe I was supposed to die in that accident or something, and it’s just luck that I didn’t, so they’d better keep looking just to be safe. Sometimes my mom cries when she looks at me. It’s real uncomfortable.

Even with my broken collarbone and my sore muscles, I went to the funeral, of course. The funeral was crazy packed. I mean, even people who showed up on time had to stand in the back, and there were some people in the lobby area of the church just trying to hear even though they couldn’t see. Even the mayor of Healy was there. Brandon’s mom and dad and all his brothers and sisters were up front, and his mom was just sobbing all hysterical, which made all the moms and the girls sob even harder. The whole team and Coach Hendricks was up behind the family, and Coach Hendricks just kept shaking his head the whole time.

I think Alice is the only student at Healy High who didn’t come to the funeral. Even Kurt Morelli was there with his grandma. I guess it makes sense since he lived next door to Brandon ever since we were all in kindergarten.

At the service, the pastor said all this stuff about Jesus and making sense of bad stuff, but I didn’t really listen. I rubbed my hands on my knees, wiping the sweat off. I couldn’t stop thinking about me being wide receiver and Brandon being the quarterback and how we’d practice together, just the two of us; it was like we never even had to talk to each other. We just always knew where the other guy was going to run, where the other guy was going to throw. I think about how Brandon would throw these perfect spirals and they would just fall into my hands so easy. Swish, thump. Swish, thump. Swish, thump. We could do it over and over and over again.

We talked without talking.




I think about Brandon and I think about the funeral and I think about the hospital, and I think about that day a few days after they’d buried Brandon. The day his mom came over to our house to see me. My mom was still making me spend most of my days resting on the couch in the den, like she was afraid to let me out of her sight.

“God, Josh, if only I’d known Brandon had been drinking, I wouldn’t have ever asked him to go to the store,” Mrs. Fitzsimmons said. “But honey, I’m not an idiot. Brandon wasn’t a stranger to a couple of beers. The police said it was the drinking that probably caused the accident, but Officer Daniels said you mentioned something about Brandon’s phone? What can you tell me, sweetheart? I feel like there’s something you aren’t saying. Please, Josh. I just want to know everything that happened that day.”