Only Child(27)

I looked at the pictures for a long time, and my heart was beating fast because guns are dangerous, I know that, but they’re a little exciting, too, except I had to think about how Charlie’s son used these guns to kill Andy, and I wondered which gun it was that the bullet came out of that killed Andy. And I wondered how Charlie’s son brought four guns to the school, and how do you even use four guns at the same time? It must have hurt really bad when the bullet went in Andy’s body, and I still didn’t know where on his body it went in, and then he died from it.

Under the pictures of the guns it said Charlie’s son put a message on Facebook when he was on his way to McKinley. I know Facebook from Mommy’s phone. She goes on it a lot to see what her friends are posting, and she shows me pictures and funny videos on it. She posts pictures, too, mostly of me and Andy at sports and stuff like that. Daddy doesn’t like Facebook and doesn’t go on it and once Mommy and Daddy had a fight about it because Daddy said Mommy shouldn’t post pictures of us for the whole world to see, and Mommy said, “Well, that’s just a little ironic considering how much you like to show off.”

This was the message Charlie’s son put on Facebook:

Charlie’s angels, today is the day I’m coming for you. See you soon, Dad! Pray for me.



That’s what Charlie’s wife called us at the party, “Charlie’s angels.”

The alarm box behind me said “Front door!” in the robot lady voice, and I almost dropped the iPad. I pressed the button on the top fast to turn it off, and I put it away. My heart was beating at super speed and my face felt like it was having the red juice spill. Mimi came in with bags from the food store, and I thought she was going to notice right away, but she didn’t.

“Good morning, sweetie” was all she said, and I couldn’t say anything back, only make a “Mmmmm” sound.

Mimi unpacked the bags and I watched her take out milk and eggs and bananas, and maybe she forgot that no one in our family likes bananas except Andy. Andy loves bananas, but now he wasn’t here to eat them, so who was going to eat all the bananas Mimi got from the store? The bananas sat there on the counter, and I couldn’t stop looking at them. In my head I was saying in a really loud voice, “Who’s going to eat all those stupid bananas?” I was like screaming it in my head: “Stupid, gross bananas, they’re all mushy inside!” And I grabbed them and threw them in the garbage. It felt good to do that. I walked out of the kitchen and didn’t even listen to Mimi, who was calling: “Zach, honey, what was that for?”





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    Feelings Pages


I NEVER KNEW YOU COULD FEEL MORE than one feeling inside of you at the same time.

Especially feelings that are opposites. I know you can feel excited, but when you do what made you excited, the excited feeling goes away and you feel happy because it was fun. Or sad because it’s over already, like right after everyone leaves from your birthday party. But more than one feeling at the same time, right next to each other or on top of each other and all mixed up inside you? I never knew that could happen.

But now it happened to me, and it was hard because when you’re happy, you know you want to laugh or smile at least, and when you’re mad or sad, you want to yell or cry, but when you feel all of those together, then you don’t know what you want to do. I walked around the house and kind of went this way and that way, upstairs and downstairs, and it was like the inside of me couldn’t settle down, so the outside of me couldn’t settle down either.

I walked past the family calendar in the kitchen, and it made me stop. It still had all the activities on it from last week. Daddy’s row is at the top, then Mommy’s, then Andy’s, and my row is at the bottom, because it goes by age and I’m the youngest. The names were on the calendar in permanent marker, they don’t get erased when Mommy erases everything on Sundays to write down the activities for the next week. So now Andy’s row was going to be empty, there was going to be an empty row between mine and Mommy’s, but his name would still be there, so he was still part of our family, except not really.

I stared at Andy’s row and what he was supposed to do last week, and he only got to Tuesday (lacrosse) because he died on Wednesday. He didn’t get to do soccer on Thursday. For Friday it said “lacrosse game, 7 p.m.” in his row. I wondered if Andy’s team still had the game without him there on Friday. Maybe they got one of the players who normally stands on the side of the field and he played instead of Andy, and it was like Andy wasn’t even missing and nothing changed. I started to feel mad about that, that they had their game anyway. Although Andy plays really good and scores a lot of goals, so maybe they didn’t win without Andy.

Today was Tuesday and on Tuesdays I have art at school. I love art and I’m a really good artist. I was this close to finishing my portrait of Frida Kahlo, and it was starting to look good, like it’s one of her own portraits. Frida Kahlo was a famous artist from Mexico we learned about in school. She painted a lot of colorful pictures of herself, and in them she has really big eyebrows, they meet in the middle, so it’s like one long eyebrow, and she has a mustache, but she’s a woman. I like to use a lot of different colors, too, when I paint. I was sad I couldn’t go to art today, but I was happy, too, that there was no school. Sad and happy. See? That’s opposites in feelings.