Only Child(29)

Outside of our house it looked like everything else stayed normal and the same. When I looked out of my window, I noticed that real life was still there on our street, and it looked like before. Mr. Johnson was still taking Otto for walks around the neighborhood, and the garbage truck still came, and the mailman still brought the mail in the afternoon at four, always at the exact same time almost. All the people outside our house did the things they always do, and I wondered if they even knew that inside our house everything was changed.

The only thing from the outside that matched the inside of our house was the rain. It rained and rained, and it was like it was never stopping, like Mommy cried and cried and she was never stopping.

All the same stuff was still on TV, and they were still talking about the same stuff in the commercials, like how awesome Froot Loops are, like everything was how it always was and it still mattered. I thought that maybe watching my normal shows would make it so that it didn’t feel like this fake new life anymore, but now the jokes on Phineas and Ferb didn’t sound funny to me anymore, and even when there was a funny one, I didn’t laugh. Because mostly everything inside me felt like the opposite of laughing.

I started to pretend like I was in a bad dream and that I was watching myself walk around and do stuff in the dream, because this was not how I wanted real life to be like. I didn’t want Mommy to always lie in bed and cry. I didn’t want to keep walking in Andy’s room in the mornings to check the top bunk, just in case. Every morning I did that, I couldn’t help it. Right before I looked up I thought, “What if he’s in his bed and it all wasn’t real? What if he was playing a stupid joke on us and he will sit in his bed and laugh at me because I thought he actually died?” Because it was like POW!—like someone put his fist in my stomach every time I saw his top bunk was empty.

I didn’t want to keep peeing on the mattress. Last night was the second time it happened, and that’s two nights in a row of peeing in my sleep. Mommy found out and had to get the wet PJs from the bathtub and the wet sheets off the mattress and wash them. She didn’t say anything about it, but I got embarrassed anyway.

We didn’t go outside. It was like the inside and the outside were different worlds and we had to keep them separate. Even Daddy didn’t go to work, but instead he kept going inside his office and closing the glass door behind him. I didn’t know why he went in there, because it didn’t look like he was doing work. He just sat there and stared at the computer. Or he put his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands.

After breakfast today I looked at the outside world through my window and I wished I could be on that side, where real life was still there. At first I just saw the rain and I watched the circles the raindrops were making in the puddles on the sidewalk. But then I noticed someone was standing on the other side of the road, across from our house.

It was Ricky’s mom. She was wearing only a T-shirt again, and she didn’t even have an umbrella. She stood there in the rain like she didn’t even feel it, but she looked wet all over, and she was staring right at our house. It was weird, she was staring and not moving and not walking across the road to come inside. Then all of a sudden I saw Daddy walking across the street, also no umbrella and getting wet from the rain. He grabbed Ricky’s mom’s arm and turned her and they walked away down the road.

After a little while Daddy came back, but without Ricky’s mom. I went downstairs and asked him where he went, and he looked at me funny and said he had to go for a walk to clear his head.

In all the days after the gunman came—and that was one week ago, I checked on the calendar in the kitchen—more people came to visit and brought more and more food even though the fridge in the kitchen and the one in the basement were full with food already. Today, in the afternoon, Mr. Stanley from my school came. Mr. Stanley’s really nice. He’s only been at McKinley since when I started first grade. I like him better than Mr. Ceccarelli, who was the old assistant principal. He was mean sometimes, and he didn’t give us a lot of stars, even when we were acting good and respectful, so we never got to have PJ day in kindergarten because of him. Mr. Stanley always makes jokes and pretends like he got lost in the hallway and doesn’t know which way to go, because he’s still new, and he gives us stars all the time.

First grade probably has enough stars for PJ day by now, because we need two thousand stars, and the week before the gunman came we had one thousand eight hundred, so by now maybe they have two thousand. Maybe they would have PJ day without me because I was still not going to school, and that wouldn’t be fair, because I earned a ton of the stars for behaving and being respectful.

Mr. Stanley didn’t make any jokes when he came today. But he smiled at me and he bent all the way down to me—Mr. Stanley is very tall, that’s why a lot of kids at school call him Tall Stanley, instead of Flat Stanley—and gave me a hug. I liked it when he hugged me, and normally I don’t like people hugging me. I wanted to ask Mr. Stanley about PJ day, but he went in the living room with Mommy and Daddy, and I wasn’t allowed to go in with them.

Mimi said I should stay in the kitchen with her, but I really wanted to know what Mr. Stanley was talking about to Mommy and Daddy. So I asked Mimi if I could go upstairs, and she said yes, but then I didn’t really go upstairs. I sat down on the stairs instead and I tried to spy on Mr. Stanley and Mommy and Daddy. It was hard to hear because they were talking so quiet and I wished I could go closer, but then I was going to get busted spying, so I tried to turn on my sonic hearing super sense.