Only Child(37)

I sat crisscross applesauce on Andy’s sleeping bag and didn’t move and didn’t say anything. I just waited. I waited for the sadness blanket to come off my shoulders and for my chest to stop feeling so tight. I wanted to see if it was going to feel different now, if the funeral made it so that Andy would feel more gone than before.

I wondered again if Andy could see us from somewhere at his own funeral, and if he also noticed that people were talking about him like he was a different person—even Daddy didn’t say the real truth about him. Andy probably thought it was funny and now all the bad stuff he did didn’t matter anymore. But I thought that if it was me, I would be afraid that if people didn’t remember me right, my actual self, then it would be like I was really gone from earth forever.

“Andy,” I said in a quiet voice. “It’s me, Zach.” I waited like he was going to answer me back, but of course that wasn’t going to happen. I was hoping that maybe I would know if he could hear me. “I’m in your closet. It’s my hideout now. It’s a secret, no one knows I’m in here. Well, Daddy knows now.” I was telling him things that if he was seeing me right now, he would know already, but I said them anyway. “I bet you’re mad I’m in your room and you can’t do anything about it. You would try to kill me if you were here right now and not dead.”

I thought that that was mean to say to a person who’s dead, but it was saying the truth. Saying the truth to Andy felt good. “Anyway, you were really a jerk to me all the time.” Jerk. That’s a bad word. But Andy said it a lot, so now I was going to say it, too. I heard someone calling my name from downstairs, so I got up fast. Before I left the hideout I turned around and said, “I’m still mad at you about that.”





[ 23 ]


    Death Stare


“I HEARD HE HAD PROBLEMS for a long time and the family didn’t know how to deal with him.” Mrs. Gray, our neighbor, and Miss Carolyn, that’s Mrs. Gray’s daughter, were standing by the sink, washing dishes. Mrs. Gray handed a wet plate to Miss Carolyn and she took it to dry it off and put it away in our kitchen cabinet. From the back they looked exactly the same—same body, same way of moving around, same long hair with curls—you could only tell Mrs. Gray is the mom because her curls are gray and Miss Carolyn’s are brown.

“Yeah, he never graduated, so he’s just been sitting in his parents’ basement for the last couple years doing who knows what on the computer. How could they have not known how sick he was?” Miss Carolyn took another plate from Mrs. Gray, and they both shook their long brown and gray curls no.

“Right?” Mrs. Gray said, “It’s bizarre. I mean, this is Charlie we’re talking about! And Mary! They’re such nice people. Charlie is so great with kids, but his own son…What a horrible thing to happen to a parent.”

“Yes, but, Ma, he shouldn’t have had access to guns. In his mental state? They didn’t know he had all those guns in the house?”

I watched Mrs. Gray and Miss Carolyn clean the dishes, and I listened to them talk about Charlie and his son, the gunman, and they didn’t know I could hear them from where I was sitting on the yellow chair in the family room. The yellow chair was starting to be like my spy chair. People never realized I was sitting there, and I could hear everything that was going on in the kitchen and in the family room.

After the funeral a lot of people came to our house, and they were staying for a long time. There was a lot of whispering and crying everywhere. I sat on the spy chair because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and Daddy said I wasn’t allowed to go back upstairs.

“He bought guns on the Internet, too. Where the hell did he come up with the money for that? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Mrs. Gray said. “I can’t get over the message he posted on Facebook. It gives me goose bumps every time I think about it.”

Miss Carolyn said, “I heard that Mary found out about the message and tried to reach Charlie, but it was too late. Obviously.”

I thought about how it was when Charlie let his son come in the school that day. He has a little TV by his desk, and when someone rings the bell at the front door, he can see who it is on the TV because there’s a camera outside. So probably his son rang the bell and Charlie thought, “Oh, my son is coming to visit me,” and he let him in, and so it was like it was his fault, too, what happened next.

“Let me check if anyone else is done with their plate,” Miss Carolyn said, and she turned around to come in the family room. I didn’t want her to notice me in the spy chair, so I got up fast, and right then I heard the doorbell. I went to open the door and my belly did a super big flip, because standing right there on our porch was Charlie and next to him his wife, and just a minute ago Mrs. Gray and Miss Carolyn were talking about them.

In all of kindergarten and on all the days I was in first grade so far, I saw Charlie every day and he always looked the same. Same glasses, same McKinley shirt with his CHARLIE RANALEZ name tag on it, and same face with the big smile. Charlie always talks a little bit loud and jokes around and right when you start kindergarten he learns all the names, and that’s a lot of names to remember. Every time I walk past his desk by the front door, he yells out: “Hey, Zach, my best buddy! How you doing today?” He calls the other kids “buddy” and “princess,” but not “my best buddy”—that was only for me.