“To Ryan?” I ask stupidly.
“Yeah, you know, we’re friends.” When I don’t respond, she adds, “From theater? I do all the sets every year? Okay, maybe I’m the only one who thinks I’m famous.” She laughs lightly and shakes her head.
“I’m on tech,” I say. “So I see Ryan every day now—I guess I’ll see you, too?”
“Oh, yeah, you’ll be totally sick of me by October! I’ve been away with the—”
“Internship stuff,” I finish for her. “Right.”
We just sort of nod at each other a few times, not sure how to keep the conversation going. I want to ask again, find out what exactly Ryan told her. But that feels kind of pathetic, and besides, Ryan wouldn’t have told her anything that bad.
“Oh, we can start closing!” she says, looking up at the clock. “Quick, go lock the door!”
In a flurry of activity we lock up the front and wipe down all the counters. Employee of the Year that she is, Steph already washed the windows, so after ten minutes of work, all that’s left are the tables outside. I change back into my sweater and grab my purse so I can leave right after we’re done with the hoses.
It’s cooler and much quieter when we step out the back door, locking it behind us. I help Steph unwind the hose, but she waves me off when I try to carry it. “Stop, you’ve done enough. And you’re wearing real clothes. Go home!”
I step aside, grateful. But I feel a little lost, too. I wonder if it would be weird to ask Steph for a ride. I know she appreciated my help tonight, but it was also kind of needy, me showing up like that. And then she helped me with Maddie . . . and I just can’t ask for anything else.
So, with a wave, I walk around to the front of the store, heading toward home.
But as I step into the parking lot, I see a silver car. With someone leaning against the hood.
“Rosie,” Alex calls softly.
I hold my breath, waiting to feel . . . I don’t know. Nervous? Annoyed and a little sick, the way I felt with Paul?
But there’s none of that. I just feel happy, really happy, to see a friend.
“Hey,” I say, stepping closer. “What are you doing here?”
He smiles. “I heard you might need a ride home.”
I breathe out, long and smooth. “Yeah,” I say. “But let’s go somewhere else first.”
16
“HAVE YOU BEEN talking to Ryan about me, too?” I ask once we’re in the car.
“Uh, no. Why?” Alex turns on the engine, but doesn’t start driving yet.
“Oh, you said you heard I needed a ride . . .” I feel silly, assuming he’s been talking about me with anyone. Maybe it was just an expression.
“I ran into Maddie on her way out,” he says. His voice sounds totally neutral and for a minute I’m stuck, trying to figure out what that might mean. Was Maddie trying to help me? Is she less mad now?
Or she could’ve been making a mean joke about me not having anything to do tonight, and Alex didn’t realize? It’s hard to picture, but at this point I’m not sure I know Maddie as well as I thought. After all, before Cory came along, I thought that no matter how much I messed up, she’d at least give me a chance to explain.
“So . . .” Alex drums his fingers on the steering wheel and watches me.
“Right, okay, you want to go somewhere?”
“I have until one,” he says. The clock on the dashboard says 10:23.
Too late, I realize I’ve been thinking of places that other Midcity kids go—the old elementary school playground, or the big park in Omaha where people smoke weed sometimes. I don’t want to run into anyone, not after serving all of them stupid ice cream, but I also know that a bunch of places farther away might be tricky. Dave said that half of downtown is still blocked off because of storm damage to the river.
Here I have an actual chance to impress Alex Goode, and I’m completely blowing it.
“Sorry,” I say, after too much silence has filled the car. “I guess maybe the park? I don’t know if it’s just a bunch of fallen trees right now, or what . . .” I trail off, feeling awkward. The park is two blocks away, and I haven’t even seen it since the storm.
Alex nods. “It is,” he says simply. Of course he already knows where the worst damage has been done. He’s probably been cleaning it up all week, in between school and football.
“We could probably just—” I start, but he’s already saying, “I have a place.”
“Oh.” I nod quickly. “Okay.”
He pulls away from the DQ, and I lean back in my seat, watching the dark storefronts go by. There are almost no other cars on the road—it’s late and this is a pretty residential area—but for once the sight of empty streets doesn’t fill my chest with that ache I usually get. That deep-down loneliness that comes from living in a small town a million miles from anything interesting or important. That desperate void that opens between my lungs and can’t be filled.
It can be quieted, though. A new crush, a party hookup. A new guy who thinks I’m hot and tries to make me laugh.
Alex isn’t that guy, and yet, I’m okay. I guess it’s because he’s interesting and important, just as a person. Alex is bigger than this town. He’s not from here; he’s not stuck here. A whole new kind of panic balloons under my lungs, but it’s more like excitement than stir-craziness.
“So I guess you know my sister,” I say as we pass St. John’s.
“Yeah, Ayla, right? She’s a great kid.”
“Not sure she’d agree with the ‘kid’ part,” I say. “She’s gonna be thirteen in a few weeks, you know.”
He smiles. “Junior high was the worst.”
“Ugh, I know. I tried to cut my own bangs.”
Alex snorts a little, glancing over at me like he’s checking to make sure my hair doesn’t still look ridiculous. “And it didn’t work?”
“Are you kidding? My mom literally screamed when she saw me.”
“Oh, man.” He shakes his head sympathetically.
“I’d totally forgotten about that until just now, isn’t that weird? Anyway. Why was it bad for you?” I ask. “Junior high, I mean, not my bangs. I know why those were bad.”
This time he laughs, a real, out-loud laugh, and I get that buzzing feeling I get at school whenever I make a joke that really gets him. Somehow the buzzing feels a lot more intense now, alone with him in a dark car on a dark street in the deep, quiet night.
And it’s more intense with Alex than with other guys. The way he doesn’t flirt with me but still seems to see me, to really listen—it’s not the kind of attention I’m used to.
But I could get used to it.
“Got in a lot of fights, I guess,” he’s saying. “Kind of a troublemaker.”
“You?” It sounds like I’m teasing him, but I’m genuinely surprised.
He shrugs one shoulder, his eyes fixed on the road. “My parents split up when I was eleven, and, I don’t know. I did the standard acting-out thing, I guess.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad,” I say, still trying to imagine Alex having any strong, out-of-control feelings. Or hitting someone. “You seem so . . . level.”
“Do I?” He sounds surprised. “My dad says I act like I’m too good for everyone.”
There’s a painful heat to his words that I don’t know how to respond to. I hold my breath as he turns down an unlit street, and then again onto a dirt road between two soybean fields. For a second I bother to notice that we’re really alone—really out in the middle of nowhere, and not a part of nowhere that I recognize.
The car bumps along the road for a while and then I see a dim light ahead, shining over a garage door with an old basketball hoop barely hanging on to it. Alex drives past the house, so I don’t get a very good look except to see that it’s about as badly kept as the hoop and there’s a truck in the driveway.
A short distance past the house is another dirt road that leads to a small barn. More like a shed, I guess, but big enough for a tractor. Alex p
ulls all the way up to its weather-beaten door and stops the car.
“Is this the part where I find out you’re a serial killer?” I say. My voice jumps around, betraying the fact that I really do feel nervous all of a sudden. Not in an entirely bad way, though. Maybe a little excited.
But it’s not like I’m the most trustworthy person in the dark, either.
Alex laughs again, quietly this time, like he’s afraid of waking someone up. “Sorry,” he says. “I guess it does look pretty creepy, huh? I didn’t even think of that. It’s just—there’s actually a hell of a view on a good night like this. I wanted to show you.”
We look at each other in the dim light of the dashboard readouts.
“Then I want to see it,” I say.
The slamming of our car doors is the only sound besides a few crickets and the wind moving through the grass and crops next to the road. I have to jog to keep up with Alex, who’s hurrying around to the side of the shed-barn. Just before the car’s automatic lights switch off, I see the ladder.
“Oh, come on,” I say. It only feels pitch-dark for a second—there’s still enough light from the city out here that my eyes adjust almost immediately—but I’m still not sure I want to climb an old, metal ladder up to the roof of an old, questionable outbuilding on a cold Friday night.
“You go first,” Alex says. “So if it breaks you’ll fall on me.”
I widen my eyes at him.
“Kidding! Seriously, I come up here all the time. Like, daily. Nightly. It’s fine—you only need to go first because I’m a gentleman.”
The buzzing feeling trickles down my spine as I grab the rusted ladder and lift my foot up onto the bottom rung.
It’s trickier to climb than I thought, and by the time we scramble onto the roof itself, I’m wondering if I should start going to the gym for arm exercises. Plus, the roof is pitched just enough that I have to stay on all fours, scooting out of Alex’s way and then carefully turning myself around to sit. I feel wildly uncoordinated.
But then—then I see that he was right.
We’re not that high up, but the view is perfect. Along the horizon you can see the glow of the city, then another little sparkle where our own suburban downtown area is still lit, the car dealership signs poking their heads into the night sky. But the fields below us are as black and vast as an ocean. Short stands of trees break the horizon line like ships, and the noise of the bugs could be the rhythmic splashing of waves. Or a giant heartbeat, filling the night air.
“Look up,” Alex says, his voice barely a whisper.
We lie back at the same time, and there are the stars.
“They’re so bright,” I breathe.
“This is a good night,” he says. “It’s usually hazy out here, especially in the summer. When my dad first moved back he used to drag me up here every night, and half the time you couldn’t see anything but the Dippers, if you were lucky.”
He doesn’t say it, but I know we’re both thinking how lucky we are to be here right now. You can see the whole universe. The sky is inky black behind the sparkling stars, and though I don’t know any of their names, I stare at them like I’ll never get enough. Like we’ve been reunited after a long, long time apart.
“The Milky Way is over there,” Alex says, pointing. I follow his hand and blink at the white smudge. I feel impossibly small and incredibly perfect, all at the same time.
I let out a long breath. “What you were saying the other day—about, you know, therapy and stuff? We can talk about that, if you want.”
Alex doesn’t say anything for a minute, and I bite my lip. What the hell happened to my ability to flirt, anyway? He’s brought me out to look at the stars, and I’m talking about therapists?
I feel him sitting up next to me, but I don’t move. I know I’ve ruined the moment but I can’t face it yet.
“I’m sorry, I was totally just joking.” My voice is small, whiny.
He stays silent, and I keep staring up, but finally I sit up, too. He’s hunched over his knees. Doesn’t look at me.
Damn it. Maybe he’s flirting, maybe not—either way, I could just be a friend. Right? I could try.
“Listen—I know you probably get sick of talking about what you did, but you don’t even know . . .” I hunch, too, trying to catch his eye. Suddenly it feels very important, to make him see what everyone else sees when they look at him. “Most of us go through every day and make things worse. Like, my entire life is a mess because I’m an idiot, you know? And you did this thing that was so big and brave and helped so many people, it’s just—”
“Rosie, come on. Don’t.” He keeps his elbows propped on his knees, his face in his hands.
“I just think you should know, it’s amazing, the way you help people—the way you helped your whole school—”
“It wasn’t like that.” His voice is angry but not scary—just insistent. “You know, I went to school with Brian for years. Everyone knew he was the fucked-up kid with the shitty house, right? His dad drank and his mom would disappear for weeks, and all of them had all these guns and stuff, like serious weapons, way beyond the normal stuff. Brian was mean to everyone, and we were mean to him right back.”
I stare at him, thinking of all the news stories that showed Brian as a troubled kid with access to a lot of firearms. I never really thought about where he was before that day, though. I never imagined that he’d known Alex. And the other kids. The teachers.
“We played football together when we were kids, and he never had the right gear, you know? So we’d all laugh at him. And then he dropped off the team, and not one of us cared or asked why or even thought about what he might be doing. Everyone basically ignored him—it was just easier.”
Alex throws his head back again, looking up at the stars, but not seeming to see anything but his memories.
“There was this post on the school message board, like, one of those anonymous ones?”
I nod. Midcity had a real-names-optional online board until last year, when all the bullying got so bad they took it down.
“And someone said they were going to shoot themselves in the head. And then someone else said they hoped it was Brian Hinckley.”
I inhale sharply, and below us the crickets pause their song, like even they’re shocked by this.
Alex nods. “It wasn’t me,” he says, as if there’s any way I would’ve thought it was. “But I didn’t say anything back, either. I saw it and I just . . . left it.”
“You didn’t know,” I whisper.
He shrugs. “Maybe not. But my dad gets depressed, you know? And whatever, I’m not a complete asshole. Aren’t you supposed to reach out? Isn’t that what those goddamn assemblies are for? Don’t be a bystander, et cetera?”
I sigh. Those assemblies make it sound so easy, and then everyone goes back to class and tries to survive. The kid who actually tries to talk about whatever antibullying message just got handed down? They’re the biggest joke in school until the next assembly.
“You didn’t know,” I say. “You couldn’t know he’d try to—to kill other people.”
“See, there’s the thing.” Alex lets his arms fall straight out, so his elbows are still on his knees but his palms are open to the night sky. He stares at his hands for a long minute before he goes on. “Brian came to school with some guns. And I had to be there early for a team thing. And I happened to run into him.”
I can feel my heart pounding in my chest. I can’t imagine how scared I would be, to have been where Alex was that day. I’m terrified just hearing about it, so much that I kind of want to jump off the roof and run away through the fields.
But I wait, and Alex keeps talking.
“I heard these weird noises in the sophomore lounge. We had these rooms—you guys only have the senior lounge, but at Sioux Crossing all the classes got them. I don’t know why he was in there. It was always crowded in the mornings, but like I said, it was early. And the weather was really bad, snowing. Anyway. I was jus
t walking down the hall and I heard this click, and it sounded like a gun being loaded.”
Alex pushes a long breath through his lips. I’ve never heard him talk this much. I’ve never seen someone who seemed to need to talk this much.
“And I just went in. I just waltzed into that room, like some kind of goddamn Clint Eastwood shit. And there’s Brian, all suited up, fucking Kevlar vest and the whole thing. Ammo, rifle. He looked like he was joining the army. He looked like he was the army. He’s sitting in this stupid plastic chair, next to a bunch of beanbags, like a goddamn video game character.”
“Jesus,” I breathe.
“I know, right?” Alex looks over at me, and for a second I see something glimmer in his eyes. Regret that he’s telling me all this, maybe. Or maybe just regret.
He shakes his head again, looking back out at the horizon.
“I wasn’t scared, though. I got really pissed. I called him a loser and pathetic and all this shit—I don’t even remember. I said only a real shithead had to hide behind his dad’s guns. And I said he should just get it over with and kill himself and leave the rest of us alone, and everyone would be a lot better off.”
The crickets don’t go silent this time, but everything else does. My heart stops beating, and Alex doesn’t move a muscle, and the world probably stops spinning, too.
And then he takes a gasping breath, like a sob, and lowers his head again. I don’t need him to say anything else. Everyone knows how the story ends. Brian killed himself. Right there in that room, while Alex watched.
Everyone knows it was a miracle.
But until right now, I didn’t even think about how it was a tragedy, too.
I’m already sitting close to him, but I slide across the scratchy roof tiles until my body is pressed to Alex’s, and I put both arms around him. He falls into me, not crying but shaking, trembling. His head rests on my shoulder, and his arms are tucked between us, gripping his sides. Holding it all together as best as he can.
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