We're all Winners, Deep Inside

November 28th: Happily Ever After

Ashley and Ardith had a joint funeral on the fifth of December. That morning I found myself dashing around the house in hysterical tears, screaming and kicking at anything that got in my way.

"April!" I yelled when I tripped over her shoes. She popped her head in from the family room. "Your shoes... Your shoes were in my way..."

April walked in calmly, picked up her shoes, threw them back into the family room, and grabbed me by the shoulders. "You, Colin York, are going to be fine. It’s a funeral, noone’s expecting you to be happy, noone’s expecting you to smile, noone’s expecting you to talk. You’re there to mourn, like everyone else, and to wear black, and to think of all the times you and Ashley and Ardith shared and how they should have lived, and to cry at all the right moments. Because that’s what you do at funerals, and because you’ve always been good at following instructions."

I stared at my sister. "But... But... I don’t want to go anymore."

"Too bad. You’re giving Ms. MacFarley a ride, remember? And even if you weren’t, you’d be going. You’re supposed to be there to support her, you know. She specifically asked that you be there."

"You’re not going to leave me, are you?" I asked worriedly.

"I’m going to be standing right next to you the whole time, crying at the appropriate moments and giving a touching speech right before you." She dropped her hands from my shoulders, took my fingers and squeezed. "It’ll be fine, Colin. Noone’s going to leave and nothing’s going to go wrong." She gave me a quick hug. "I promise."

Over the next few hours we dressed and got ready for the funeral. Alex showed up at the house at twelve seventeen – I knew because I had been staring at the clock in the microwave for nearly five minutes by that point, watching the numbers change –, knocking on the front door. April answered and shooed him into the kitchen, where I handed him a Dr. Pepper and a microwaved mozzarella stick. "Sorry," I said with a sheepish grin. "We don’t have much food around here. Noone’s felt like going shopping."

He tore off a piece with his teeth. "Nah, this is good," he said, still chewing, his words muffled by the bread. "My mom only ever buys peanut butter and wheat bread. Me and my kid brother have wild fun trying to figure out how we can make peanut butter and wheat bread into anything besides a sandwich."

I raised my eyebrows. "Any success?"

"Nah. One time she bought potato chips, though. God, we had fun. Peanut butter and potato chip sandwiches. On wheat bread, nonetheless." He grinned at me, bits of bread and cheese stuck in his teeth, before taking a swig of Dr. Pepper. "Ma’s crazy, sometimes. Says she buys wheat bread because it’s healthy. I don’t know, I think maybe we should get something with vegetables, at least the kid should, he’s still growing and all." He swallowed another bite of the mozzarella stick. "But no, wheat bread and peanut butter it is, every night. If I didn’t love Ma, I swear I’d go on strike."

I grinned at him. "My mother’s a great cook. Guess I’m lucky like that. Lots of vegetables, meat, dairy, fruit, all that good stuff. You and your brother, you should come over for dinner sometime. When we’ve actually gone grocery shopping, maybe." I grabbed a cheese stick of my own off the tray. "Mom loves it when people come over. Noone ever does, anymore. Lily used to bring people over all the time, when she was fourteen, fifteen. We had someone new everyday, didn’t like many of them, but Mom loved it. She lived for it. New people to cook for, talk to, et cetera."

He gave me a thoughtful smile. "Tell me about Lily."

"She was different," I said after a moment. "Really different. You could’ve met a couple million people, she would probably stick out in your mind. Even when we were little, just little kids, she was always the one with the weird ideas that had the adults raising their eyebrows. We had lemonade stands in the snow and built forts out of pillows and had the weirdest games, and she had the meanest, weirdest pillow fights ever. But really, she was just... She was Lily, and I loved her, everyone loved her, except maybe herself. But I think even that was starting to change, in the last days. I think she was starting to feel better about herself, when she came home and came clean with the family."

"Yeah," he said softly. "The way people talk about her, she sounds... I don’t know. Sad. Just really sad."

I stared at him for a long moment. "It’s strange," I said finally, "that you’ve never met her and you can say exactly what I’ve been trying to put into words for months now."

April came in at that moment, grabbed a soda from the fridge, and raised her eyebrows.

"Jackie’s coming in a second. You two ready to go?"

We both nodded. "Well then," April said, taking a deep breath, "let’s go."


We pulled up in front of the graveyard a few minutes later. Jackie didn’t have a lot of money to throw around, so she’d opted out on the funeral procession or a church service. The burial, she said, was going to have to do.

It was casual. Casual and beautiful are about the only words to describe it. Two small caskets sat next to each other, just behind the podium, reminding us why we were there. It was a small group – mostly family of the MacFarleys, and then April, Alex, and me. Anyone who wanted to was invited to speak. Jackie had said before that she wanted both April and I to say a couple words, so when April grabbed my hand and tugged me to my feet and up the microphone, I was expectant but still nervous.

April went first. "Life," she said carefully, "is more than the beating of a heart. A heart can beat, and we can still not fully live. A person can walk, talk, breathe... And still not live.

"Some of us walk through life saying, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’. We have doubts, uncertainties, that keep us from making the most of our days. We get cold feet, sweaty palms, or perhaps we have other plans, other things to do that are more important, more pressing. Maybe that business contract is more important than calling up someone and making amends. Maybe that history report means more at the moment than telling your father you love him, or taking that hike in the mountains with your little sister that you’ve been promising her since you were sixteen, and never got around to.

"You get around to having lots of plans, things you’re going to do tomorrow, things you could have done today but... Something got in the way. You’re too lazy, or tired, or frightened. You think you’ll have years more, you’re not due to die yet. You’re only eighteen, twenty-seven, thirty-four. You’re too young to die, right? Let me tell you a secret. Eight is too young to die. But look at this casket. Look at it. It holds an eight year old girl who never got to live out her dreams. Noone is too young to die. Noone is immune, or protected, or looked over. The people who have the most to give are sometimes the first to go.

"In life, you’re going to run into lots of people who have regrets. Things they wish they’d done, wish they’d said. You’re going to run into a lot of people who wasted away their life putting things off till tomorrow, like tomorrow was a guarantee. It’s not a guarantee. If you’d asked Ashley or Ardith if they were ready to die that morning, they wouldn’t have said yes. There were a hundred more things they probably wanted to do, a hundred things they hadn’t had the chance to do. And now they’ll never have the chance.

"Maybe at funerals you’re supposed to give speeches about the departed, and how wonderful they were. But I didn’t know either of them that well. That’s my brother’s job. What I do know about is regrets. When you’ve just lost a sister, eighteen years old, you learn a lot about regrets. All the times you could have made up with her for those stupid fights. That hike in the woods I mentioned that I put off for six years, that we’ll never have now. I know a lot about regrets. If Ashley and Ardith were here, they’d probably be telling you a lot about regrets too. How they wish they could have told their mother they loved her one more time. How they wish they could just have made it long enough to do whatever it is they most dreamed of doing.

"Don’t have regrets. Don’t live your life thinking you’ll have another day. Don’t take tomorrow for granted. You’re never too young to die, as I said already... But don’t forget, either, that you’re never to old to learn to live."

There were a lot of surprised glances going around. I don’t think anyone was quite sure how to acknowledge the walking inspirational speech that my sister had become. I think it was Jackie who was the first to clap. Soon there was more applause, and then a couple more people joined in, and soon the whole small gathering was clapping. I caught April’s eye. She wiped it with one sleeve of her black dress and shot me a tiny grin. "Someday soon, Colin, you and I are going on Lily’s walk. In her memory, if you want."

I nodded, stepping up to the podium. "That... That would be great. Let’s go tomorrow."

She smiled. "Let’s go today."

She sat down next to Alex and smiled at me. I looked over at Jackie. She was crying, which I had expected, but she didn’t look too bad. I smiled at her, and she managed a weak smile back.
"Ashes," I began. "That’s what I called her, in the last days. Of course, for us, every days were the last days. I only knew her for two weeks. Not very long, considering. But sixteen years isn’t very long, either. Too short to live. Too soon to die. But I think it’s strange, that I called her Ashes. You know that bible saying? ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ It’s true. We all return to the earth. We all return to what made us, and it gives us new growth, new life. But in this case, it meant something extra. Because... Ashes, or the girl I called Ashes, is now a cremated body in an urn. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What we once were, we forever will be."

I took a deep breath. "But maybe that’s not how I’m supposed to talk, giving this speech. I don’t really know – I’ve never spoken at a funeral. Maybe I’m supposed to talk about how amazing they were, but I hardly knew them. I only saw Ardith a handful of times, and Ashley and I only knew each other for two weeks. Maybe I’m supposed to say I wish they’d lived longer, which is true, I do. But... There’s more to it than that. I can say what I wish, or what I would’ve wanted, what they could’ve been or what they were. But those are things that I either can’t change or don’t know anything about. The only thing I can tell you about is... Hope. I can tell you a lot about hope."

I was crying, but I kept talking anyway. I had to. "When you see two young people, young people with a lot to offer and a lot to give, die like this... It’s too much for a lot of people. If innocent kids, kids who haven’t done anything wrong, aren’t spared from death... What’s the point? What are we doing here, when eight year old kids are dying senselessly? What are we doing here, waiting to be next? And we get caught up in those thoughts, caught up in that way of thinking, that way of seeing things. You can think like that for a long time, before you finally give up. But it’s inevitable, if you do. Think like that, I mean. If you do think like that." I was tripping over my words, sobbing, but I kept going. "You can waste away, dying inside while everyone around you is just fine. You can just die away. Or you can step back, and look at things, and you can do what you can to fix them. And a lot of the time... A lot of the time, you can’t change the way things are. You can only change how you yourself are reacting to them, how you yourself are seeing things. That’s where hope comes in. That’s where hope is important. Sometimes, it’s the only way to change things. Sometimes, it’s the only way to get through those really tough times. Sometimes it’s the only thing left. But if you have it, you hold onto it, and it won’t leave you. I’ve figured that out, these past days. Hope is one of those things that doesn’t die, doesn’t abandon you, and doesn’t expire. As long as you have the energy to hope... You have the energy to be."

I stepped down from the podium and went to my seat. The applause came more quickly, that time. Applause at a funeral. I’d never been to one, or at least not in years and years, so I wasn’t sure if that was normal. I didn’t really care, to tell the truth, but I still wondered. It kept my mind off everything else.

The rest of the ceremony flew by. They lowered the caskets into the ground at some point, I remember hardly being able to see it through the flood of tears. But with April on one side and Alex on the other, I was alright. Or I was going to be. I hoped I would be.


A few hours after we got home, I knocked on Jackie’s door. She had moved into April’s room, in the end, and April was sleeping in Lily’s, arguing that she didn’t want Jackie to have to sleep in a dead girl’s room. But I knew April, and I knew that wasn’t her real reason. She just didn’t want someone else owning part of Lily’s memory. She wanted it to stay in the family, for the time being, anyway.

"Come in," Jackie said through the door, her voice muffled.

I opened the door and walked in. "I brought you something," I said quietly, digging in my pocket. I brought out the locket on its new gold chain.

She took a deep, wobbling breath. "Thank you, Colin," she said finally. "Thank you."

I walked over and dropped it into her hand. "Oh, I put something extra inside."

Jackie pried the locket open with her thumb and gasped. "Colin!"

"I found it at your house," I said slowly. "I was going to keep it but... It’s yours. She was yours, more than mine."

She looked up at me, rubbing the hair delicately with her index finger. "Colin, she’s not anyone’s, don’t you see?" She sighed. "Ashley can’t be owned, or bought, or possessed. Peter tried, and look where it got him. She’s too free a spirit for that. She belongs to everyone, but more than anything to herself. She was her own person, Colin. Not mine. Not yours."

"Maybe," I said softly. "Maybe. But I still want you to have the hair."

"No," she said quietly. "No. The hair is yours. You found it. You want it, I can see it in your eyes. I had sixteen years with Ashley. Sixteen years of memories. I have things that were in my purse that morning that she gave to me, made for me. I have pictures from my family’s houses, pictures from their albums and their collections. I have more pieces of Ashley than I could ever fit in this little locket. You don’t have anything. You should keep the hair, really."
I smiled at her. "But... I got a kiss. That was all I ever wanted."

She smiled back. "Let’s let it go, then. Ashley always wanted to fly." She walked over to the window and opened it slowly, popped out the screen, and reached back a hand. I placed the lock of hair in her palm, and she held her closed fist out the window. "Wait for the wind..." she whispered. It was a moment before she let go.

We watched the dark gold piece of hair float off into the evening, and I said a silent farewell to Ashes.


April and I drove out into the mountains that next day, taking only a picnic lunch, water bottles, and a cell phone to keep us company. We found a nature trail she’d heard about from one of her friends and started up it, holding onto the shoulder straps of our lightly packed backpacks and talking.

"Lily and I were planning to do this for years, but we never got around to it. I came up here once, when I was fifteen, with my friend Rochelle and her older brother. Beautiful place. There’s one spot where you can sit on these flat rocks, dangle your feet just above the water... Gorgeous. I’ve always wanted to go back."

I grinned at her. "So let’s go."

She was right. It was beautiful, just beautiful. We sat on a flat, dry rock, the packs in between us, fishing out sandwiches and chips and drinks. "This is good," I said between swigs of Dr. Pepper. "I’m glad I got to come. I wish Lily were here."

"She is," April smiled, taking a bite of her sandwich. "She wouldn’t miss this for the world."
And somehow, though every practical part of me said that it couldn’t be true, I agreed.


Alex came over two nights later for dinner, the night my family finally went to the store. Mom was making spaghetti, one of her best recipes, and garlic bread. Alex sounded surprised when I told him. "People actually eat things like that? Are you sure you’re not having peanut butter sandwiches, and just trying to trick me?"

"Pretty sure," I told him," but if you want, you can double check. I’ll gladly call Mom to the phone."

"Nah, I’m good. Joey’s going over to a friend’s house tonight, so I was all on my own anyway. Ma’s never home for dinner."

"We eat around six, but if you want to see the table setting ceremony and be an active taster of Mom’s bolognese, come at five."

So Alex showed up at five, at the back door this time – I’d coached him over the phone – and the two of us were immediately recruited to set the table. "Knives, forks, spoons, salad forks – don’t give me that look, Colin, I know we’re not having salad and I don’t care – plates, and bread plates. Oh, and napkins. Don’t forget the napkins!"

Alex and I obliged, shooting each other looks across the table. I set out the salad forks with a grin, putting them on the right of the regular forks, instead of the left. It was the kind of thing that would drive Mom crazy. Just knowing that it would actually work, that she would actually notice, was enough to tell me that our family was slowly but surely getting better. Mom’s temper tantrums over little things had always been a part of the family.

We both tasted the sauce before we went up to my room. I thought it was perfect, but Alex suggested more basil. I raised my eyebrows. "Dad’s a chef," he explained on our way up the stairs. "I only see him once a year, but he’s taught me herbs. One week a year, and the man uses the time to teach me about seasoning elements. Go figure."

I grinned and held open the door to my room. "Well, there are worse things to converse with your father about."

We bantered on like that for forty minutes, and before we knew it Mom was calling us down for dinner. Alex almost sat in Lily’s old chair, but April glared pointedly at the chair next to me. "Sorry," she said, "but noone sits there. Not yet, anyway."

The six of us squeezed around the table, a table meant for five, with seven chairs, and said a quick prayer over the food. I stared at the empty chair across from me and felt a pang. Noone jumped for the garlic bread as soon as prayer was over. Noone glared at April, kicked me under the table, or offered to save the leftovers to make bird feeders – as though spaghetti bird feeders would really be an attraction. Lily was gone, really and truly gone, and even with two extra people there it was impossible to fill the space.

We ate in silence for a moment, but soon conversation struck up. Alex seemed to interest my family, especially Dad. "So what do the people in your family work at?"

"Dad’s a chef, out in California. I don’t see him often," Alex said with a tiny smile. "My mother, she works for an insurance company here in town. And me, I get construction jobs over the summer, help pay for football gear and trips and stuff for the year." He took a bite of bread. "Hard work, construction," he added.

My father nodded. "Any brothers or sisters?"

"A brother. Joey. Good kid. Real wild and mischievous. He’s only twelve, though. He’s got time to straighten out. He makes everybody laugh. He’s good at that." Alex smiled.

My father smiled back. "Good, good. Invite him over sometime. We’re always willing to have company."

And we were, I thought, looking around at my family. Without Lily, with Lily, it didn’t matter. We liked people, other people, our own people, people we didn’t know and people we knew better than we knew ourselves. Some families had a knack for communication, or animals, or running some big business with just the four or five of them, parents and kids. Us, we had a way with people, with making them feel comfortable, making them feel like they were are own. That was what Jackie was doing there. That was what Alex was doing there. That’s what Lily’s endless string of friends had done there, years before. Because when you reached out to people, that’s when you found yourself. And if there was anything my family needed, right then, it was to find ourselves.

After dinner, we cleared away the plates and unused salad forks, dirty silverware and crumpled paper napkins. "I like this family," Alex confided as I set a stack of plates on the counter next to April, who was already elbow-deep in dish soap. "You guys have something special. You’re lucky."

"Yeah, I guess." But deep down, I wasn’t guessing. I knew that. I was lucky. I was damn lucky. I had a family that would do anything for me, that would do anything for each other. I had a family that would stay together for a long time, through death and pain and lies and hardships. I had a family that could do the impossible, live through the messes and the rough spots, and still come out with our hearts intact, our heads unharmed, and our arms outstretched. "I guess we are."


I started going back to soccer that week, and April started looking for an apartment. It was a week of changes for all of us, I think. Reconstruction started on the MacFarley house, and within a few days it was already beginning to take shape. Jackie walked over every day and helped build it. She was starting to gain some weight, which made me smile. She looked better when she wasn’t so thin. I wish Ashley could have seen her.

We started planning for Lily’s funeral that week. It was going to be what my mother called a "real funeral", which pretty much meant that it was going to be everything that Ashley and Ardith’s "services" hadn’t been. Mom was adamant about the church part, at least. It would be open casket. I wasn’t sure how to react to that, but I tried to put it out of my mind.

So when the phone rang one December night, when Mom and I were washing dishes and April was sleeping on the couch in the living room, and Headstone Engravers Services asked to talk to my mother, I wasn’t surprised. I just handed over the phone to Mom and leaned against the cabinets, wiping my soapy hands with a dishtowel.

My mother listened for a moment, then turned to me, her hand over the mouthpiece. "They want to know..." she paused, took a deep, shaky breath, and sighed. "They want to have a name for the baby."

I thought for a long moment, thinking. How was I supposed to be expected to do this? How could I name this child, my sister’s child, my deceased sister’s child, the child I’d never met and she had never wanted? The child who had torn my family into pieces, who had in the end meant Lily’s death?

And then again, how could I possibly pass the honor to someone else?

I stared at April, asleep in the living room. I stared at my mother, her eyes teary and bright. I stared at my shoes, which looked decidedly happier than my face in its reflection on the microwave door. And then it was back to April, with her closed eyes and expressionless face. April, my surviving sister. The one who had found the point, the good, in Lily’s death. And then I knew it; I knew what to name the baby.

"Hope," I said quietly. "Tell them to name her Hope."

November 26th: Conscience, Remorse, and Grief as an Independent Beast

"I thought you’d turn up," Ms. MacFarley said weakly. "I thought you would." She was sitting on a pile of wood in the corner of her old house. "The neighbors are going to help me build a new one, right here... Isn’t that nice of them?" she remarked absentmindedly, pulling at the chain around her neck.

"I wanted to talk to you about something, ma’am," I said quietly, walking slowly toward her. "I think I know who set your fire, and I think I know why. But I don’t want to do anything about it without your permission." I paused, took a deep breath, and pressed onward. "I want nothing more than to see this guy put to justice. But if you want to let sleeping dogs lie, I won’t go against your wishes."

Yank. "Who is it, Colin?" Yank. Yank. Yank.

"I can’t say for sure, understand, it’s just a guess."

Yank. "I know. But who do you think it is?"

"Peter Blackman."

She sat there for a moment, her eyes fixed on me, and then picked up a piece of wood and threw it. "I knew it would be," she said, sobbing. "I knew... I knew..." Yank. Yank. Yank.

"I can’t prove anything, ma’am, understand? I can’t prove anything."

Yank. Yank. "I know you can’t. But I believe you. I don’t want to believe you. I want to believe it was an accident. But it wasn’t, was it?" She picked up another board and tossed it a weak five feet. "I knew that, all along..." Yank. The chain snapped in her hands, and she let loose a long, low moan.

"My sister has some chains, ma’am. I can get you another one, and put the locket on it," I suggested weakly. I didn’t know what to do, but I wasn’t going to give up on her.

She nodded. "That would be nice." I walked a few steps closer and let her drop the locket into my hand. She buried her face in her palms, shaking. I sat down next to her, pulling my legs to my chest.

"My family says you’re welcome to stay at our place, if you like. Until the house is rebuilt. We’ve got an empty room, now that my sister –" My voice caught. "Now that my sister’s gone."

She looked up, her eyes wide and bright and tired. "That would be lovely," she mumbled. "Lovely..."

"I’m sorry about your girls," I said after a moment, stretching my legs out in front of me. The denim of my jeans was already covered in ash.

She sniffed. "I am, too." She sighed. "You can do whatever you like with Peter. I won’t get in your way. But I don’t want anything to happen to him. I don’t want trouble... Maybe an apology."

I rose, patting her on the shoulder. "I’ll try, ma’am. Let me drive you to my house, okay? I’m sure we’ll find some clothes you can wear." She was so thin, after all. And short. Lily’s heroin clothes would fit. I assumed they were around the house somewhere, sent home from detox. "It’s going to be okay."

"Call me Jackie," she said quietly, and stood up slowly. "Thank you, Colin. You’re a good boy."

I took her hand as we walked down to the car, where April sat waiting. I crawled into the back seat and Jackie took the front, pulling on the seatbelt with trembling hands.

We drove the few short blocks home in silence. When we parked in front of the house, noone moved for a moment. "Well," April said finally, smiling at me in the rearview mirror, "welcome home."


April was the one to ring the doorbell at Peter’s house. I’d warned her that his father wasn’t part of my fan club, and she’d laughed. "We’ll find a way to get in, Col. Don’t worry." But I was worrying, anyway, standing on Peter’s front porch. I didn’t think I could possibly not worry, when I was about to barge in and accuse a guy who was obviously capable of hurting me – he’d proved that enough times – of murder.

"I told you not to come back," Jonah greeted us.

April shot him a charming smile. "I’m sorry. My brother and I are here about a school project he and your son are doing together. They wanted to interview me about growing up here in Hill Crest, and how it’s affected my view on the political world," she explained. I gave her a surprised glance. I’d never seen April lie through her teeth before, and I had to admit, she was good at it.

"Go upstairs then," he growled. "But I don’t want any noise, got it?"

We nodded and proceeded past him up the stairs. I opened the door to Peter’s room. He sat in the middle of the floor, staring at a bunch of fanned out photographs.

"Thanks for knocking," he muttered. "I guess you’re here to talk about Ashley."

April gave him a sticky-sweet smile. "Yeah, we are." She sat down on the floor across from him, and I followed suit. She stared at him for a moment, then looked at the photos on the floor. They were beautiful, black and white shots of forests and animals, but mostly of a girl with greasy-looking blonde hair and bruises on her face and arms.

"We used to go out in the woods and take photographs. Hers are the nature shots. I only took pictures of her." He said it without looking at either of us, his eyes flickering from one photograph to the next. "Twisted love, that one," he laughed quietly.

"Why did you set the fire?" my sister asked softly.

I glanced at Pete. I was expecting him to deny it, to scream at her to get out of his room, to tell her that she was wrong. But he didn’t do any of that. "I wanted to make her understand that I was serious. That without her, I would die..."

"But she was the one who died," I broke in.

He gave me a look, his eyes glassy and his face tired. "I know. That wasn’t supposed to happen."
April lowered her head and stared at her hands. "Peter, you have to tell her mother."

"I can’t!" he said quickly. Then he sighed. "She hates me. She’s always hated me. For years now. She’ll put me in jail. She’ll... She’ll..."

"She says she doesn’t want to cause any trouble," I spoke up. "She says all she wants is an apology."

He glared at me. "Of course that’s what she says. But that’s not what she’ll say if I tell her. Then she’ll scream and rant and rave and have me arrested."

"If she does, we’ll say she’s making it up," April said quietly. "It’s us against her. But if you don’t, it’s us against you. And who’ll believe you? Witnesses know you hit Ashley, Pete. You have no choice."

A single tear slipped down his cheek. "Stop."

"You have to," she repeated. "There’s no way around it. You’ve got to tell her mother. You have to apologize. You killed her daughters, Pete. You killed her daughters. You owe her an apology for that. You know you do."

"Stop your fucking preaching!" he squealed suddenly. He took a few deep breaths. "I don’t need to hear this," he said shakily. "Not from you, not from Colin, not from my father, not from myself. I don’t need to hear this." He picked up a photograph of Ashley from the ground. "She kept messing with my head, see? That bitch was always messing with my head." He ripped the picture cleanly down the middle, then doubled the halves up and tore them again, and again, and again until they were just tiny pieces of black and white confetti on the floor.

April grabbed one of his hands. "All she wants is an apology. You took her only family from her, and all she’s asking you for is an apology."

Peter shot her a look of disgust, of hatred, but there was something more, too. Respect? Awe? Fear? He felt something for my sister that I didn’t think he was used to. Something he’d never felt around Ashes and certainly never around me. "Fine," he spat at her. "Fine, I’ll apologize. But remember that no matter how many times you make me say it, you can’t make me mean it."

"No," April said, "I can’t."

They sat and stared at each other for a long time. I stayed on the side, not daring to interject myself into their silent battle. There was something between the two of them that scared me, a competition and a fierceness. It was something I had never seen in April, ever, and something that I had a feeling she very rarely saw in herself.

"Let’s go, then," Pete said finally, sighing, and sweeping his hands over the photos so that, in one quick movement, they were neatly stacked.

April rose to her feet, grabbed my hand, and pulled me up. "Let’s go," she said quietly, and offered Pete a hand.


"I didn’t mean to kill her," Peter said quietly, staring out the window over Jackie’s head. "I meant to scare her, to show her I meant business. To show her that... That I really wanted to elope with her, but I could hurt her if she didn’t... Didn’t do the right things, act the right way. I wanted to show her... I don’t know what I wanted to show her, dammit. But something went wrong, whatever it was." He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his t-shirt. "Your daughters weren’t supposed to get hurt, miss, they were supposed to smell the smoke, get out of there... Live..."

He looked at the pale, willowy woman sitting in the chair across from him. Her eyes were red and weeping, her lip quivering. "But why did you... Why did you have to show her? Why couldn’t you tell her? Why couldn’t you just tell her?"

"I don’t know words. Words don’t work, they don’t... People get angry, people get hurt, words don’t say that. There aren’t words around for that, to say those kind of things, to say, ‘I love you but I want to kill you and I want you to be with me forever or I don’t want you to be at all’. They don’t make Hallmark cards like that, they don’t make words like that, they don’t make flowers or chocolates or pictures or books or anything to say that with."

Jackie looked down at her hands, her fingers shaking. "My daughter thought you were the greatest guy around. The day she met you, she came home beaming ear to ear, big smile, big laughs, lots of energy, and she said, ‘Mom, I’ve met the greatest guy, I think I’m in love and I’ve hardly talked to him once’. And the first time you fought, she wouldn’t eat or talk to anyone for three days, she holed up in her room listening to breakup songs and used ten boxes of Kleenex. And later, that girl would make any excuses for why you were the way you were, why you were jealous and why you hit her and why you screamed like you did. Football, anger, inferiority complex...." She sighed. "Someone should have seen it. I should have seen it. Colin, he should’ve seen it. This was coming, all along. Looking back, it’s all I can see."

I shot her a look. "How can you say that?" I broke in. "How could you say that I should have seen it? I knew her for two weeks!" April put a hand on my shoulder silently, warning me, but I was angry. "You can’t blame me, not for this one. Lily, yeah, blame me for Lily, blame me for her, don’t blame me for Ashley. Ashley’s not my fault! Look at him!" I pointed at Peter, defiant of April’s shocked attempts to shush me, staring fiercely into Jackie’s eyes. "That’s the guy to blame! It’s not my fault, it’s not... I swear it’s not..."

April took a step toward me and wrapped me in her arms. "It’s not," she whispered in my ear, softly. "And it’s not your fault about Lily, either."

Peter sighed. "Listen, I don’t want this to be about whose fault it is, because Colin’s right, it’s my fault, all my fault, and I shouldn’t... I shouldn’t be asking anyone else to take the blame. I killed your daughters, Ms. MacFarley. I killed them, whether I meant to or not, whether I set out to do it or not. And... It’s not fair of me to expect you... To let me off with an apology. But I’ll give you one, ma’am. I’m sorry, very sorry, for what I’ve done to your family, to you. I’m sorry that your daughters are dead. I’m sorry that I thought... That I thought I could play around with life, when it’s not something for me... For me to play around with." He took a deep, shaky breath. "I’m going to turn myself in, right now. Maybe... Maybe it’ll be the best thing. Maybe if I go to jail, or death row, or wherever, I can at least... I can feel like she didn’t die for nothing. Cos if she hadn’t, I might’ve done it again... And again... And... I can’t think about that. I can’t." He was crying, snot dripping from his nose, his eyes squeezed shut. "I just wish your daughter didn’t have to be the one that made me learn. I wish it could have been anyone... Anyone but Ash..."

"You don’t have to," Jackie said softly.

"Of course I don’t have to," Pete replied quickly. "But I said to Colin and April back at my house that I didn’t have to mean it when I apologized, either. But I did. And... I don’t have to turn myself in. But I will."

Jackie gave him a long, tired look. "You can play the hero for a long time, if that’s what you’re doing," she said warily. "But if you really mean it, if you’re doing this because you honestly feel bad... Then I’m proud of you. Takes a lot of courage to own up to shit." She sighed. "Lot of courage."

"Yeah," Peter said quietly, "it does."


It was in the papers the next morning. Teenage Arsonist Turns Himself In To Police. It didn’t make the front page, but it didn’t get buried too far back, either. He would be tried as an adult, of course. He would’ve asked for it, even if he weren’t old enough. But I couldn’t help but think that he wasn’t an adult. None of us were. We were just kids, messing around, falling in love and out of love, doing stupid things that only something as weird as love could make us do. We were kids, and we were crazy, and we were lonely but we were going to be okay, if we had the chance to be okay.

I hoped for that, for Pete. I hoped he was going to be okay. Sure, he’d probably get the death sentence. And even if he didn’t, prison was going to be bad. But he was different, that last night. He wasn’t cocky, or indignant, or bitter. He was just a guy, a scared guy with a secret. A lot like me.

I went back to school the following Monday. Alex met me at my locker with a big grin and a hug. "What was that for?" I asked, once he’d pulled away.

"For actually showing up. Thought you were dead, man. Thought Pete had gotten the best of you."

I gave him a tiny smile. "It’d take more than Pete to kill this," I said, thumping my chest in the ancient and barbaric gesture of machismo.

Alex grinned, then gave me a sympathetic look. "So I hear it’s been a tough couple weeks. Your sister and Ashley, both at the same time."

"Yeah," I said slowly, quietly. "I knew one for two weeks and one for eighteen years, but they both hurt about the same. Is that supposed to happen?"

Alex shrugged. "I don’t think you can tell grief how it’s supposed to come out. It’s kind of an independent beast."

"An independent beast," I murmured. "I like that."

"Yeah," Alex cracked, grinning. "Me too."

November 25th: In Which Colin Touchingly Converses with his Family

My mother met me at the door with a lukewarm cup of coffee and a hug. I wrapped my arms around her, squeezing her tightly, and sobbed. "Everyone’s dying," I rasped in her ear, and then I couldn’t say anything more.

She tightened her grip. "No," she whispered, "not everyone. Not you."

"I begged for it, this morning." My declaration sent her into tears, and she pulled away, stepping into a corner of the kitchen, facing the cabinets, away from me. "I didn’t mean it, though," I added quickly – even though I had.

She turned to look at me. "This isn’t fair," she whispered.

"I know."

"My daughter’s dead, Colin," she said after a moment, chewing on her lip. "My baby girl is dead." She looked at her fingertips, at the nails chewed to the point of bleeding, at the raw, pink skin. "Noone should ever have to feel this. It’s not fair. Eighteen isn’t old enough to die. She was supposed to get married, have children, be wildly successful and happy..." She gave a tiny, sad laugh. "Oh, I suppose I didn’t really care about the husband, or the kids. I wanted the successful and happy. The part I never got to have."

I shot her a look, leaning against the wall. "Mom, stop it."

"Oh, why should I? What’s the good? I’ve got one child dead and another who wants to die. You might as well know that I hate this godforsaken house, this godforsaken town, this godforsaken dead dream in the making." She picked up a coffee mug and threw it at the wall. "Ask your father if I ever wanted to move here. Ask your father if I ever wanted to be a stay at home mother. Ask your father if –"

"Stop it!" I screamed. "Stop it, stop it, stop it!" She stared at me, her eyes bright. "You’re only saying that because of Lily, because you think if you hadn’t done everything you’d done up till now maybe she wouldn’t be dead. Well fuck you, Mom, fuck you thinking you know everything, thinking this is all about you and everything you’ve done! It’s not! It’s about Lily being stupid and Lily being brave and finally Lily being dead, and I don’t see your name mentioned in there anywhere, so it obviously can’t be your fault."

We stared at each other for a long time. It was frightening to see my mother, really see her, after glancing past her for all these years. She’d always been the sidekick of the family, the one we went to for advice and help and hugs after everyone else had been exhausted as a comfort. I think she was used to being part of the background, because she seemed unnaturally good at fading into the cabinets as she stood there, eyes shining, biting her lip till it turned white around her teeth and blood red everywhere else. I don’t think she was used to being screamed at, told off, or scolded. I don’t think I was used to screaming at, telling off, or scolding people either, which made the situation doubly awkward and difficult.

"Mom," I said finally, "she didn’t do this just to break your heart."

We stared again. I wondered what I looked like in her eyes. The grieving son with emotional problems, who couldn’t hold in his anger? The naive little boy who didn’t know what he was saying when he talked about love, or pain, or heartache? Colin York, the child she’d thought was hers, thought was a good person, until mourning brought out his worst? Or did she see a reincarnation of her daughter standing there, yelling at her, as noone had yelled at her since Lily was sixteen and about to be sent off to the middle of nowhere?

"I’m not Lily," I said suddenly.

My mother’s eyes grew wide. "I know, sweetie," she said after a moment, laughing a little – the saddest kind of laugh, the kind inserted into a conversation like a punctuation mark, trying to fool the other person into thinking that things are just fine.

"I’m not Lily," I repeated.

"I never said you were," she responded, without the laugh this time. "I know you’re not your sister."

"Mom," I said again, "I’m not Lily."

"Stop saying that!" she exclaimed, pulling out a strand of her hair.

I stared at her earnestly, with her bright, teary eyes and her wobbling jaw. "I’m not Lily."

"How am I supposed to know that?" she asked, her voice strained, and turned away.

I left the room in silence, my heart and feet dragging on the ground.


I knocked on Lily’s closed door. "Daddy?" I hadn’t called him that in forever, but somehow it fit.
"Come on in," he said quietly, in a voice barely audible through the door.

I pulled it open and stepped in, shutting the door behind me. My father was standing in front of Lily’s mirror, staring at himself in the glass. "I never liked this color," he said, sighing, picking at the paint on the wall next to him. "It’s dingy. We should’ve done a couple shades lighter, something... She wanted it black for awhile. We should’ve done it black."

"Painting her room black wouldn’t have kept her here," I said, sitting down on the bed. My father glanced at me, heaved a sigh, and perched on the empty dresser, his eyes closed.

We were like that for a long time, just sitting there in silence. It was a good five minutes before he broke the spell. "Do you know what it’s like to pick up the phone, and hear them say it’s the hospital, concerning your daughter, Lily? And what it’s like to wonder why she isn’t calling herself, what went wrong, what’s happened, but trying to keep your cool because maybe everything’s fine, and she’s just groggy, and they wanted to call you instead?" He took a shaky breath. "Do you know what it’s like to hear, ‘I’m sorry sir, your daughter just passed away under side effects from the anesthesia’, and to have to pass the phone on to your baby daughter so she can talk to the goddamned hospital about her sister, because you can’t speak when you can’t even breathe? And to think to yourself, ‘She’s been doing heroin for two years, she’s survived being a prostitute and a junkie for so long now, she’s survived being pregnant with a heroin addicted child, she’s survived the disappointment of her family and the abandonment of her friends, she’s survived a tragic miscarriage, and in the end, anesthesia, something that hundreds of thousands of people are put under the influence of every year, is what killed her’. And you think to yourself, ‘There has to be a mistake, because my daughter’s too stupidly courageous to die from some heart attack brought on by the damned hospital’s general anesthesia’. But really, underneath all that, the only thought you’re having is, ‘My daughter is dead. My daughter is dead. My daughter is dead.’ Do you know what that’s like, Colin?"

"No," I said quietly, looking at him. His eyes were still closed, his face wrinkled and tired. He looked so old right then, my father. "I don’t know. I don’t ever want to know."

"Noone does, Colin," he told me, his eyes opening. They were bright blue, deep blue at that, and they were bright and glassy with tears. "Noone wants to know what it’s like to die inside. But I know, now. I know." He sighed. "The first time I held her, eighteen years ago, she was lying there just perfectly peaceful, like she was completely above all the excitement of being born. And I smiled and laughed at her, and she stared up at me with these big eyes, and I just broke down and cried. Because she looked so happy, and alive, and I knew she would be the one to change the world." He closed his eyes again. "In the end, the only world she changed was ours."
"You say that like it wasn’t enough," I whispered. His eyes opened, and he looked at me for a long moment. His face drooped wearily, like the very effort of existing was too much for him.

"I don’t know what I’m saying," he said finally. We sat in silence for another few minutes before I rose to leave.

Just as I was about to shut the door he said something that stopped me in my tracks. "I love you, Colin. I don’t know whether fathers are supposed to tell their sons that. But I don’t really care."

I turned and looked at him, with his bright eyes and tired face. "Love you too, Dad."

When I closed the door to Lily’s room that day, I knew I would never return.


I opened her door without knocking. The courtesy of a knock had never appealed to April and I, when it concerned one another. So I barged into her room, sat down on her bed beside her, and pressed the off button on her CD player, all without being invited in.

"Sometimes people are stupid," I said quietly, giving her a tiny smile. "Sometimes they let things get in the way – for example, their self pity – and they say things that they don’t really mean, to people they love, and then they regret them for the rest of their lives. Some people don’t understand that just because you pity yourself, the world won’t always pity you. And then some other people, the lucky ones, have older sisters who tell them so, to keep them from making fools of themselves. The lucky ones have to keep those older sisters around, and so when they do something stupid and awful, like telling said sisters that they should die, they swallow their pride and beg said sisters for forgiveness and a renewal of the lifelong supply of sage advice."

April snorted. "You apologize too well," she sighed, giving me a small smile. "How am I supposed to be angry with you when you apologize so well?"

"That’s an easy one," I grinned. "You’re not supposed to be angry with me at all."

"It’s not fair that you lost two people in less than a week," she said quietly. "It’s not fair for me to expect you to be coherent and okay after that. But it’s not fair of you to say things like that. It’s not fair of you to think I’m not going through a lot of pain, too." She sighed. "Colin, can I ask you something?"
"What?"

"Do you think there’s any way... Now, this is going to sound kind of weird, and mean, but... Do you think there’s any way that Peter had something to do with the fire? Do you think there’s anyway he could have had a part in this?"

"Yeah," I said softly. "Yeah, I do." I explained that I had talked to him, that he had nearly admitted to it, with his babble about it being electric, but that I had nothing to prove that he had been involved.

"I want to talk to him, if you’d let me," she said quietly. "Maybe he would listen, if it came from me."

"I’m going with you," I said immediately.

She smiled. "I was going to ask you to come, anyway." She gave me a quick hug, squeezing me tightly. "It is going to be alright, Colin. It is."

"I hope," I whispered. And when I realized what I’d said, I smiled. There it was again, back and better than ever: hope.

November 23rd: I Don't Want Any Trouble

I arrived just before the firetrucks. They raced up behind me when I turned onto her street. Smoke was billowing from a tiny vinyl-sided two storey house at the far end of the street. I double-checked the address in my head, insisted that I must be wrong.

I pulled over to the side of the road and let the firetrucks roar past me, the sirens deafening me with their screams. "Oh God," I prayed, "please." In that moment, I had no trouble hoping. My entire existence was suddenly hoping, just hoping... I had to keep hoping.

My eyes closed when the sirens shut off. I could hear shouting further down the street. Lip quivering, heart skipping beats left and right, I slowly opened the car door and rose, walking toward the house. As I drew closer I walked faster, and faster still, then I was jogging, running, sprinting. My lungs gasped for air, my arms pumped up and down, my legs tore through the still morning air. I could see flames, and they drove me to go faster, the body that I loathed, out of shape from the weeks without soccer practice, racing toward the burning structure.

And then someone grabbed, me holding me back, screaming that it wasn't safe, it wasn't safe.

"You don't understand," I said, breathless, in tears. "That's my friend, maybe the best one I have, maybe my girlfriend, even, if she..." I stopped, tried again. "That's the girl that means more than dirt, more than dirt..." I sounded like a raving lunatic. Even hysterical, I knew that. I knew they thought I was crazy, or drunk, or worse. I knew that they wouldn't let me go in. But I wasn't going to give up without trying. There was a chance... A tiny chance...

The man shook his head, pushing me back, looking me in the eye. "You can't go in there, it's not safe."

"But... But sir..." I stuttered. But sir, I'm Corin, and she's Ashes, and there's been a terrible misunderstanding. See, sir, I want her to be happy. She has to be happy! You can't be happy when you're dead, I won't be happy when she's dead...


"Kid, I have to work. Go get in your car and drive away from here, you hear me?" I stared at him blankly. "Do you hear me, kid? You're not dying today. I'm not going to let you die today."
But I have to, I protested in my mind. I have to die, if she does.. I can't lose her. I can't lose another person. Not this week. Not this year. Not this lifetime. If I lose another one, there won't be anyone else. But I didn't say that, though everything in me wanted to. I walked numbly back to my car and watched from a distance.

I saw two guys carry a body out. I couldn't tell from a distance who it was. I prayed that someone else would be behind them, with another body, or better yet, that one of the girls would walk out unscathed, not a scratch or a bruise or a burn or a sputter, weeping but unharmed. I didn't get my wish. There was noone else.

They turned the hoses on the place. The fire was stubborn. It stuck to the beams, the stairs, everything. It was amazing, with the outer wall burnt down, how much of the house you could see. There were the crumbling, ashy pieces of furniture, the skeletons of the rooms, some of which I had walked through only days before, and then there was the spot where the second storey had collapsed into the first, the pile of debris shielding any other remnants of the MacFarley family and their home.

The stairs were almost perfectly intact. They stood, straight up, at the back of the house, burning almost majestically in the night. And then the hose was turned on them, and they were gone too, faded into the piles of soot.

Within fifteen minutes it was over. Two ambulances came. One loaded up the girl -- I still couldn't tell which it was -- and was on its way. The other stayed, assumably for other bodies they might find. No, I scolded myself, not bodies. People. They're people. The firemen, including the one who had held me back earlier, picked through the debris. They seemed especially interested in the spot where the second floor had collapsed. One of them was picking at something, and the others had crowded around him.

That was all I could take. I got out of the car and ran, sprinting like the wind, toward the house. I ran up to where the men were standing, and peered between them. One of them turned and tried to shoo me away, but I wasn't listening and I certainly wasn't going to obey. Because sticking out of the rubble was a clammy hand, and part of an arm. The wrist was exposed, the remnants of a shirt mostly burnt away, charred pieces of fabric clinging to it.

I saw the stitches running up the arm, like they’d been used to stitch up a slit wrist. It was too much to be an eerie coincidence. It was then that I knew it was truly over.

I started to cry right there. Because of Lily, and her baby, and their impossibly unjust end. Because of Ashley, the girl who was worth more than dirt, who was now lying amidst ash and debris. And because though I looked and looked while I was standing there, screaming and crying and shouting her name, cursing at the firemen as they tried to calm me down, because though I searched my soul and my mind and my heart, I could not find hope.

I was whisked away in the second ambulance in hysterics. I pleaded with the EMTs to kill me. They ignored my cries, shooting me up with a sedative. They said it would make me sleep. I mumbled for a moment about how needles had made my sister weak, and being weak had killed her, and how I wished I could die... And then I was gone, somewhere between awake and dreaming, a groggy wasteland where hope was shamed and the only way out was to die.

They kept me in the hospital until three that afternoon. I was crying the whole time I was awake. April was there before the clock struck nine, holding my hand and whispering and sobbing. "It's unfair," she said. "Life's so unfair to you." I agreed. First Lily, then Ashley, and finally my sanity. If there was a God, he hated me. And if there wasn't, I certainly wouldn't mind. I didn't want eternal life anyway. I couldn't even handle the short one I'd had already.
When the let me out the first thing I did was ask about Ardith. "I don't know," April said wearily. "I don't know."

So we got in the car and started the long drive home. April insisted on driving, whispering soothingly to me that I needed my rest. I sat with my feet on the dashboard, my eyes on the road, and bit my lip until it bled. "She broke up with Peter this morning," I said at one point, tears welling up in my eyes.

"Don't do this to yourself," April cautioned quietly.

I sighed, glaring at her, my lip twitching. "I was almost happy for a second. Lily's last wish for me was that I could be happy. Guess that got fucked up." I kicked the windshield, causing the whole car to shake. "Well damn that, I don't even want to be happy anymore."

"Stop."

"Why don't you just go die like everyone else?" I screamed at her. Her face went pale, and her hands gripped the wheel tightly, but she didn't lose control. She just drove onward, toward home. I hated my sister so much in that moment, so much. I kicked the windshield again, and shouted, "Go ahead and die!" But she just drove onward, expressionless and weary as ever
We parked in the driveway when we got home, and she turned to look at me. "I lost a sister last week, Colin. I know it feels like the end of the world to lose someone. You do too. And for now, people are going to excuse your outbursts, saying it's just the grief, it will wear off. But they don't know what you know. They don't know what I know. It doesn't wear off, Colin. It never is going to wear off." She arched her eyebrows, took a deep breath, and continued. "When you're thirty years old, you could still be grieving, and you could still be saying things like what you said to me. But noone is going to want to be around someone who acts like a bratty six year old and says terrible things to people he loves, and noone is going to excuse you for it because you lost a sister and a not-even-girlfriend fourteen years before!" She pounded on the steering wheel. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself."

"Fuck you," I hissed, and pushed open the door. I took off running down the street.

"What's your problem?" April called. "Come back, you idiot. Mom and Dad are going to shoot me. They'll think you ran away."

I turned and looked at her, breathing hard, adrenaline racing. "I have to go talk to someone," I shouted. And then I took off down the street, arms and legs and lungs and heart pumping, the tears drying in my eyes as I ran.


The house had been reduced to a soot encased, rotting structure. If it could even be called a structure, after what the fire had done to it. I walked through it slowly, picking up the few remnants of normal life that I could find – a button, a pen cap, a toothbrush, a quarter – and stuffing them into my pockets, all the while swallowing back the tears that swelled up in my throat. A couple of times I just sat down in the ashes, damp soot soaking through my clothes and chilling me to the bone. I sifted through the debris with my bare hands, looking for something recognizable, anything to tie me to the girl...

I crept over to the place where the ceiling had collapsed, where I had seen her arm that morning. I lifted up the damp wood and pawed through the soot, my hands blackening steadily, my eyes leaking tears and my throat sending a silent, never-ending scream into the damp air. And then my fingers touched something foreign, something soft. Under a mound of insulation, at the very bottom of the pile, was a tiny lock of her hair – dingy, greasy, and dark blonde. I sat back on my heels and stared at it, resting in the palm of my hand, a dirty clump of hair my only connection to the girl who had once been connected to it, to the girl that was worth more than dirt. It was only then that I fully understood that she was never coming back.

I heard footsteps behind me, interrupting my grieving, and turned to look. Ms. MacFarley was strolling toward me, hands in her pockets, her eyes glistening with tears. "Ardith is dead," she greeted me, her voice wobbling.

I stuffed the lock of hair into my pocket and looked up at her. "I’m sorry, ma’am," I said quietly. "I’m so sorry." But that wasn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her the story of Ashes, the girl who could’ve been anything until she fell for a loser boy who didn’t give a shit whether she was alive or dead. I wanted to tell her that I was in love with her daughter, and wondering if she’d like to give me her opinion on whether that was necrophilia or not. I wanted to tell her that it was all her fault, that if she’d just been half a parent she could have kept Ashley from being so miserable those past years; she could have kept Ashley from Peter. But I just looked up at her and said I was sorry, like I didn’t really mean it, like I didn’t really care at all.

She jerked at the chain around her neck. "Everyone is dead, Colin, my daughters, my husband, everyone...." She looked so sad standing there, crying, her hands hanging awkwardly at her side, a red ring around her neck from her yanking on the chain so often, surrounded by the ashes of the house. "They’re saying..." she began, then stopped. She looked me up and down, several times, swallowing and pulling on her necklace. "They’re saying it wasn’t an accident," she said, softly, quietly.

I stared up at her, at the sad scene that surrounded her, and I realized that I had known that all along. "I have go, Ms. MacFarley," I said quietly, rising, grabbing one of her chubby hands in my own. I turned and walked away through the ashes, leaving her staring after me.

"Where are you going?" she cried weakly, tiredly, and as sadly as I’d ever heard anyone sound.
I turned to look at her. "I have to talk to the man who set your fire," I called back. And then I was gone, stealing through the streets in the afternoon rain, the low rumble of thunder pushing me forward and into the wind.


I rang the doorbell. There was a grumbling noise on the other side of the door, then the creaking of a key in the lock, and the squealing of the hinges as the door swung open. "What do you want? Oh, great, you’re the kid from before. Go home. Peter’s busy. Scat."

"I only need to talk to him a second," I protested, giving him a weak smile and an earnest nod. "Please, sir."

He brightened at the sir. "Well alright, but don’t take too long. The boy’s got homework! He has to do well in his studies or he’ll end up working at a drive through on that highway out past the horse fields."

I had no idea what this guy was getting at, but I nodded. "I wouldn’t want to interrupt a young man’s education, sir," I said softly, then walked into the house, up the stairs, and into Peter’s room.

His desk sat in the corner, on the right wall, near the windows. Peter was sitting on his desk chair, earphones on, drumming his pencil on the desk as he worked on his homework. I shut the door behind me.

"She’s dead, you know," I said loudly.

He reached up and pulled off his headphones. "Huh?"

"Ashley MacFarley is dead."

His face went white, the white of bridal gowns and milk and brand new socks. "No she isn’t," he stuttered. "She isn’t! Someone would have told me!"

"It happened after most people went off to school," I said calmly. "You didn’t mean to kill her, did you?"

"What are you talking about?" he asked shakily. "I wouldn’t touch that house. Yeah, we broke up, but only for a couple days, she’ll come running back... Or she would, if she was alive... It was electrical, Colin, it must’ve been."

I raised my eyebrows. "Electrical?"

"Well, yeah, the fire. Electrical. It happens all the time, in those older houses."

"I told you I thought you killed Ashley, I didn’t say how. How did you know she died in a fire?"

He looked shaken. "My father told me."

"So he told you her house was on fire, but not that she was dead?"

"Yes!" he said indignantly. "You’re just looking for someone to blame for this, because you don’t want to blame yourself." He paused, and a flash of something that could have even been real, true pain flickered across his face. But it was gone as soon as it had appeared. "You can’t accuse me of being behind everything that goes wrong."

"You didn’t mean to kill her," I said again, gently. "You wanted to scare her, show her that she couldn’t get away from her. Show you what you could do, if you had to. But she’s dead, now, and so is Ardith. You’ve taken away one woman’s whole family, you’ve killed your own girlfriend, and you still don’t want to admit that it’s your fault."

"Get out of my room."

"Admit you lit the fire."

"Get out of my room."

"Just tell me. Or tell Ms. MacFarley. Tell your father, Pete. But you have to tell someone. It’ll eat you alive."

"Get the fuck out of my room!" he wailed, and I left, shutting the door quietly behind me.

His father shot me a look from his chair off the hallway when I came thumping down the stairs. "Don’t come back, either. I ever see your face around here again, there ‘ll be some trouble, boy."

"I don’t want any trouble, sir. Have a good evening," I said quickly, and ducked out.

Walking home was one of the loneliest experiences of my young life. Dusk was just beginning to settle in, and it was drizzling, a miserable, maddening, spitting rain. I wanted to say a lot of things to God right then, if he was around to listen. I wanted to tell him that if Peter didn’t confess, I would go insane. I wanted to tell him that I was ready to have a breakdown and it was all his fault. I wanted to tell him to stop playing with peoples’ lives like they were chess pieces. And more than anything, I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself.

But there are some things you don’t say to God, and those were a few of them. So I brooded silently while I walked home through the rain, and – I’ll admit it – I cried.

November 22nd: About Hope

Sunday dawned overcast and gray. I pulled the covers over my head and curled up in a ball. A quick glance at the clock upon waking had told me that it was only six in the morning, but already I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Insomnia was quickly becoming my struggle, something I was none too happy about. It had been days since Lily’s death, and I still couldn’t breath quite right. There was something in my throat, blocking me, getting in the way. Sometimes I would see something that would remind me of her, and I would cry. It sounds stupid, but I couldn’t look at peppermints without my eyes misting up.

It was sad to be me, that Sunday. Without a sister, without a friend, without a hope. I’d never remembered feeling quite so low.

I quickly gave up on sleep and crawled out of bed. Groggily, I stepped out into the hallway, and literally ran into April.

She stepped back, rubbing her head, and gave a weak laugh. "Hey, sleepyhead." She reached up and tousled my hair, her lip quivering as she tried to smile. "Let’s talk, okay? I want to talk."
So I returned to my room, settling on the bed. She sat on the other end, across from me, her back against the wall. "I used to be jealous of her," she said, laughing softly and sadly. "I was always the one who could do okay on my own. She needed all this constant attention. She got in so much trouble, but she was so... Interesting, and special. Her teachers would always write letters home about how she was failing their class, but did they know their daughter could write? Oh, but their daughter could write so well, she was a regular prodigy!" She looked down at her hands, flexing her fingers. "I was never a prodigy at anything. I was the one who was just barely good enough."

I looked at her earnestly. "You also didn’t drive anyone out of their mind. Noone ever had to cry over you, or pray over you, or stay up late in the night wondering if you were still alive. Noone ever hated you because of the games you were playing, or wanted to kill you just so they could stop the heartache, or wrote letters to you that they ended up having to rip into pieces not because they didn’t mean it, but because they weren’t sure if they could talk like that to a sister." She gave me a tentative smile. "Lily was a hell of a person, April. One goddamn hell of a person. But so are you."

April’s lips quivered and twitched into what I guess could be called a smile. "I miss her, Colin. Just living here without her, knowing that she’s never coming back... She was that kind of person that filled up a room, so there was never room for anyone else but her, but I got to liking that, because she was so vibrant and different and interesting and... Lily was just everything that I wasn’t, and I feel so off balance without her."

"Let me tell you something," I said quietly. "Lily loved you like hell. She would have died for you. She would have done anything for you, anything. If she were here now, and you were wherever she is, she would probably be sitting on my bed crying and saying how you were always the serious, insightful person who just amazed people with how sensitive and thoughtful she was, and how she was always jealous of you because she was just the lighthearted colorful clown and you were the person everyone came to with problems, who gave the best advice the world ever saw." I paused to look at her. She was still crying, but she was smiling a little stronger, and she didn’t look so completely sad. "You did balance each other, and you miss her, but that’s not what it’s about. You’re missing the point. So am I. We all are. I don’t know what the point is, but it’s not to miss her. It’s not to mourn her forever and a day."

"I know what it is," she whispered.

"What?"

"You have to hope for something," she said quietly. "You can hope for anything, but you have to hope for something. Or... Or you can just hope. Lily did a lot of that. Just hoping."

We sat there in silence for a long time before I spoke up. "Yeah," I said softly, "I think that’s it."

It was easier after that, for a couple of days. I kept reaching for that hope, the hope that I didn’t truly think I had, but that I knew I had to find. I could see April doing it, too. It was sad to watch her, because she didn’t look quite sure of herself doing it, but I knew she was trying. We were all trying.

I didn’t go to school on Monday. I think Lily’s death had finally hit me at full force, like a brick to the head. Mom didn’t argue at all when I’d said I was staying home. She wasn’t doing too well herself. The night before, Sunday, I had walked into the kitchen to see her standing in front of the refrigerator, crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she took a gulp of air and burst into more hysterical tears. "I promised your father I’d make pot roast, and I forgot to thaw the meat."

That was a pretty good display of our family’s coping abilities, in general. We were alright until something stupid and tiny happened, and then we would lose it. On Monday morning, when I was reading a book in my room, the lightbulb went out. I sat there holding it in my hands for two hours, trembling and rocking back and forth on my bed. It seemed like we were all just looking for excuses to have breakdowns, and they weren’t having too much trouble finding us.
So it was no surprise that when something truly terrible finally happened, on Tuesday morning, November the twenty third, I finally lost it all.


Ashley called me at seven. "I’m sorry," she said breathlessly. "Pete and I just had a huge fight. But that’s not why I’m sorry. I’m sorry because I was an idiot to you last week, and I should have been nicer to you, but I didn’t want to think that you were right. I really did think he was the right guy... The perfect guy... I really did think it, Colin... How could I have been so stupid?"

"Ashes, it’s okay." I could hear her crying. "It’s hard, isn’t it?" I said finally. "But you’re strong, Ashley. You can do this. You can live without him."

"I don’t know if I can," she sniffed. Then she sighed. "Are you sure it’s okay? I was a complete bitch."

"Yeah," I said with a grin, "but I wasn’t so charming myself. Do you want a ride to school? I’ll drop off your sister too, if you want."

"Oh Colin, you don’t need to do favors for me..."

I smiled. "Really, it’s okay, Ashes. I like you, and your sister too, and I don’t think anyone should have to walk in this kind of weather."

I could almost hear her grin. "I like you too, not-so-charming Colin," she giggled. "Seven fifty sound good?"

"Sounds fine to me."

"I’ll see you then, okay? Oh, and I have to tell you something."

"What?"

"I’m not going to get back with Pete. I’m sick of being dirt. I want to be more than dirt."

My grin stretched even wider. "You are much, much more than dirt."

And those were the last words I ever said to Ashley MacFarley.

November 21st: Just Keep On Keeping On

"Is it true? Is your sister dead?"

"Oh, that’s tactful," I said drily. "Thanks for your consideration, and yes. And while we’re asking subtle questions about the deaths of our family members, why the fuck didn’t you tell me your father is dead?"

Ashley sighed into the phone. "Because it wasn’t your business."

"But it didn’t occur to you that my sister’s death is none of yours?" I sunk onto the living room sofa, staring at the unlit fireplace across from me. "I don’t need you and your pity and your bullshit. And I don’t need you to tell me about what a magical person Peter is. If he’s so fucking wonderful, why does he hit you?"

I saw my mother out of the corner of my eye, peering into the room. I waved her away. "You have no idea what you’re talking about, you idiot," she whispered. "He only hits me when I’ve been stupid. How am I ever supposed to learn what he wants me to do if he doesn’t show me?"

"Oh, god, let me think," I said mockingly. "You could, I don’t know, talk about it? Have a discussion about it? Be somewhat civilized? But that’s crazy talk, isn’t it? Because obviously, such things are easier to understand when he beats them into you."

She laughed. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been expecting her to scream, or hang up on me. But she laughed, a bitter little laugh, and sighed. "You think you know everything about him. You don’t know anything, Colin. You don’t know about his father. You think Pete beats me? You should see what Jonah’s doing to him when he goes home. He’s miserable, Colin. He thinks you’re fucking me, which you probably would be if you had your say, and that’s why he’s always throwing punches at you. His mother ran off when he was six and he hasn’t heard from her since." She laughed again. "Oh, but Colin, you know everything about him. I know you’d never judge him without knowing all the facts."

I thought of a lot of things to say right then, but I couldn’t actually find the nerve to speak any of them. "Just because Jonah hits him doesn’t mean he has to hit you," I said finally, quietly.

"What do you know about it?" she challenged. Before I had a chance to answer, I heard a click. I knew what I had to do. I walked through the family room into the front hallway, grabbed my coat from the coatrack, and pulled a scarf from the closet.

"I’m going out," I called to my parents, and then I was gone.


"What?" An older man, about sixty, with a potbelly and a scraggly gray beard, answered the door.

I gave him a weak smile. "Mr. Blackman? I’m here to speak with Peter."

"Yes, yes, of course you are," he muttered. "Going to go give the boy his drugs, I assume?" I didn’t answer, figuring it was a rhetorical question. The man eyed me, then heaved a sigh. "Go up the stairs and his door’s right in front of your nose. Show yourself out when you’re done."

I nodded, thanked him, and bounded up the stairs. I opened the door to Peter’s room without knocking. The wall opposite where I stood was a row of windows. His bed was under the center one, and he sat on the end, earphones on, his wary eyes focused on me.

"What do you want from her?"

Peter took off his headphones and turned off his Discman. He smiled a slow smile, a serpent’s smile, and cocked his head to one side in mock curiosity. "Why do you hate me, Colin?"

Because you beat her, I thought. Because you make her feel like dirt. Because you’ve poisoned her. Because she wants to die, and it’s your fault. But I said none of those things. "I don’t hate you, Pete," I heard myself say instead. "I just hate the way you make her feel."

He laughed his self-assured laugh, smirking. "I can’t make Ashley feel anything. One man has no way of controlling another’s emotions. She feels what she wants to feel, Colin, just as she dates whom she wants to date. You may resent me because that person isn’t you, but that’s beyond my control."

I stared into his eyes for a moment. He was amused by my anger, I could tell. Just as he was amused by her pain. I clenched my fists, my arms aching with the strain of holding back. I wanted so badly to give him a taste of her pain. But I didn’t move. I didn’t need another fight with Peter. Instead, I grabbed the nearest lamp and threw it. It crashed against the wall and fell to the floor, shards of the lightbulb laying amongst various broken parts. Peter sat bolt upright, his smirk gone. "Stop it, Colin," he demanded. He rose, and seconds later he was in front of me, one hand wrapped around my throat, the other twisting my arms behind my back. "Colin! Stop crying!" His voice was a splash of ice water to my burning rage, but it did nothing to stop the fires. I was embarrassed to be crying in front of him, but there was nothing I could do. I hated him. I hated a lot of people right then, but he was the one who was there, and therefore I hated him the most. I sobbed, hardly able to breathe, and pulled one arm free of his grip. I twisted to the side and punched the wall, my fist plunging easily through the old drywall. Peter knocked me off my feet, pinning me to the ground.

"Are you done?" his voice came, echoing through the hollowness of my mind. Exhausted, I tried my best to nod. He let me get up, watching me as I rose.

"You can’t keep taking shit out on her," I said, my voice trembling. "You can’t keep throwing her on the ground, man!" I could hear myself cracking, not just my voice but my entire being. "You just keep breaking her, over and over, and then you glue her back together and you expect her to be fine! She’s never gonna be fine, Pete. Not after all the shit you’ve pulled."

His eyes were trained on mine, coal-black and intense with his anger. "You think you could do better, Colin? Is that it? You really think you, the piss-poor excuse for a man that you are, could put up with a bitch as wild as that? So I get a little out of it sometimes, have too much to drink, knock the bitch around a little. You don’t hear her complaining, do you? She dun mind, Colin. She dun give a flying fuck, as long as I keep giving her what she wants."

I hated him more, in that moment, than I ever had before, because at the end of the day he was still the one in control. In control of me, in control of Ashes, in control of everyone that mattered. But more than anything I hated him because he knew just how to keep that control. Like the puppet that I was, I swallowed my fear of the answer and put myself right where he wanted me: "What does she want?"

He laughed. It was the coldest, most heartless laugh I’d ever heard. "She wants to be somebody, Colin." He flopped back onto his bed and props himself up on his elbows, again fixing his eyes on mine. "She was nobody before I found her. Just another face in the crowd. And then lo and behold, I showed up. Suddenly she had friends, Colin, real live friends. She had a boyfriend with connections; a boyfriend who was going places. And she was going places too, because good Pete was helping her. Oh, he isn’t perfect," he mocked in a high falsetto, "But he’s the most amazing person you’ll ever meet, Colin! He makes me feel special!"

What killed me more than anything is how much he sounded like her. But I said nothing, as was usual.

"Colin," he says, returning to his normal voice, "You stormed in here asking what I wanted from her, correct?" I nodded stiffly. "I don’t want anything from her. Not a single fucking thing. But she keeps giving and giving, things I never asked her for. And who am I, old Peter Edward Blackman, to say no?" His smirk grew impossibly more snide.

I felt sick to my stomach. How could he think of her like that? How could he take Ashley, smart and beautiful Ashley, and make her sound so naive? I broke my stare, looking instead at my scuffed sneakers on the impeccably clean carpet of Peter’s bedroom.

"I have to go," I told him quickly, and then I ran.


The pebble hit the glass and bounced back at me. I stepped aside and let it fall to the lawn before picking it up again and once more throwing it up. It had taken me nearly half an hour to work out which window was hers. I hoped and prayed now that I hadn’t thought wrong.

She appeared at the window, her face tired. As soon as she saw me she frowned, fumbling to unlatch it. The window groaned as she lifted it upward. "I’ll go open the kitchen," she told me. "It’s around the side. Meet me there."

I ran around the side of the house and peered through a bay window. I could barely make out the refrigerator. I stood there, waiting, in front of her dark house, peering through her window. The moonlight cast eerie shadows on the walls. I ran one finger over the glass. It needed to be cleaned, and badly, but I knew it probably never would be.

Ashley’s face peeked around the corner. I waved. She tiptoed through the dark kitchen and raised the window, biting one lip. The window was level to the kitchen floor, so I was able to hoist myself up and make it through with little problem at all.

"Hey. What are you doing here?" She eyed me warily. "It’s midnight, and I’m not particularly crazy about you right now."

"We need to talk, Ashes," I whispered, closing the window and pulling off my shoes, holding them in my hands.

She raised an eyebrow. "Fine." Ashley looked pretty tired herself, but I didn’t mention it.
We tiptoed up the stairs, as silently as we could, and into Ashes’s room.

She closed the door quietly behind us. "Ardith’s been having bad dreams, and Mom hasn’t gotten sleep in ages." She flopped onto her bed and I took a seat in the chair in front of her window. "I didn’t want to wake her up."

"It’s fine," I said quietly. Then I sighed. "Listen, I came here because I want to talk to you, without either of us running away or hanging up or screaming. I talked to Pete, earlier, and it didn’t get anywhere. I’m trying to understand him, Ashes, and I’m trying to understand you, but... What are you thinking, staying with him? He hits you, Ashley! What kind of insanity does it take to stay with a boy who hits you?"

Ashes stared at me intently. "That’s not fair!" she hissed. "Peter loves me, dammit, more than you ever have! He understands me a hell of a lot better than you! He doesn’t know any better, Colin. His ass of a father never taught him better. You can’t blame him for that! You can’t blame him for acting the way everyone’s always acted to him!" By the time she finished she was shouting, her anger flushing her cheeks bright red.

"Oh, get over him already. You think even more of him than he thinks of himself! So what if his father hits him, you can escape what your family’s done. He hits you and you don’t go around beating people! Obviously there’s something wrong with him, because there are only two people involved here and there sure as hell is nothing wrong with you, except that you’re dating an abusive piece of shit!" It comes out in one long string of words, insensitive and full of held-in rage.

"If there are only two people involved then what are you doing here?" she spat. At that instant, there was a knock on the door that kept me from replying. Ashley’s face went ashen quickly. "Shit," she muttered. "Who is it?"

"It’s Mama, sweetie, are you okay? Is there someone in there?"

Ashes shot me a dirty look. "Nobody, Mom, it’s okay. I was listening to music. I’m sorry I turned it up so loud, I wasn’t thinking. You can go back to bed, okay?"

"You’re sure nothing’s wrong?" Ms. MacFarley’s voice whined, sounding like a scared little girl. I could picture her on the other side of the door, yanking at her necklace.

Ashley’s eyes were sadder than I’d ever seen them. "I’m positive, Mom. Now you get some sleep, okay?"

"Okay," Mrs. MacFarley said. "‘Night, Ashley."

"Goodnight, Mom."

Footsteps sounded down the hall, and finally we heard a door open and close. "Get out, Colin."
I turned and walked away, slamming the door behind me. So much for not hanging up. So much for not running away.


I was home by twelve forty. All the lights in the house were on. I found April sprawled out on the floor in front of the television, watching the Weather Channel.

"Ape?" I said tentatively. She turned to look at me, bags under her red eyes. She wasn’t crying when she first turned around, but within a few seconds she was, silent, simple tears.

She sniffed. "I couldn’t sleep until you came home... I was afraid you were dead."

I stared at her. It was amazing what the day had done to my sister. She was pale, sickly pale, and her red rimmed eyes were swollen, with gaping bags underneath. Something about the way she was looking at me was so frightened and earnest that it made me want to cry, too. "Aw, April... You can’t do this to yourself. You just can’t. She’s dead, yeah, but I’m not, Mom and Dad aren’t, and you’re not either."

"I hate her, Colin," April said quietly. "I hate her. Why did she have to die?"

I couldn’t think of an answer. I walked over to her and sat down. She struggled to sit up and scooted close to me, pulling her knees to her chest. I wrapped my arms around her, holding her shaking body in my own trembling hands. I knew it wasn’t much, but sometimes not much is better than nothing. That’s what I had to tell myself about my sister’s life. It wasn’t long, but not long is better than nothing.

November 20th: I Go On as You Grow Colder

The instant was over by the time I pulled up in front of Ashley’s house. She and her sister were standing on the front porch, huddled inside tattered coats, gripping each other tightly, faces flushed pink. They ran over to the car when I arrived, and both dove into the front seat, Ardith settling on her sister’s lap.

"Ar–" I started to tell her to move to the back, but a look from Ashley stopped me. "Never mind. Let’s go." I put the car back into gear and turned to the sisters. "Direct me, fair ladies."
And so they did, giggling all the while, because evidently there was something laughable about me that I’d never noticed before. Both of them seemed to, and they snuck looks at me when they thought I wasn’t looking, tittering all the while. Ardith leaned up to whisper in her older sister’s ear a couple of times, which nearly drove me crazy. I wondered what it was about me that struck them as being so terribly amusing.

We pulled up at Ardith’s school at seven fifty three. She leapt off of her sister’s lap and gave her a huge hug. "Bye Ashy, bye Colin. Thank you for the ride." She gave us a nearly toothless grin and disappeared into the crowd of children.

Ashley stared out the window at her, a motherly, adoring look on her face. When Ardith was long gone, she turned to face me. "Onward, Jacques." I drove slowly away from the school, and it was a good five minutes before she spoke. "I love that girl. I don’t know what I’ll do..."
I raised my eyebrows. "What you’ll do? What are you going to do?"

"Oh, I shouldn’t tell you. It’s supposed to be a secret." She smiled, glanced at her lap, and then looked back up at me. She was beaming, her grin stretching across her face. "Oh, Colin, I’m getting married! Pete and I are eloping on December first."

My mouth dropped open, and I was too shocked to maintain control of the steering wheel. We veered into the next lane, bewildered drivers around us sounding a chorus of honks. "Colin!" Ashley cried. I regained partial composure, and drove on until we reached the nearest turn off. I turned into the parking lot of a dark strip mall, parked the car, and looked over at Ashley.

"Are you crazy?" They were the first words I thought to say. At the time they seemed tactless, irrelevant, cruel. But when I look back, that’s the only question I ever asked her that seemed to make any difference at all.

"I don’t know," she said, managing a shaky grin. "But I love him."

He hits you, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I don’t think it would have made any difference, anyway. Ashley was determined to do it, and the one thing I learned in the next week – the last of her life – was that when Ashley wanted something that badly, she would not let it go.


Peter was waiting for us in the school parking lot. If it were anyone but him it would have surprised me, but in the short time that I’d known Peter, I’d learned that he was more than mad enough to stand for hours waiting for Ashley’s arrival.

He shoved me up against the side of my car when I climbed out. "I told you not to touch her," he growled in my ear.

I stuttered an apology, but he let me go. He turned his attention to Ashley, who had come up beside me. "Hey, baby. Just a week and a half till we can leave. Sorry about the screaming this mornin’, I didn’t mean it." He kissed her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him close. I looked away. It was one of the very last things I ever wanted to see.

I moseyed up to the school, the lovers behind me in a slow pursuit. Alex, the guy from my English class, found his way over to me as I entered the building. "Hey, Colin."

"Hey," I mumbled, not completely sure of his sincerity.

He smiled, not unkindly. "Sorry about yesterday. I’ve just learned to listen to Pete. You, you never do that. Don’t learn to listen to him. You’re the only guy out there brave enough to fight with him." He edged closer, leaning in. "I’ve heard he beats his girl."

"You’re kidding me," I said drily. "And you might want to refer to her as his fiancé." I knew Ashley wouldn’t be thrilled if the word got out all over school, but at that moment I couldn’t have given less of a shit. I was still feeling like a wounded puppy dog, bashful and bruised and sulky. "They’re eloping on the first of next month."

Alex almost dropped his books. As it was, he did run into a pretty, blonde freshman, who gave him a disdainful look. "Holy mother of god, Pete? And Ash? And marriage?" He let out a long, slow whistle. "That’s just crazy." He paused, the whistled again. "I mean, they’ve been dating since Jesus was born, but... Marriage?" He narrowed his eyes at me. "Are you sure they’re getting hitched? Who told you?"

"Ashley," I said simply.

Alex turned, stopping at a locker, and spun the lock. "Sorry," he mumbled. "Gotta load up." It was obvious that he was mulling it over as he unpacked and re-packed his bag. "So," he said, slinging the pack over his shoulder, "Are you and Ash good friends?"

I managed a tiny laugh. "Nah. We only met about a week ago. I do her favors, she smiles at me, so we’re even." I grinned, and Alex smiled back. "Pete’s crazy though. She could do a hundred times better."

Alex nodded. "Most people could. Pete’s a beast. On the field that’s a good thing, in the real world... It doesn’t work out. He’s got too much anger and not enough places to put it."

I sighed, walking into the science wing. Alex tagged along behind me. "It’s not so much that," I replied in a low voice, "that bothers me. What really gets to me is that she really thinks he’s the best thing for her."

Alex raised an eyebrow as we were jostled around. "Well who is, then? You?"

"We kissed," I confessed, blushing. "A couple days ago." ‘A couple days ago.’ How vague. I could have told him the exact hour, minute, and second, but I didn’t want to creep him out. General statements seemed best in this case.

Alex whistled yet again. "And? Does Pete know?"

I shook my head. "I don’t think so. I hope not. If he does, he’s either playing games with me by not telling me or he’s feeling a sudden burst of compassion. But I’m sure he’ll find out sometime." I pushed my way through a mob of people and to my locker.

Alex was right beside me. "What’re you going to do, man? He’s going to tear your head off."

"I don’t doubt it," I muttered. I pulled my chemistry notebook out of my locker and shoved my statistics gear in. "I just wish something would happen to keep them from eloping, really. That’s my main focus right now."

That morning, walking through the crowded hallways to Gray’s room, a possible new friend by my side, I never dreamed that I would live to eat those words.


Ashley found me by my locker after school.

"You bastard," she growled at me. "Alexander Jacobson was talking to me at lunch. Says you told him Pete and me were eloping." She smacked her gum, glaring up at me.

"Je-Jesus, Ashes, calm down," I stuttered. "I didn’t mean to tell him, I promise. It just came up, and came out, and I don’t know..."

Her eyes flashed. "How could you? I thought I could trust you! I thought you were the kind of person who could keep a secret."

"Listen –" I began.

"No," she interjected. "You listen. I am sick of you. You’re jealous of my boyfriend, you talk about me behind my back, and you expect me to feel sorry for you." She shook her head in disgust. "And then you think that if you kiss me, it’ll shut me up. You thought that kissing me was just going to solve everything! Well go to hell, Colin, go home to hell." She was crying, shaking, and angry. I didn’t dare to touch her, or to speak. Not because of her anger. I could handle that. No, the reason I was so paralyzed was the figure standing behind her. He was big, muscular big, and his hair hung in his eyes. There was something very scary about Peter in that moment, and it only grew scarier when his eyes met mine.

"You kissed her?" he said, his voice a low rumble. I backed away, my jaw quivering.

Ashley turned around and stared at her boyfriend. "Pete, leave him alone." Peter continued to advance, his eyes narrowed, his breathing heavy. "Pete, please!" She grabbed at his arm. He swung her off, flinging her into the lockers. She whimpered, rubbing her side, and bit her lip. "I’m sorry," she mouthed at me.

"I told you, York," Pete hissed, his face glowing red. "I told you a dozen fucking times. Stay away from my girl. But you didn’t listen, did you? You didn’t think I was serious, did you? Well guess what, Colin?" He paused, a sadistic smile spreading across his face. "You were wrong."

I turned and took off running. I knew I could never beat him in an all out fight. But maybe, just maybe, I could outrun him.

I heard him behind me, in hot pursuit. I slammed through the door in front of me, never breaking stride, and into the fresh air. I sprinted up the sidewalk, darting through clumps of people, trying not to notice their stares. I ran and ran, up and around the school, weaving through the parking lot. I saw my car in the distance, its hood barely visible in the afternoon sun. I looked behind me. Peter hadn’t lost any distance, if anything he’d gained a foot or two. I knew it was all or nothing. I could leap for my car and hope I made it, or I could turn around and fight. Either way I’d probably lose. I fumbled in my pocket for my keys, pulled them out, and pressed the button. I raced toward my car, my legs pumping harder than they had in any game of my life. I ran to the driver side door and yanked it open, literally leapt in, and pulled it shut.
But something was wrong. "Oh shit," I mumbled. The seatbelt was stuck in the door. I tried to yank it in, but it wouldn’t come. Peter was on the other side of the door, yanking as hard as he could. I yanked back, pushing the lock down with my elbow as I did, securing all but my own door. "Let go," I shouted through at him. He shook his head, his face red with the effort.

And then the idea came to me. It was a risky move but it was my only choice. The keys lay on the passenger seat beside me. I adjusted myself, then let go of the door with my right hand, grabbed the keys, and stuck them in the ignition. I felt the muscles on my left hand straining. With a gasp I let the door fly open. The suddenness of it knocked Peter against the car to my left, and I used the instant of surprise to put the car in gear and back out of the parking space. I pulled my seatbelt inside and closed the door, locking it with my right hand. I raced out of the parking lot, engines roaring, not bothering with my turn signal. I could see him running behind me, but even he knew he was no match. He stood there, shaking his fist and yelling something, as I turned onto the road.

I knew that I had avoided nothing, just postponed the inevitable showdown. But I had given myself some time to prepare. I spent the night in the basement with the punching bag, beating it liberally. April came down to watch me at one point, eyebrows arched and a strange, somewhat frightened look on her face. At nine o’clock my mother came down to beg me to stop, insisting that I go eat. I complied, with a sigh, acknowledging to myself and to her that I had done all I could do.

But when the battle came, I was unprepared, because it wasn’t a physical fight – it was a battle of the wits. And, as usual, Pete was dictating the rules.


As I waited for the first attack, I made repeated calls to Ashley. Each time Ardith or her mother answered the phone, and each time I was told that she wasn’t home, could they take a message? At first I did leave messages, just little, ‘Call me back, here’s my number if you lost it’ ditties, but after two days of unreturned calls, I took matters into my own hands. I visited Ashley’s house on Thursday afternoon.

"Come in," her mother said tiredly when she saw me at the door. "You’re the boy Ardith’s always talking about."

I gave a sheepish grin. "I’m sorry I’ve been calling so much," I said, pulling off my gloves and stuffing them in my pocket. "It’s just that I want to be sure she’s okay."

"She’s fine," her mother said, yanking at the chain on her neck. I had seen that same gesture on the first day, at the hospital, when I asked her to see my sister. "She hasn’t been the same since her father died, is all. If you’d known the real Ashley, you would never recognize her now."
She sat down on the couch, and gestured to the chair across from her. I took a seat. "So Mr. MacFarley is dead?" She nodded. "Oh, I’m so sorry. It must be hard on your family."

She yanked at the chain again. "Oh, it is. I used to pretend, a lot, that he was still alive, just away on a trip... He went on trips a lot, Frank did..." A single tear leaked from her eye. "Oh, I know I miss him, but Ashley’s taken it the worst. She’s so sad... I don’t know why she always has to be so very sad..."

"I’m sorry," I repeated. I wasn’t sure what else to say to this woman. She seemed ready to spill all her secrets to me, though she knew nothing about me. It made me nervous, but more than that, it made me sad.

"I wear a piece of his shirt in my locket, here," she said, gripping the chain tightly. "He was wearing it when he died. Ashley has one too, but she hasn’t worn it since... Since she started seeing... That boy."

I looked up at her with sudden interest. "You mean Peter?"

She nodded, wrinkling her nose. "Oh, how I hate him. But she thinks he’s the one. He treats her awful. He even hit her, once."

I stared at her. Her eyes were glazed over and blank, her lips drawn into a frown. I wanted to tell her that her daughter was planning to marry this boy that she so hated. I wanted to tell her that he had hit her many more times than the one. But I didn’t have the heart to say those things. She’d been through enough. So I excused myself and left, ignoring the nagging voice inside of me that told me to go and see Ashley.

I pulled the door shut behind me and stood on the front stoop. The streetlights were on, light pooling on the quiet road beneath them. It was cold, and my fingers numbed as soon as I stepped outside. I removed my gloves from my pocket and pulled them on, then rubbed my palms together. I was still freezing. I began the long trek home through the frosty air, staring at the gray sky and talking to myself.

"She’s got a psychopath for a boyfriend," I mumbled, "and I don’t want to mess with him. But if I don’t mess with him, he’ll keep on messing with her. And if he keeps on messing with her, she could get hurt pretty damn badly. Hell, he could kill her. So I have to mess with him, but I can’t expect to escape him again like I did last time. That was a once in a lifetime thing."

I was contemplating this very predicament when I saw April running under a streetlight some distance up the road, wearing just jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. I ran up to the nearest light and waved at her. "Colin!" she called to me, her voice breathless. "Colin, Colin... It's over... We lost her, Colin, we lost her..."

I could hardly understand her. She was both winded and hysterical, which didn’t exactly help her in her coherency. I nodded and took off running up the street, toward her. When I reached her trembling figure, I wrapped my arms around her and held her shivering body to my chest. "God, April, what’s wrong? Can you tell me?"

"She’s dead, Colin, she’s dead." She pulled away and looked up at me. Her nose was red from the cold and from crying, and cold snot blanketed her nostrils and upper lip. Her eyes were red and puffy. "Colin, oh Jesus Colin, what are we going to do?"

I gripped her arms. "April, it’s okay. Who’s dead? What happened?"

"The doctors said there were complications," she squealed, burying her head in my shoulder. "Complications... Too many complications..."

I pulled off my coat and wrapped it around her shoulders. I was left with just a shirt on, but I hoped that maybe if she was warm, more comfortable, she could talk.

"She’s dead," April gasped, and sat abruptly down on the pavement, shaking and shivering and wailing. I tried for twenty minutes to get her to stand up, but it was no use. Eventually, I scooped her up into my tired arms and let her wipe her nose on my shirt. She must have fallen asleep on the way home, because when I reached the door her mouth was partially open and she was breathing deeply. I rang the doorbell, and for one silent moment I stood on my front porch, my eldest sister cradled in my arms, scared and apprehensive for the news I was sure would greet me.

My mother answered the door a moment later. She looked no better than April. Snot was dripping from her nose and her face was drenched with tears, her eyes swollen and red. "Put her on the couch," she whispered, eyeing April anxiously. I took her into the living room and lay her on the sofa, covering her with the quilt that we always kept on the back of it. Then I returned to the kitchen, where my mother was standing at the sink, scrubbing her hands with a dishrag.

"How much has April told you?" she asked without turning around. I could see her reflection in the window over the sink. Her dark hair, laced with grays, hung limply around her face, and her already pale skin was white and creased. She looked a hundred years old, not fifty two.

I shook my head slowly, taking a step toward Mom. "Nothing. She just kept saying that someone was dead, over and over."

"Your sister," she said. For a second, I didn’t understand. What about April? Wasn’t she going to say anything else? And then I understood. She wasn’t talking about April.

"Mom," I said slowly, biting at the skin on the inside of my bottom lip, "what happened to Lily?"
And that’s when I found out what April had meant by ‘complications’. Lily had suffered a miscarriage that morning. It had drained her completely, but she had seemed fine. She’d called home in that time, and talked to both Dad and Mom. "She was so happy, still," Mom said shakily. "She was the one comforting us. She had just lost a baby, and she was the one comforting us."

It seemed so unfair, what happened next. The doctor entrusted to care for Lily had advised her to have surgery, a uterine evacuation, to make sure things continued to go smoothly. They’d put her under anesthesia at seven that evening. But something had happened, something awful. "Her heart... Her heart was just beating, and beating, and beating, too fast. They decided against the procedure, and they were going to wake her up..." Mom broke down at that point, and she didn’t speak for five full minutes. I watched the clock on the microwave, timing her. It seemed an awful thing to do, timing my mother’s grief, but it was the only thing I could do to keep my own from overtaking. "She had a heart attack. It was too much for her. She was so weak from the miscarriage, and the heroin..."

"Oh God," I whispered. "Oh God oh God oh God. Not Lily, not my Lily..." And then the darkness took over. The last thing I remember was sinking down to the floor of the kitchen, back against the stove, and holding my head in my hands as I sobbed and trembled and ached.

November 18th: Holier Than Thou

The family seemed more at ease with Lily gone. That night at dinner, the normal familial banter was abundant.

"So, Colin, are you going to soccer tomorrow? You were supposed to go Monday." April stuffed a forkful of salad in her mouth and raised her eyebrows.

I dropped my gaze. "I didn’t feel like it." The complete truth. April didn’t press the issue, but I knew she was watching me. I concentrated on cutting my carrots into tiny pieces, then stirring them into the mashed potatoes.

My mother was watching me too, evidently, because she cleared her throat loudly and shot me a look when I met her gaze. I stopped the mixing, but continued to obsessively cut the carrots. Mom gave up on me, turning her attentions to April.

"Are you going to need the car tomorrow, honey?"

April shook her head. "Nah. I’m going to walk to the store, I think, check out the job applications. Henry said yesterday that they’re hiring." She scooped up a fork of potatoes, stuck them in her mouth, and chewed liberally. "I thought maybe I could start helping with the bills."
Dad shot her a look. "Are you sure that’s what you want?" What he really meant was ‘If you’re messing with my mind, please stop. But if you’re not, I’m going to give you a hug right this second.’

April nodded. "I’ve been thinking about it for awhile. I figure I’m old enough now, I should be helping. I thought maybe I could save up some money, too, and next year I could try being on my own."

"Honey, that might not be such a –" my mother began.

"Mom," April cut her off, "I’m twenty-two. I’m a grown woman. I can’t live here forever."

I knew why my mother didn’t want to let her go. It was because the last time one of her babies left the nest, she came back with a drug habit and a pregnancy. I wanted to say something in April’s defense, to tell my mother that she wasn’t Lily – and for that matter, that I wasn’t either –, but I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes, I decided, it was better just to listen.

"Twenty-two is not grown," my mother said gruffly. "And you can always stay here. You know that. We’re your family. This is your home."

My sister shot her a look. "You’re just afraid that when I go away, it’s going to be just like when Lily went away." I tried to hold back my grin. April evidently didn’t need me to help her out on this one. "I’m not Lily, Mom. Colin isn’t Lily. You aren’t Lily. Dad isn’t Lily. Noone in this house, in this world, is Lily, except Lily herself." She stood up, leaning on the table, her shadow falling over my mother’s plate. "So stop treating me like I’m going to run off and get myself addicted and start whoring myself and get pregnant and fuck up my life."

Everyone’s mouths were open. Mine because I’d never heard April speak like that to our parents. Mom’s because she’d just been told off by her twenty-two year old daughter. Dad’s I wasn’t sure about, but he cleared up that confusion pretty quickly. "Maureen," he said to my mother, in a perfectly even voice, "is our daughter Lily pregnant? And did she in fact work as a prostitute?"

That was it for me. I grabbed a piece of bread off of my plate, wrapped it in my napkin, grabbed my can of Dr. Pepper, and walked away. April sighed and followed me down the hall and into the family room. I could hear Mom stuttering and crying in the kitchen. I flipped on the television, turning the volume up loud enough to drown out her voice.

"Colin –"

"Leave me alone. You’re no better than them. You have this holier than thou attitude that’s really starting to bug me, Ape." I changed the channel, then tore a piece of bread off with my teeth. "Fuck you."

She sat down next to me on the couch. "I’m sorry, Colin. I’m sorry you think I’m like our parents, or that you think that’s a bad thing. I’m sorry that you think I have an inflated ego. But let me tell you something. You’re a lot like them, too. You’re afraid that I’ll be like her, not in that I’ll take drugs or turn tricks or get pregnant, but that I won’t call you for two years and I’ll forget that you’re alive." She reached out and touched my shoulder, and though I thought to shake her off I didn’t have the heart. "I wouldn’t do that to you, Colin. And she wouldn’t either, anymore. I love you, Colin. So does Lily. And neither of us are going to forget you, or abandon you."

I stared blankly at her for a moment, then sighed. "I’m going upstairs." I turned off the television and gathered up my things. I walked up to my room, moved my bread from one hand to the other so that I could twist the doorknob... And stopped.

I can’t say to this day what made me go down the hall to Lily’s room. But something did, and whatever it was that took me there kept me there for hours, staring at my reflection in the mirror across from her bed. I must have fallen asleep eventually, because that’s where I woke up, a piece of bread stuck to my face, at seven o’clock the next morning. My mother was waving the phone in my face, smiling down at me.

I squinted up at her. "What?"

"You have to leave for school in less than an hour and there’s a girl on the phone asking you for a ride."

I grabbed the receiver from her hand. "‘Lo," I said groggily.

"Colin?" Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that it was Ashley’s voice that I heard. "I’m so glad you’re still home. I really need a favor, if you could."

I sat up. "Yeah, Mom told me. A ride. I got it. I’ll pick you up when?"

"No, that’s not all. I kind of need... Could you give Ardith a ride, too?"

I sighed, squeezed my eyes shut, and opened them again. "Yeah, yeah, sure. I’ll pick you up at seven forty, drive her over there, and then drive us to school. Why isn’t Pete driving you?"

"Oh," she said, her tone suddenly flustered, "he’s... He’s not really... He’s not there, to tell you the truth. We had a fight at about four in the morning and he stormed out of his own house. I walked home. I called a couple minutes ago, his father says he hasn’t come back."

My eyebrows rose. "Isn’t his dad worried?"

"Jonah Blackman? You have to be kidding me. He’s more concerned about the cockroaches in the basement than about Pete’s habits these days. I don’t really blame him. Pete’s stayed away for days before. Noone ever knows where he is, or if they do they keep good cover."

"Oh." I peeled off the remnants of the bread from my cheek. "Okay then. I’ll pick you up in a bit. See you."

"Bye."

I groaned, pressing the off button on the phone, and handed it to my waiting mother, who was standing at the doorway. "I have to leave early. Is the ugly one making breakfast?"

Mom smiled. "If by that you mean your sister April, then yes. Pancakes, just for you. I saw her writing ‘I’m sorry’ in blueberries on one of them. Better run down and fetch it. I have a feeling it’s for you."

"She told you we fought?" I pulled off my sock, formed it into a ball, threw it at the hallway floor, and hopscotched over to it. My mother clapped drily behind me.

"No, April wouldn’t do that. But both of you were upset last night, and she fell asleep in your room and you in Lily’s, so obviously there was something up." I tossed my sock at the door of my room, then hopped on one foot to it. "I’ll see you downstairs," Mom moaned.

I opened the door to my room and hopped in. My sheets were still rumpled where April had slept. My sister never had been too keen on making beds. I straightened it out and pulled on some clothes. Then I headed out to see what this ‘I’m sorry’ pancake business was all about.
There were three of them, on a plate, decorated with syrup and sprigs of mint, two pats of butter on the side, a fork and a knife neatly arranged on the sides of the plate. It was already at my seat at the table, beside a napkin and a daffodil from the garden out front. April didn’t say anything when I sat down, but she watched me from the stove, arms crossed.

"Fine, fine," I said, slathering the butter on the pancakes. "I forgive you. But only if you’ll forgive me."

April came over and hugged me. "Screw you, I got up and made you pancakes and now you’re trying to barter with me for forgiveness. Colin Jeffery, I swear you’re going to kill me someday." But she was grinning, and I was too.

"Thanks, Ape," I said, digging into my breakfast. "I seriously have no idea what I would do if I had to cook my own food."

She grinned, walking back toward the stove and the remaining pancake batter. "You’d eat a lot of toast."

I stuck my tongue at her, and she grinned, and for an instant, it seemed like everything was back to the way it was before.