TWENTY-FIVE

Tom Buller died that night.

I don’t think we ever got over what happened to us on that mountain. I still think about it every day; and probly every few minutes, I see myself looking out at the sunlight glinting off the leaves on the other side of the river and Chase Rutledge raising that gun, the crack! of the firing, the flash of sparks and white smoke like a circus cannon, and then Tommy spinning and twisting down to the ground.

Boys like Tommy Buller should never die, even if it seems like they always do somehow. He never came back from that mountain, not even in my dreams, and such a big part of me died with him that I felt like I was hollowed out for the longest time.

I can still feel the emptiness now, a constant ache; a feeling that I can’t catch my breath because I’ve been held under ice water for so long I can’t loosen up to take the smallest swallow of air.

And maybe Luz was right about me not telling my friends how I really feel, sometimes. But sometimes the words just want to stay put.

She came to see me when I was in the hospital. I was so busted up the doctors needed to put metal pins and a bar inside my leg. It felt so good to see that door open and watch her peek her face in and smile. I raised my head up from the bed and she just floated in and brushed my hair back and kissed me on the mouth and then again on my forehead.

“Troy.”

“I’m wearing a dress.”

She slid a chair beside my bed and put her hand on mine.

“Luz, will you kiss me again?”

She smiled. “Are you hooked up to a heart monitor?”

“No. Just something to pee in.”

She pressed her face down next to me on the pillow and kissed me again.

“I’d slide over for you, but I can’t move.”

She looked down at the shining metal rods that passed right through the wrappings on my leg and into the bones.

“Does it hurt?”

“It feels better right now.”

She held her hand up over my leg. I swear I could feel something coming out of her skin.

“You can touch it. Everyone else here does, and I don’t even know ‘em.”

She touched my leg, just so lightly: the weight of a snowflake. She rested her hand on my chest.

“I came and sat with you last week. You were sleeping, though.”

“You should’ve woke me up.”

The angel is sleeping in the woods.

“I held your hand. I kissed your face. You looked so beautiful sleeping, Troy. I think I stayed here for two hours and then they came and told me I had to go. And then I cried.”

“I been here for more than a week?”

“A week yesterday.”

“I never had a dream. All that time.”

“You were really sick.”

“I guess.” I put my hand over hers and pressed it to me. “And Gabey?”

“He’s here. I made him wait outside in the hall.”

I smiled. “I bet you made ‘im.”

“Troy. I want you to know this,” she said, and I looked, un-blinking, into her clear eyes. I would believe anything she would ever tell me, even if it were impossible. “There will never be anyone else. Not for me.”

I whispered. “I love you, Luz.”

“Tommy loved you, too, Troy. He was good. He was a good boy.”

“I know.” I could hardly say it. I looked away.

And she kissed me again and said, “I better go get him.”

And I was scared to see him again; afraid that we could never go back to being those boys who had talked so loud around that fire; that those boys had somehow disappeared. And when he came in, shuffling his feet on the cold, slick floor, he just filed up to the side of my bed like a mourner at a wake, looking at me like I was so fragile, and I know I was looking at him the same way. And neither of us would put into words the thing that was so horrible and thick between us. It was as if there was some stinking carcass, bleeding, just hanging down from the ceiling; and we were all too caught up in just being nice and pretending not to see it.

Gabe didn’t say anything for the longest time, and then he looked down at the bars and screws jutting from my leg and said, “Damn. Frankenstotts.”

“Yeah. They hurt.” I breathed. “I can’t stand it here, Gabey.” I looked at the window. “They might let my dad take me home tomorrow. But I’m gonna miss school for a while when it starts.”

I looked him in the eyes, those eyes cool and pale like his sister’s. I needed to tell him something, but I couldn’t. I needed to get up out of that bed and shake him, make him tell me to shut up, or punch me, but I knew it wouldn’t happen.

I cried when they left. And then I slept.

They found those boys’ bodies a few days later. It was a horrible thing, from what I’d heard. They found Jack Crutchfield’s first, floating in the lake. Then they found Chase Rutledge’s, snagged in some trees by the flats above the bridge where the water had gotten lower.

It was driving me crazy. For the months that I spent at home, supposedly recovering, doing nothing but schoolwork, Luz visited often; I knew she had to sneak out of the house to do it because Mr. Benavidez was trying to hold on to her so tight, even though she was slipping away from him. But every time I tried to call her brother he wasn’t home, or he would make up some obvious excuse to get off the phone. She told me that her father didn’t want them coming to see me; that he said that I needed this time to be with my father and heal, but it was more than that, and I believed Mr. Benavidez was afraid that if Gabe and Luz came near me bad things would happen to them, like they did to me and Tom. He didn’t come right out and say it, I knew he never would. But just thinking about Gabey, and wondering—was he mad at me or just scared?—was making me crazy.

Gabriel never told Luz the whole story about what happened to us because he thought it was all his fault and that he did something horrible. He told her about everything except how he threw the rock that hit Chase and made him fall into that water; he just said that Chase tripped over Tommy’s legs just when he was about to shoot him again, so Luz thought it was all some kind of miracle. But I did sit down with Carl months afterwards, just before my seventeenth birthday. We drank beers and I told him the whole story, even about the day that Chase stole our clothes and Gabriel shot him. But I never told anyone else the whole story, not even my own father, even though I started to at least a half-dozen times and then just let it go. And Carl smoked about two packs of cigarettes listening to me and finally said it was probably just as well that I didn’t tell anyone else, because it didn’t matter now anyway.