Ashley whistled, impressed.
She’d tried skating a few times, but couldn’t get a feel for the board beneath her. She’d always ended up flat on her butt with skinned elbows to show for her efforts.
“She left a note,” he explained. “She said she was sorry, it was better this way, not to be mad at her. She said she wanted me to have her cassette player and her tapes.” Shane laughed, but no smile accompanied the sound.
“You’ve read it?”
“My mom keeps it in the album. It’s on the very last page. I used to sneak it out and read It over and over again. Like maybe if I read it enough times, I would know why she did it. But there’s nothing there. There’s no why.”
Ashley searched for words. When someone died, her mother would tell the family I’m praying for you or you have my sympathies, but Ashley didn’t find those words comforting. Plus they’d sound strange coming from her lips.
“That really bites,” she offered.
Shane looked at the sky, tilting his head so far back, his blond hair brushed his shoulders.
Blazin’, Hot, Stud. That’s what the girls at school called Shane. But the word that came to Ashley’s mind as she watched him was beautiful. She could practically hear the other kids ribbing her for such a thought. Guys weren’t beautiful. And yet… Shane Savage kind of was.
She felt warmth rise into her cheeks and looked away.
“If you look high enough, like put your head so far back you can’t see the ground, there’s only sky. There could be nothing but sky right now,” he said. “She jumped off the roof of her high school. It was a pretty high building, like three stories.”
He pulled his head down and blinked at the ground.
“Makes me dizzy,” he murmured.
Ashley tried to imagine his sister, Belle. Maybe she looked like him, beautiful with golden hair billowing out behind her as she stepped to the edge of the roof at her high school.
Did she look at the sky or the ground?
“The janitor found her. She did it in the afternoon. I still remember the day, weird how days get stuck in your mind. I can’t remember the first time I fell off a board, but I can remember that day vividly. My mom was cooking chili. It was October, one of those cold, blustery days where you look out the window and see the wind shaking down all the trees. I wanted to play in the leaves, but my mom wanted me to wait for Belle to get home from school so she could keep an eye on me. It was sunny. A sky like today with those huge clouds, marshmallow fluff, Belle called them. And later on, I thought about that. It wasn’t a kill yourself kind of day. Didn’t people kill themselves when it was raining or gray? Who kills themselves when the sun is shining?”
He bent down and picked at a skull decal peeling off his board. He ripped it off, but only a corner pulled free, leaving a one-eyed skeleton gazing up at him.
“By the time the cops showed up, the sun had set and my dad was home from work. We ate chili at the table and my mom kept glancing at the door. Every few minutes she’d say an excuse like maybe the girls went for sodas or Belle’s been working so hard on her history paper so she probably stayed after for help. We saw the cop car pull into the driveway and my dad stood up so fast his chili knocked over. I remember my mom scrambling to clean it up. She started to cry, these big gasping sobs, and I thought it was because the chili was dripping onto the carpet. I kept saying, ‘It’s okay, Mom,’ and trying to sop up the chili with my stuffed bear. Now, I understand she somehow knew.”
“That your sister had killed herself?”
Shane ripped another strip off the skeleton.
“That Belle was dead. When the cops came in, one of them took off his hat and held it to his chest. My mom collapsed. She curled into a little ball and started wailing. My dad told me to go to my room, but he wasn’t paying attention, so I just stayed right there.
“We’re sorry to inform you that your daughter is dead. That’s how I remember it. I’m not sure if that’s right, though. That part of my memory is more like watching a film. I might have taken those words from a movie, for all I know.”
Ashley frowned, her mouth dry and her heart thudding softly against her breastbone. The world seemed fuller suddenly, bright and aching and hard to take in. In her mind, she could see a seven-year-old Shane watching his mother on the floor, chili dripping from the table as two policemen took their entire world and crushed it into a little ball and then threw it in the trash.
“I don’t know if she died instantly or lay there on the concrete, everything broken, blood leaking out of her. I remember the casket was closed at her funeral. There were hundreds of kids, like teenagers, kids her age. The girls were crying and falling into each other, and the boys stood shoulder to shoulder, eyes all screwed up and confused. My mom had to be carried out after the service. My uncle Joe carried her because my dad had to help carry the casket.”
Ashley wanted to speak. She searched again for the right words and managed only a little puff that sounded a bit like ‘sorry.’
Shane sat heavily on his board, pulling his legs in and resting his elbows on his knees.
“I guess that’s why my dad’s a dick.”
Ashley sat down too, crossed her legs, and pulled at her t-shirt, wishing she had gum or some poppers to explode, anything to focus on other than Shane’s solemn face.
His eyes didn’t water, but they’d gone a few shades paler as he spoke, the navy irises fading to match the sky.
“She’d be twenty-six now. We celebrate her birthday every year. Mom and me. My dad would go ape-shit if he knew. But we go out to a restaurant and get a piece of cake and put a candle on it. Her birthday is in September. She’d had her seventeenth birthday just a few weeks before she did it. My parents had given her a new pair of roller skates for her birthday. She loved to roller skate. There was a rink a few miles from our house, and she went there with her girlfriends every Friday night.”
“Do you have any other brothers and sisters?” It was a stupid question. They attended the same school. She knew he didn’t have other brothers and sisters.
He shook his head and then looked up, offering her a wry smile.
“Want to go get ice cream? Swirly Cone still has two for one.”
Surprised at the abrupt shift in conversation, she nodded.
Shane hopped up, dropped his board, and pushed toward the road, looking back as she hurried to keep up.
12
“Did you see his eyes?” Ashley whispered as Warren passed her and Sid in the hallway.
To both their surprise, he didn’t reach over a meaty hand to knock Sid’s books from his arms.
Sid twisted around, but Warren had already shuffled around the corner.
“What was wrong with them?” Sid asked, stopping at his locker and hoisting his books under one arm while he fumbled with the lock.
One by one the books slipped and fell, and Ashely caught each one before nudging Sid out of the way and putting his combination in for him.
“What if I’m sick one of these days, Sid? How will you ever get your math homework?”
Sid laughed and held up his thick fingers. “My mom says I’m all thumbs.”
“I hate to agree with a parent, but she might be right,” she said.
Ashely swung open his locker, and a tumble of papers flew out followed by his Star Wars lunchbox. Ashley rolled her eyes at the box, choosing not to mention for the hundredth time that he’d get made fun of less in the cafeteria if he brought a brown bag like she did.