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“What?” I was suddenly angry, like when your parents yank the blankets off in the morning to make you get out of bed. In the cold January air, my skin felt so thin that it was almost transparent. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
Natalie answered, “You never talked about it. We were just waiting until you were ready, I guess.”
And then Ha
I stared at them. My body drained of everything, including the anger that had been so palpable only a moment ago. They’d known this whole time, and they hadn’t treated me any differently than they did. I wondered what they saw when they looked at me.
Ha
“She was beautiful,” I said. “She was … she was great. She was fu
I looked at my phone. “Shit, it’s three o’clock! My aunt!” Ha
“Where have you been?!” she asked.
“I was just—I—”
“Your cheeks are all red,” she said, and put her hands against them. “You’re freezing!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I … this kid, he fell on the ice and I had to help him inside.”
Aunt Amy gave me a look like she didn’t know if she believed what I was saying. “Lying is a sin, Laurel.”
I looked back at her. “Yeah, I know.”
She was quiet for a moment, tucking her silver hair behind her ear as she tried to decide whether to trust me or not. My stomach knotted with guilt.
“Can we go?” I finally asked.
She nodded, and her old white Beetle pulled off through the parking lot.
When we got home, it was like I’d never been so tired. I told Aunt Amy I still wasn’t feeling well and went to lie down. For some reason I started thinking of this game called the dead game that May and I used to play with Carl and Mark, the neighbor boys.
In the summer, after a day at their pool, we’d go home for di
Then when it started to turn to dusk, before the streetlights came on and we’d have to go in, May would usually say it was time to play the dead game. It was the perfect time of night, when parents would be watching TV and the light was low and sticky. She loved the game because she always won.
She got the idea for it that summer before she started high school, just after Mom moved out. Once our basketball game was over, we’d started playing truth or dare. May thought that Carl’s and Mark’s dares—stuff like flashing the neighbors’ houses—were boring, so she said she had a better dare, for all of us.
The dead game worked like this. You’d lie in the middle of the road on your back with a blindfold—it had to be the dead middle, we made an X with chalk—and wait for a car to come. Whoever could last the longest before they got up and ran out of the way won. The thing is, since you had the blindfold on, you could only know if a car was coming by the sound it made on the road.
Sometimes, the car’s driver would see us in the street and screech the brakes. But lots of times, because it was dusk, the driver couldn’t see. May would wait just a second too long before she rolled away. The first time we played, I thought the car would really hit her. I ran out into the street in front of it, waving my arms up and down, until it came to a screeching stop. An old woman got out and started yelling at us. When she was gone, May turned to me. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you get it? That’s not how the game works.” The point was that when you were the dead one, you and only you knew exactly when to run. My cheeks turned hot with shame.
So after that, when it was May’s turn, I would stand on the sidewalk, curling my bare toes into the cement, still warm from the day’s sun. I would try not to look at the street. I would look instead at the coming stars and wish for May to be okay. But at the last minute, I couldn’t help it. I always looked down and saw her body there, motionless. When she’d roll away in time, I would wipe the hot tears from my eyes. And then she would be so alive, gri
Yours,
Laurel
Dear River,
In chorus today, Ha
After class, Ha
Eventually I walked out to the alley and found Natalie and Ha
After a few moments of silence, they forced themselves to chatter. Tristan lit a cigarette with his giant kitchen lighter. When he and Kristen had to leave to get ready to go to di
When Tristan and Kristen left, I was about to go, too, so that I wouldn’t be late again to meet Aunt Amy. But then Ha
The way that she said it, so kindly, made me wish that I could tell her everything. “I’m sorry, too,” I answered, “that I didn’t talk to you guys about it before.”
Ha
Then Natalie said, sounding very serious, “It’s, like, really sad that people die.”
We all laughed at once, because this was so obvious. It was an accidental, perfect example of what Ha
“Are you drunk?” I asked her, which made us laugh harder.
When it finally got that after-laugh quiet, I said, “I’m so glad I have you guys.” And I am.