Kathleen Hale - No One Else Can Have You

Before Davey gave his speech, I had this really distinct picture in my head. That she kicked, fought, swore. That whoever did it left the cornfield beaten and bruised from the fight. And now all I can think about is how it wasn’t like that at all. How maybe she even tried to run away, her heart suddenly chicken, forgetting entirely that she was lit up like a Christmas tree.

I hear Dom chasing after me, but I just speed up, making a beeline across the parking lot, heading for the car.

“The cookies were bad,” I shout over my shoulder, throwing open the back door and shoving the pan inside. I am hiccupping. I am ugly with tears.

Dom trots up behind me. I struggle under his hug, but he holds me tight. “Hey . . . hey ,” he says softly. “Let’s stop a sec, okay?”

“But the cookies . . .” I dissolve into involuntary groans and hiccups. Tears and snot are like glue across my face.

“It doesn’t have to be about the cookies,” he says. “It’s okay to be upset about what you’re upset about.” He leans back and looks at me, still holding on. “As someone who also appreciated Ruth as a person, I can only imagine how hard this is for you.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point,” I plead. I’m thinking about how I will have no one to stand with in the hallways. How part of me wishes she would come back and the other half doesn’t even know if she liked me.

“I’m a bad friend,” I finally say. “The cookies were bad and I was bad. I was really, really bad.” I stare at the ground, brushing Dom’s hand away as he tries to wipe my cheeks with the sleeve of his sweater.

“My little porcupine,” Dom says softly. “There are different kinds of bad.”

“Oh, just quit it with the psychobabble,” I snap and shove him off me. I barrel into the car and slam the door.

I watch Dom sigh and go around to the driver’s side. The minute he gets in, I yell at him again. “I’m not going to revel in this with you, okay?”

Yet as we drive back, I am relieved by this sadness creeping in. Fall used to be my favorite season. All that happy red, bright and scattered everywhere. Now I look around and all I see is death, moving across the leaves like a fire.

Dom’s scheduled to give a talk at some PTA meeting the day after the memorial service. It’s for parents of high schoolers, and he wants me to go with him. Apparently, most people are bringing their kids. I guess they don’t want to risk leaving them home to be murdered.

“Come on, Cactus, time to skedaddle.”

I groan and tell Dom I’d rather stay at the Great Moose Motel and shove pencils in my eyeballs than listen to him embarrass me in front of the entire town. Then I crawl into my double bed and pull the covers over my face, hoping he’ll leave without me.

“I love you, Huggersmith,” he says.

“My stomach hurts,” I grumble.

For one thing I don’t really feel like running into any more tear-stained faces, especially when I can’t seem to wipe this angry look off my own face. Plus, Dom let it slip he’ll be giving a speech today titled “Hugging Your Teenager.” He was always doing stuff like that when I was in middle school. Once for an assembly, he got onstage in front of the whole sixth grade and gave a presentation called “Love Your Body While It Changes!” There were illustrated diagrams and a mannequin, and Dom kept winking at me the entire time. It was terrible.

“Everything you’re feeling is valid, Kipster,” Dom says, putting on his counselor voice. I hear his knees crack as he crouches beside my bed. “Go on, talk at me, honey, it doesn’t have to be all pretty.”

I peek out at him from underneath the blankets. “I guess I wish you’d fart outside,” I say. “I mean, that’s where I’d start, if I started expressing myself.”

“Okay, so you’re deflecting, I get that, you betcha.” He plucks his phone out of its belt holster. “And you can stay here while I’m out, but not by yourself—no way, no how.”

So now Ralph is coming over.

Ralph Johnston has been keeping an eye on me since Mom died—which basically means he’s been my babysitter since he was two years younger than I am now. So it doesn’t really make sense that I’m not old enough to look after myself, and there’s definitely grounds for raising my voice about how unfair Dom is being. But I don’t feel like arguing.

Plus, it’s Ralph. He’s lived across the street from me my whole life, and if it weren’t for the age difference I’d probably just call him my second best friend . . . or promote him to hypothetical first best friend, since Ruth could give a crap. Basically I have no friends.

Ralph actually called last night to say sorry for not coming to Ruth’s memorial service. He obviously knew her pretty well—or at least, he’d exchanged basic pleasantries with her for the nine years she and I were inseparable—and so he’d barely known her for a long time. Anyway, on the phone last night he said he was sorry, but that when it came down to it he just wasn’t ready to go back to Cutter Funeral Home.

“I dragged my heels,” he said. “I wasn’t brave enough to leave the house.”

And I couldn’t argue with that. Ralph’s parents were like family to me—but when it was time for their funeral last winter, I locked myself in the bathroom and pretended to be throwing up until Dom relented and let me stay home unchaperoned. At that point it had been eight years, nine months, and four days since Mom had died. So I can’t even imagine how Ralph must have felt about returning to Cutter less than a year after both his parents were displayed there.

“No worries,” I told him. “You didn’t miss much except me mucking up.”

The last time Ralph and I were at Cutter Funeral Home together was when he and his parents went with Dom and me to pick up Mom’s ashes. For moral support, or whatever. I remember being downstairs while everyone else went up to help Dom fill out the paperwork. People had been holding me on their laps for weeks, and I hadn’t gotten to see her yet all by myself. Standing there with her ashes was the first time I fully realized how different it would be without her. I had been momentarily forgotten, left alone with a bag of ground-up bones. And Mom would never have allowed that. Even if the bones were hers.

Anyway, I couldn’t stop touching them. The ashes, I mean. I opened the bag and grabbed handfuls. And by the time Ralph trotted down looking for me, I was elbow deep in remains. I caught his eye and froze. I was so afraid that Ralph, who was older, would tell on me, or make a face like I was gross—I mean, who tries to hug their mom after she’s been pulverized? But instead he just said, “Yeah, it’s like construction rubble, huh?” It was. Like gravel or a bag of broken shells.

And that’s the thing about Ralph: he’s not judgmental. He never has been. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I think it has to do with the fact that he’s really good with computers. Like, it makes him look at the world differently, because he can break a problem into pieces—and when you’re zooming in on yourself, he can zoom you back out.

The point is, we get along, and I’ve never felt self-conscious around him, and I can’t say that about most people. I can wear what I want and say what I will, and ask dumb questions and mess up. But he never thinks I’m weird or what some might call a loser.

“Jesus, Kippy Bushman,” Ralph whines when I open the door. He’s got on a matching Windbreaker set and those wrap-around sunglasses that ESPN poker players wear. He used to wear the same thing every day: baggy jeans and funny, screen-printed T-shirts—with real zingers on them like Eat Sleep Code or I can explain it to you but I can’t understand it for you. But ever since he took a break from computers, this is his new uniform.