I mentally rifle through anything and everything that has ever seemed out of place. My parents’ divorce. Mom’s overprotectiveness. The invisible boy.
Oh God, the invisible boy.How can he be a coincidence, some fluke bout of crazy, after all this? Is he…could he be connected to Rory somehow?
People don’t spontaneously appear and disappear; something makes them. And in any case, they have to come fromsomewhere.Somewhere like the past.
Who is this guy?
I look at Caleb.
I want to say,Do you know why I went to Overton today? Because I’m seeing things. Because just like everything outside me, something is broken inside me, too.
But I look at my older brother, and even though I’ve known him every day of my life, I don’t recognize him.
I’m not telling him about Bus Boy.
I slip past him and head upstairs.
My mind is racing a million miles per hour, and I can’t even think about sleeping, though it’s past ten and I have school tomorrow.
I think about texting Katy again, but what would I say?Guess what, my parents are crazier than we thought—they erased my dead little brother?
I can tell from Mom’s and Caleb’s reactions that it wasn’t easy, that it hurts them just to say his name after not doing it in so long. Or did they do it in private, when I wasn’t around? Did they think about him at birthdays, random days of the year to me that made them want to crawl under the covers and hide? Did seeing me happy, normal, when they couldn’t be make them hate me? Is that what Caleb meant about me getting to live like it never happened?
My chest hurts at how random things I never thought about must have devastated them.
But I don’t have enough space to feel sorry for them. Not when the corners of my room seem to be crowding in againstme.
Not when there are tiny storms erupting in my head, thoughts of packing my bags and leaving and never coming back home, questions about what I can trust and who I can trust. Not when everything feels like a lie.
I want to call my father and scream at him, scream and not have to see the hurt in his eyes.
This is why he stopped loving me.
But he’s probably in the air.
I put on headphones and listen to my favorite piece from the concert, “Air on the G String.”
Now the melody snakes its way around me. Every instrument’s part tangling and interweaving with the rest, like clasped hands tightly tucked within each other. One hand tracing the lines on the other’s palm; the webs between the fingers damp with sweat. This song makes me feel close to something, to someone nameless and faceless.
I don’t want to feel close to anyone tonight, though. I want to be unreachable.
So I pull out my viola, despite the hour, and play a different song.
I play loudly and recklessly. I play angrily, for so long that I push the corners of the room further back and hold them there. Mom doesn’t dare ask me to stop, even though she has to get up early for her six-thirty report.
My fingers tremble from the music or anger or fear, and I keep playing. Playing away the ghost of a brother I didn’t know I had, playing away all the questions that I still can’t answer.
I keep thinking about Bus Boy, about the night on the bus. I can’t shake the feeling that everything that happened tonight, everything since the accident, started the moment that boy walked onto the bus.
But how doesthatmake any sense?
Rory would be six now, not seventeen. How can they be connected?
I don’t have any of the answers, so I play away the questions. Caleb pounds twice on my door, begging for quiet. I play harder.
And then I stop.
BEFORE
