Still, I wish things had gone differently. And I hope, one day, you will forgive me.
It took months before I was able to sleep at night.
In the first couple of weeks after the shooting, I’d just lie in my bed, listening to every tiny creak, noticing every little shadow, and running through a thousand possibilities of what they could be, each worse than the one before. I spent hours in the darkness, convinced I wouldn’t be alive by morning. Wondering how I’d die. Terrified of the prospect of existence justending.
When the sun came up, I’d finally manage to doze off, still only sleeping in bursts, woken up by nightmares or Mom, poking her head in to check on me.
I don’t know what gave me the idea to climb onto the roof. It seemed logical at the time, though. From there, I could see anything coming. I would know before the danger could reach me. The roof just felt like the safest place I could be in the middle of the night.
So I grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen and headed outside. A wooden fence ran down the middle of the narrow swath of land that separated our yard from Mrs. Mason’s, and once I hoisted myself onto the fence, I was able to jump onto the roof. I found a spot and sat there, cross-legged for hours, turning the knife over and over in my hands, my wide eyes watching for any signs of trouble in my dark little corner of Virgil County.
I stayed there until the sky shifted from black to an almost royal blue, with the sunlight just beginning to peer over the horizon. As the streetlights flickered out, I hopped off the roof and snuck back inside, burying myself beneath the covers on my bed before Mom could wake up.
I’d been doing this every night for a week when Miles noticed me. Or, maybe he’d noticed me before. I’m not sure. But this was the first time he’d come outside while I was up there.
Miles’s grandmother, Mrs. Mason, has lived next door to Mom and me since I can remember. She’s a little old lady with wispy white hair and a habit of calling everyone “sweetie.” When I was eleven and my own grandmother died, she brought Mom and me dinner every night for a week, because she didn’t want Mom to have to worry about cooking on top of everything else.
So when Miles came to live with her a year later, right after I started seventh grade, he took me by surprise. He wasn’t at all how I’d imagined Mrs. Mason’s grandson to be. I’d imagined him in khakis and a collared shirt, not a dirty hoodie and ripped jeans. I’d pictured him as having the same warm smile as his grandmother, not a face that shifted from sulky to angry and seemingly nothing else.
I wasn’t sure why Miles had come to live with his grandmother, because we’d never really spoken. I know that’s hard to believe—two kids, roughly the same age, living right next door to each other and never interacting. But if you knew us, especially before the shooting, you’d understand. He was a year ahead of me in school at the time. He was quiet, even back then he mumbled everything, and as far as I could tell, he didn’t seem all that interested in getting to know me. Not that I tried that hard, either. I spent most of my time with Sarah, and he was definitely not the sort of guy I could see her becoming friends with.
Honestly, even now, I wonder what she’d think of him if she were still here.
But, anyway, that night was the first time I ever really spent time with him.
It must’ve been around one in the morning. The tiny subdivision we lived in was completely dark aside from a few streetlamps. I’d already been sitting up there for an hour or two when I heard a voice from the ground.
“Lee.”
I jumped and my fingers tightened around the knife. But the voice had been quiet, almost careful. Slowly, I crawled to the edge of the roof and peered down. Miles was standing just on the other side of the fence. I almost didn’t see him. He was wearing a black sweatshirt and a black beanie covered his hair. His face was pale, though, almost ghostly, and it stood in contrast to the darkness around him.
We stared at each other for a long, quiet moment before he asked, “Can I come up?”
I nodded and scurried back as he climbed the wooden fence. A second later, he appeared over the edge of the roof, pulling himself up and then crawling over to sit next to me. I saw him glance down at my hands, at the knife, but he didn’t say anything.
I wasn’t surprised when he’d appeared. In a way, I think I expected it.
That first night, we didn’t talk at all. Not a word. It was a warm sort of silence, though. A silence that felt safe. Even though I barely knew Miles, I was glad to have him there with me. Because I didn’t want to be alone, but usually, when someone else was nearby, they were staring at me, asking me questions, or trying so hard to make me feel comfortable that I felt like I was being suffocated with a pillow. But those quiet hours on the roof, that was what I’d been longing for.
I assume Miles needed the same thing. I’m sure that’s why he climbed on my roof that night, but I’ve never actually asked him.
We spent almost every night that summer on top of my house. Some nights we sat in that same blanket of silence. Miles would bring a flashlight and a book, about the Industrial Revolution or the War of 1812. He’d read quietly, lips moving over the words, while I sat there, clutching my knife and counting streetlights. Other nights, though, we stretched out on our backs, looking up at the sky. But only when the moon was bright and there were plenty of stars. On black, cloudy nights, I couldn’t stand to look up.
It was on one of those cloudy nights that Miles and I had our first conversation that consisted of more than a few words.
He was leaning back, arms crossed over his chest as he stared up. I took one glance at the sky and shuddered a little before pulling my knees to my chest and focusing on the streetlights instead. I still had the knife in my hand, and my fingers tightened around the hilt.
“You okay?” Miles asked in his quiet, almost slurred mumble.
“Fine.”
He didn’t say anything, but I could feel his eyes on me. He knew I wasn’t fine. Neither of us had been fine in a while. And I didn’t know why I was lying to him of all people.
“I don’t like it when the sky is this dark,” I said. “When I lie back, the darkness is all I see and I feel … I feel like I’m falling into nothingness. It’s what I imagine death feels like.”
Before the shooting, I hadn’t thought much about death. Obviously, I was aware that I’d die one day, but it was an abstract concept. It felt distant and somehow irrelevant. After the shooting, though, after seeing death firsthand, realizing it wasn’t necessarily a far-off threat, it felt like I was seeing the world with new eyes. Like a curtain had been pulled back and I could now see the hideous truth of mortality.
And now I saw death everywhere.
