The Beginning of After - By Jennifer Castle Page 0,29

to move beyond that, not knowing how to answer his non-questions. David took another swig from his bottle, and it occurred to me that he hadn’t yet looked me in the eye. My hair, my shoes, anywhere safe and only distantly related to the person he was saying these things to.

“Leave me alone,” I finally said, swallowing hard. It came out lame, weak, a little kid being bullied on the playground. My mother had taught Toby what to say when I teased him: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. It only made me laugh and tease him harder.

“You’re living it up over here with Joe Lasky. Aren’t you even the slightest bit broken up by what happened to you?” David said.

Something dark inside me knocked twice. He’s right, you know. Why are you in this place, when they can’t be? Just like you were home that night when you should have been with them.

“That’s none of your business,” I said, trying to make it sound forceful. But then suddenly I popped out with: “What about you? If you’re here, why can’t I be here?”

“Because we’re just crashing this party. Do you see me wearing a goddamn tux? My buddies and I came here to pour some kamikaze in the punch, then leave.”

He held up his bottle as proof, but the kamikaze—if that’s what it was—was almost gone. Where was Joe? Joe would make David go away.

David saw me looking toward the house. “Laurel, you can go to as many proms as you want, but it’s not going to change things.”

“I know that.”

“You’re an orphan. That’s what I heard someone say inside. ‘She’s an orphan now.’”

The word made me think of Dickens, of Pip and David Copperfield and even Oliver! It wasn’t me. Clinically, officially, yes, but I’d never connected to it.

I must have looked shocked, because David regarded me now with more regret than anger.

“That came out sounding way harsher than I thought it would,” he said, then looked down at his kamikaze accusingly. I noticed his hands were shaking. “I wasn’t prepared to see you here,” he added, his voice a little deflated now.

But if he was deflating, I was doing the opposite. Something in me was filling with air.

“You’re an orphan too,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. This made David stand up, his confusion giving way to defensiveness.

“No, my dad is still alive. He’ll be fine.”

“If that’s what you want to believe. Personally, I think he’s going to be a veg forever.”

I blamed that one on the alcohol, making me brave for one or two seconds at a time.

“Shut up,” he snapped.

So I’d struck a nerve.

“Which is what he deserves,” I said, “considering he killed four people.”

David paused, his hand squeezing the plastic bottle so tight I heard it pop a bit. “My dad wasn’t drunk.”

“He didn’t have to be drunk,” I said. “He just had to be careless. Either way, he’s a murderer.”

David wanted to hit me. I could tell. He wanted to hit me so bad that his heels came up out of his shoes. I had put my beer cup on the ground, and now he kicked it into the pool, where it landed without making noise.

Even though he was standing and I was sitting, I could feel things shift. I had found a box of ammunition somewhere, tucked into the back of my mind. What else was in it?

“What about Masher?” I asked, as if we were a married couple breaking up, figuring out custody of our joint life.

“What about him?”

“I don’t have to take care of him. I can give him back to your grandparents.”

David shook his head, looked away. “You can’t do that. They don’t want him.”

“Then you want me to take care of him?”

David’s face had caved in a bit, the shadows carving deeper across his cheeks and chin. He didn’t seem that different from Toby after one of our arguments, after I’d beaten him on every front. This was when Toby would have jumped on me for the wrestling portion of the program, but I was pretty sure David wasn’t about to do that.

“Yes,” he said, and placed his kamikaze bottle carefully on the ground.

“Yes, what?” That’s what this ammunition box was. Big-sister power. The only power I had in the world, at least when Toby was still in it.

“Take care of my dog, please,” whispered David. He turned around and walked back toward the house, then around it in the