Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,34

a fine mist of guilt is settling over me. I think of my parents and shake it off. You don’t owe them anything.

I try smoking weed again, but instead of mellowing things out it gives my worries tiny fangs and bright yellow eyes and hairy feet and sets them marching like trolls. I sit on my bed with the lights on and my cell phone at the ready, my thoughts sliding back and forth between paranoia and self-recrimination. If you weren’t so self-absorbed, you would have noticed that things weren’t okay with Sukey. You would have helped her. But no, all you cared about was whether she would take you for milkshakes when she came to visit. You selfish little brat. You knew she didn’t die in a car crash, didn’t you?

I didn’t, I swear I didn’t.

But you cared more about keeping Mom and Dad happy with your stupid piano playing than about knowing the truth.

I curl up into a toxic ball of grief and self-loathing, the ceiling light hot and accusatory on my back. In the morning, I promise myself, I’ll get Doug to tell me the details, even the horrible ones, even the ones that will break me in ways I will never be able to fix. It’s what I deserve for being such a coward. And it’s the only way I can start to forgive myself for hiding from the truth for so long.

chapter seventeen

“He was a kid, eh. Young guy. Stupid. Hooked on junk.”

Doug and I are sitting in a sticky, distinctly sneezed-on booth at the Sunshine Diner, one of those all-day-breakfast places in Chinatown. He agreed to put down his early-morning beer, pull a shirt on over his speckled torso, and talk to me when I showed him the wooden bear. We’re the only ones here except for a table of twentysomething hipsters wearing plastic sunglasses and those really tight cardigans that make skinny people look anorexic and everyone else look morbidly obese. They’re reading the menus and laughing about the spelling mistakes, debating loudly whether to order the chocorat milk or the rapefruit juice. They project this aura of gleeful self-awareness that makes me feel awkward sitting with Doug while he pores over the menu like a sacred text, hungrily and with complete lack of irony.

I clamp my hand around my glass of syrupy orange juice. “What was his name?” I say.

“Billy.”

Billy. I handle the word warily, like an animal that might bite. My head has been swarming with questions all morning, but now that Doug is here in front of me, I’m too nervous to speak. I wish he would just talk, just tell me things. I tear at the edge of my napkin and twist the little white shreds into spirals, my mind shouting, Ask! Ask! Ask! but my lips refusing to move.

The waitress comes to take our order, staying just long enough to leave a disinfectant breeze that lingers over our table. I take a sip of my orange juice, as thick in my throat as cough syrup.

“So this Billy,” I force out, my fingers working the napkin. “Um. How—um.”

Doug lets out a long, hoarse sigh.

“She helped him out a couple times. Sukey-girl could never say no to anyone who needed help, even a junkie. She said he was just a kid. Said he just needed to get on his feet.”

My stomach turns.

“She knew him?”

I’d been imagining a stranger or distant acquaintance—some random brute, senseless as a dump truck. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that it was a friend. Someone who knew her. Someone she’d helped. Someone who had seen how small she looked in her denim jacket and realized how easy it would be to break her body with a fist, a knife, a pair of scissors. I feel the orange juice burning in the back of my throat and force myself to swallow.

The waitress comes again with our food but I don’t see her, I just hear the clink of plates on the table in front of me and smell the suddenly unwelcome aroma of scrambled eggs. Doug reaches for the grubby ketchup bottle next to the napkin dispenser. He turns it upside down and whacks it. Dark red blobs of ketchup plop out, and I have to look away before it calls up images I’d rather not have in my head.

“I told her to stay away from that kid,” he says. “He was dangerous. Shifty-eyed. Rob his own mother for a fix. Sukey used to let him