Towering - By Alex Flinn Page 0,60

allegedly gone skiing. Reminded, I said, “Yeah, Josh was telling me about that.”

I felt guilty about lying to her, especially when she asked, “Did you see anything interesting?” It was almost like she knew.

“Anything interesting? Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Birds, animals. You city types seem to find that kind of thing fascinating, no?”

She didn’t suspect. She was just making small talk. But maybe I should tell her anyway. She could help Rachel. Rachel could live with us—if I could talk Rachel into it. After all, Mrs. Greenwood had already taken me in.

But something held me back. Rachel had been adamant about not telling anyone.

I said, “Nothing really. Do you want me to get dinner? I make a pretty mean spaghetti with cut-up hot dogs.” I’d bought hot dogs on one of my trips into town.

“I have a chicken in the oven. It will be ready soon. Come watch Star Trek.”

But suddenly, I wanted to be alone for a while. The events of the day had been pretty amazing. Pretty weird. From being chased in the morning to falling in love in the afternoon to confessing everything about Tyler. I felt empty. I glanced at the screen. “I’ve seen this one. I think I’ll go upstairs and change. My socks got wet.”

She nodded, not taking her eyes off Captain Kirk. “Okay, about six o’clock, all right?”

I glanced at my watch. The episode would end at six. I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see me. “Okay, I’ll be back.”

I trudged to the stairs and started up. The house was already dark, so I flipped the switch to turn on the stairway light. As I walked up, I noticed the photos, as I had the first day I was there. The woman in the wedding dress, I now knew, was Mrs. Greenwood. Like her daughter, she had been beautiful once. The photos reminded me of something, I wasn’t sure what.

Then, I remembered.

I could still hear Star Trek in the background. I had close to an hour when she’d be concentrating only on that.

Instead of turning into my own room, I looked behind me. Nothing. I touched the doorknob on my left. No one sprung out at me. With one more glance over my shoulder, one last listen for footsteps, I turned the knob. I stepped inside. I closed Danielle’s door behind me.

Danielle’s room looked the same as that first night. No broken glass on the floor. I hadn’t expected it. The broken window had been a dream, a figment of my imagination.

And yet, I expected the room to look somehow different. I expected it to be different now that I knew Danielle was dead.

After Tyler died, his mother had come to stay with us for a while. When the crime scene people finally cleared out of their house, my mother and I had offered to go over and clean out Tyler and Nikki’s rooms. The house was being sold to whoever would buy it. Mom suggested that I, as Tyler’s best friend, would know what was most important to save and what he might have wanted given to friends. I didn’t know, though. Tyler hadn’t thought about what he wanted to leave people. He hadn’t planned to die. He wouldn’t have. You don’t consider your own mortality at sixteen. He wasn’t like my grandfather, who had talked about what he’d leave me for years before he had. Death in the elderly seemed inevitable. Death at sixteen is usually sudden and seems escapable, as if you should simply be able to rewind, turn the page back, and get on with the course that had already been charted. I should have told a guidance counselor or someone about Tyler’s stepdad. Then, Tyler would have lived, played football, taken the SAT. He’d have gone to prom, then college, done all the things he was supposed to do. Death, in Tyler’s case, wasn’t an ending. It was like one of those books where they don’t tell you what happens to the characters because there’s a sequel. Only, in Tyler’s case, the sequel had never been written. Instead, I was in Tyler’s room, looking at each binder in a backpack he’d never use, thinking I couldn’t just throw them away, that he’d need them. Then, realizing he wouldn’t. He never would. So I separated out the textbooks to give back to the school (trying not to think of the kid next year being assigned a dead guy’s American History text) and stuffed the rest of his backpack