Leo

LEO

NOW

On your fourth day home, I go back to school. I walk there, taking the long way. I still can’t walk by our old babysitter’s house without feeling the need to dry heave, even though last I heard she and her husband don’t live there anymore.

Dad says not to talk to the kids at school about you. If anyone asks, I’m supposed to say my dad told me not to talk about it. That goes over about as well as to be expected. During lunch, I get my cafeteria tray knocked out of my hands because I won’t spill the details of what happened to you.

The tray falls. Dr. Carmichael blames me because by the time it hits the ground, Adam Beltner is nowhere around. Everyone laughs. Look at that idiot, they say.

Dr. Carmichael makes me clean it up. By the time I do, there’s no time left to eat. I go hungry.

I get nudged during the day. Kids ask questions that I ignore. They throw things at me. They call me names. Jagoff. Jerkweed. They stare. They point fingers and laugh.

The effing reporters have snapped about a gazillion pictures of you since you’ve been home. They’re in the paper. They’re all over Snapchat and Instagram. Kids keep sharing them on their own stories like what’s happened to you is their own tragedy. Everyone’s seen the pictures. It’s the same picture, taken from ten angles by ten different photographers. In them, you’re red, covered with blisters on your arms and face. Bleach burns, the doctors said. Second degree. They’ll probably scar. Your clothes don’t fit right. You haven’t bathed in eleven years; you look like trash.

I overhear some kid call you a burrito face because of the blisters and burns. I go to punch him in the face, but Piper Hanaka gets in my way. “Ignore him, Leo. He’s, like, just trying to screw with you. Don’t give him what he wants.”

Piper Hanaka is your age. She’s two years older than me. She’s a senior, practically engaged to some guy she’s been dating since freshman year. Rumor has it, they’re going to different colleges next year. They’ve decided to break up before they go. Neither wants to hold the other back and, if it’s meant to be, I’ve overheard her say, it will be. It sounds very mature, and also stupid as shit. But it means that in exactly eight months from now, Piper Hanaka will be single. Not that she’d ever want me.

Do you remember Piper Hanaka? You used to be friends. I don’t remember that. She told me once, all cloak-and-dagger-like in the hall. Just sidled up to me at my locker and said she had a dream about you. I went mute. I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. Then she said, “Do you want to know what it was about, Leo?”

I said, “Okay. I guess.”

She told me about her dream, how the two of you were trying to pick all the woolly bear caterpillars up off the street. You did it so the cars couldn’t drive over them. You’d gather them in the palms of your hands, then run them back to the trees. You’d set them on the leaves, watch them walk away. By the time they reached the end of the leaf, they were moths. They could fly. In her dream, you were still six.

I thought it might mean something. I thought her dream might be premonitory, like you were dead and you’d turned into an angel with wings, and were flying to heaven.

But as it turned out, it was just a dream. Not all dreams mean something.

She said, “I still think about her, you know? I, like, think about how we used to hang out when we were kids. I wonder if we’d still be friends if she never went away.”

Went away, she said. Like you had some choice in the matter. I didn’t hold it against her. She’s the only one who ever talked to me about you in a way that wasn’t brutally honest. She’s also one of the few who doesn’t give in to the herd mentality and make fun of me.

Piper Hanaka used to live across the street from us. You and she used to ride your bikes on the sidewalk, do cartwheels, play house, climb trees. I don’t remember any of it. Any knowledge I have is secondhand from Dad.

Piper and her family moved after everything happened. I don’t remember them living there. As far as I know, that’s always been old Mr. Murphy’s house. But Dad said their house was on the market within five days of Mom being dead. They didn’t go far ’cause Piper is still at the same school as me. They stayed in town, just on the other side of it, where they didn’t have to look out their window and be reminded that bad things happen to good people every day. It’s like six degrees of Kevin Bacon. All the time, we’re closer to disaster than we think.

I asked Dad to put our house on the market, too. I wanted to get up and go. I wanted to start over somewhere else as someone new, where no one had heard of Mom and you.

Dad said no, because what if you came back and couldn’t find us? As long as you were gone, he would never leave. Time stood still in your absence.

To be straight, Piper Hanaka and I are not friends. Piper Hanaka is way too cool to be my friend. In case you didn’t realize it by now, I have no friends.

That said, Piper Hanaka doesn’t want to see me get expelled for punching some douchebag in the face. She stands in between him and me until I back down and leave.