Gone, Gone, Gone (21 page)

I will let her go.

It’s like a voice in my head has said,
enough
. Or, as Lio would say, “Let it be.”

Maybe the voice in my head is Lio.

Tuesday morning, before school, I tell all of this to Dad in this voice that doesn’t sound nearly as hopeful as I would like it to. Dad tells me Todd would tell me not to kill myself, and he takes me out for pancakes before Lio wakes up.

“I feel so bad,” I tell him. “I should have been looking out for them better. I was pretty much a pretty shitty . . . whatever I was to them, I was pretty shitty about it.”

He says, really softly, “Craig.”

“Peggy should have been in a cage.”

“You had a cage for her?”

I nod. “She should have been in it. I should have put her in.”

“Craig,” Dad says. And he takes a deep breath. “You had to let her out of the cage. I . . . kid, in a way, I’m glad this goddamn break-in happened.”

My chin shakes. “Why?”

He puts my hand on my shoulder. “To let you out of your cage.”

So that’s it, really. I will need to deal with this. I’ll still miss Peggy all the time, but I need to keep going where I’m going.

So here is what I have.

Four dogs.

Eight cats (but I think I am going to give the kittens away).

Two rabbits.

One mouse.

A koala.

I get out of the car to feed the animals who are here to be fed and Dad turns on the news. I hear Lio’s alarm go off upstairs. His alarm is so loud because that boy can sleep through anything. He says it’s a consequence of growing up with six girls.

A bus driver was shot, fifteen minutes ago. Close to here again. Standing on the steps of his bus. And the news decides this is the time to read a bit of the note that the sniper left on Saturday.
Do not release to the press,
it says and here they are, releasing it to us. This feels like the worst idea in the world. The note says:

Your children are not safe, anywhere, at any time.

My breathing hurts.

I say, “I’m not going to school today,” as Lio trudges down the stairs, rubbing his eyes. Mine feel like they’re catching fire. I don’t like this. I don’t like this and I really don’t like that note.

Dad is watching me and he says, “Okay.”

“What’s going on?” Mom says. She’s coming down the stairs behind Lio. She kisses the top of his head, and he gives
her a sleepy smile before he turns his focus to the news.

He takes a second to process what’s going on, then he puts his hand on my shoulder.

“I’m scared,” I say. I blurt it out. Here it is. I don’t know why I’m scared
now,
surrounded by walls, with my parents and Lio right here. But I am. This should be the place where I’m safe. This should be it.

He gives me one of those small smiles he used to give me back when he didn’t talk. His eyes are so close to me that for a minute I think I’m looking in a mirror, even though his eyes are blue and I know mine aren’t. I realize how scary it would be if Theodore was still around. And how amazing. And I feel for a minute like I’m going to cry, but it passes, because Lio’s still looking at me.

He whispers, “Want to hear a secret?”

I nod.

“You’re safe with me anywhere, at all times.”

It turns out, our “anywhere” is the basement, and our “at all times” is the entire day. We don’t go to school. We play checkers and make out. My parents are upstairs watching the news. And even though it feels like the entire world is freaking out, and even though the entire world is really just our area, and no one else anywhere gives a shit, and they definitely don’t give a shit that there are two boys making out in a basement, that’s what we are, we keep doing it,
and there is something sort of beautiful about the fact that we keep doing that even now that we know it’s not what the world is about.

If I could take all the machine guns in the world and bend them into hearts, I totally totally would, even if I got grazed by bullets in the process, which knowing me I probably would, because I’m a little bit of a klutz, but Lio thinks I’m cute.

LIO

THAT NIGHT I DECIDE,
ENOUGH DAWDLING.

I get out of bed at two in the morning, which is difficult, because, despite the rubbery mattress, it is warm and lovely under the covers. And out of bed, it’s freezing. It has become mid-autumn completely without my knowledge. Most of October is gone. It feels like we should get to try this month over. Not the things that happened, just the season. We didn’t notice it getting cold.

I put on a pair of socks, consider my feet, and put on another pair of socks. I don’t want to get sick.

Todd is already at work, and Craig’s parents are sleeping. Across town, my family is asleep, except my
mother in New York, who is drinking or sleeping, and my grown-up sisters, who are probably just drinking. I think when we sleep, the world belongs to everyone still awake. Which means a whole shitload of the world belongs to Craig.

I whisper his name from the top of the stairs.

He rolls over in his bed and looks at me. He isn’t emailing. He’s lying there.

“Come upstairs,” I tell him.

He moans a little. “God, my parents . . .”

“Like this is about your parents.” I know what that room is to him. “Come on. I’m sick of looking at all your stupid trophies and drawings all by myself. Come tell me what they mean.”

He wraps his arms around himself. “The animals . . .”

“Can come up or stay down here,” I say.

He watches me. I lean my cheek against the banister.

“Pleeeeease, Craig?”

He gets out of bed, shivering, and says, “Come here.”

“Why?”

“Cold. Too hard to find a sweatshirt.” He grabs me by the legs and lifts me onto his back. I like this. I kick my feet all the way upstairs. I hope I’m keeping him warm.

It’s Tuesday night, and we’ve been together for three months or three days or something, and it’s been the best time of my life.

And let’s be
honest, I have no idea how many three days or three months I have left.

“I really like you,” I tell him.

He drops me on the rubbery mattress and kisses me.

“You know that kid who got shot?” I say. “Outside Michelle’s school?”

He’s breathing hard between kisses. “Uh-huh?”

“He’s totally going to be fine. Saw it on the news.”

We are in the bed, squeaking on the mattress. We are all arms and legs and mouths. I’ve never kissed like this before. I feel like I’m falling into him.

“I like your hair,” he says.

“Mmm.”

His hand underneath my T-shirt. I shiver. “However far you want to go, Craig.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s fine with me. I’m ready.”

He kisses me hard, for a long time. His teeth are against my lips.

He whispers, “Li? Can we just sleep tonight?”

I can’t say I’m not a little disappointed. But it’s all right. There
will
be other nights. There will be. I have to believe that. And again and again and again.

I wrap my arms as far around him as they will go. “We can sleep forever. I promise I won’t go crazy.”

“Don’t get cancer.”

“I won’t. Don’t, um, get a dog.”

He
chuckles, and we kiss. And he falls asleep with his lips against mine.

He sleeps. My fucking boyfriend is asleep, and maybe tomorrow he’ll wake up without that headache or that bleary look in his eyes or the ringing in his ears from staying up for thirty hours. He sleeps so close to me, like he’s doing it just to prove to me that he’ll be okay.

It is so much more beautiful than any polar bears in Alaska. Because I am here and he is mine and forever is as long as we want it to be.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Like a lot of mornings, we wake up and there is news. They’ve arrested two men at a rest stop. The sniper rifles were in their trunk of their car. A man found them. They were asleep.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK COULD NOT HAVE EXISTED WITHOUT
the support of my amazing editor, Anica Rissi, or my agent, Suzie Townsend. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a role these two had in shaping the final draft of this book. Suzie always knows where I need to add words, and Anica always knows where I need to cross them out. Without the two of them, I would never know what my books were about. They’re invaluable. Thank you as well to everyone else at Simon Pulse and FinePrint Literary. It’s an honor to be working with you.

My best friend, Alex Stek, read
Gone, Gone, Gone
a page at a time while I was writing the first draft. He pretended it was perfect.

My family, on the other hand, deserves a million thank-yous for putting up with the fact that I don’t let them read my books until they’re on the shelves. My mother, my father, and my sister are three of the best people I have ever met, and they prove it every day by somehow tolerating me. Thank you as well to Seth, Emma, Galen, and my cousins, who are all family as well, some more obviously than others.

I don’t know
how to address the people who were affected by the 2002 Beltway Sniper attacks except to say that I hope this story reaches you if you want it and doesn’t if you don’t.

I’m useless without the Musers, and almost as useless without my magic gay fish.

And I owe a million thank-yous, as always, to you. I do it for you, you know?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HANNAH MOSKOWITZ
is the author of
Break
,
Invincible Summer
, and the middle-grade novel
Zombie Tag
. She was in Maryland the whole time, and she has owned a total of fourteen pets. Visit her at
untilhannah.com
.

From
BREAK

THE FIRST FEELING IS EXHILARATION.

My arms hit the ground. The sound is like a mallet against a crab.

Pure fucking exhilaration.

Beside me, my skateboard is a stranded turtle on its back. The wheels shriek with each spin.

And then—oh.
Oh,
the pain.

The second feeling is pain.

Naomi’s camera beeps and she makes a triumphant noise in her throat. “You
totally
got it that time,” she says. “Tell me you got it.”

I hold my breath for a moment until I can say, “We got it.”

“You fell like a bag of mashed potatoes.” Her sneakers make bubble gum smacks against the pavement on her way to me. “Just . . . splat.”

So vivid, that girl.

Naomi’s beside me, and her tiny hand is an ice cube on my smoldering back.

“Don’t get up,” she says.

I choke out a sweaty, clogged piece of laughter. “Wasn’t going to, babe.”

“Whoa, you’re bleeding.”

“Yeah, I thought so.” Blood’s the unfortunate side effect of a hard-core fall. I pick my head up and shake my neck, just to be sure I can. “This was a definitely a good one.”

I let her roll me onto my back. My right hand stays pinned, tucked grotesquely under my arm, fingers facing back toward my elbow.

She nods. “Wrist’s broken.”

“Huh, you think?” I swallow. “Where’s the blood?”

“Top of your forehead.”

I sit up and lean against Naomi’s popsicle stick of a body and wipe the blood off my forehead with my left hand. She gives me a quick squeeze around the shoulders, which is basically as affectionate as Naomi gets. She’d probably shake hands on her deathbed.

She takes off her baseball cap, brushes back her hair, and replaces the cap with the brim tilted down. “So what’s the final tally, kid?”

Ow. Shit. “Hold on a second.”

She waits while I pant, my head against my skinned knee. Colors explode in the back of my head. The pain’s almost electric.

“Hurt a lot?” she asks.

I expand and burst in a thousand little balloons. “Remind me why I’m doing this again?”

“Shut up, you.”

I manage to smile. “I know. Just kidding.”

“So what hurts? Where’s it coming from?”

“My brain.”

She exhales, rolling her eyes. “And your brain is getting these pain signals from where, sensei?”

“Check my ankles.” I raise my head and sit up, balancing on my good arm. I suck on a bloody finger and click off my helmet. The straps flap around my chin. I taste like copper and dirt.

I squint sideways into the green fluorescence of the 7-Eleven. No one inside has noticed us, but it’s only a matter of time. Damn. “Hurry it up, Nom?”

She takes each of my sneakered feet by the toe and moves it carefully back and forth, side to side,
up and down. I close my eyes and feel all the muscles, tendons, and bones shift perfectly

“Anything?”

I shake my head. “They’re fine.”

“Just the wrist, then?”

“No. There’s something else. It-it’ too much pain to be just the wrist. . . . It’s somewhere. . . .” I gesture weakly.

“You seriously can’t tell?”

“Just give me a second.”

Naomi never gets hurt. She doesn’t understand. I think. she’s irritated until she does that nose-wrinkle. “Look, we’re not talking spinal damage or something here, right? Because I’m going to feel really shitty about helping you in your little mission if you end up with spinal damage.”