Silent (16 page)

Crunch.

Glancing down, I found the remains of a broken beer bottle under my feet. For some reason, the sound injected me with a rush of angry fear, and I paused to scatter the shards forcefully before rounding the corner.

And then I was on the street, only a few blocks back, with no more time to waste. Panic stole my breath but I ran on, even faster than before, because I could see now just how bad it was.

Fire trucks. Police cars. An ambulance. Crowds of worried onlookers. Giant streams of water aimed at the blackened house. And lots and lots of smoke.

My lungs were already burning, and by the time I got near enough to make out the faces of the people watching, the smoke wasn’t helping any. Still, I sucked in as much air as possible so I could shout for a path through the crowd. Not many people moved, and in the end I just went barreling straight into them.

“Stay back,” a police officer ordered once I got near the front.

“Out of my fucking way!” I tried to push him aside, startled by the hysterical edge in my voice. “That’s my house!”

“Son, you need to stay back.”

“I’m not your fucking son!” This time I attempted to go around him. He grabbed me by both shoulders, squeezing hard, but I ducked and twisted—I had a lot of experience in that—and broke free.

I didn’t get very far. I was looking around wildly to make sure no one was coming after me and wound up colliding with Suzie just a few steps away.

She held me by my shoulders, too, but it was a much gentler grip. “Alex! Alex, listen to me, everyone is okay.”

“What?” I sagged a little under her touch.

“Everyone got out. Everyone is okay.”

I glanced back at the house. Smoke, but little flame. The fire had happened a while ago…enough time ago that Suzie had had a chance to arrive, as well as the nosy neighbors from the entire block.

Why the fuck had I stayed after school?

“Everyone’s okay?” I repeated, trying to ease my guilt.

“Yes, I promise.”

Turning around, I scanned the front of the crowd. I found Ms. Loretta and Ms. Cecily first—Ms. Cecily was sobbing hysterically, her face buried in her sister’s fleshy chest, while Ms. Loretta was stroking her hair and trying to comfort her. She was crying, too, but they were silent tears. Dwayne had an arm on her shoulder.

A few feet away, Ryan was holding onto Brandon’s legs—really clutching them, like they might suddenly float away if he let go. Andrew stood in front of them, both arms wrapped around himself, body slumped with misery. Brandon reached down to rub his back, but he didn’t seem comforted.

Laloni pushed her way onto the scene. She looked at the house and threw a hand over her mouth, the whites of her eyes large with disbelief. Then she ran up to Brandon and hugged him.

I passed my gaze over the crowd once more. Ms. Loretta, Ms. Cecily, Dwayne, Andrew, Ryan, Brandon…

“Seb!”

Diving into the mass of people, I slammed my body around with little care for who or what I was hitting. “Seb, where are you? Seb! Sebastian!”

“Alex!” Suzie chased after me. “Alex, calm down!”

“Where is he? Where’s Seb? I don’t see him!”

“Alex, stop!” Suzie maneuvered herself in front of me to halt my panicked charge. “Sebastian is okay, I promise.”

My chest kept heaving, so I worked on catching my breath and bringing myself back to some level of sanity. “Where is he?”

“I already arranged for his transportation.”

“Transportation to where?”

“A place to stay. I have to do that for all of you right now.”

I swallowed hard, my throat coated with a mixture of smoky phlegm and the bile making its way up from my stomach. “We…we have to go?”

She didn’t say anything, but she sighed, her eyes drifting down. I looked back at the house.

The brick front still stood, but through the now charcoal-colored window frames, I could see—most of it was destroyed.

“Why…why’d you send Seb away so fast?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice from trembling. “Won’t we all be going to the same place? Why couldn’t we all just go together?”

In my peripheral vision, I saw that Brandon and Laloni were near me now. Laloni was trying to hold Brandon’s hand, but he shoved both of them in his pockets.

“It was Seb,” Brandon said before Suzie could answer me.

I turned toward him. “What?”

“It was Seb. He started the fire.”

It took me about two seconds to really process what he was saying…and then another two seconds for the meaning to burn through my system and build up a rage that demanded immediate release.

I sprang at him and took him down in the first move. With my grip on his shirt, I slammed his back into the soot-covered asphalt where we’d landed. “You fucking liar! You take that back!”

Shrieks surrounded me—onlookers and Laloni, probably, but I didn’t let up. I lifted his chest a few inches off the ground and slammed him down again.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he choked out. He recovered from the initial stun and twisted his hands into the fabric of my shirt to try to throw me off. “You’re fucking crazy!”

We rolled once but I came out on top, grinding my knee into his ribs to keep him down. I could feel he was trying to get a leg under me to kick me off, so I jerked to the side and shook his head against the asphalt once more in the hopes of disorienting him.

It worked, because he tried to shoot out to the left where I easily stopped him by connecting my other knee with his face.

“Alex, please stop!” Suzie shouted—the loudest I’d ever heard her voice. She grabbed one of my elbows, and Laloni grabbed the other. “Please, this isn’t going to help anyone!”

“But he’s lying.” I shook Brandon one more time and then let them pull me off. “Seb’s afraid of fire! He wouldn’t do this!”

“He’s retarded!” Brandon jumped up immediately, body tightened in a fighting stance. “How the fuck would you know what he would and wouldn’t do? I
saw
him!”

Laloni ran to Brandon and threw her arms around him. She rubbed his chest soothingly and shot me a look like I was pure scum. “What the
hell
, Alex!”

I tried to match her anger, but found all the fury had escaped during the course of our fight. I was left with only broken, pathetic dreams, crumbling further with each agonizing second. “I don’t think he…I mean, I’m not sure he’s really…”

Brandon wiped a bit of spittle and blood from his lip with the back of his arm. He looked at the red streak it left behind and then fixed me with a glare. “It was probably your fucking lighter he did it with.”

“You fucking asshole!” I lurched forward again, reignited, only to find my head trapped in Suzie’s hands. She squeezed my cheeks slightly and leaned in so we were nose-to-nose.

When was the last time anyone had had the balls to cup my face like that? I couldn’t remember. Mimi, maybe, when I was really little.

“Alex, you need to stop this
right now
. Even if Seb started the fire, we all know it was an accident.”

I stared into her worried eyes. She was trying to be firm, but the little twitches of her gray irises told me she was unsure. I could’ve easily hurt her if I’d wanted to.

I didn’t. I just needed to know what was going to happen to Seb. “But…but where did you send him off to? Is he gonna go to Juvee?”

She dropped her hands to my shoulders and each of her fingertips pressed against my shirt. No long nails like my mother, just stubby white fingers desperately trying to keep me from spiraling out of control again.

“Of course not. But Seb has special needs, and it’s not easy to find a placement for him. I thought with all the commotion here, it’d be best for him to go somewhere safe right away.”

“Where’s safe?”

“He’s going to a group facility. He’ll be fine there, I promise.”

Facility.
Not a house or a home, but a facility. The word instantly brought to mind images of white walls and locked doors.

“What about the rest of us? Are…are we going there, too?”

“We’re working on finding placements right now. Hopefully I’ll hear within the hour.”

A sudden absence of sound was followed by a shift in the mass of people around us, and I realized the hoses had stopped. Now that both the fire and the fight were over, the onlookers were drifting away. No more spectacles, just the fucked-up lives left behind. Not nearly as entertaining.

Suzie kept an arm on my shoulder as she walked me toward Ms. Loretta. I was only slightly aware that her thumb was making small circles against my back, probably in an attempt to calm me down. And strangely enough, I did feel calm…but it was an eerie calm. Something closer to giving up.

Ms. Loretta still held her sister tightly. Giant tears continued to travel down her cheeks, creating rivers that fell into the deep crease of her cleavage and eventually soaked into the front of her orange blouse.

Life liked to fuck her over, too, it seemed. The appropriate thing would’ve been for me to say something to console her, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound empty and false.
Sorry
just didn’t cut it.
Sorry for your loss
sounded too much like someone had died, and I doubted she’d want to be reminded of that feeling. And
sorry your home of many years just went up in a cloud of smoke
was probably a bit too graphic.

Better just to keep my mouth shut. Besides, even though I knew in my gut Seb hadn’t started the fire, if my lighter had been used, it meant
I
could be the most guilty party. Maybe I didn’t even have the
right
to say anything.

We watched the fire department load their hoses on their trucks, and I saw Suzie signal Laloni to keep Brandon back while she acted as a human barrier.

She really didn’t need to bother. I was through with Brandon, and through with this entire life, it seemed.

Her phone rang and she answered, but I didn’t listen to any of the conversation. Eventually she hung up and hunkered down near my ear to whisper, like she was trying to keep from waking a sleeping lion. “I’m going to go get the car. Would you like to come with me, or can I trust you to wait here?”

“I’ll wait,” I murmured, staring straight ahead, barely noticing when she left.

I didn’t feel like moving, and neither did anyone else, apparently. We were all just…frozen. It wasn’t safe to go inside the house, so each of us stood still, locked in our various poses of confusion and pain. I blinked and shifted my eyes each time, capturing the scene in mental snapshots with the sense this might be one of the last times I saw any of them again.

Ms. Loretta lifted her head, her face blank as the tears finally stopped flowing. Ms. Cecily had also turned to look up, though she hadn’t stopped crying or clutching her sister for comfort. Ryan was now holding Andrew, and both boys were studying the house with desperate eyes, probably hoping there was some chance they could return to the protective structure. Dwayne was standing by a fire truck, his arms across his chest, his head bobbing up and down slowly like he was just accepting what had occurred.

I couldn’t say any of them were like family…but they were…
something
to me.

Movement returned when Suzie pulled her beige Corolla in front of the ruined house and Ryan burst into tears.

“I don’t wanna go!”

Ms. Cecily went to comfort him, finally dislodging herself from her sister. “When we get a new house you can come right back and stay with us, we promise.”

I wondered where
they
were going to go…and whether they could have taken us with them, even if they’d wanted to.

Suzie got out and opened the passenger door. She put an arm around my shoulder and steered me toward it. “We’re going to get going now.”

“Now?” Laloni whirled around and clung to Brandon. I’d forgotten she was even there. “But…”

Brandon pulled free and opened the back door to the car. “I’ll call you later,” he mumbled before slipping inside. Ryan and Andrew followed, but Dwayne remained by Ms. Loretta’s side. Maybe he’d been chosen to stay; he’d been with them the longest, after all.

And how insane was it that I thought he was
lucky
? Lucky because the shit you know is always less frightening than the shit you’ve yet to experience. Not that life had been all shit with Ms. Loretta. There were those good meals, after all. Her chicken wasn’t bad, and even the vegetables had a decent flavor. Of course, the meatloaf really was the best. My mom had never baked meatloaf. It wasn’t really a dish of our people. I wasn’t sure how it was even made, but somehow Ms. Loretta’s turned out perfect every time.

I had only a passing notion that my thoughts were going off on strange tracks, as if my overwhelmed mind could no longer focus on anything of importance. There was no more anger, no sadness, no worry about the future, even. Just meatloaf.

Forcefully pushing aside the desire for one last bite of the dish, I sat in the front seat of the Corolla and mechanically buckled my seatbelt, then glanced in the rearview mirror to see the others do the same.

Ryan’s tear-streaked little face should have made me feel some kind of emotion, but it didn’t. Neither did Brandon’s hardened one. But when my eyes drifted to Andrew, I caught a glimpse of something I instantly recognized.

His hands were clenched together, his eyes glued to the floor, brows wrinkled like he was in agony. And he probably was. Guilt could do that to a person. I looked back at Brandon and saw him shift his gaze to Andrew knowingly.

Of course. He was covering for the kid, like any good big brother would. Why not blame it on Seb? Seb was
special
, so no one could really be angry with him. He was the perfect fall guy.

That was the last clear thought I had before fixing my eyes on the little pine tree air freshener dangling from the mirror. I didn’t trumpet the news when Suzie got back in and we started to drive off. What would’ve been the point? Seb was gone. The house was gone. My new life was gone.

Game over.

~*~

After dropping Andrew, Ryan, and Brandon off at an office building I assumed was filled with more stuffy white people in drab suits, we left for my new placement.