We can’t get any closer to the ceremony than the corner of Carol and Spruce, a full two blocks away from the main action. The cops have set up sawhorses to block off the streets, which are packed anyway with moms and kids in strollers and old men dressed up in starched white shirts and blazers. It would look like Memorial Day, or maybe a block party, except there are no balloons and nobody’s smiling. The world’s worst block party, then.
“I’ll be back,” Wade says as soon as we park. He hops out of the car and scoots between two sawhorses, pushing his way into the crowd. For a while, I track him moving between people, and then I lose him. Even with the windows down, it’s hot. Quiet, too. There’s scratchy interference from a speaker up ahead. Someone must be speaking into a microphone, but the sound quality is bad, and I can’t make out a single word.
Mia leans forward, resting her elbows on both seat backs. “He could have left the air conditioner on,” she says.
“Tell me about it.” Abby has pulled her hair away from her neck and makes a show of fanning herself.
I scan the crowd again and find myself half expecting to see Summer. One of her games used to be to pretend she was dead. She’d lie in bed, stiff-backed, eyes open, or float on her stomach in the public pool, hair waving seaweed-style in the water, try to scare the shit out of us. Then she’d suddenly stand, spitting out a mouthful of water. Gotcha, she’d say, and put her arms around me, rest the point of her chin on my shoulder. Would you be sad? she’d say. Would you be sad if I died?
Yeah. I’d be sad.
How sad?
It would be like cutting out my heart with a spoon.
Silly. You’d need a knife for that.
I shake my head, like memories are just flies that keep buzzing around my ear.
“Hey.” Mia straightens up. You ever seen a meerkat? That’s what Mia looks like when she pays attention. All huge eyes and twitchy nose. “Isn’t that Mr. Haggard?”
“Mr. Who?”
“Mr. Haggard,” she says impatiently. “Our old bus driver.” Then: “It is him. Look. Over there, in front of Tweed’s. Wearing the funny shoes.”
She’s right. Mr. Haggard, our weirdo bus driver, who used to get the kids to quiet down by singing as loudly as he could in a voice that sounded like piping a foghorn through a funnel, is standing at the edge of the crowd, wearing a badly fitting suit jacket and old waders. His face is shiny with sweat, and every so often he swipes at his forehead with a balled-up tissue.
Summer was horrible to him. She used to call him Mr. Faggard. She used to make her voice all sweet around her insults, shouting, “Doesn’t it hurt to sit on your fat ass all day?” or “You ever gonna move out of your mom’s basement, Mr. Faggard?” and expecting Mia and me to snicker on cue. Mia would always turn her face to the window, pretending not to have heard, even though Summer would make fun of her for it later. What’s the matter, Mamma Mia? You got an itch in your panties for Mr. H?
But I laughed. I always laughed.
“I’ll be damned,” I say. “He looks the same.”
As I’m watching him, wondering whether it would be weird to go up and apologize, wondering whether I even could, there’s a ripple in the crowd. Like someone’s just hurled a stone into the mob and everyone’s reacting. Suddenly Owen Waldmann gets spat out and goes stumbling down Carol Street. One guy—two guys—three—sprint after him.
“What the hell?” I say. “Did you see—?” But Mia’s out of the car before I can finish. “Mia!”
She’s already dodging the sawhorses and disappearing down Carol. I curse and get out of the car. Already, the blob of people has re-formed, filled in all the spaces. The scratchy microphone voice is still blaring in the distance. Five years ago today . . . a tragedy in our community . . . Other than that, it’s silent. Not a single sneeze, cough, or fart.
I tug my hood a little lower, mumble “Excuse me,” and work my way over to Carol, skirting the edge of the crowd.
A few doors up on Carol, Heath Moore has Owen shoved up against the window of Lily’s Organic Café and Bakeshop. His two friends remind me of blowfish: hovering just behind Heath, doing their best to puff themselves up and look bigger. One of them has a phone out and he’s filming the whole thing. And Mia’s just standing there with her fists clenched.
“Stop it,” she’s saying when I blow past her—but quietly, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Leave him alone.” Heath doesn’t even glance in her direction.
“You think this is funny?” Heath shoves Owen against the window. Owen doesn’t try to fight back, although I bet he could. “You think it’s a fucking joke?”
I’m out of breath from the short dash down the street and pull up, panting a little. I snatch the phone from the blowfish who’s filming and dance out of his reach before he has a chance to take it back.
Heath Moore whips around, keeping an arm across Owen’s chest. “What the hell?” he says. “That’s my phone.”
“My phone now.” I pocket it, keeping my voice steady, relaxed. The calm before the fuck-you-up. “So what happened, Heath?” I say. I don’t even know why I’m so desperate to defend Owen. “Your mom forget to lock your cage this morning?”
His eyes sludge past me and land on Mia. His face goes through about ten different expressions and settles on the ugliest one.
“Cute,” he says. In the five years since Summer died, Heath Moore has thickened out, and not in a good way. “Real cute. The whole band’s back together.” His dopey friends are just standing there, staring. They must be twins. They’ve got the same chewed-up look, like someone gnawed on their faces and then regurgitated them just a little wrong. “You’ve got some balls, showing up here.”
“At least one of us has them,” I fire back.
“Very funny.” Heath’s not sure who to go after first. He keeps swiveling around from Owen to me, me to Owen. “It’s all a game to you, isn’t it? Showing up here, laughing at everyone. Laughing at Summer.”
I squeeze my hands into fists and imagine black smoke rising through me, blotting out the memory. “She was our friend,” I say. “Our best friend. Just because you decided to perv out on her—”
Heath turns red. “She went after me.”
I barrel right over that one. “—doesn’t mean you knew her. It doesn’t mean you knew anything about her.”
“I knew enough to know what she thought of you.” He’s lost it now. His voice is carrying, and people at the end of the street have started to look. But no one comes over to investigate. They’re like frigging cows, just herded up and watching all the action. “I know what you did to her. You turned her.”
“Turned her?” For a second, I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“Into one of you,” he said. “You turned her gay.”
He takes another step toward me and leans in, so I can feel the heat of his breath, a gasoline smell, like maybe he’s been drinking. He reaches up with hard bloated fingers and takes my shoulder. “Or maybe you just haven’t had the right guy yet. What do you think of that?”
Whoosh. Anger crackles through me. Without thinking, I bring my knee up, hard, between his legs, catch him right in the soft parts. Heath lets out a howl and doubles over, cursing, tears streaming down his face.
One of the Regurgitated Twins comes at me. I’m hot now, ready for a fight. But he’s stronger than he looks and shoves me off balance.
“Bitch,” he says.
“Don’t touch her.”
Even as I’m swinging at the guy, Owen comes at him, knocking him in the shoulder to spin him around. Owen swings. His fist connects with a crack. The guy stumbles backward, blood gushing from his nose, a bright tide of it, and I think of that day years ago on the playground, when Owen turned on Elijah Tanner and shut him up with a single punch—but when Owen’s eyes meet mine, I see in them something that runs through me like a shock: we’re the same. He fights not because he wants to, but because he has no choice. He fights from the corner.
Then the other guy leaps on Owen from behind and brings him to the ground, and now Mia’s voice has finally broken free of her throat and she’s standing there screaming, “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
People come flowing down Carol Street, and my whole head feels huge and swollen as a blister, about to explode—they’re going to see us, they’re going to see us. Just then, I spot Mr. Ball, Summer’s foster dad, in the crowd. But the next second, a woman shoves him aside and hurtles past me.
“What on earth—?”
It takes a minute for my brain and eyes to connect: Ms. Gray. Owen and Twin #2 are still grappling on the ground. Ms. Gray just steps in and grabs Twin #2 by the shirt collar, like he’s a dog, and hauls him backward. “What is going on?”
“They started it,” I blurt out.
She gives me a look—are you serious?—and I press my lips together, wishing I hadn’t said anything. Next to me, Mia’s practically hyperventilating, as if she were the one getting clobbered. Her voice has dried up again, just straight up and gone.
“Owen,” she says. The word is so quiet I almost miss it.
Owen’s still on the ground, holding his eye where Twin #2 must have punched him, a thin dark trickle of blood working out of his left nostril. The rest of the crowd is pressing closer, murmuring, and the whole world feels like a guitar string about to snap, tense and humming—they’re going to recognize us, they’re going to take us apart leg by leg, slurp up our skin and pick their teeth with our bones—when Ms. Gray gets a hand around Owen’s elbow and hauls him to his feet.
“Come on,” she says to him. Then she turns to me and grabs my wrist, squeezing so tightly that when I pull away, I see that she’s left marks. “Come on.”
Mia looks like she’s about to pass out. I link arms with her and we follow Ms. Gray as she plunges into the crowd, one arm extended to keep people back, one arm around Owen, bodyguard-style. The crowd falls away, allowing us to pass, even Mr. Ball, dressed in a bright yellow polo shirt like it’s a goddamn golf outing. I don’t know how Ms. Gray does it, but maybe that’s one of her life skills. Like she’s a motorboat and we’re just bumping along in her wake, no problem, don’t mind us. Then we’re at the car and, thank God, Wade is there too, pacing next to the car, chewing on a thumbnail.
“What the—?” He does an actual double take when he sees us. “What happened?”
“Is he with you?” Ms. Gray still has an arm around Owen.
Wade’s eyes go to me.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, he’s with us.”
Ms. Gray opens the back door and helps Owen inside. He’s still holding on to his right eye, and he stumbles a little trying to get into the car. Mia hurtles into the backseat after him. Ms. Gray turns back to me. Her eyes go to the crowd behind us—I don’t have to turn around to know that they’re still watching, still murmuring. A swarm of hornets sharpening their stingers. Buzz buzz buzz. Was that Owen Waldmann? Buzz buzz buzz. And the Ferguson girl, together?
“Go,” Ms. Gray says. She looks exhausted. Her eyes are bloodshot and her hair has started to come loose from its bun. She has a carnation pinned to her blazer. “Get out of here.”
I want to thank her and apologize all at once, but the words stick in my throat. This must be how Mia feels. “I’m sorry . . . ,” I start to say.
“Go,” she repeats, almost angrily. Then she turns and dodges the sawhorses, plunging back into the crowd and disappearing.
“God.” In the car now, everyone quiet and tense, Mia still wheezing out the occasional words like she’s forgotten how to speak, Owen letting out the occasional moan when the truck hits a rut, Wade just dying to ask questions and chewing his lip to keep them down, Abby finally breaks the silence. “Seriously, guys. We can’t take you anywhere.”