Read About That Night for Free Online Page B

against another guy he was pissed at or who was pissed at him, and you’d see some genuine pugilistic combat. But put him against a girl whose main weapon—whose only weapon, by choice—was words, and all you got was silence. Like from a boulder. Or a wall. Like—it was so hard to tell, and that was the problem—from someone who didn’t care.
    She’d wanted to know what was wrong, why he was sulking around, why he didn’t hand in his homework when it was stuff he could have done with his eyes closed, for God’s sake, so why not take the twenty or thirty minutes or whatever it was and get it done and stop having all that grief rain down on him that only put everyone in a bad mood and screwed with their plans, which had to get canceled again because all of a sudden Mr. Atherly had had it up to here with him and had assigned him an essay that, trust me, you don’t hand this in first thing Monday, young man, and you are not, repeat, not passing this class in my lifetime, so put that in your pipe and smoke it . Mr. Atherly, who never raised his voice to anyone, and who never, ever, said anything as asinine as put that in your pipe and smoke it . He must have been reliving something his father said to him thirty or forty years ago.
    Of course, Ronan didn’t answer. Instead, she got the stare. Then she got the shrug. Then she got the shift of his eyes away from her and off to something to the left, when all that was there was a brick wall, the exterior wall of the gym, in fact.
    That’s when it had dropped down on her like a tiny bird landing on her shoulder, as light as a puff of air but with a chirp that was loud and clear: You cannot communicate with this guy, Jordie. Sure, he’s got amazing eyes and he’s great to look at and has a great body. And you bet his ass is the best ass in jeans of any guy, bar none, in this whole school. And sure, he’s got those soft lips and, boy, can he kiss. And those hands—Jesus, Mary and Joseph, talk about a burning bush. He’s sweet, too, in a kind of inarticulate, semi-bashful way. And every now and then he says something that makes you sit up and take notice, like when her grandpa was gruff and cranky after having his heart attack, and Ronan said he didn’t care how old someone was or how wise they seemed most of the time, he was pretty sure they were as afraid of dying as anyone else, even if it didn’t seem that way to younger people. He said it with a fierceness she hadn’t seen in him before. And then he said maybe it would be a good idea to go and see him, maybe try to cheer him up a little—something else he’d never done before. And they did go, and her grandpa liked Ronan. But that kind of thing didn’t happen very often, whereas the stare, the shrug and the shift off to left field happened all the time, and she couldn’t get a word out of him about why.
    Before she could say what was on her mind, he broke up with her. Just like that. “This isn’t working for me,” he said.
    She went home. She went up to her room, in tears, of course, because even though she was angry with him, she was also hurt. She had stood right in front of the mirror on top of her dresser and looked at herself. She remembered that. She remembered asking herself, Am I the one who’s crazy, or is it him? Then, yes, she had slipped off the bracelet and held it. She had opened the top drawer and she had set the bracelet inside, in the tray where she kept her other bracelets, the two good ones—one from her parents and one from her grandmother—and the two matching pairs of earrings that went with them.
    Her eyes pop open now. She slides the drawer out. Then, slowly, she turns toward the door.
    â€œHave you been in my things?”
    The movement is almost imperceptible. Almost, but not quite. Jordie catches the flash of tension in her sister’s body against the wooden doorframe.
    â€œMe? You