I was carrying bread when I died. Day-old rye, half price, in a paper bag that had gone soft on the bottom from the wet. Of everything that happened that night, that’s the part that still bothers me.It had been snowing since noon, the heavy kind off the lake that doesn’t blow around so much as just come down and keep coming. I’d clocked out of the warehouse at four, spent six hours after that driving packages to people who couldn’t be bothered to go to the store, and parked the van at the depot at ten past ten. The bus on Fillmore had quit running an hour earlier, so I was walking the last stretch home with my collar up and my hands jammed in pockets that had stopped holding any heat sometime around the second winter I’d owned the coat.I wasn’t thinking about anything big. I was thinking that the pill organizer on the kitchen counter, the one with the days of the week on the lids, needed refilling on Sunday, and that the pharmacy closed at six on Sundays, so it would have to be Satu

Chapter 3: Two Years TodayI got through the rest of the day on instinct and bad coffee.Not coffee, actually. Rian didn’t drink coffee. I got through it on water from the fountain by the gym, which tasted like a penny, and on the free lunch line, where I took a tray of rubbery chicken nuggets and ate them standing up in a stairwell so nobody would have to decide whether to sit with me. Nobody tried to. Hale didn’t show again. That worried me more than if he had.By the last bell I had a rough map of Rian’s life, assembled the way you learn a new route at the warehouse, by getting it wrong in small ways until the wrong turns stopped. Locker 314, combination in his head, not on paper. Chemistry with a teacher who called him Mr. Delgado like it was an insult. A bus that left from the corner of Ash and Delaware at 3:12 and would not wait. Nobody said goodbye to him, and he didn’t say it to anyone.The apartment was on the second floor of a building that had been yellow once. The stairwel

Owen Pruitt found me at lunch, which I hadn’t expected.I was in the stairwell again, working through a carton of milk and a bag of pretzels from the vending machine, when he came down the steps two at a time and stopped three feet short of me, like I was something that might go off.“He says okay,” Owen said.“Who does?”“Marcus. After the assembly. Behind the field house.” He kept his eyes on the wall behind my head. “He said you could talk, and that’s all. You said nobody gets hurt.”“I did.”“So that’s what I’m telling you.” He swallowed. “Don’t say anything about the pharmacy. I’m not doing it again. I just needed something for my little sister, and the guy at the counter wouldn’t...” He stopped himself, shook his head, and left.I sat there with a pretzel halfway to my mouth. Whatever he’d taken, it hadn’t been for himself.I added that to the pile of things I wasn’t proud of.The school library was a long room with bad carpet and six computers that took a full minute to wake up

“He’d have been thirteen in March,” Hale said.He still hadn’t turned around. His voice carried back to me across the trestle, flat and quiet, the voice of a kid reading something off a card.“He wanted a drum set. My dad said no because of the neighbors. I told him I’d help him get one anyway.” The wind pushed at his jacket. “I used to think about that a lot. Stupid, right? That’s what I thought about. A drum set.”I stepped onto the first tie. The wood gave a little under me.“Marcus.”“Don’t.” He turned then. His face was wet and blotchy, and the red rims around his eyes had gotten worse, like something had been rubbed raw. “Don’t say my name like we know each other.”“Okay.”“You were there.”I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The words were sitting right behind Rian’s teeth, and every other muscle in this body was clamped down on them.“Kyle told me.” Hale laughed, short and ugly. “Not on purpose. He was wasted at a party in April, and he said something about Rian Delgado looking at hi

Hale didn’t forgive me. I want that on the record, because I’d half expected him to.He sat there with the watch shut in his fist and his knees pulled up, and the longer he sat, the less like a bully he looked. Without the jacket squared on his shoulders he was just a tall, worn-out kid with a split knuckle and mud on his jeans.“I don’t forgive you,” he said finally.“Okay.”“I’m not saying it to be a jerk. I just don’t. I don’t think I can.” He turned the watch over. “I keep waiting to feel better, and I don’t. I feel the same. It’s just that now it’s true instead of something I made up.”“That’s fair.”“Don’t say that’s fair.” His mouth twisted. “Everybody says stuff like that.”I shut up. We watched the creek.After a while he said, without looking at me, “I came out here to jump.”The words just sat there. I’d seen it, in a way. I’d seen him standing on that tie with his shoes on the edge. But there’s a difference between suspecting a thing and having it said in a quiet voice by