I sidestepped through mud. My feet stuck to the ground and made sucking noises as I forced them free. “Uh, yeah, I heard you.”
“Did you ever talk about it with your counselor?”
“My counselor?”
“The one you got sent to last year.”
“Did we talk about Soren?”
Keith stared at me. “Not Soren. What happened before. With Dad.”
Before.
Ssssnap!
nevertelldrew
promiseme
“Oh,” I said.
“So you didn’t talk about it?”
“I—I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember what happened or you don’t remember if you talked about it?”
“I don’t know!” I stuffed the rest of the crackers into my mouth. Why didn’t he just tell me what he wanted me to say? Speculation was not in my nature. Reaction was. I peeked over. Keith was crying again, like full-out sobs that made his whole body shake.
The high-pitched trill of a tree frog drew me in. I inched to the very edge of the swamp before I saw it, a summer peeper, bright green with brown spots. It sat on a moss-draped trunk and sang to me.
I tried singing back.
Tiny bubbles …
Keith yanked me around by the sleeve, a violent motion, until I faced him again. “Damn it! You can’t do this. It’s what you always do.”
What was?
“You have to have some sort of reaction, Drew. This shutting-down thing of yours, the spacing out, it’s bullshit!”
“Bullshit,” I echoed. I leaned around him to see the frog again, but it had hopped away.
“We can’t change what happened, but we can change ourselves if we talk about it. Look how messed up we are already! Half the time I feel like I can’t breathe, you know? Like someone’s stomping around on top of my chest. It hurts. And you, you’re always so angry. The way you’re always fighting. How you don’t have any friends. You’re like a bomb waiting to go off, I know you are!” He ran his hand through his thick hair. More sobs escaped him.
An alarm bell went off in my head. Uh-oh. Did he know about those cars I’d scratched up? The bad words I’d written? Would I go to jail?
Keith’s nostrils flared. A sick fervor gleamed in his eyes. “Remember those wolves we saw last year, Drew? Their pack mentality? That guy, he said the lone wolves usually die, so you can’t be a lone wolf, all right? We’re like that pack. We have to stick together, no matter what. Promise me that.”
“I promise,” I said quickly, although I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Wolves and bombs? I felt jumpy and uncomfortable, as if I’d begun to leave my own body, as if I had a leaky soul. The words I’d said to Phoebe ran through my head: I think I’m crazy. But new words came to me, like a second language. I think Keith is crazy, too.
“You know what scares me the most?” His voice dropped, morphing into a low whine that joined with the drone of the dragonflies hovering above the bog. “That we might become the same way. That we’ll hurt people, too. I learned about it in school and I read about it online. This kind of thing, this sickness, it probably happened to him when he was a kid. Maybe Grandpa did it … and now it’s—it’s like a cycle that gets passed down from one generation to the next. Unless we stop it.”
He was starting to sound weird, like creepy weird. I had to do something. I had to change the subject.
“Hey, Keith, are Mom and Dad related? Like cousins or something?”
Keith took a deep breath and shook his head. “No. What’re you talking about? Where’d you hear that?”
“I dunno. Someone said something to me.”
“Well, forget about that. It’s stupid. I’m trying to talk to you—”
“What about you and Charlie? You’re cousins. Is that stupid, too?”
His face went bright red. “Jeez, just shut up already, Drew.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up! I’ve seen you two. Like at the fair, you kissed her!”
Keith’s mouth opened. Then closed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. At all.”
“Well, I don’t like her. I think she’s bad for you to be around.”
He snorted. “No, she’s not.”
“She’s mean,” I said. “She’s mean to me.”
“You know, your precious Anna is the one to watch out for. She’s the bad one.”
“No, she isn’t!” My voice rose. It startled me.
“Yeah, right,” said Keith.
“What about you?” I snapped back.
“What about me?”
“You’re the meanest of all! You’re the one who drugged me!”
Keith’s jaw dropped. A great cloud of hurt and shock blew across his face.
“Drew,” he said, reaching for me.
Then it was the hunger, the thirst, the medication, the stress, I don’t know, but I didn’t feel well. My legs buckled right there in the cool shade of the mossy forest. Keith must have seen something, the sickly gray of my cheeks, the vacant glaze of my eyes, because he grabbed me around the chest before I pitched over.
“I have to lie down,” I managed.