I went back to my hometown for a friend's funeral. I found…
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I went back to my hometown for a friend's funeral. I found something under the high school bleachers.
Whenever someone died back in my hometown, my mom was always the first to call. She'd never admit it, but I'd often catch a whiff of excitement on her voice from being the one to tell me the name and how it happened.
Not with Nick Bertocchi, though.
When he died, she called me on the verge of tears. I had to speedrun several rounds of reassurances that I was doing all right, feeling better every day, before I could even get her to admit anything was wrong.
Nick, my best friend from back home, was dead. They found him outside our high school with his neck broken, lying on the asphalt beneath the football stadium bleachers.
I had heard the words, but they held no real meaning yet. I told my mom I was booking a plane ticket home. She said my bed was already made.
Information about what had happened trickled back to me from the friends I hadn't spoken to in more than a decade. Most of them had left town after graduation, like I had. Some had since moved back. But none of us had done a particularly good job of keeping tabs on Nick. From what we could gather, there was no reason to suspect any version of the story other than the simplest, saddest one — the one that the cops had accepted as the official truth. They said Nick died drunk and alone, having accidentally fallen through the stands. The local newspaper, which existed only as an unreadable website anymore, called it a "freak accident."
As sad as that version of events sounds, I wish it was an account I could believe.
It would be so much easier to sleep.
\*\*\*
I was in my childhood home all of 10 minutes before I started plans to leave it again. Each room looked how I remembered. Mine was still decorated with the posters and reading list of a high schooler on the verge of escape velocity. And yet the house seemed faded in a way—as though I might find a long-past expiration date printed somewhere on the outside, like I had with most of the snacks in the pantry.
I texted the chain where a few of us had already gathered to exchange what we knew about Nick's passing. The funeral was set for the following day, and I hoped to clear out the cob webs adorning what had once been the most important relationships of my life before then. I was the first to arrive at the Irish pub that our fathers used to vanish into and optimistically grabbed a table large enough to seat everyone who had said they'd come.
Each entrance was an exercise in extrapolation. Could I match the faces I remembered so well to the seasoned ones coming through the door? What would 20 years have done to the eyes I watched cry with laughter or the cheeks I saw go flush when the right person stole their hat?
All together again, our conversation's rhythm returned without much effort, like a championship team reuniting two decades later for a pick-up game. Shit talk was dished out in precise amounts and old arguments dusted off for the fun of it. We filled gaps in the stories of the lives I once would have died to protect, and they made it easy for me to remember why. None of them had wound up where I thought they would have, and yet each had found their way. No one knew about the day I couldn't muster the will to eat anything or how that day turned into a couple weeks. I didn't tell them about how my parents frantically flew out to sit silent and confused at my hospital bedside. Or how I had told them not to come. But I think I preferred it that way.
It wasn't long before we reached the gaps among us we couldn't fill and Nick became all we could talk about.
He had been the live wire, the originator of our dumbest schemes, the one who somehow drew us all together from disparate corners of the school. Honors class, marching band, water polo, or in my case, in-school suspension. It was as if he had collected us for some plan for which only he had the designs. And he loved us, together.
More than anything, that's what we recalled about Nick. He only seemed happy when we were in one place. After mornings perfectly wasted in the banded shade of the stadium bleachers, contrasting class schedules would pull us apart for several hours. Watching Nick as we separated, you'd think one of his arms was off to Spanish, while a leg was due in the chem lab.
He was a terrible student himself. I always suspected that his failing grades were nothing but an act of short-sighted rebellion. At the bar, we were laughing about the red-heavy Scantron strips he'd hold up for us like freshly claimed scalps when someone chimed in to ask if anyone else remembered his drawings. The recollection crashed over the group like a wave. Nick had been a great artist, they said. It was how he spent most of his class time—drafting impossible worlds and terrifying creatures. They all spoke, describing the sketching as if samples hung inches from their eyes, rather than 20 years in their past.
And yet I couldn't remember any of it.
As they each took their turns trying to capture what they saw, I listened, hoping for some stray detail to shake loose a memory, but nothing came. The longer I waited, the colder and more hollow I felt. Where the others beheld visions unique to their friend—so colorful, so Nick—I watched my loss deepen beyond what I had previously thought possible.
No one knew much about what became of Nick after school. As far as we could tell, he had never left town and hadn't ever shown much interest in life outside of it. Some of us recalled texts he sent around the holidays and summers those first few years after we split up, asking if we were home for the break and whether we'd want to hang out. It was with a quiet shame that we confessed to never making good on the offers.
Drinks ended a little after that.
\*\*\*
The school was on my way home from the bar, but I would have wound up there regardless. Nick's missing drawings wouldn't let me go. I had somehow found myself even farther from my friend than the distance between life and death, and returning to the space where we had both lived—where he had died—seemed like the only way to narrow that abyss.
I couldn't have known how right I was.
The high school was a squat, sprawling two-story structure, a year or two away from a complete remodel—as it had been when I attended. In its arrested redevelopment, however, the building stood untouched and, unlike my childhood home, undrained of its power. Even twenty years later, as I peered into its darkened windows from behind the chain-link fence surrounding it, that place felt as though it could devour me.
I followed the barricade around to the back, where it opened into the rear parking lot, the one used by underclassmen and for Friday night football games. As I turned the final corner of the building, the bleachers came into view.
The stands stood with their back to the school, in the liminal space between the cloistered classrooms and a full-contact field. Like most things in my hometown, they were smaller than I remembered, but maybe that was because I was no longer just revisiting a place I only knew as a child. This was now where Nick Bertocchi had died. The site of a loss that immense could never measure up.
I blame the drinks for both the impulse to hop the fence and how shitty my landing was. Jagged bits of pavement had pooled on the other side and were there to cushion the impact on my palms. Once the stinging stopped, there was nothing to distract me from how still the stadium was, how unnervingly quiet for somewhere built for roars.
I was making my way toward the bleachers when a high metallic clanging caused me to almost jump out of my skin. Stuck in the open, my only choice for hiding had been to stand perfectly still. With my heart racing, my eyes quickly found the locked chains hanging from the cafeteria doors nearby, swaying in the wind. I couldn't remember a gust strong enough in the moments before to cause such a stir, but without a better explanation, I carried on with whatever it was I had come to do.
The sides and back of the bleachers were open, exposing the scaffolding that held up a good portion of the town's population on game nights. Back then, if any of them noticed my friends and I were there at all, it was because of the acrid smoke or the unbound belly laughs wafting up from between their feet. Twenty years later, I stood in that same spot, smoking alone in the narrow alleyway framed by the crisscrossed bracing. I wondered how it was possible—that those two points in time, then and now, could be connected.
I finished the joint and got cold again. The wind bit at my hands, and I wrapped my coat tighter around me. I was drunk and tired and missing my friend. More than anything, I wanted to go home. Whether a place that like even existed for me anymore, I couldn't say.
The rest of the journey down the length of the bleachers had me stepping over struts and ducking beams. In hind sight, it was the moment when I emerged from beneath the stands again, when the air became stagnant, heavier somehow, and the noise from passing cars struggled to reach me, as if the sound waves were stymied by a more viscous medium. That was the moment when I should have known. But admitting that you've found yourself in a situation requiring bravery demands a courage of its own.
I rounded the structure looking for a more direct way out than the one I used to come in, but instead, I found something else. The double doors to the cafeteria were open.
Now, I *know* that the chains on them had been locked before I first went under the bleachers. That is a fact, and I need to acknowledge it as such. There are so few certainties from that night that I cling to the ones I can. The doors to the cafeteria had been closed, but now, they sat there, each one stopped out wide like an invitation.
For what seemed like a long time, I just listened, waiting to hear the creaky casters of a janitorial cart or staticky strains from a cleaning crew's radio, sounds I would have expected to be emitting from an open school building in the middle of the night.
Instead, I heard what I would have after emerging from the bleachers at any point in my past. The school sounded alive. The bell was ringing, likely for the end of a period, when the halls were filled with students savoring the fleeting moments before another chime instructed them to sit quietly in neat rows once again. I can’t say for sure why I went inside that night—other than that's all I had ever done in that exact scenario.
The sound of the school as I walked through the cafeteria doors had been a familiar one. And so was the sight of it, but for one exception. The linoleum tiles were still a stale color that made it unclear if they were old and dirty or just old. The long tables were set out, ready to accept hungry bodies. And the clock on the wall was held within a cage for reasons no one will ever grasp. All was how it was supposed to be, but there wasn't a single person in sight.
And yet, no matter where I ventured throughout the halls, I heard them. Voices calling answers to questions or shouting in order to get other shouting to stop. I heard the squeal of sneakers on sealed hardwood as missing balls bounced alongside them. There was laughter and outrage and praise, but I could see none of it. Every hall was deserted and each classroom as empty as it should be this late at night. And yet it was all so close.
The mystery of what I kept hearing devolved into a quest to solve it, one that brought me to the second-floor hallway where my locker had been—where it still was. The sight of it stopped me. I knew which one belonged to me without a doubt. My thumb and forefinger met to input a combination that no longer had any correlation to numbers, just instinctive movement, the kind that I used to complete with a mind occupied by a million other impossibly important things, seemingly the entire world.
*A twist, a swing, and a swipe.* The door opened with difficulty, how it was supposed to.
At this point, I should state something directly. I screwed around a lot in high school, but I'm not currently stupid. And I wasn't that night, either. I was standing in my high school in the middle of the night, hearing the voices of people I couldn't see. Obviously, something was wrong. Perhaps it was because of my recent brush with psychiatric medicine that some allowances were being made for experiences slightly outside of the typical. But I wasn’t aware of how far I had traveled down that road until the metal door swung inches from my face and revealed a drawing by Nick Bertocchi taped to the other side.
I recognized it the moment I saw it. An outlandish scene, set atop a Möbius strip. Its central figure was a small, hunched man walking the circuit between the two infinite loops. One side was presided over by a mountainous, snarling ghoul brandishing a rusted butcher's knife, and the other was watched by its twin holding a soiled syringe. Nick had handed it to me at my locker between classes one day and played off its giving as a prank. But I had made sure he saw me hang it on the inside of my locker door.
As much as I wanted to take the picture with me that night, something inside me said it was wrong to remove it from the place of pride where it had hung across time. And so instead, I poured over its scratchy lines, every considered eraser mark. Nick had somehow found me again. Or I had found him. Either way, I wasn't letting go so easily.
At some point in my study of the drawing, the voices had stopped speaking. I doubt I would have noticed at all if it hadn't been for the sound that replaced it. Two rubbery squeaks—one high, one low—in regular intervals. My first thoughts tried to puzzle out what I was hearing, but then I noticed that the voices from the classrooms around me hadn't actually been silenced, just quieted. They were whispering rapidly, as if fearful of being overheard. When the voices nearest me grew even dimmer, I could distinguish the character of the squeaks more clearly.
They were footsteps, and they were getting closer.
Since I already explained that I'm not dumb, I won't waste much space here describing what happened next. I took a staircase in the opposite direction of the footsteps, left through the cafeteria, and ventured back beneath the bleachers. Even in my mind at its most frantic, it stood to reason that my flight from the school would involve the stands much as much as my journey inside had. When I emerged out the other end, finding the cafeteria doors suddenly locked with chains once again seemed utterly logical. I went straight home and didn't come out from under my covers until a gentle knock sounded on the door.
It was my mother. It was time for the funeral.
\*\*\*
Nick's burial lacked all of the specificity that had brought so many of his old friends back together the night before. It was a drab affair, punctuated by dusty ceremony meant to comfort the living and by looks secreted among friends all thinking the same thing. None of this was Nick.
With one of his drawings fresh in my mind, I had to agree, and with every wrong turn the proceedings took in honoring the friend I had lost, the picture returned to me. As I stood in the church pews, leaving it behind the night before became more and more inexcusable. The trip home had already dredged up so much guilt and regret, and yet there had been more to mine. I hadn't been the friend Nick deserved, but I would have rather lived with the painful memory of that failing than the craven emptiness of forgetting it.
The group from the night before reconvened graveside once everything was done. One of them asked if I was sticking around for the night. There was going to be a proper send-off, one more befitting of the mastermind behind our best brainless nights. I thanked them for the invitation and said I would try to make it once some things around town had been taken care of.
That night, the school was the same lonely scene I had found on my walk home. And the fence was no easier to hop. The chains were affixed to the cafeteria doors on one end of the bleachers and gone by the time I reached the other. The voices echoing in the halls were still boisterous and their sources still lost. I flung my locker open with abandon, desperate to reclaim the gift I had been foolish enough to leave behind.
The clanging of the locker door against its neighbor must have masked an abrupt hushing of the voices, because by the time the crash faded, the footsteps were right behind me.
And when I turned, the old woman was there.
She said I could stay as long as I'd like, but if I continued to make a racket, she would have no choice but to handle me like she did that other boy.
#entertainment
source
Whenever someone died back in my hometown, my mom was always the first to call. She'd never admit it, but I'd often catch a whiff of excitement on her voice from being the one to tell me the name and how it happened.
Not with Nick Bertocchi, though.
When he died, she called me on the verge of tears. I had to speedrun several rounds of reassurances that I was doing all right, feeling better every day, before I could even get her to admit anything was wrong.
Nick, my best friend from back home, was dead. They found him outside our high school with his neck broken, lying on the asphalt beneath the football stadium bleachers.
I had heard the words, but they held no real meaning yet. I told my mom I was booking a plane ticket home. She said my bed was already made.
Information about what had happened trickled back to me from the friends I hadn't spoken to in more than a decade. Most of them had left town after graduation, like I had. Some had since moved back. But none of us had done a particularly good job of keeping tabs on Nick. From what we could gather, there was no reason to suspect any version of the story other than the simplest, saddest one — the one that the cops had accepted as the official truth. They said Nick died drunk and alone, having accidentally fallen through the stands. The local newspaper, which existed only as an unreadable website anymore, called it a "freak accident."
As sad as that version of events sounds, I wish it was an account I could believe.
It would be so much easier to sleep.
\*\*\*
I was in my childhood home all of 10 minutes before I started plans to leave it again. Each room looked how I remembered. Mine was still decorated with the posters and reading list of a high schooler on the verge of escape velocity. And yet the house seemed faded in a way—as though I might find a long-past expiration date printed somewhere on the outside, like I had with most of the snacks in the pantry.
I texted the chain where a few of us had already gathered to exchange what we knew about Nick's passing. The funeral was set for the following day, and I hoped to clear out the cob webs adorning what had once been the most important relationships of my life before then. I was the first to arrive at the Irish pub that our fathers used to vanish into and optimistically grabbed a table large enough to seat everyone who had said they'd come.
Each entrance was an exercise in extrapolation. Could I match the faces I remembered so well to the seasoned ones coming through the door? What would 20 years have done to the eyes I watched cry with laughter or the cheeks I saw go flush when the right person stole their hat?
All together again, our conversation's rhythm returned without much effort, like a championship team reuniting two decades later for a pick-up game. Shit talk was dished out in precise amounts and old arguments dusted off for the fun of it. We filled gaps in the stories of the lives I once would have died to protect, and they made it easy for me to remember why. None of them had wound up where I thought they would have, and yet each had found their way. No one knew about the day I couldn't muster the will to eat anything or how that day turned into a couple weeks. I didn't tell them about how my parents frantically flew out to sit silent and confused at my hospital bedside. Or how I had told them not to come. But I think I preferred it that way.
It wasn't long before we reached the gaps among us we couldn't fill and Nick became all we could talk about.
He had been the live wire, the originator of our dumbest schemes, the one who somehow drew us all together from disparate corners of the school. Honors class, marching band, water polo, or in my case, in-school suspension. It was as if he had collected us for some plan for which only he had the designs. And he loved us, together.
More than anything, that's what we recalled about Nick. He only seemed happy when we were in one place. After mornings perfectly wasted in the banded shade of the stadium bleachers, contrasting class schedules would pull us apart for several hours. Watching Nick as we separated, you'd think one of his arms was off to Spanish, while a leg was due in the chem lab.
He was a terrible student himself. I always suspected that his failing grades were nothing but an act of short-sighted rebellion. At the bar, we were laughing about the red-heavy Scantron strips he'd hold up for us like freshly claimed scalps when someone chimed in to ask if anyone else remembered his drawings. The recollection crashed over the group like a wave. Nick had been a great artist, they said. It was how he spent most of his class time—drafting impossible worlds and terrifying creatures. They all spoke, describing the sketching as if samples hung inches from their eyes, rather than 20 years in their past.
And yet I couldn't remember any of it.
As they each took their turns trying to capture what they saw, I listened, hoping for some stray detail to shake loose a memory, but nothing came. The longer I waited, the colder and more hollow I felt. Where the others beheld visions unique to their friend—so colorful, so Nick—I watched my loss deepen beyond what I had previously thought possible.
No one knew much about what became of Nick after school. As far as we could tell, he had never left town and hadn't ever shown much interest in life outside of it. Some of us recalled texts he sent around the holidays and summers those first few years after we split up, asking if we were home for the break and whether we'd want to hang out. It was with a quiet shame that we confessed to never making good on the offers.
Drinks ended a little after that.
\*\*\*
The school was on my way home from the bar, but I would have wound up there regardless. Nick's missing drawings wouldn't let me go. I had somehow found myself even farther from my friend than the distance between life and death, and returning to the space where we had both lived—where he had died—seemed like the only way to narrow that abyss.
I couldn't have known how right I was.
The high school was a squat, sprawling two-story structure, a year or two away from a complete remodel—as it had been when I attended. In its arrested redevelopment, however, the building stood untouched and, unlike my childhood home, undrained of its power. Even twenty years later, as I peered into its darkened windows from behind the chain-link fence surrounding it, that place felt as though it could devour me.
I followed the barricade around to the back, where it opened into the rear parking lot, the one used by underclassmen and for Friday night football games. As I turned the final corner of the building, the bleachers came into view.
The stands stood with their back to the school, in the liminal space between the cloistered classrooms and a full-contact field. Like most things in my hometown, they were smaller than I remembered, but maybe that was because I was no longer just revisiting a place I only knew as a child. This was now where Nick Bertocchi had died. The site of a loss that immense could never measure up.
I blame the drinks for both the impulse to hop the fence and how shitty my landing was. Jagged bits of pavement had pooled on the other side and were there to cushion the impact on my palms. Once the stinging stopped, there was nothing to distract me from how still the stadium was, how unnervingly quiet for somewhere built for roars.
I was making my way toward the bleachers when a high metallic clanging caused me to almost jump out of my skin. Stuck in the open, my only choice for hiding had been to stand perfectly still. With my heart racing, my eyes quickly found the locked chains hanging from the cafeteria doors nearby, swaying in the wind. I couldn't remember a gust strong enough in the moments before to cause such a stir, but without a better explanation, I carried on with whatever it was I had come to do.
The sides and back of the bleachers were open, exposing the scaffolding that held up a good portion of the town's population on game nights. Back then, if any of them noticed my friends and I were there at all, it was because of the acrid smoke or the unbound belly laughs wafting up from between their feet. Twenty years later, I stood in that same spot, smoking alone in the narrow alleyway framed by the crisscrossed bracing. I wondered how it was possible—that those two points in time, then and now, could be connected.
I finished the joint and got cold again. The wind bit at my hands, and I wrapped my coat tighter around me. I was drunk and tired and missing my friend. More than anything, I wanted to go home. Whether a place that like even existed for me anymore, I couldn't say.
The rest of the journey down the length of the bleachers had me stepping over struts and ducking beams. In hind sight, it was the moment when I emerged from beneath the stands again, when the air became stagnant, heavier somehow, and the noise from passing cars struggled to reach me, as if the sound waves were stymied by a more viscous medium. That was the moment when I should have known. But admitting that you've found yourself in a situation requiring bravery demands a courage of its own.
I rounded the structure looking for a more direct way out than the one I used to come in, but instead, I found something else. The double doors to the cafeteria were open.
Now, I *know* that the chains on them had been locked before I first went under the bleachers. That is a fact, and I need to acknowledge it as such. There are so few certainties from that night that I cling to the ones I can. The doors to the cafeteria had been closed, but now, they sat there, each one stopped out wide like an invitation.
For what seemed like a long time, I just listened, waiting to hear the creaky casters of a janitorial cart or staticky strains from a cleaning crew's radio, sounds I would have expected to be emitting from an open school building in the middle of the night.
Instead, I heard what I would have after emerging from the bleachers at any point in my past. The school sounded alive. The bell was ringing, likely for the end of a period, when the halls were filled with students savoring the fleeting moments before another chime instructed them to sit quietly in neat rows once again. I can’t say for sure why I went inside that night—other than that's all I had ever done in that exact scenario.
The sound of the school as I walked through the cafeteria doors had been a familiar one. And so was the sight of it, but for one exception. The linoleum tiles were still a stale color that made it unclear if they were old and dirty or just old. The long tables were set out, ready to accept hungry bodies. And the clock on the wall was held within a cage for reasons no one will ever grasp. All was how it was supposed to be, but there wasn't a single person in sight.
And yet, no matter where I ventured throughout the halls, I heard them. Voices calling answers to questions or shouting in order to get other shouting to stop. I heard the squeal of sneakers on sealed hardwood as missing balls bounced alongside them. There was laughter and outrage and praise, but I could see none of it. Every hall was deserted and each classroom as empty as it should be this late at night. And yet it was all so close.
The mystery of what I kept hearing devolved into a quest to solve it, one that brought me to the second-floor hallway where my locker had been—where it still was. The sight of it stopped me. I knew which one belonged to me without a doubt. My thumb and forefinger met to input a combination that no longer had any correlation to numbers, just instinctive movement, the kind that I used to complete with a mind occupied by a million other impossibly important things, seemingly the entire world.
*A twist, a swing, and a swipe.* The door opened with difficulty, how it was supposed to.
At this point, I should state something directly. I screwed around a lot in high school, but I'm not currently stupid. And I wasn't that night, either. I was standing in my high school in the middle of the night, hearing the voices of people I couldn't see. Obviously, something was wrong. Perhaps it was because of my recent brush with psychiatric medicine that some allowances were being made for experiences slightly outside of the typical. But I wasn’t aware of how far I had traveled down that road until the metal door swung inches from my face and revealed a drawing by Nick Bertocchi taped to the other side.
I recognized it the moment I saw it. An outlandish scene, set atop a Möbius strip. Its central figure was a small, hunched man walking the circuit between the two infinite loops. One side was presided over by a mountainous, snarling ghoul brandishing a rusted butcher's knife, and the other was watched by its twin holding a soiled syringe. Nick had handed it to me at my locker between classes one day and played off its giving as a prank. But I had made sure he saw me hang it on the inside of my locker door.
As much as I wanted to take the picture with me that night, something inside me said it was wrong to remove it from the place of pride where it had hung across time. And so instead, I poured over its scratchy lines, every considered eraser mark. Nick had somehow found me again. Or I had found him. Either way, I wasn't letting go so easily.
At some point in my study of the drawing, the voices had stopped speaking. I doubt I would have noticed at all if it hadn't been for the sound that replaced it. Two rubbery squeaks—one high, one low—in regular intervals. My first thoughts tried to puzzle out what I was hearing, but then I noticed that the voices from the classrooms around me hadn't actually been silenced, just quieted. They were whispering rapidly, as if fearful of being overheard. When the voices nearest me grew even dimmer, I could distinguish the character of the squeaks more clearly.
They were footsteps, and they were getting closer.
Since I already explained that I'm not dumb, I won't waste much space here describing what happened next. I took a staircase in the opposite direction of the footsteps, left through the cafeteria, and ventured back beneath the bleachers. Even in my mind at its most frantic, it stood to reason that my flight from the school would involve the stands much as much as my journey inside had. When I emerged out the other end, finding the cafeteria doors suddenly locked with chains once again seemed utterly logical. I went straight home and didn't come out from under my covers until a gentle knock sounded on the door.
It was my mother. It was time for the funeral.
\*\*\*
Nick's burial lacked all of the specificity that had brought so many of his old friends back together the night before. It was a drab affair, punctuated by dusty ceremony meant to comfort the living and by looks secreted among friends all thinking the same thing. None of this was Nick.
With one of his drawings fresh in my mind, I had to agree, and with every wrong turn the proceedings took in honoring the friend I had lost, the picture returned to me. As I stood in the church pews, leaving it behind the night before became more and more inexcusable. The trip home had already dredged up so much guilt and regret, and yet there had been more to mine. I hadn't been the friend Nick deserved, but I would have rather lived with the painful memory of that failing than the craven emptiness of forgetting it.
The group from the night before reconvened graveside once everything was done. One of them asked if I was sticking around for the night. There was going to be a proper send-off, one more befitting of the mastermind behind our best brainless nights. I thanked them for the invitation and said I would try to make it once some things around town had been taken care of.
That night, the school was the same lonely scene I had found on my walk home. And the fence was no easier to hop. The chains were affixed to the cafeteria doors on one end of the bleachers and gone by the time I reached the other. The voices echoing in the halls were still boisterous and their sources still lost. I flung my locker open with abandon, desperate to reclaim the gift I had been foolish enough to leave behind.
The clanging of the locker door against its neighbor must have masked an abrupt hushing of the voices, because by the time the crash faded, the footsteps were right behind me.
And when I turned, the old woman was there.
She said I could stay as long as I'd like, but if I continued to make a racket, she would have no choice but to handle me like she did that other boy.
#entertainment
source
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