Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone Read Online Free PDF

Now he was looking at me, finally, eyelids swollen with tears, red and wet and with only dark, oily slits where his iris showed between.
    He swiped at his eyes, coughing, and then cleared his throat.
    He said, “I was thinking, all right. I was thinking about everything.”
    I watched him regain control of himself, willing myself to stay silent.
    “Everything,” he said again. He gazed into the distance and kept talking.“I always knew you would leave, you know, at the end of the summer. I knew that you’d leave, and I’d still be here, and that’d be it.”
    “We never talked about that,” I started, but he waved a hand to shut me up.
    “Come on, Rebecca,” he said. “You’re dying to get out of here, you’ve said it a million times. I get that, you don’t really fit in, or whatever it is. I thought you could’ve tried harder. But I just kept thinking about that, the whole time that you were on the stage, how everybody up there was moving on. Except for me. Tons of those kids are leaving town, but not me. I have to stay here.”
    “That’s bullshit. You could have had your diploma this year. Hell, you could go back in the fall and be done in a semester,” I said.
    “But for what?” said James. “Where would I go? My dad can’t send me anywhere. And I couldn’t leave him alone.”
    I sighed. “He would understand.”
    “It wouldn’t be right.”
    “No, it just wouldn’t be easy.”
    He looked at me again. “Maybe. But . . . I was so pissed off, so angry. I didn’t want that, to be here forever. Watching you up there, it made me feel like I’ve got no choice, and it made me so goddamn angry, and then you said that thing about being salutatorian and it was like a fucking slap in the face. Like you’d already moved on and left town, like I wasn’t good enough for you anymore.”
    “Christ, James,” I said, “it was a fucking joke.”
    “I know,” he said.
    “So, what, that’s it? You just got pissed, and you decided to hurt me before I could hurt you?”
    “I never wanted to hurt you.”
    “Well, you did.”
    We sat together, the rushing breeze making rustling sounds in the trees, the branches above our heads creaking, groaning, moving in time with the wind. The air was thick with the scent of wild roses.
    So thick, that smell. It stifled, pressed back against the golden thrust of the sun. The wild rose wants to be remembered, wants to color the afternoon with its heady essence, so that every summer recollection is tinted with its sweet, soft-petaled scent. It was a blanket that covered everything, crept into my nose and flooded my eyes with perfume that couldn’t be blinked away.
    The heat, the same heat that had tormented the police that morning as it stripped down the dead girl and urged her stiff, dry flesh into baking decay, was beating against my skin. It was crushing. I wanted to succumb, let it force me prostrate against the ground. It wrapped wetly around my sweating thighs and blew against the beads that trickled down my forehead. It soaked James’s shirt with perspiration, sticking it against his ribs and under his arms.
    Sitting there, making heavy indentations in the thirsty grass, we looked at each other and wondered who would collapse first.
    “Listen,” he said. I kept my eyes on him.
    “We can wait it out,” he said. “No pressure, no expectations. Whatever you want, whatever feels right to you, that’s what we’ll do. But . . . but I was wrong. I don’t want this to end.”
    “I’ll be gone,” I said. “I’m going.”
    The words felt hollow. The thick and faraway voice didn’t sound like mine.
    “That’s what you should do,” James said, so forcefully that it startled me. “But we can still have this summer, can’t we? I want to make this up to you.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t—”
    “Becca, at least let me try. Wouldn’t you rather have it that way? You leaving, and thinking that last night was really who I am, that’s what I