Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone Read Online Free PDF Page B

can’t stand.”
    Looking at him, my stomach churned. He had hurt me, pulled the rug from under me, knocked my breath away so swiftly and abruptly that I thought I might never get it back. I tried to focus. To care only for myself, to think about last night. Its reality, its physicality.
    The smell of the grass.
    The sound of his breathing.
    His voice, floating down from the ambiguous dark overhead, saying, “This is done.”
    Instead, as he looked at me, waiting, I felt my conviction falter.
    What happened had been shocking. It had hurt. But it wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
    I wasn’t ready to let go.
    James moved toward me, the grass sighing and springing back with relief from his weight, and cupped my face with one of his hands.
    “I love you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I love you.”
    Nothing moved.
    I held my breath.
    James held my hand and looked past me, his eyes unfocused and far away.
    He said, “It’s going to be okay.”
    * * *
     
    I awoke an hour later with my head resting heavily on his chest. In the moments that followed our conversation, I was suddenly, crushingly exhausted. I had fallen asleep almost instantly, cushioned by the soft grass at the base of the maple tree, to the feeling of his fingers in my hair.
    I sat up, hot and disoriented in the muted pink light. Behind me, the sun was creeping toward the horizon.
    “How long was I out?”
    James looked down at his chest and said, “Long enough to drool. A lot.”
    “Oh,” I said. I felt awkward and unsure of myself. “Sorry.” He smiled and shrugged, moving stiffly to his feet. A lightning bug flashed over his shoulder.
    “Do you want to get dinner or something?” he asked. He shifted from one foot to the other, as though uncertain, in the wake of our last words, whether the relationship had changed completely. Where did we go from here? Forward? Backward?
    “Not tonight.”
    He sighed. “Okay.”
    “This is . . . a lot.”
    “I understand.”
    He squatted down beside me, traced a finger along my temple. Gooseflesh broke out on my arms and legs at his touch.
    “There’s something I want to know,” he said.
    “What?”
    “I understand that last night, what happened . . . well, that it was wrong. I understand why you feel the way you do. But after today, after what I told you, does it make any sense at all?”
    His voice was pleading. I thought about James, his insecurity and his fear of being left alone, and about the night before—not how it ended, but how it began. I remembered the swish of polyester as each kid tripped awkwardly across the stage to shake the principal’s hand, the sweaty grip, the diploma handoff. I remembered looking out, over the sea of audience members with upturned faces, perched on groaning folding chairs. I remembered seeing James, standing just behind the back row, with his hands deep in his pockets and his eyes fixed, unblinking, on each of his friends as they closed the high school chapter of their lives and shuffled back to their seats. He had felt the weight of stagnation, seen nothing ahead but a lifetime of desertion, friends who never came back, and day after day of unbearable small-town shit.
    “Becca?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    I understood.

CHAPTER
5
     
    E arly on—after that first night at the bonfire, after our first and second and tenth kiss, when the sunset began coming earlier and the slow plod of summer gave way to the hectic reentrance of back to school—there had been a fight. Our first and only. For me, it had been resolved and forgotten. It was eclipsed by the deepening feelings that had turned out to be love.
    It was different for James. I knew that, now. He had carried it with him for almost a year, nursing his grudge through the long cold of winter, holding it tightly while he watched me walk the stage at graduation, letting the resentment grow bigger and wilder until it burst out and knocked us both senseless.
    I understood. I’d almost forgotten that once, it had