Everything Breaks Read Online Free PDF Page B

policeman came out of the darkness behind us and took my right shoulder while the first one gripped my left elbow. “The paramedics need to check this kid out,” the first one yelled across to the other one. “I’m pretty sure he’s in shock, and he’s bleeding from somewhere. I think his legs have been injured.”
    They turned me toward the beach, which seemed almost like a carnival with its many flashing lights—yellow ones on the sawhorses, red ones and blue ones atop the ambulances and police cars. I watched over my shoulder as the fire exploded upward to become a towering monster with the Mustang lost somewhere deep inside its gut.
    A distant siren quickly went from loud to deafening as Clevesdale’s yellow fire truck came speeding down the narrow beach road with its bells clanging and its lights whirling. It idled at the barricades just long enough for workers to scramble opening them, then it swept toward the burning car like a dragon with lidless halogen eyes.
    I turned away then, from the car, from Trey. I had no choice.
    A man in a yellow raincoat ran up. “We found a second body,” he told the two policemen in a rushed, grim way. “Thrown from the car like the other one we found. Looks like they went down the bluff headfirst. One’s probably the driver.”
    I couldn’t feel my mouth, but I heard a strange version of my own voice saying to them, “The driver is still inside the car. His name is Trey.”
    Two yellow rubber tarpaulins covered something on the ground right beside the first ambulance. A breeze from the lake came up and rippled them, made it look like the long, thin bodies beneath were twitching impatiently, trying to get up and call it all a joke.
    Like Zero was about to untangle his legs and rise to do a little bobbing, bent-kneed dance with his cutoffs ragged around his knees and his elbows high and aerodynamic.
I told you I could fly from this bluff like an eagle, dudes!
Like Steve was going to sit up and push his hair into sweat spikes as he scouted around for his lost clarinet case.
Hey, guys, doncha remember I told you to watch my instrument?
He’d get up off the ground, surely, any second now, give the crowd a boyish smile, swat the dust from his jeans, and begin sauntering out of here with his well-worn Memphis cowboy boots.
    One of the policemen stepped in front of me, blocking my view. When I tried to see around his shoulder, he took my arm and held it, hard, stopping me.
    â€œYou’re gonna have to come to the station to tell us what you know about this, son,” he said, quietly and gruffly. “But first let’s get those legs of yours cleaned up.”
    A fireman ran up to talk to the other policeman. They were speaking in low voices with their backs to me as the first policeman led me away. I wasn’t supposed to hear what they were saying, but I heard all right. I could hear everything—some of the kids from my class acting hysterical, others acting like they were too cool to act hysterical, the yellow flashers on the barricades clicking on and off and on and off, the gravel squishing under the gum boots of the firemen and policemen, the lake moving, the fire moving, the stars moving in the faraway black sky.
    â€œWith a fire as hot as this one, glass and metals bond to other objects, including human remains,” the fireman was saying to that policeman. “When that thing burns out, it’ll be hard to tell who or what anything used to be.”
    I closed my eyes and saw Trey against my lids, Trey as I’d seen him when the smoke had cleared for that half second, Trey’s head and arms flailing around like he was playing his drums at a gig with his band. Yes, that’s what I’d thought I’d seen for that crazy half-second, Trey drumming. Now, I understood he’d been blown into jittery mock life there behind the wheel by the force of those vicious flames. His long red hair