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bad and move it halfway back. “Why don’t you go home and stay with Carolina?” I say.
    “Why do you push us away, Alejandro?”
    “I’m not pushing anything. But I know you’re worried about Lina.”
    “Now, you think that. But this morning—you had to go out even though I tell you not to. You had to go. You complain about being lonely, having no friends. But we would always be with you if you let us.”
    I knew she wouldn’t understand. I shouldn’t say anything else. It’ll start a fight.
    But still I say, “When I’m alone, that’s the only time I don’t feel lonely.”
    She sighs. “Que quieres decir, Alejandro?” She touches my hair. “This is crazy talk.”
    “No, it’s not. Because most of the time, when I’m with people, it’s like I’m not there anyway. People treat me like I’m a science project or have the plague. Or they ignore me. You do it too.”
    She’s looking at me like maybe it’s the drugs. But my mind is clear. I’m just tired.
    “Remember when I was eight, when Austin’s dad took us fishing?”
    “I remember Austin,” she says, like she’s glad I’ve said something that makes sense.
    “He took me and Austin out. It was my first time fishing.”
    I lean back, remembering. The tubes and machines fade away. I’m on the ocean.
    It was this perfect Miami day, the kind where the sky and ocean seem to meet so it’s like you’re inside a blue ball. You hate to turn the motor on and ruin it, so you just sit and let the fish come to you.
    “I caught a fish that day,” I tell Mom. “I remember Austin’s dad helped me take it off. I watched the fish grunting while he removed the hook. ‘What happens to it now?’ I asked him. I didn’t want to eat it.
    “‘We put it in a bucket with ice and water. It’ll last a few minutes, maybe an hour. But, sooner or later, the air runs out, and then … fade to black.’”
    “Alex,” Mom says now. “What does this have to do with anything?”
    “I’m like that fish, Mom. I’m flopping around in a bucket of ice water, no future, nothing to hope for. I feel like I’m fading away.”
    “You have hope. You have a future. We must ask God for a cure.”
    “I’ve asked him. Forty million people with this disease have asked, and he doesn’t listen. Or maybe he says no.”
    “No. God does not say no.”
    “He says no to babies in Africa. Do you know how many have died? He doesn’t care.”
    My mother’s hands go to her ears. “We just have to wait. You have been lucky so far.”
    “Yeah. Lucky. I won the damn Florida lottery.” I remember the nurse, the gloves, the medical waste. “Why do you always have to tell people I got it from a transfusion?”
    “Alex, we have been through this. If we tell people you got it that way, then they—”
    “Don’t think I deserve it.”
    “I did not say that.”
    “You didn’t have to.”
    Can you believe that God will help find a cure, but still believe he gives it to people who deserve it? But I don’t say it.
    “It’s no one’s business how I got it,” I say instead. “It shouldn’t matter.”
    “It matters to some people.”
    “To you? Are you ashamed of me?”
    She sighs. “I try to make it easier for you. This is not only hard for you, Alex, but for all of us—especially when people are cruel. I want to make them be kinder, to make them think.”
    For the third time in ten minutes, I say, “I’m sorry.”
    She puts her arms around me. “Oh, my poor boy. At least they caught the person who did this thing.”

Monday, 2:30 p.m., Cole residence
    CLINTON
    I didn’t do it!
    When they told me they thought I’d smashed Crusan’s car with a baseball bat, I freaked. Polite and respectful went hurtling out the window. I started crying, yelling that I needed my father and I wasn’t going to talk without him. They backed off then. They called Mom. It took her a while to get there, and they didn’t let me eat lunch. I thought she’d be trippin’ ’cause she had to