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it had only been a couple of years since that day they’d stolen the fancy red pillow from Sears and built David a headrest for his wheelchair, strapped together with duct tape and a couple of one-by-twos they’d busted up from a keep out sign Taylor grabbed on their way home.
    Taylor watched Mike’s hands tighten on the edge of the casket, his knuckles white. A slight tremor snaked up his arms and back. She could see he was fighting to keep his jaw clenched but the tremor transformed into a shake. Taylor watched in horror as Mike’s whole body convulsed. At first there was no sound except for the soft pounding of Mike’s head on the edge of the coffin. Then his body became racked with sobs, long rough moans that sounded more like they came from a tortured animal than a thirteen-year-old boy.
    Taylor had never seen Mike cry. He said he never had. Not when he broke his arm playing street football. Not when he fell from his garage roof onto the unfinished concrete wall in the back alley, landing on a piece of rusted rebar. Not even when his dad took the belt to him after they got home from the hospital, tearing up the unbandaged flesh of his skinny, shirtless back.
    â€œNever cry” was the number one rule governing survival if you were born into the Doyle family. It was a rule they had tried to teach the middle boy, Ryan, ever since they could remember—lesson after lesson after lesson, usually huddled in the back closet after a beating. But Ryan, Ryan was a crier. That boy never learned how not to cry. His mom would just look at him sideways and he’d start bawling, and once he got started Mike was the only one who could calm him down. But now Mike was the one sobbing, ragged howls, feral, unleashed. Taylor felt like she was going to be sick. The room began to spin and she left her body to watch from the top of the chapel. She saw Ryan panic, get up, and run red-faced out into the street, and she remembered the morning two weeks ago when everything began to break apart.
    It was that hot, sticky summer dawn when she’d heard something hit up against her bedroom window.
    â€œTaylor, get up! You gotta come help me,” Mike was whisper-shouting from the walkway below. Her room was at the end of the house, just across from the Doyles’ living room. She heard everything that went on in the Doyle house and could tell from the sounds which kid was getting beaten or whipped. Mike was too big for his mom to hit. Tommy was trying to get big fast but wasn’t quite there yet, so when Mrs. Doyle cupped her hand against the side of his head it sounded like a pumpkin dropped off a roof. Before David’s accident, he and Sean made exactly the same quick squeal of outrage and then became real quiet because they knew it only made their mom madder when they cried. Pretty soon she’d stop and they’d go running back outside to play.
    Ryan was the problem because no matter what they tried, he couldn’t stop crying when his mom yelled at him. Taylor had spent the morning listening to the high-pitched wail: “RY-AN, WHY ARE YOU CRY-ING?” Whup! “RY-AN, STOP YOUR CRY ING!” Whup! Every time Mrs. Doyle yelled, Ryan cried. Every time he cried, she belted him again and he cried harder. Taylor had heard it a hundred times before. She knew there was nothing to be done until she heard the silence that meant Ryan had been knocked unconscious, or the loud music that meant Mrs. Doyle had given up and was trying to drown him out. Either way, Taylor knew she’d find Ryan locked in the back closet on the other side of the house.
    It was the silence Taylor had been listening to when she heard Mike at her window. They had the routine down by now, but it hadn’t always been that way. The first time Taylor tried to help Ryan, she learned her body could make the same thick sound hitting against the wall as any boy bodies Mrs. Doyle flung that way. It had happened when she and