Free Jumbo by Todd Young Page B

knocking her down and bouncing over her. Tadd’s tires screeched on the cement as he hit the breaks.
    Mitchell rushed forward and slammed a fist into the side of the car as he bent towards Sally. A paw reeled helplessly in the air. Her intestines were on the drive.
    Mitchell held her head as the last of the light died in her eyes. Then he stood up slowly, stunned. He jerked away from a hand on his shoulder.
    “Don’t. You fucking touch me, you dumb jock prick.”
    He glanced at Sally again, and then bolted, slamming the front door behind him and taking the stairs two at a time. He threw himself face-first onto his bed and wrapped the pillow around his head, though it didn’t block out the sound of the doorbell or the sound of his mother’s voice as she registered what had happened.
    Mitchell got up and slammed his window shut, aware of his father now and of Pete, all of them talking on the front lawn. He threw himself onto the bed again. They could deal with it. Tadd could deal with it. Sally was dead.

19
    On Sunday morning, Mitchell and Pete dug a grave for Sally in the back yard. Pete had wrapped her body in a couple of burlap sacks, but Mitchell hadn’t looked at her again. Once the grave was dug, he helped Pete lower Sally’s body into it, but he didn’t want to shovel the earth over her, so he went back upstairs and had a shower.
    Memories of Sally, of all the times they had spent together, of rambles through the neighborhood, of times when he was a little kid and he had played with her for hours, of the way she had trusted him, kept returning to Mitchell with a crashing regularity. He wished there was some way it could be over, that the thoughts could be out of his mind, though he supposed he would get over it in time.
    He left his homework Sunday night. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t done it, but he simply couldn’t find the energy for it. He figured it didn’t matter. Half the teachers never checked.
    On Monday morning he felt a little better, until his mother told him after breakfast that she would be leaving sometime today.
    “You have my number.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “I need to be alone, Mitchell.”
    Mitchell pulled away from her and walked out to the car. His father was waiting.
    They drove toward the school, though Mitchell only realized as he was about to get out of the car that it was calculus first up, which meant Tadd. He walked into the classroom, a stony look on his face. The room was half-full, though Tadd wasn’t there. Mitchell walked up to the back of the room and sat down in a place he never sat. Ryan Anderson came and sat down beside him, a guy that had been raising hell since grade school and was only now realizing that he needed to do some work to get into college.
    Mitchell saw Tadd walk through the door, saw him start to look around for Mitchell, but Mitchell shifted his eyes away, and when he looked again, he saw Tadd sitting where the two of them often sat. Teresa Forester came in and sat beside him.
    The rest of the day was a blur to Mitchell, and he didn’t know how he was expected to pass, not with his mom leaving today, with Sally dead and his father telling them all he was gay. Hell, how could he concentrate with all of that going on?
    He walked to training slowly, not looking forward to it. He didn’t even want to get in the water, and that was something he always looked forward to.
    When he opened his locker, he realized he had taken two of his pairs of speedos home yesterday to be washed. If his third pair wasn’t in his pack, then he wouldn’t be able to get in the water. He half-hoped his speedos weren’t in his pack, and as he looked, he saw that they weren’t. His mother had always packed them for him, something that he knew was a little childish, but she kept track of his towels and his speedos, making sure he had a clean towel and a clean pair of speedos everyday. Well, he had a towel, one that must have been in there since yesterday,