Free Torn Away by Jennifer Brown Page B

little girls in Marin’s class made it. Not one.
    According to Ronnie, rescuers rushed to Fenderman’s Grocery right away, picking through the massive bulk under the curtain of rain, until the one remaining emergency siren—the one too far on the other end of town for us to hear on our end—cranked up another tornado warning and they’d been forced to take cover. In the morning, after the sun came out and only hours before Kolby and I were trekking toward Sixth Street, a crowd of helpers—including my stepdad—fell on Fenderman’s again. They found eleven employees—alive and well—wedged inside one of the walk-ins. And in the aisles heading towardthe walk-ins they’d found everyone else. Including Mom and Marin, who were buried under a massive shelf of canned goods.
    Marin’s hands were over her ears, Ronnie said. Mom had been lying over her, trying to protect her.
    I thought about all the times I’d told Marin that the storm was fine. That it was only noise. That it couldn’t hurt her as long as she was inside.
    I wondered if she’d remembered I’d told her those things. I wondered if she’d died feeling like I’d lied to her.
    Is the noise fine, Jersey? Is it over?
    Yes, Marin, you’ll be fine. It’s just noise.
    Dance the East Coast Swing with me, Jersey! Miss Janice taught us. It’s fun!
    No! Go away! You’re blocking the TV!
    But the noise…
    It’s fine! Just go!
    Three moms had made it out. But none of them were my mom. It seemed impossible that the same wind that had left my fragile porcelain kitten untouched could have destroyed the flesh and bone of my mother.
    “Where are they now?” I asked Ronnie, closing my eyes. The stupid wallpaper design had imprinted itself into my eyelids—purple blobs against the black.
    “At the morgue,” he said. “I went to the hospital, but it was chaos in there. So many people. And a lot of people still missing. So I went home and you weren’t there. I had no idea where you were and I thought maybe you’d gone with your mom andsister to dance class, so I went back to Fenderman’s to try and find you. I didn’t know what else to do.”
    “I was looking for them, too,” I said, a big tear rolling down my cheek. In my mind flashed a thousand images. Images of my mom and me, all the fun things we did, all the times she made me feel special and loved and happy. Images of Marin, who was so sweet and innocent and who I resented for being the baby, even though I knew it wasn’t her fault. She looked up to me and wanted me to accept her as a person. She wanted me to say she was cool. She wanted me to look up to her, too.
    I realized that the worst part of someone you love dying suddenly isn’t the saying good-bye part. It’s the part where you wonder if they knew how much you loved them. It’s the part where you hope you said and did enough good stuff to make up for the bad stuff. It’s the part where there are no second chances, no going back, no more opportunities to tell them how you feel about them.
    At some point I drifted off, and though I woke a few times to the coarse sobs of my stepdad in the bed next to mine, I slept better than I had in two days. I’d showered and changed into the clothes I’d picked up at home. I’d used the toilet and had eaten a hamburger that Ronnie had fetched for me. And it felt like forever since I had been in a bed.
    But when I woke in the morning, I was no longer confused about where I was. I was no longer waking up to those blissful thirty seconds or so of forgetting about the tornado. I was aware of it from the very moment I opened my eyes. It was all I could think about.
    On the third day, Ronnie was gone when I awoke. He’d left a note, along with a box of doughnuts, saying he was at the house and would be stopping by the hospital later.
    There was a part of me that wished he’d asked me if I wanted to go, too, but then I decided I didn’t want to go back to the house. Ever. There were too many memories