Free Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott Page A

I want to ask about suck camp, which I’m guessing was the “tough love” place his parents sent him to, the one that brought him home all cleaned up (mostly) until now. Until his dad’s car.
    But it’s his story to tell, and I know what it’s like to have to live with one. How hard it can be to think about, much less talk about.
    “You have a dollar?” I say and he grins—I see the flash of his teeth—and digs into his pockets, pulling one out.
    “You like cotton candy?” I say and he nods, glancing at me. His hair has fallen into his face again.
    I put the dollar into the machine and press the button.
    “Me too,” I say as it falls. When I pull the bag out, it’s silver and light, with a pink puff picture on it.
    He pulls out another dollar and puts it in the machine.
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “I know,” he says, and buys another bag. He pulls it open right away, sweet smell all around us, sugar and fake color.
    “I remember you,” I say slowly, and I do, bits of things half-buried. Elementary school, and the beginning of middle school; a boy with blond curls and a big smile and huge green eyes that looked like they had a bit of the sun in them, strange but somehow so pretty that you noticed them. “You talked a lot. You had—you were—”
    “I had friends,” he says, smiling a little.
    I nod, opening my own bag. The cotton candy isn’t sticky. It pulls apart in soft little clumps. “And you used to chase Amy Gray all over the playground.”
    He laughs. Amy is still pretty chaseable, only she’s been caught by a six-foot-tall volleyball player, Monica, and has been since we were freshmen.
    “You used to try to trade your sandwiches,” he says and I’d forgotten that, how when I was little Mom always bought the wrong kind of bread, the kind of stuff you see old people pick up at the supermarket and sigh when it thuds into their carts. Dan had slowly managed to get it out of the house after he and Mom started dating and I remember hugging him the first time I ate a piece of toast that didn’t weigh half a pound.
    “What?” Caleb says, and I shake my head.
    “I just—my mom used to get that bread, you know? And I’d forgotten how much I hated it and how she would never let me try something else until—” That had been Dan too. He’d said that I should at least be allowed to try another kind of bread for a week. “It can’t hurt her, Lisa,” he’d said. “There’s enough stuff in that bread she’s been eating to keep her heart and the rest of her healthy until she’s eighty.”
    I swallow and hear the bag crumple in my hand.
    “So what happened to you?” I say again, and Caleb tosses his empty bag at the trash can. It misses and lands on the ground.
    “I killed my sister,” he says.

21
    “You—she fell off her bike,” I say, startled by the flatness of his voice. The sureness. How can he think Minnie falling off her bike was his fault?
    How can he think her death was his fault?
    “I was with her. Watching her. I had to do that a lot. Minnie was—she didn’t like any of the nannies we had.”
    “You had a nanny? But you were—” I break off, blushing.
    “Yeah, I was too old,” he says. “I hated it. And Minnie knew it so she hated them too and she had ‘impulse problems.’ You know how there’s a moment when you think about something before you do it? Minnie never had that. She’d just...anyway. She wanted to go bike riding and the last nanny had quit so we went to the park. My parents were always on me and her to make sure she wore a helmet but she hated it and I didn’t want to deal with trying to get her to wear it so I didn’t even bother trying. We got to the park and I was bored out of my mind sitting there, watching her ride around. Pissed off, you know? And then there was a car and I saw her...she flew off the bicycle and landed on the sidewalk. Her bike went in the lake and she just—she just lay there. People were screaming and all I could do was