Free Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield Page B

had the kind of sturdy heft that made people think of football players, big calves and bracing shoulders and a leather-strap-snapping neck that supported a head just slightly too small for his body, a face with deep-set eyes that peered from beneath a heavy, furrowed forehead. Now, he was padded with pendulous flesh that seemed to pool around his ankles, choke his wrists, strangle and chafe at the bases of his fat fingers. As he waddled across the porch and saluted us, he just looked like a . . .
    “Giant baby,” I muttered. “Holy shit, he’s a two-ton infant.”
    James snorted violently but shot me another, angrier warning look.
    “Hey, man,” Craig called. I hung back, feeling nervous. He looked at me and shifted uncomfortably. “Hey.”
    He squinted at me, opened his mouth as though he meant to say something else, then changed his mind and looked back at James. “Everyone’s out in the yard.”
    We tripped gingerly up the creaky porch steps and walked through the house. One step over the threshold revealed a wrecked place: stuffing erupted from the upholstered sofa; strips of flypaper thick with the bodies of bluebottles hung from the ceiling; the smell of garbage floated just beneath the cheap sugary odor of a vanilla-scented air freshener.
    “What have you been doing up here for the past week? This place looks like shit,” said James, warily but not without affection.
    “Supposedly, I’m ‘packing up the house,’” said Craig grinning. “Someone had to clean out all the old-lady crap after Grammy Mitchell croaked, right? So I flew out, and I settled in, and I’ve been waking up drunk since last Tuesday.”
    I looked around the room, a landscape littered with Chinese takeout containers and pizza boxes and empty beer cans that teetered on windowsills or nestled in the cushions of the couch.
    “And never going to bed hungry, apparently,” I said. James shot me another look.
    “I mean, which is AWESOME!” I added, shooting one back and forcing a smile that I hoped looked enthused.
    Craig fixed me with narrow eyes, then relaxed and grinned.
    “Yes, yes it is,” he said.
    “What about your parents?” asked James.
    Craig’s smile disappeared.
    “You know they won’t come within five hunded miles of this place if they can help it.”
    Nobody replied and he looked suddenly, fleetingly uncomfortable—staring at the floor, rubbing the toe of a grubby sneaker against a caked-on reddish splotch that might have been pizza sauce and that flaked away from the linoleum.
    A breeze blew through the house, banging the screen door lightly and carrying the scent of charcoal and meat to where we stood. My stomach kicked once and then settled. I swallowed. My tongue felt thick.
    “Grill’s on,” Craig said, perking up and clapping James on the shoulder. “Come on.”
    He turned, avoiding looking at me, and clomped down the hall toward the back of the house. James offered a beckoning finger and followed, moving lightly in the shadow of Craig’s enormous girth.
    * * *
    In another life, another time, another town, it wouldn’t have been like this. Craig would have been too cruel, and James too smart, for their coincidental friendship to have ever lasted so long. But here, where James felt so trapped, Craig was exotic. Interesting. Something different, half outside and half in. Bridgeton blood, but a big-city dressing. He straddled the line between here and there, showing up each summer in the last weeks of school, disappearing again in the last days of August. He was living proof of a life lived elsewhere; there had even been a time, before I knew him better, when I’d thought we might be friends.
    Richard Mitchell, like any small-town smart kid, had moved on and made good, never looking back. College in another state; a life on another coast; an aging mother whom he never came home to see but who couldn’t be prouder of her absent boy.
    “My Ricky,” is what Bea Mitchell would say—clicking her