Free The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson Page A

version of my father, comfortable in his skin. Happy to joke about life over there and his scars and the bullshit they all had to deal with from desk-jockey officers and lying politicians.
I couldn’t believe what I was watching.
Dad hated talking about the war and never did it sober. Half the time he didn’t even want people to know he was a vet. Strangers often said things like, “Thank you for your service,” because they meant it and they thought that was the right thing to do, but the problem was it set off a series of detonations inside my father that sometimes ended with him punching a wall or the face of a jerk in a bar. The worst was when he accidentally found himself in conversation with the family member of a soldier who had been killed. The sadness in their eyes would blow another hole in his brain and then he’d go dead quiet for days.
And yet here he was, as sober as Spock and me, and being a soldier was all he could talk about. And he was laughing .
Roy had brought a couple of grills and soon the hot dogs and hamburgers were piled high and the guys in the backyard chowed down. I got a look at the cooler, which was filled with six kinds of ice cream plus whipped cream and a bunch of half-frozen candy bars that Roy told me were going to be chopped up and mixed with the ice cream, and I was a confused, but happy and grateful girl.
Until Michael showed up.
After Gramma died, Michael rented her house from my father; apparently, they’d been buddies in high school. He moved out when we moved in, but he came back more often than I liked. The way he looked at me creeped me out and I was beginning to think that he was the source of Dad’s weed. He’d never done anything that I could complain about to Dad, but whenever he walked in the door, I felt the need to be somewhere else. Roy and his guys would have Dad’s back if Michael wanted to do anything profoundly stupid.
Covering the football game for the newspaper seemed like a good idea after all.

_ * _ 27 _ * _
    The crowd in the stadium roared so loudly I couldn’t hear what the mom manning the ticket booth said.
“Why?” I asked again.
She glared and waited a beat for the noise to die down. “Everybody pays to get into the game. No exceptions.”
“But I’m the press,” I whined. “On assignment.”
“Students get a dollar discount.” She put her hand out. “Four dollars or don’t go in.”
I paid her. Finn now owed me nineteen bucks.
The bleachers were a wall of people dressed in Belmont Yellow. For one second, it felt like they were all staring at me, that they all knew I came to the football game alone and didn’t know where to sit, but then a whistle blew and the football teams on the field behind me crashed into each other and the crowd cheered and jumped up and down. I was invisible to them.
I turned my back to the stands. On the other side of the field sat the enemy, the Richardson Ravens, dressed in black and silver. Beyond the goalposts at the far end of the field rose a gentle hill that was dotted with people sitting on blankets, little kids zooming around them, cheerfully ignoring the sad excuse for a football game.
The referee blew his whistle and the two lines of players crashed into each other again, grunting and shouting. I couldn’t see what happened to the ball, but the Richardson side of the field erupted in cheers.
I texted Gracie:
hey
After a long pause, she wrote back:
at movie ttyl?
I sent a simple smiley face, because my phone did not have a smiley face that was wrapping her hands around her own throat and beating her head against a wall.
The two teams ran to their huddles to plot out their next bit of brilliant strategy. They ended the huddle and ran back to line up, each face inches away from the scowling face of the enemy, feet pawing at the ground like impatient horses. The quarterback grunted, the lines crashed together, and they all fell down again. Everyone in Belmont Yellow screamed and whistled.
Should I be