Free Who Do You Love by Jennifer Weiner

the socks and the perfume, the boxes and the wrapping paper and the ribbons. He inspected the bathroom to make sure he hadn’t left a scrap of tape or wrapping paper behind, and then ran out the door. We love you very much, he heard his grand­father saying. “No, you don’t,” he muttered. “No, you don’t.”
    Outside, more snow was swirling down, and an icy wind was scouring the streets, stirring up grit and trash. Andy pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt and started walking fast, head down, with the bag in his arms. Mr. Sills’s rattling pale-blue pickup truck pulled to the curb, and Mr. Sills climbed out, dressed in khakis and a plaid shirt, with his big belly pushing at his belt, his white curls under a gray knitted cap. He, too, had a wrapped box in his hands.
    â€œMerry Christmas!” he called. Andy ignored him, tucking his chin down into his chest and hurrying past before Mr. Sills could give him the present or start asking him questions. There was a Dumpster behind the Spanish restaurant on Kensington Avenue. He heaved the lid open, threw the bag deep inside, and let the lid fall down, with an echoing clang that he could feel in his teeth.
    Next to the Dumpster was restaurant trash—newspaper, plastic bags, coffee grinds and eggshells, a rotted half of a head of lettuce, and a chunk of a broken brick about the size of a baseball. Andy picked up the brick. The roughness felt good against his skin. He stepped onto the street and then, before he could think about it, before he even knew what he was going to do, he lifted his arm and threw the piece of brick, as hard as he could, through the windshield of a car that was parked at the meter in front of the restaurant.
    The glass rained down in jagged shards. A lady on the sidewalk screamed, and the man beside her pointed, yelling, “Hey, kid!” Andy ran, and at first the man who’d yelled was chasing him, except he was old and slow and Andy left him behind, his long legs eating up the pavement, weaving down one-way streets and cobbled alleys too small for a car, not feeling the cold, not thinking about the jacket or his grandparents or his mom, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing, hearing nothing, not even the shriek of sirens, until a policeman’s hand grabbed the hood of his sweatshirt, yanking Andy backward. The cop was soft and jiggly underneath his blue uniform shirt, and his belt, with a walkie-talkie on one side and a gun on the other, dragged down his pants. “Merry Christmas, asshole,” he said.
    Andy twisted violently. “Fuck you, fatso,” he said. Then the cop grabbed his hood again and slammed Andy into the brick wall of the row house beside him. The air went rushing out of Andy’s lungs as the cop pulled his arms back and up behind him, twisting them hard, and the pain pushed everything out of his mind, and he barely felt the snow in his hair, on his cheeks, melting and mixing with his tears.

Rachel
    1990
    I ran into the bridal room feeling sick with shame, my eyes burning and my heart galloping in my chest. My party clothes, a gray miniskirt with flounced tiers and a pink-and -gra y top, with pink tights and pink Mary Janes, were arranged neatly on the hanger on the back of a chair, and I shoved it over so that the clothes spilled to the ground and lay there in a sad little heap. I had never been so ashamed, never imagined that such shame was even possible, in my entire life.
    My bat mitzvah had started off perfectly. I’d studied for weeks, practicing until I could chant every line of Hebrew along with the tape that Cantor Krugman had made for me to play on my Walkman. Nana had taken me shopping and we’d picked out the navy-blue dress that I’d worn for the service (“Sophisticated,” Nana had said approvingly) and the outfit I’d wear to the party. My mother had finally let me get my ears pierced—not at the Piercing Pagoda at the mall, where all