Free Rage: A Love Story by Julie Anne Peters Page B

can still taste cherry tobacco at the back of my throat, so I leave money for our unpaid bill.
    Eight hours at Bling’s, then to the hospice. Carrie’s mom is throwing a fit about the cleaning people moving Carrie’s pictures so they can dust. She’ll do the cleaning and dusting, she says, and she doesn’t want that male nurse anywhere near her daughter.
    Bitch. Sad bitch.
    On the way to Frank’s room, I have to pass the room Mom was in. I’m usually okay, but today my knees feel wobbly and my throat constricts. I wish I would’ve told Mom about me, about who I really am; wish she could’ve seen me with a girlfriend,being happy. She loved Dad so much. I want love like she had with Dad, like Tessa has with Martin. Why can’t I have that? I can, and will.
    I sit with Frank, watching professional poker on cable. His eyes are open, but he doesn’t see, or doesn’t comprehend. He falls asleep around midnight.
    There’s a manila envelope shoved under my door at home, sealed with tape, no writing on the front. I unclasp it. Five twenty-dollar bills. LATE NOTICE screaming out in big red letters on my car insurance.
    Tessa has attached a sticky note: “We need to talk.”
    Where were you when I needed to hear from my sister so much it almost killed me? Answer that, Tessa Marie Däg.
    Robbie shuffles around the bend in the hallway as I watch from the classroom door. He’s alone.
    “Johanna, Johanna, Johanna,” he goes. “I am here to cooperate.”
    “Where’s Reeve?”
    He edges past me into the room, not answering. Locating his seat, he drops his pack, positions his case precisely in the middle of the desktop beside him, and sits with his hands folded in his lap.
    I linger at the door, hoping, praying, she might be a step behind, riding through the fog on a horse.
    The only fog is in my brain.
    “Where’s your essay?” I ask Robbie, tossing my pack onto the teacher’s desk.
    He cocks his head. “You don’t have it?”
    Do I? I dig through my pack. So much crap in here, I can’t find anything. I dump the contents onto the desk.
    “Just kidding.” Robbie whips the pages out of his back pocket. He grins.
    Hilarious.
    His pages are folded lengthwise and he runs his jagged thumbnail down the crease, then makes a major production out of smoothing the pages over the desk.
    “Do you need a pen?”
    He produces a pencil from his shirt pocket and, touching his tongue to the sharpened lead, says, “Let us begin.”
    I study him as he writes. And writes. He has Reeve’s intensity of purpose—is that autism?
    The clock over the door ticks. Twenty more minutes of babysitting. Wish I had an iPod or cell. Maybe I could find something to read, or clean out my pack.
    I feel impatient, restless.
    “Can I see what you’ve written?” I engage Robbie. I get up and walk over to him; extend a hand.
    He stops writing and lifts his head. His eyes blip around the room. I sit at the desk beside his, wiggling my fingers.
    He drops his arms and slumps. I have to reach over and get the essay.
    “March 12,” he wrote. “I was born.” Brilliant.
    “May 23 I kill my mother.
    “May 24 Ikilled myfather. May 25Ikilledherfather.”
    I glance sideways at Robbie. He says, “The plot thickens.”
    I set the first page aside and begin page two.
    When he locked the closet me and Reeve hid in there and he found us. dark is no cover. Reeve says don’t say anything she told him no don’t. but he didn’t lissen .evry night Reeve made me go in and we shut the door and waited in the dark and it was dark and cold and ther were bugs and roches skorpions and spiders in the dark and he’d come and say wer’e playing hide and seek kids and Reeve woud whisper don’t say anything don’t cry he won’t find us in the dark. but he always did. He took me first and Reeve begged him, No take me. In the dark I heard her. The dark is no cover. she didn’t cry or scream I screamed. that once. and Ihit him. and after that he took me first .
    I force