Free The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness Page B

mini-golf place is literally right by the freeway exit, so Mel’s already pulling into the lot. She parks and says, without malice, “It’s because you’re the best of us, Meredith.”
    Meredith looks at me. “I don’t think that.”
    “It’s why you’re with us tonight,” I say. “We couldn’t leave you home alone.”
    “Dad’s there.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Is this because of all the strange stuff going on?” she asks, almost as if she’s afraid we’ll answer.
    Mel and I exchange a glance and decide silently in about half a second that we’re not going to lie to her. “Yeah,” I say. “All the strange stuff.”
    Meredith nods, seriously. “I thought so.”
    We get out of the car. I see Henna waving to us with her good hand from the little hut where you get your putters. She’s with–
    “Jared’s here!” Meredith says, happily. “But who’s that?”
    And I say, “That’s Nathan.”
    I only make it to the first hole, where I discover that, even a week after the accident, the slight torso twist to make a putt in mini-golf is too much for a still-aching muscle in my back. Jared surreptitiously heals it while Mel and Nathan take their turns.
    “Sore?” Henna asks from a bench next to Meredith, who’s practising her German conjugations.
    “It’s mostly better,” I say, sitting down next to her, gingerly. “Every once in a while I get surprised by something I didn’t know was hurting.”
    “Me, too,” she says, running her fingers along her cast. “Jared helped.”
    Jared has rejoined Mel and Nathan at the first hole, which is decorated with little plastic dinosaurs. Mel takes her putt, then thrusts two fists in the air. “Hole in one!” she shouts. Mel is ridiculously ace at mini-golf.
    “I’m surprised your parents let you come out,” I say to Henna.
    “And you would be right in your surprise,” she says.
    “Ich schreibe, du schreibst, er schreibt–”
Meredith whispers next to us.
    “But nearly dying seems to have made a whole bunch of things clearer,” Henna says. “Don’t you think?”
    “Not really, if I’m honest.”
    “It has for me.”
    Jared and Nathan and Mel are all laughing at Nathan’s inability to get the ball in the hole. “You’re supposed to give up at seven strokes,” we hear Jared say.
    “I told my parents I was going out to see you guys,” Henna says. “They didn’t want me to, but I didn’t ask permission. Amazing the difference it makes. Being firm. Being clear.”
    “Your mom and dad are right to be worried, though. Two kids are dead. They probably won’t be the last.”
    Meredith pauses for a moment, then goes back to conjugating.
“Ich möchte, sie möchten–”
    “That’s actually the reason I gave,” Henna says. “I could have died.
We
could have died in that car accident. But we didn’t. I could die at home just as easily as I could die out with my friends. Or, you know, in the Central African Republic.”
    “Ah.”
    “Yeah. ‘Ah’.”
    She’s looking right at me. I don’t know what her eyes mean.
    “I don’t feel any clearer,” I’m surprised to hear myself saying. “I just feel like my body is in all these different pieces and even though it
looks
like I’m all put together, the pieces are really just floating there and if I fall down too hard, I’ll fly apart.”
    “Like a fontanelle,” Henna says.
    “A what?”
    “The soft spot on top of a baby’s head.” She taps the spot on her own head. “Babies’ skulls aren’t fused together when they’re born, otherwise they’re too big to get out of the mother. They’ve got this spot called a fontanelle that’s just kind of unprotected until the hardness grows in.”
    “That makes sense,” I say. “I’m just one big fontanelle.”
    Henna laughs lightly. Then she takes my hand in hers and holds it. “Mikey,” she says, but not like she’s about to say anything more, just like she’s identifying me, making a place for me here that’s mine to exist in. I