Free Last Train to Babylon by Charlee Fam Page B

whispered, when the girl was out of sight. “Dare me to take these?” she asked, holding up a handful of Blow Pops.
    â€œAre you insane?”
    She raised her eyebrows in that Rachel way and shoved them in her shorts. At that moment the owner came out from behind the cans of pineapple juice. Rachel’s face hardened as the man approached.
    â€œHey, girls,” he said. He went to the other side of the counter and started typing numbers into the register. “Sorry about that,” he said, handing me the Crush. Rachel stood stiffly behind, her hands cupped over the front of her shorts. The girl cashier came back and stood beside the manager and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
    I looked over at Rachel, and she shrugged.
    â€œI guess you heard about Max, huh, Lex?” The voice came from behind us, where another guy in Marc’s grade placed a bag of chips and a Coke on the counter.
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    The guy—I think his name was Pete—talked over us to the crying cashier as she rang up his bag of Doritos. She shook her head, wiped her eyes again, and he turned to us. “You guys know Max Sullivan? You know he was found dead today? Saying it was probably a suicide.” His name staggered on my tongue for a moment, in my mind, like I couldn’t quite place him, as if he were some has-been heartthrob, once plastered all over my bedroom walls. “Right in the park.”
    The scent of smoke and perfume lingered as we came out onto Jackson Avenue and the heat made my whole body ache.
    â€œThat was close,” Rachel said. I stared at the cracked sidewalk. She pulled the handful of lollipops out of her shorts and stuffed them into her bag. “And can you believe it? I can’t believe Max is dead,” she said, almost in the same breath. “You like made out with him, remember?”
    The news hit me with a dull thud. The words swirled in the heat and felt hazy, and I felt hazy, and everything was just hazy: Rachel’s voice, Max’s death, our first kiss, my second cigarette. Rachel and I stood out on the hot asphalt, dizzy from the sun and news and fear. It felt like a dream, a dull, deafening dream.
    â€œGod, Aub,” Rachel said. “You must have been a really shitty kisser.”
    W E DECIDED TO go to the wake. We sat in the back, wearing black silk scarves we stole from Karen; Rachel always had a flair for the dramatic. I couldn’t help feeling like a funeral crasher, but it seemed the whole town had shown up. Max’s body was set down in the open casket at the front of the room, his freckles muddled beneath a cakey layer of foundation, and his black hair styled in a wispy pouf. His family decided to bury him in his prom tuxedo. I guess that was his fanciest occasion, up until his funeral. How fucking depressing. His popped collar covered the markings on his neck.
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    I walked up to the casket, signed the cross, and imagined moving the collar aside and fingering the bruises that tracked across his Adam’s apple, tracing the freckled white skin of his neck down to the gold crucifix that rested upon his unmoving chest. I could not remember the color of his eyes.
    The Younger Sullivan—that’s what we called him then—was our age. He went to the Catholic school in our town, so we didn’t know much about him. Actually we knew literally nothing about him, except for that he was Max’s younger brother. He stood stone-faced against the back wall, his suit pants too short, exposing a pair of black dress socks. I guess no one ever really has time to buy a new suit for a funeral. His eyes were fixed in the direction of his brother’s casket. Green and white flowers, our school colors, decorated the area around the body.
    A funeral is really the only occasion when it is appropriate to give a guy flowers. They’re given to women all the time—first dates, the birth of a child, weddings. They’re a symbol of love, given for every