Free Inexcusable by Chris Lynch Page A

saddest statement I can think of.
    Slowly and in complete silence I creep up to her at the window. I don’t think she can hear me. There are my bare feet, and my carefulness, so I think I am safe, coming up behind her.
    I am just behind her, to where I can just about breathe on her, when she moves. She quickly reaches out and grabs the bottom level of the window sash and throws the window open.
    Quick as a snake I reach out and around her and seize the window frame and Gigi Boudakian at the same time. I slam the window back down and I wrap her up firmly, pulling her away from the window.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I say nervously, angrily. “We’re three floors up—you want to get killed? What are you doing?”
    She’s still not talking. I have her wrapped up snugly, her arms pinned to her sides, my nose right in her ear, smelling her skin, her hair. For a second I cannot hold my eyes open, the way you can’t when you sneeze. Only it is the overwhelming sense of Gigi, and of what I feel for Gigi, that has my eyes shut.
    How can things go so wrong? How can people be so wrong?
    â€œYou have to talk to me, Gigi. If people don’t talk to each other, then they get everything wrong. You have got everything wrong.”
    She is breathing a little faster, but still there are no words coming. I can feel her heartbeat, through her back, into my chest. That makes my own heart kick in triple-time with I don’t know what of a feeling, but it is a massive feeling. It’s a lot of feelings, and they are all massive, and they are fighting one another and they are killing me.
    â€œYou hurt me, you know, Gigi. That’s right. You’re the one who punched me and scratched me, and I would never, ever even think of doing anything like that to you. You don’t have to be afraid of me, because I have never hurt you and I would never hurt you, and I’m not even keeping you here so that whole window thing was just crazy.”
    I feel a slight shifting of her position in my arms, and I have to respond by squeezing her just a little bit tighter. I don’t want to restrict her. But she has to understand. She has to hear me out and talk to me and work this out before we can go anywhere, and I know we can do it. And, I have to say, the harder I squeeze Gigi Boudakian, feel her bones and smell her skin, the more helplessly I love her and the less I want to let her go.
    â€œPlease speak to me,” I whisper into her ear, squeezing her. “Please speak to me.”
    But all she does is make a whimpering noise.

COMMENCEMENT
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    T he graduation ceremony was exactly as boring and stiff as it was supposed to be. I was on the brink of nodding off at almost every moment. Once, emerging from a pleasant mini nap, I almost walked out, flashing back, thinking I was sitting sweating out a graduation from the past, a graduation I didn’t actually have to be at, so why bother. I did that at Mary’s sweaty boring graduation, and again at Fran’s sweaty boring graduation. I walked out. But I came back, too. I was clapping for them at the end, just as hard as anybody there was clapping for theirs.
    Fran and Mary weren’t walking out on mine, though, and they weren’t clapping that I could hear. They’d made good on their threat not to come.
    I was there for them. Just as I always had been and always would be there for them. Their absence was inexcusable.
    But I had Ray. Like they had Ray. Like my mother had Ray and still has him, dead as she is, like everybody has Ray. That’s loyalty right there. That’s the way your people should be, through thick and thin, if life is going to mean anything at all.
    â€œThanks, Dad,” I said as we headed to the car after the ceremony.
    He was crying a little bit. We tended to talk less, when Ray was crying. We tended, actually, to talk about not much more than his crying.
    â€œCould you stop that, now?”
    â€œLeave me