Free Resurrection Bay by Neal Shusterman Page A

regret. Like the way he blames himself for Mom dying, even though he wasn’t even in the room when Sammy was born. It’s as if he thinks that if he feels bad enough about it, he’ll wake up one day and it won’t be true.
    Me, I’m a realist. Things are the way they are. I move forward, kind of like a glacier—slowly and with no regrets, because I know what it takes to be happy.
    The next morning the picture of the newlydeads that the old lady took was all over the papers—and not just the local ones—because it caught the smiling couple and the falling piece of ice just a few feet over their heads. It was one more thing for Dad to make himself miserable over.
    It was the third week of September. With fall setting in, more and more people were closing shop for the winter, escaping to wherever it was summer folk lived for the rest of the year. It wasn’t exactly a ghost town here, but for the first few weeks it always felt like one until we got used to it again.
    I decided to go up to Exit Glacier after school the next day—not just because of the tragedy, but because it had always been my favorite place. I could go there alone and not feel alone. I could go there with friends and somehow have abetter time just because I was there. I’d read my favorite books there in the glacier’s shadow and had written my best poems. I was never dumb enough to get too close to its face.
    Going there on that day, though . . . it was more than just wanting to be in the company of the glacier. Maybe I was having some kind of intuition or even a premonition—not the kind you see, but the kind you feel in your gut when you know something big is about to happen.
    I went as far as last year’s moraine—the mound of earth that marks how far the glacier pushed last winter before the summer sun melted it back. It was a good fifty yards from the face of the glacier. There were other people around, too—lookie-loos watching as the workmen hacked at the ice with jackhammers and a bulldozer hauled ice away—all behind a police line that had gone up one day too late. They were trying to find the dead couple, but there was a lot of ice left to move.
    I was content to keep my distance. I closed my eyes, held out my arms, and felt the glacier breathe.
    Glaciers do breathe. It’s a scientific fact. Cold air is heavier than hot air, and so, depending on where you’re standing, you can feel the cold air breathing off the glacier, or the warm air rushing in. I always thought it was more than that, though. A glacier’s breath is not a soulless thing. It’s vital and fresh. It’s the reason why tourists can’t capture the truth of it on film. Because it’s not what you see; it’s what you feel when youstand in front of a wall of ice.
    As I stood there, feeling the breath of the glacier flow around my upturned palms, I finally realized the reason I had come. I had come to ask a question.
    Why?
    Why did you take those people?
    What had they ever done to you?
    And I didn’t just mean this couple, but all the people who had lost their lives to Exit Glacier over the years. Ice climbers who tried to scale it and fell. People who slipped into a crevasse and were lost. And the many who, like this sad couple, became victims of falling ice.
    Why?
    And then I heard a voice behind me.
    “You look like an idiot!”
    I put my arms down and turned around. I knew that voice better than anyone’s in town. It was Rav Carnegie, all spiky black hair and smirks. I hadn’t spoken to him yet this school year, since we were giving each other a mutual cold shoulder.
    “At least I have to work at it,” I told him. “But you look like an idiot without even trying.”
    He laughed at that and then climbed to the top of the moraine with me. “Have they found the bodies?” Rav asked.
    “They wouldn’t still be digging if they’d found them.”
    Rav is what you might call my off-season boyfriend. During the summer, we hate each other, mostly because he’s