Free Guy Wire by Sarah Weeks

Adams nodded and took Buzz’s mom by the arm.
    “Come on, Barb, we’ll get a coffee downstairs and come right back. Let the boy have a minute with his friend.”
    My mother went with them. As soon as the door closed, I went over to the side of the bed.
    “Buzz, are you mad at me? ’Cause if you are, I wouldn’t blame you. This is all my fault.”
    Buzz coughed a little, but he didn’t open his eyes.
    “I’m sorry, Buzz. Sorry for what I did. Sorry for what I said. I don’t want you to die. You know that. I would never do anything to hurt you on purpose. I didn’t mean to hurt you. You’re my best friend, Buzzy. My best friend.”
    Buzz opened his eyes, moved his head back and forth on the pillow, and groaned a little. Then he held his hand out over the edge of the bed. I thought he wanted me to hold it, which would have meant he forgave me, but when I touched him, he jerked his hand away and started grabbing at the covers and groaning louder.
    I ran to the door and started shouting for help. Nurses came running, and then Buzz’s parents came back. My mother and I were sent back downstairs to wait.
    “Mom, I’m scared,” I said.
    “I know,” she said. “I am too.”
    Buzz’s dad came down later to tell us that they’d taken Buzz back into surgery. There were complications , he said. Complications,and they wouldn’t know anything until morning. We should go home, he said.
    “I don’t want to leave,” I told my mother.
    “We need to get some sleep, honeybunch. We can come back in the morning,” she said.
    But I refused. My mother called home and had Jerry bring over our toothbrushes and a change of clothes, and she stayed with me that night. She sat in a chair, and I lay with my head in her lap. She didn’t say anything about my tears soaking her skirt; she just patted my back while I cried. And she didn’t talk about positive energy anymore. I think we both knew it was too late for that now. “You can’t fight fate,” I had said to Buzz. “It’s a losing battle.” Whatever was going to happen to Buzz was going to happen, whether we wanted it to or not.

Chapter Sixteen
    O bviously Buzz’s nickname stuck. Not long after I thought it up, everybody was calling him Buzz. Even his own parents. Buzz and I spent a lot of time together, hanging out after school almost every day. I liked him more and more. He was always polite around adults, but around me he was funny and weird in just the kinds of ways I like. His twang got less noticeable over time, and he started calling his mother Mom like the rest of us. Every few weeks he’d call up my mom and make an appointment with her for another haircut. “Maintaining the buzz,” they called it.
    For a while George’s name came up fairly often, and although I never told Buzz, italways made me feel funny when it did. Buzz told me he felt bad about the way they’d acted toward me, but I didn’t care anymore; it seemed like ages ago. One day he told me George had written him a letter saying he had a new best friend. I didn’t tell him this either, but I was glad.
    When school let out, Buzz and I went to work on a project we’d been planning together for months. A fort. We collected all kinds of stuff. We got scrap plywood from under his porch and a bunch of carpet samples from my basement, hauling it all out to a spot we’d picked in the field behind our subdivision. My dad gave us a stack of old records, which we tacked up all over the place as decoration. It wasn’t much to look at, but we loved it.
    The day we nailed the roof on it, our parents agreed to let us sleep overnight out in the fort. We took sleeping bags, and my mom packed a bunch of food for us, including a big bag of snicker doodles. Mrs. Adamscontributed some juice and a package of rice cakes, which we entertained ourselves with by sailing them across the field.
    That night we lay in our fort, swatting mosquitoes and talking in the dark.
    “Did you ever think about that question