Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down by Anne Valente Read Free Book Online

hands gripping his sleeve, a mother who had come in her daughter’s stead while Sarah’s father stayed home. Zola watched Eric Greeley at the periphery, how he gazed at the white signs and how in profile his eyes glistened wet. She watched him turn away alone, heading down the dark sidewalk until he disappeared.
    Candles: extinguished and kept, tucked away into purses and backpacks. Cheeks kissed. Chests crossed. Carnations and lilies and small teddy bears left beside still-glowing tea lights. Parents holding one another. Parents holding their teenagers. Parents gathering their children all around them, constellations of families moving down the sidewalk toward the haven of their cars.
    In the backseat on the way home, Nick leaned his forehead against the glass of the car window and watched the ink-spill of the Midwestern sky. He thought of Sarah at home, surely curled up in the twin bed where she’d tried so many times to make him give in at last, a roll of condoms tucked into her bedside drawer. He thought of Kelly Washington, his first crush. How he’d never once spoken to her despite admiring her from afar. How he thought her face was beautiful in kindergarten beneath a shock of dark hair and small barrettes and how he knew she’d joined the cheerleading squad at Lewis and Clark and how her older brother had been at the vigil alongside a woman who must have been Kelly’s mother. How both of them looked too stunned to weep.
    In the passenger seat of her father’s Ford Taurus, Christina reclined the chair and leaned her forearm across her eyes, her brother in the backseat. Her father stayed quiet and in the silence she thought of Elise Nguyen, her mother and father and sister at the vigil, how they’d come so often to swim meets and cheered from the sidelines, how they were surely driving home to the echoed walls of an empty house. She thought of Mr. Bennington, how she’d been only fourteen when he taught her about echolocation, how bats and dolphins find one another across spans of dark too wide to imagine and howthis had comforted her somehow, her parents just divorced, making one’s way home without light. How Mr. Bennington would not, his name etched into the starkness of a white sign, his partner alone at the vigil and straining to speak. How Mr. Bennington had disappeared from the earth only yards away from where she’d crouched in French class immobile beneath a desk, as useless to him sputtering on the library floor down the hall as she was to Ryan hidden in the stalls of the boys’ locker room.
    Zola moved down the street on foot with her mother, their house close enough to walk. Zola’s mother ran her hand down Zola’s back, a comforting weight, and pointed her other hand to the sky, the jagged line of Cassiopeia. Her mother knew the stars, a backyard astronomer, her telescope standing firmly in the grass every autumn until the first snowfall of the year. Her mother whispered Andromeda and Cepheus, two stars that flanked the constellation above them. She said Cassiopeia would be brightest in November. Zola watched the stars above her so she would not have to look at Alisha Trenway’s house as they passed it on the way back to their own, a house of darkened windows and drawn shades that had not been raised since Wednesday.
    Matt rode in the front seat of his parents’ Chevy Impala, buckled on the upholstered bench between them though the backseat was empty and full of room. His mother drove and his father sat with his arm tucked around him, a relief Matt leaned into as he watched the October landscape pass through the panorama of the windshield. He tried to latch his brain on to the view but saw the athletic calves of Jacob Jensen instead. Calves that held no sexual charge, no allure but only a symbol of lack. Of energy, of force, what could no longer move them. Matt closed his eyes to erase them and imagined Tyler instead. Nights that had been theirs