Page 78 of Too Late

I hold my breath. I’ve never seen a dead body before and I really don’t want to see one now, but I know I have to make sure it’s my dad and not the men. I tiptoe into the living room and I’m so scared, it feels like my heart is beating in my neck.

When I reach his chair, I take a deep breath and then step around it to look at him. I’m a little surprised to see that dead people don’t really look all that different from the people who are still alive.

I thought he’d have blood all over him, or be a different color—like a ghost. But he still looks the same.

I lift my finger to touch his cheek. I heard dead people are colder than people who are alive, so I press the tip of my finger into his cheek to see what his skin feels like.

His hand goes around my wrist and he squeezes it. His eyes pop open and it scares me so bad, I scream.

My dad’s eyes are real mean when he looks down at my clothes. “Where the hell have you been, boy? You’re filthy!”

I thought he was dead.

He’s not dead.

“Under the house where you told me to go yesterday. You said you’d come get me.”

He squeezes my wrist real tight and he leans forward and says, “Don’t ever fucking wake me up from a nap again, you little bastard! Now go get in the shower, you smell like a goddamn sewer!”

He pushes me away from him. I step back, still confused how he’s alive.I thought the men came. I thought they killed him.

He squeezes the back of my neck and shoves me until I stumble out of the living room. He said he would come get me, but I don’t think he even remembered I was under the house.

I can feel my eyes start to get warm, so I run out of the living room. I can’t cry in front of my dad or he’ll get really mad.

I walk down the hallway toward the bathroom, but really all I want to do is eat something. My stomach has never been this hungry before. When I pass the bedroom where my mom stays most of the day, her door is open. She’s asleep in her bed, so I walk inside her bedroom to ask her if I can have something to eat. I shake her and try to wake her up, but she just groans and rolls over. “Let me sleep, Asa,” she says.

I don’t like how much she sleeps. She says she can’t sleep very well on her own, so she takes lots of pills that help her sleep better. She says the white ones are for the nighttime, but she takes them when the sun is up sometimes. I’ve seen her do it.

She has some yellow ones, but she says those are herspecialpills. She says she saves those for the days when she wants to go somewhere else in her mind.

I look at her bottle of pills and I wonder if she would notice if I stole one of the yellow ones. Because I want to go somewhere else in my mind. I don’t want my mind to be inside this house anymore.

I pick up her bottle of yellow pills and I try and try, but I can’t get them open. I’m not very good at reading because I’m only in the first grade, but I finally figure out that the lid says I have to push down and then twist it open.

When I do that, it opens this time. I look at my mom, but she’s still facing the other way. I hurry up and take one of her yellow pills and I put it in my mouth and chew it. My face crinkles up because it’s the grossest thing I’ve ever eaten. It’s real bitter and makes my mouth dry. I take a drink of my mom’s water so I can wash it down.

I hope she’s right. I hope this pill takes me somewhere else in my mind, because I’m getting really tired of being in this family.

I put the lid back on the bottle and I sneak out of my mom’s room. By the time I get to the bathroom to take a shower, my legs already feel like they aren’t mine again.

So do my arms. My arms feel like they’re floating in the air.

I look in the mirror after I turn the water in the shower on, because it feels like my hair is growing. It doesn’t look longer, though. It looks the same.But I can feel it growing.

My toes start to tingle just like my legs. I feel like I’m about to fall down, so I hurry up and sit down in the bathtub. I forget to take my clothes off, but that’s okay because my clothes are really dirty. I think my clothes need the water, too.

I wonder how long I was under the house for. I probably missed a day of school. I don’t really like school that much, but I really wanted to go today so I could see what Brady’s mom packed him for lunch.

Brady sits next to me at the lunch table and he brings a lunchbox every day. One time his mom packed him a piece of coconut cake. He doesn’t like coconut cake, so he told me I could have it. It was so good. I went home and told my mom how good it was, but she still hasn’t bought me coconut cake.

Sometimes Brady’s mom writes notes and puts them inside his lunchbox. He reads them all to us and he laughs because he thinks they’re dumb. I never laugh, though. I don’t think the notes are dumb.

One time I saw one of the notes he threw in the trash and I picked it up. It said, “Dear Brady: I love you! Have a great day at school!”

I tore the top of the note off that had Brady’s name on it and I kept it. I pretended my mother wrote it for me and sometimes I would read it. But that was a long time ago and I lost the note recently. That’s why I wanted to go to school today, because if Brady had another note from his mom, I wanted to steal it and pretend it was for me again.

I wonder how it would feel to have someone say those words to me.

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