After You Vanished by E.A. Neeves EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: E.A. Neeves
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Siblings
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The Boy who Watched You Disappear
BEFORE I’D EVER SPOKEN TO HIM, I HATED TOBIAS SMITH. I HATED his skinny
tie with its cartoon swimmers angled all up and down the fabric. I hated the
way his hair always looked like one of his comic book characters, standing
unnaturally on end. But most of all, I hated who he was: the boy who’d
watched you disappear.
Six months after you melted into the night, our parents organized a
memorial at Bottomrock Park. Note that memorial wasn’t the word I would
have chosen. Memorials are for dead people. People with bodies to bury.
Ashes to sprinkle. But Mom and Dad felt they needed to do something, and
no one could think up a better word for the service that was held in your
memory.
People wore all sorts of stuff to your memorial-that-wasn’t-a-realmemorial. Some wore black, which bothered me, like they were giving up
on you. This was Mom. Some people dressed really nicely but in muted
colors, a kind of compromise between what you wear when someone’s died
and what you wear for the living. This was Dad: gray suit, navy shirt, no tie.
He looked stupidly young without one. And then there were the people who
wore their regular, everyday clothes. Jeans. Sweaters. This was me. In the
end we were all clad in our best winter puff wear, anyway, because it was
February in Massachusetts and the air had a bite.
Toby wore a navy suit and skinny tie, patterned with little people doing
all four strokes in repetition. I recognized him from your swim meets, but
even if I hadn’t, I think I would have known anyway. He was wandering
around, fidgety and reticent and alone. Mom asked me if I saw him, hissing
the pronoun like she was referring to the devil himself.
He circled the fringes for most of the service. I say service, but that’s
another word that doesn’t really fit. There was no religious officiant reading
passages from a holy text. There was no music or schedule of events. Just
people going up to a microphone and remembering you. I mostly stuck to
this picnic table behind the guardhouse, in the woods. Toward the end of the
event, Toby approached me. He said, “You look like her.”
No shit, Sherlock, I thought.“Can I sit?” He was already sitting anyway. “Hankie?” He whipped out
a handkerchief from somewhere inside his suit coat and waved it at me. I
wasn’t actually crying, but there were tears welling. I gave him my best
eyebrow sneer.
“Toby.” He offered his hand. The other still held the handkerchief, its
bright blue silk visible through the clutch of his fingers. “I swam with—”
“I know who you are.” I like to think there was a sharpness to my voice,
but if I’m honest, it was probably more of a quiver.
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