You lie in your bed, trying to fall asleep. It's late, so late that the fireworks have gone from constant to sporadic to nonexistent. You are tired; this is the most exhausted you have ever been, and you think this is the most exhausted you will ever be. You were planning to sleep at the hospital while you awaited news, but the news came sooner and heavier than you expected. The nurse in the Daisy Duck scrubs told you that you were loitering after two hours. Loitering. It had been a vocabulary word you learned in sixth grade, one you had difficulty spelling, but the definition had been easier. Loitering: sitting around without a purpose. You were without a purpose. Eight hours ago you had one. Will you ever find a new one? You guess, right now, your purpose is to sleep, to wake, to plan. To make calls and posts and arrangements. Your purpose is to step up. But it's now the fifth of July and you're only fourteen and your brother is dead and your sister is seven and your mother is gone and your father doesn't know you exist and your stepfather does not give a fuck about any of you.

He left you alone at the hospital after signing the papers because you wouldn't move and you're too big to carry anymore and he's not brave enough to hit you in a room full of witnesses. So he left you there in the vinyl chair that stuck to the skin of your thighs. When Daisy Duck kicked you out for loitering, you called your brother's best friend to pick you up. He thought he was picking the both of you up. He was wrong. He will never pick your brother up again, except for next Wednesday when he carries his casket. He cried when you climbed in the passenger seat. It was your first time sitting in the front of his car. That was your brother's seat. He cried again when he pulled up in front of your house. It was now your house to him, no longer your brother's.

You have yet to cry. You don't know if you want to. All you want to do is sleep. Crying would help you sleep, it always has. But the tears won't come and you know why. It's because your baby sister sleeps in the bunk below you, and if you sob she will ask why, and you haven't found the words to tell her that her brother is dead. That your brother is dead. So you quietly climb the ladder and walk out the door and down the length of the hall until you come to another door. His door. You open it without knocking, just the way he hates. Hated. Past tense. It will take getting used to, remembering that everything about your brother is now past tense. Except for the fact that he is dead. And always will be.


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