Andy watched his eyes as he fell.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
When Andy was in the ninth grade, she’d had a crush on a boy named Cletus Laraby, who went by Cleet, but in an ironic way. He had floppy brown hair and he knew how to play the guitar and he was the smartest guy in their chemistry class, so Andy tried to learn how to play the guitar and pretended to be interested in chemistry, too.
This was how she ended up entering the school’s science fair: Cleet signed up, so Andy did, too.
She had never spoken a word to him in her life.
No one questioned the wisdom of giving a drama club kid who barely passed earth sciences access to ammonium nitrate and ignition switches, but in retrospect, Dr. Finney was probably so pleased Andy was interested in something other than mime arts that she had looked the other way.
Andy’s father, too, was elated by the news. Gordon took Andy to the library where they checked out books on engineering and rocket design. He filled out a form for a loyalty card from the local hobby shop. Over the dinner table, he would read aloud from pamphlets from the American Association for Rocketry.
Whenever Andy was staying at her dad’s house, Gordon worked in the garage with his sanding blocks, shaping the fins and nose cone shoulders, while Andy sat at his workbench and sketched out designs for the tube.
Andy knew that Cleet liked the Goo Goo Dolls because he had a sticker on his backpack, so she started out thinking the tube of the rocket would look like a steampunk telescope from the video for “Iris,” then she thought about putting wings on it because “Iris” was from the movie City of Angels, then she decided that she would put Nicolas Cage’s face on the side, in profile, because he was the angel in the movie, then she decided that she should paint Meg Ryan instead because this was for Cleet and he would probably think that Meg Ryan was a lot more interesting than Nicolas Cage.
A week before the fair, Andy had to turn in all of her notes and photographs to Dr. Finney to prove that she had actually done all of the work herself. She was laying out the dubious evidence on the teacher’s desk when Cleet Laraby walked in. Andy had to clasp together her hands to keep them from trembling when Cleet stopped to look at the photos.
“Meg Ryan,” Cleet said. “I dig it. Blow up the bitch, right?”
Andy felt a cold slice of air cut open her lips.
“My girlfriend loves that stupid movie. The one with the angels?” Cleet showed her the sticker on his backpack. “They wrote that shitty song for the soundtrack, man. That’s why I keep this here, to remind me never to sell out my art like those faggots.”
Andy didn’t move. She couldn’t speak.
Girlfriend. Stupid. Shitty. Man. Faggots.
Andy had left Dr. Finney’s classroom without her notes or her books or even her purse. She’d walked through the cafeteria, then out the exit door that was always propped open so the lunch ladies could smoke cigarettes behind the Dumpster.
Gordon lived two miles away from the school. It was June. In Georgia. On the coast. By the time she reached his house, Andy was badly sunburned and soaked in her own sweat and tears. She took the Meg Ryan rocket and the two Nicolas Cage test rockets and threw them in the outdoor trash can. Then she soaked them with lighter fluid. Then she threw a match into the can. Then she woke up on her back in Gordon’s driveway because a neighbor was squirting her down with the garden hose.
The whoosh of fire had singed off Andy’s eyebrows, eyelashes, bangs and nose hairs. The sound of the explosion was so intense that Andy’s ears had started to bleed. The neighbor started screaming in her face. His wife, a nurse, came over and was clearly trying to tell Andy something, but the only thing she could hear was a sharp tone, like when her chorus teacher blew a single note on her pitch pipe—
Eeeeeeeeeeee …
Andy heard The Sound, and nothing but The Sound, for four whole days.
Waking. Trying to sleep. Bathing. Walking to the kitchen. Sitting in front of the television. Reading notes her mother and father furiously scratched out on a dry erase board.
We don’t know what’s wrong.
Probably temporary.
Don’t cry.
Eeeeeeeeeeee …
That had been almost twenty years ago. Andy hadn’t thought much about the explosion until now, and that was only because The Sound was back. When it returned, or when she became aware of the return, she was standing in the diner by her mother, who was seated in a chair. There were three dead people on the floor. On the ground. The murderer, his black shirt even blacker. Shelly Barnard, her red shirt even redder. Betsy Barnard, the bottom part of her face hanging by strands of muscle and sinew.
Andy had looked up from the bodies. People were standing outside the restaurant. Mall shoppers with Abercrombie and Juicy bags and Starbucks coffees and Icees. Some of them had been crying. Some of them had been taking pictures.
Andy had felt pressure on her arm. Laura was struggling to turn the chair away from the gawkers. Every movement had a stuttering motion to Andy’s eye, like she was watching a stop-action movie. Laura’s hand shook as she tried to wrap a tablecloth around her bleeding leg. The white thing sticking out was not a bone but a shard of broken china. Laura was right-handed, but the knife jutting from her left hand made wrapping her leg impossible. She was talking to Andy, likely asking for help, but all Andy could hear was The Sound.
“Andy,” Laura had said.
Eeeeeeeeeeee …
“Andrea.”
Andy stared at her mother’s mouth, wondering if she was hearing the word or reading the word on her lips—so familiar that her brain processed it as heard rather than seen.
“Andy,” Laura repeated. “Help me.”
That had come through, a muffled request like her mother was speaking through a long tube.
“Andy,” Laura had grabbed both of Andy’s hands in her own. Her mother was bent over in the chair, obviously in pain. Andy had knelt down. She’d started knotting the tablecloth.
Tie it tight—
That’s what Andy would have said to a panicked caller on the dispatch line: Don’t worry about hurting her. Tie the cloth as tight as you can to stop the bleeding.
It was different when your hands were the ones tying the cloth. Different when the pain you saw was registered on your own mother’s face.
“Andy.” Laura had waited for her to look up.
Andy’s eyes had trouble focusing. She wanted to pay attention. She needed to pay attention.
Her mother had grabbed Andy by the chin, given her a hard shake to knock her out of her stupor.
She had said, “Don’t talk to the police. Don’t sign a statement. Tell them you can’t remember anything.”
What?
“Promise me,” Laura had insisted. “Don’t talk to the police.”
Four hours later, Andy still hadn’t talked to the police, but that was more because the police had not talked to her. Not at the diner, not in the ambulance and not now.
Andy was waiting outside the closed doors to the surgical suite while the doctors operated on Laura. She was slumped in a hard plastic chair. She had refused to lie down, refused to take the nurse up on the offer of a bed, because nothing