The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan Page A

working down on Main Street at Blender-Benders for the summer and they started walking home together. Anyway, according to Josh, as Alex started changing, Beth stopped liking him so much and stopped hanging out with him. Later, when the school year got started, I saw my chance and I asked Beth if she’d go out with me sometime and she said yes.
    This is all stuff I can remember. Stuff that happened before this weird yearlong darkness came over my brain.
    I also remember what happened the night Alex was murdered. I was in the mall parking lot outside my karate studio after a lesson. I was just tossing my bag into the back of my car—my mom’s car, really, but I was driving it. Alex and a couple of his not-so-nice friends came up to me. I guess Alex had heard about me asking Beth out. Even though he wasn’t seeing Beth anymore, he was pretty angry. At first, it almost looked like he and his pals were going to start a fight with me. But Alex had second thoughts and he kept things cool.
    Instead, he got into the car with me. We took a drive together. It was the first time we’d talked in a long while. Alex was about as upset as I’d ever seen him. He told me how it was at his house since his father left and about his mother crying and all that other stuff.
    I didn’t know what to say. I mean, my family had its problems like everybody, but this sounded really tough, tougher than anything I’d been through. I just tried to listen to him and be encouraging. I tried to get him to keep strong and not give up on things.
    I had a card I used to carry with me in my wallet. An index card Sensei Mike had given to me. He’d written something on it, something a former prime minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, had said when his country was in danger during World War II:
    “Never give in; never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty; never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force: never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
    I tried to get that idea across to Alex. It was easy for me to say, I know, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. You have to keep going. I’ve learned that for a fact now. No matter how bad it gets, you have to keep looking for a way through.
    But Alex didn’t want to hear that. As hard as I tried to be helpful, our conversation turned into an argument, a big one. I’d stopped the car near the Oak Street park at that point. We were still sitting inside, still talking, and the conversation was getting very intense. Alex started saying all this stuff about how everything people told you was a lie and how you couldn’t believe in anything and everything had to be torn down and started again. It was crazy stuff as far as I could see, but he said he had all these new friends who agreed with him and he trusted them.
    Finally, he got really angry. He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about or what he was going through. He got out of the car and I got out after him. He was really yelling at me—so loudly that a woman who was passing by walking her dogs stopped to look at us.
    Then Alex ran away. I tried to stop him, but he ran off into the park. That was it. That was all that happened that I saw.
    But there was more in this newspaper—this newspaper story I was holding up in the church moonlight. I had to strain to make out the words, but I could read it. According to this, Alex never made it out of the park alive.
    There were a couple of kids in the park—that’s what the paper said. Their names were Bobby Hernandez and Steve Hassel. They were just a couple of middle-school kids who had gone into the park to smoke and drink beer where no one could see them. They told the newspaper that they heard Alex and me arguing with each other on the street. A few seconds later, they said, they saw Alex come running into the park. He paused under one of the park streetlamps. That’s when they saw his