Ask Him Why by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page A

then I run out of ideas. But in this case, it felt inevitable, unavoidable. They were there, they already existed, and I couldn’t look away. I had to see what they said.
    I sat reading for a few minutes with my mouth open, each new well-aimed statement a knife stabbing into my already bleeding gut.
    One person was kind to my brother Joseph and suggested we wait and gather more information on what happened before rushing to judgment. One. The rest just piled on Joseph, and then, when the one nice person defended him, they all piled on that commenter.
    I’m not going to detail what they said. I want to pretend I no longer remember specifics, but some of the things I saw are burned in, seared into my brain like the chandelier lights burning a pattern into the corneas of Aubrey’s and my eyes. But I won’t repeat them word for word, because they were ugly, and I feel like I’d only be helping to keep them alive.
    I’ll just generally say that, according to their vitriol, Joseph had killed more than just two fellow soldiers. He had killed us all. He had emboldened the enemy, showing the weak underbelly of America, which wouldn’t be weak in the first place without the Josephs of America, thus signing all of our death warrants.
    More than a few said he was a traitor to his country and should be put to death for his crime.
    I’m sorry to say I’m not exaggerating.
    Some not only took the blame and threw it back on my brother, but even on his family—which, I realized in my well-knifed abdomen, was me. People were saying things about what kind of family we were— our family —people who had never met us, never laid eyes on us.
    All I could think was how I could correct them, every one of them. I felt like I had to fix everyone’s perceptions of us and argue back with everybody until they saw the light.
    I sat another minute, half aware that my mouth was still hanging open, wondering what I should write to set the record straight. It would have to be something like the one kind commenter had written. I’d have to say they didn’t know Joseph, so they didn’t really know what they were saying, and they had no right to judge a person they’d never met, especially so soon, when all the facts hadn’t even had time to come out.
    Then I went back and read the abuse that one person had taken for arguing against a rush to judgment.
    The decision as to whether I was brave enough to jump into that fray made my head spin, quite literally. It made me dizzy, and when the knock came on my bedroom door, even though it was a soft knock, it made me jump.
    “Who is it?”
    “It’s Aubrey,” Aubrey said, sounding unusually cowed. He was normally a confident little brat. “Can I come in?”
    “Um. I guess so.”
    He came in and closed the door behind him. Then he walked over and sat on the edge of my bed, but he didn’t speak, at least not at first. He just gazed around my room as though this was the first he’d ever seen of it. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week.
    “What?” I said, finally. I didn’t mean to sound harsh, but I might have anyway, accidentally.
    “Was Joseph ever in a mental hospital?”
    I wanted to say, So you’ve been reading them, too . I guess I could have, but I didn’t.
    “Not that I remember. I’ve been trying to think. It said he was twelve. Which means I would have been five. So, I don’t know. It’s pretty hard to remember what happened when you were five, you know? I do remember he was gone a lot. Like all summer, every summer, and I don’t really remember where they told us he was going, or even if they did. But he couldn’t have been spending every summer in a mental hospital.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because they just don’t work like that, Aubrey.” Of course I had no way to know how mental hospitals worked, but, being the teenager I was, I spoke with absolute authority. “They’re not summer camp. If you have to go, then they just send you. Right then. Whether