Ask Him Why by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page B

school’s out or not. And they keep you till they’re done with you.”
    “Oh,” he said. And looked around my room some more. “So what’s the thing about that guy?”
    “What guy?”
    “That guy who they say was like another father to him.”
    “I didn’t read anything about a guy who was like another father to him.”
    “Oh,” he said again.
    I decided to fight against this new development—maybe any new developments. If there was one thing we had too much of already in our new world, it was developments.
    “You must’ve made a mistake,” I said. “If Joseph had some guy who was like another father to him, don’t you think we’d know it?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, which I thought was a bad answer. “Anyway, I’m not wrong. They said his name, but I don’t remember it now. But it’s Scottish. It was a first name most men don’t have. American men, I mean. At least, the ones I know about.”
    “I read everything I could find,” I said, which was not entirely true. I had read the news portion of the thing, as much as I’d had time to read before Aubrey came knocking. “And I didn’t see anything about a guy like that.”
    “It’s not in the news stories,” he said. “Maybe it will be. You know, later. After they go talk to him. Right now it’s just something people are saying on the blogs.”
    “I don’t believe you,” I said. Which was not only a slightly mean thing to say, it was pathetic on my part. It was obvious he was not making any of this up, and I couldn’t think of any reason why he would have wanted to. A more honest statement might have gone something like “I desperately want not to believe you.” Or “If I believe you, this whole thing will cross the line into too much for me to hold up,” because, believe me, my toes were right on that line as it was.
    He got up and shuffled to my door, as if he barely had the energy to lift his feet off the carpet. His shoulders looked rounded in a way I wasn’t used to seeing.
    “Aubrey,” I said, and he stopped. I didn’t know what else I wanted to say, I just knew that I wanted to say something that would be kinder than I’d already been.
    But then I got stuck on what that would be.
    “Don’t read the comments,” I said.
    He actually smiled, but it was a tragic-looking thing. “Too late,” he said, and then he quietly let himself out.

    I called Sean’s cell phone seven times and left messages each time, but he didn’t call me back. It was something that felt wrong, even as I was doing it, because I didn’t really know Sean all that well. We had a date for Friday night, but it was going to be our first. So he wasn’t exactly my boyfriend—more like a boyfriend-to-be. But in that moment, I desperately needed a connection to someone, so I tried to speed up our process. That was the part I knew felt wrong, but it was less of a want and more of a need, and I felt utterly helpless and just along for the ride.
    I’d really never had an honest-to-goodness boyfriend. I’d had a few brushes with boys, but nothing that carried that genuine sense of connection. There’d been that boy, Jacob, who was the older brother of one of Aubrey’s friends. It was clear that he’d liked me, but he was so shy—pathologically shy—and so we never even held hands. And there had been two boys who wanted to go very far with me very fast, but I didn’t trust them and I wasn’t ready, so they moved on in short order. There was not a boy in that pack that I could have talked to about all this, even if he hadn’t been long gone.
    I started to think our date was off. That we were off. Maybe he’d read some of the things I’d read, or heard about them from somebody who did, and maybe that was just that. Who would want to walk into a firestorm like this if they didn’t have to?
    I spent a big part of the day trying to decide what I would do if the tables were turned. It was scary to think about, but I decided I’d be strong and