Silent Alarm by Jennifer Banash

“Yeah?” I answered, rummaging through my backpack distractedly. There was a long pause, and I stopped digging and looked up at him, blinking in the morning light. I was tired, worried about my history project, anxious about being late, as usual. “Have a good day,” he said finally, pulling his keys from the ignition and shoving them in the pocket of his jacket, his face empty—)
    The minute the garage door opens with a rumble, the reporters run up to the car, tapping their silver microphones against the windows, cameras rolling. I look into the eye of the lens, hypnotized, until my mother steps on the gas, throwing a hand in front of my face to shield me.
    â€œGet down!” she yells. “Head down, Alys. Now.”
    I lean forward, place my head between my knees, trying to breathe normally, but there’s not enough air, not enough air in the whole world, it seems, to satisfy me, and I gulp it down greedily as if it might run out at any second.
    â€œMrs. Aronson, do you have a statement you’d like to make?”
    â€œAlys! What was Luke
really
like?”
    The tires squeal as my mother pulls out of the driveway. I can hear her gasping so hard it sounds as if she’s hiccupping. Tears flow out from beneath the glasses and down her cheeks. She’s not wearing any makeup, and her face looks vulnerable and exposed without it. I reach over and put my hand on hers, almost pulling away when I feel how cold she is, how stiff.
    (—don’t think about Miranda under the table, how her screams got louder and louder, then stopped altogether. The blood that seeped over the pages of fallen books that rained down, pages fluttering. Don’t think about Ms. Parsons splayed on the floor, a starfish pinned to a board, her mouth opening and closing—)
    Don’t think.
    I turn to look out the window, taking in our street, a place I have always loved, with its rows of even lawns, garden gnomes, Victorian houses with long porches set back from the road, tall oak trees lining the streets. White picket fences, the paint flaking in some places. The lilacs blooming in the spring, filling the night with their impossibly heady, purple scent, the synchronicity of countless sprinklers the unwritten soundtrack to our lives. I sink down into my jacket, wishing I could disappear inside it entirely.
    â€œHave you talked to anyone? What about Delilah?” My mother pulls off the sunglasses and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. As always, there is clay lodged under her short nails from her nightly work in her basement studio, pots springing from her hands like alchemy.
    Delilah and I have been best friends since we were in the fourth grade. Like Ben, she lives only a few streets away, and there has hardly been a day in the past ten years that I haven’t seen or talked to her at least twenty times. I don’t even have to close my eyes to conjure her image—I know it as well as my own. Waves of dark hair swarming around her face. Blue, almost violet, eyes that change color in the light—especially when she’s thinking about breaking some kind of rule, which is most of the time. Her small, compact body that barely fills out her dance leotard, muscles as tightly strung as the strings on my violin, her legs corded and strong, her feet flitting across the floor, more glide than walk, toes pointed out. Duck walk. I remember the time she tried to teach Luke to dance, the only time I’d ever seen him flustered, his face reddening as she pulled his arms around her waist, smiling up at him. Luke’s big feet tripping through the steps until they gave up, falling over in a heap, their laughter uncontrollable. That was two winters ago. Before my brother started spending all of his time in his room, away from us. Before he started speaking in monosyllables, then stopped talking altogether, his eyes growing flatter, deader as the months passed.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with