Cold Kiss

minute.
    We all just stood there, our heads bowed and hands folded, listening, waiting for it to be over. Nothing was right—instead of gray and rainy, the way it was supposed to be, the way it always is in movies, it was a bright, hot July day. The sun poured through the leaves of the giant maple beside the plot.
    But at Danny’s grave that day I thought the crowd of football players and the stoners from his art class were probably glad they had a legitimate reason for their sunglasses, even though everyone knew they would have worn them anyway. It was hard not to choke up when you heard Danny’s mom and little sister, Molly, sobbing, when you saw his older brother, Adam, choking back tears as their dad patted his back. None of us were supposed to die. Life was supposed to be what we were waiting for, not something already over.
    When someone’s cell went off a few feet behind us, my head went up so fast, I nearly lost my balance. My mother put a hand on my shoulder. I wanted to shrug it off, but I couldn’t—any minute that glass around me was going to shatter, and all that furious energy was going to explode out of me. I had to shut my eyes for a second, trying not to imagine the carefully manicured lawn around the pit of Danny’s grave going up in flames, or a sudden wind ripping through the cemetery, hurling the mourners against the headstones.
    I couldn’t let that happen, not to Danny’s parents, and Ryan, and Danny’s other real friends. Not even to Danny, although I knew that the boy I loved wasn’t really in that casket. Not the part that mattered, anyway.
    At home later, I went down to the basement. I figured I could do the least damage there—or maybe the most, without consequences anyway. Getting through the reception at Danny’s house had taken more self-control than I thought it would, even though I hadn’t managed to do much more than stand against the wall in the living room with a paper cup of punch in one hand, nodding at the people who came over to hug me.
    I didn’t even change my clothes before I ran down the basement steps, and I had fistfuls of my black shirt in each hand as I stared at the accumulated junk that we had let pile up over the years.
    I had no idea what I expected to do. What I wanted was to blow a hole in the sky, explode a star, let the burning embers scorch me and everything they touched.
    I jumped when my mother’s hand landed on my shoulder again, warm and firm. She rested one palm against my cheek and handed me a chipped dish from a pile on a shelf. “Go on,” she said. “It works just as well.”
    I stared at her, not understanding, every vein throbbing with the need to let all that energy out. But that wasn’t what she meant. She picked up another—a cracked bowl from a set of green-striped dishes we used when I was really little—and smashed it against the dull gray cement floor.
    I jumped again as the sound of it echoed inside me, and then I let the dish in my hand drop. It crashed among the broken shards of the bowl, pale blue pieces as sharp as the noise.
    “Harder,” Mom said, and handed me a mug without a handle. FIRST NATIONAL SAVINGS BANK was printed neatly around it in bright red letters. I hurled it at the bare spot on the wall beside the dryer, and it shattered so violently, pieces of it bounced over the floor to land between our feet.
    In fifteen minutes we managed to break every old piece of dishware down there, until the floor was a jagged carpet of smashed pottery, When there was nothing left to throw, I sank to my knees and started to cry, the kind of huge, gulping, embarrassing sobs that make you blotchy and shaky. Mom settled down beside me, pulling me into her body until my face was pressed against her shoulder, and I had to wonder if she’d thrown things when Dad left, if she’d felt this alone and helpless.
    I felt better afterward. Not right, not good, but not tied up in so many emotions I couldn’t untangle them all.
    There was a lesson there, I realized later. I didn’t learn it, though.
    “What are you thinking about?”
    It’s almost eleven, and Danny and I are lying on his bed, legs tangled together under an old blanket. I had to wait till Mom was asleep to sneak back to the loft tonight. I didn’t stay long the first time, after I let Danny smoothe all the rough edges from running into Gabriel. This time Mom was in bed, the little TV on her dresser flickering softly in the dark. Robin was snoring in her room, one