The Beginning of After

Something in me was filling with air.
    “You’re an orphan too,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. This made David stand up, his confusion giving way to defensiveness.
    “No, my dad is still alive. He’ll be fine.”
    “If that’s what you want to believe. Personally, I think he’s going to be a veg forever.”
    I blamed that one on the alcohol, making me brave for one or two seconds at a time.
    “Shut up,” he snapped.
    So I’d struck a nerve.
    “Which is what he deserves,” I said, “considering he killed four people.”
    David paused, his hand squeezing the plastic bottle so tight I heard it pop a bit. “My dad wasn’t drunk.”
    “He didn’t have to be drunk,” I said. “He just had to be careless. Either way, he’s a murderer.”
    David wanted to hit me. I could tell. He wanted to hit me so bad that his heels came up out of his shoes. I had put my beer cup on the ground, and now he kicked it into the pool, where it landed without making noise.
    Even though he was standing and I was sitting, I could feel things shift. I had found a box of ammunition somewhere, tucked into the back of my mind. What else was in it?
    “What about Masher?” I asked, as if we were a married couple breaking up, figuring out custody of our joint life.
    “What about him?”
    “I don’t have to take care of him. I can give him back to your grandparents.”
    David shook his head, looked away. “You can’t do that. They don’t want him.”
    “Then you want me to take care of him?”
    David’s face had caved in a bit, the shadows carving deeper across his cheeks and chin. He didn’t seem that different from Toby after one of our arguments, after I’d beaten him on every front. This was when Toby would have jumped on me for the wrestling portion of the program, but I was pretty sure David wasn’t about to do that.
    “Yes,” he said, and placed his kamikaze bottle carefully on the ground.
    “Yes, what?” That’s what this ammunition box was. Big-sister power. The only power I had in the world, at least when Toby was still in it.
    “Take care of my dog, please,” whispered David. He turned around and walked back toward the house, then around it in the direction of the driveway. I watched him cross paths with Joe, who looked at David, registered where he was coming from, and searched me out in the half-light. In seconds he was running over to me.
    “What was David Kaufman doing here?” asked Joe, breathless. “Did he talk to you?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What did he say?”
    I opened my mouth to recap it, to report it to Joe in order to make it all real, but instead a noise came out like a sob. Loud, a short barking burst.
    “Oh my God,” said Joe, and he scrambled onto the lounge chair with me, his hand on my back. “What happened? What’s the matter?”
    I turned my head to answer him and wow, his face was so much closer than I thought. There wasn’t enough room between us for words.
    So I kissed him. I had practiced on my pillow dozens of times, and I was so used to that pillow that I didn’t even expect Joe to kiss back. But he did, his lips warm and larger than I imagined they’d be. Hesitant at first, a little confused, but then confident and well-trained. He put his hand on the side of my head, his palm moist against my ear, his fingers crunching against hairspray. I stepped out of us for a second, in my head, to get a wide-angle shot of how it looked from a few feet away, wondering if it matched what I’d seen in movies and on TV.
    Joe pulled back after a little while, glancing around to see who might be watching.
    “Why are you stopping?” I asked, also looking around.
    Joe turned back to me and smiled. “I have no idea.” Now he put both hands on my face, one on either side, and drew me closer. His turn at kiss initiation was softer than mine, gentle, as if we had all the time in the world.
    Fooling around with Joe lasted minutes, but I couldn’t tell you how many. I had crawled into a place inside myself, hearing only my own thoughts and what Meg called “mixing tuna” noises. Do I open my eyes? What if I open them and his are open too? I should open my eyes.
    Happy, nervous, angry, excited. Neurons exploding in fireworks.
    I was laughing and then, I was crying. It started when I was still lip-locked with Joe, and it took him a few moments to pull away and see why my shoulders were heaving up and down.
    “Laurel?” he asked.
    I wanted to look up and smile, wipe away my