My breath lodged itself in my chest. Ty never said things like that. He was angry with Dad; that was how he dealt. He’d always maintained that he hated Dad, that he was glad Dad was gone, that he didn’t miss him.

“Please,” he said again.

And what about me? I thought. Did I want Dad to come home? Could we pretend that this past humiliating year had never happened, that he wasn’t a liar and a cheater and an all-around pathetic excuse for a human being, that everything hadn’t been turned upside down? Could we go back to the way things were before? Did I want to go back?

Dad cleared his throat again.

I waited for him to say, I can’t. Or I’m sorry, son. Or something about how life is hard, but that doesn’t mean we give up.

But he didn’t say anything.

And he didn’t stay. Even though the doctor had said that Ty needed to be under strict surveillance for the next 24 hours, Dad didn’t even get out of the car. He just looked at me and said, “Call me if you need anything,” and I kind of nodded, and my eyes burned with furious tears that I didn’t let fall, and I turned away and walked Ty up the steps into the house.

Later, when Ty was sleeping, I went from room to room gathering anything that might be dangerous. Razor blades. Pills, although we’d already established that this wasn’t an effective method of offing yourself. Rope. Then I unlocked the closet in the back of Dad’s office and stared at the line of 3 hunting rifles in their cases. I checked to make sure none of them was loaded, and then I went to the shelf and swept every single bullet into a box with the rest of the stuff. I sealed the box with duct tape, labeled it ROMANCE NOVELS, and hid it in the back corner of my closet under a pile of half-naked Barbie dolls I still had lying around. After that was done I went to check on Ty, listened to him breathe, and tried to convince myself that he was going to be all right. Then I tiptoed back upstairs and sat at the kitchen table and finally allowed myself to cry.

I could cry back then.

I loved Ty. I loved him and I had almost lost him. So I cried. Tears were still a part of my anatomy.

They called him lucky, that time. His body was able to metabolize the Advil. His liver was damaged, but would probably heal. Lucky, they kept saying at the hospital as they took his statement and ran the tests on him and acted in general like the whole thing was a stunt, like he’d tried some harebrained move on his bicycle. You’re so lucky. Lucky, lucky you.

Lucky was the last word my brother would pick to describe himself. But in the end he nodded and told them they were right. So they would let him go.

The Advil thing was a “cry for help,” they said, so they required him to see a therapist, who got my brother started on antidepressants and tried to get him to talk about his “pain” every week for the next year or so, at 60 bucks a pop, which our insurance didn’t cover but Mom convinced my dad to pay. And for 2 whole years, nothing much happened. Mom became a licensed nurse. Dad married the cliché. I got an 800 on the math section of the SATs and everybody began talking about what college I would go to. Ty joined the basketball team. He started lifting weights, and his body filled out. His arms grew strong and muscled. He wore a letterman’s jacket when he swaggered through the halls at school. Girls liked him. People in general liked him. He was popular in a way that I never could have dreamed of being. And it was easy to forget that he’d ever been sad enough to down a bottle of pills.

We only talked about it once, after that day at the hospital. It was about 2 weeks later, and we were at Denny’s, waiting for Dad to show up for breakfast. Dad was late. I was looking at Ty, really looking at him, and his eyes seemed glazed over, like he was staring out at his life through a pane of glass.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

He glanced at me, startled. “I’m hungry. I wish Dad would get here already.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “Are you okay?”

His ears went red. “Oh, that. I told you, that was stupid. I’m fine. Really. I won’t do that again.”

“Okay. But I want you to promise me, if you ever feel like that again, like you want to—”

“I won’t—” he said.

“But if you do, you have to tell me. Call me, text me, wake me up at three a.m., I don’t care. I want to know about it. I’m here for you.”

He didn’t meet my eyes, but he nodded. “All right.”

“Promise,” I said.

“I promise.”

“Good,” I said, but I worried that he was just telling me what he knew I wanted to hear.

In the end, I shouldn’t have concerned myself with whether he’d keep his promise.

I should have thought about whether I’d keep mine.

6.

ASHLEY DAVENPORT, according to the yearbook, is a cheerleader. She’s a sophomore. She has long blond hair, or at least I think she does—it’s hard to tell from the 1-by-1.5-inch black-and-white photo on page 173.

She could be the one.

There are 1,879 students at my high school, and nineteen of them are named Ashley: about 1 percent. Over the past two days I’ve already checked off Ashley Adams, who’s practically married to her boyfriend (so clearly not the droid I’m looking for), Ashley Chapple, who’s a senior and I know her and no way she dated Ty, and Ashley Chavez, whose raven’s-wing-black hair doesn’t match my memory of the girl Ty took to homecoming.

So now I’m to the Ds, and Ashley Davenport. Blond. Sophomore. Cheerleader.