You Are Here, This Is Now by The Best Young Artists & Writers in America: readPUSH

Alex sat behind me in math.æ Sometimes IÍd lend him one of my pencils, and when I got it back, the eraser would be worn down to a nub, his nervous teeth marks scattering the wood with shallow dents.æ His fingernails were always grubby.æ It was startling to hear his voice, as he rarely spoke, and when he did it was always in short, unpunctuated sentences.æ He smelled like oranges
It must have been about a month or so after my brother got sick that Alex started giving me parts of his lunch.æ I never saw him in the cafeteria; I donÍt know where he went for that twenty-minute slice of time every day.æ But at the end of math heÍd shove a rumpled paper bag across my desk before scrambling out the door like he had somewhere important to go.æ Inside the bag would be the dessert his mother had packed him that morning:æ a Twinkie, a cupcake, sometimes a baggie full of gumdrops or jelly beans.æ IÍd walk home, my cheeks filled with sugar or frosting, crumpling the paper bag with his name written across it in slanted printing, throwing it at the big sycamore tree in the schoolyard as hard as I could.æ Walking and eating slowly, to make both last.
      The night before EddieÍs funeral it snowed.æ I fled from the house, shuffling between the sickly yellow circles the streetlights made on the ground.æ There was a terrible dark song in my head that I couldnÍt remember any of the words to.æ It leaned hard on my brain, and I wondered what would happen if I just exploded right there in front of Mrs. RobinsonÍs white-capped lawn gnomes, my whole body going up like fireworks for some unannounced holiday, the sparks sizzling against the snow as they fell.æ I thought about all the violent things I could do with so much snow:æ bombard cars with white missiles, destroy snowmen, bury the town with a huge white wave.
      That was when I felt the snowball smack against my neck and slither down the back of my coat.æ I whirled around, expecting someone amazing:æ God or the devil standing there in a snowsuit and mittens, grinning sardonically at the trick he had played on me.æ What would he do once I saw him?æ Would he lift me up and carry me away from all this dark, or would he meet my nose with a right hook, delivering me swiftly in to the arms of the snowbank?
      Alex stood there, shifting in his oversized rubber boots.æ It was too dark for me to read his face, but I could see well enough to hit my target.æ He didnÍt look surprised when I slammed him with a fistful of snow.æ He stepped back a little to keep his balance but lost it instead, sliding across the white ground until he landed in a sprawl across the sidewalk.æ His laughter broke over me like a thousand tiny bells, but instead of crystal they were made of spun sugar that shattered into a sparking deluge.
      When our fingernails were raw from scraping snow and our throats were hoarse from laughing, we started walking.æ The yellow lights of the plows flickered through the blackness like steady fireflies.æ We stomped through the snow in silence, our breath billowing in puffs ahead of us as if we were dragons or steam engines.æ Standing at my front door, watching AlexÍs back slowly blur into the blackness, I could see our side-by-side sets of footprints, clear and deep on the sidewalk, going on forever in the snow.
      That was all.
      Later that year, his dad got a job in Sacramento.æ I passed by the moving truck on my bike as it rumbled out of town.æ The driver wore a Phillies cap and a splash of stubble on his chin.æ I didnÍt see Alex.æ The truck whushed by, blowing up the first few dead leaves of autumn in its wake.æ They fluttered against the wheels of my bike like brittle butterflies before settling on the road.
In school in the fall, there were new kids who filled up all the empty seats in the classrooms.æ Autumn was longer than usual, and its warmth cut into winter, making for a soggy New YearÍs, with sidewalks still cluttered with the dead leaves that shuffled into the gutters and clogged the street drains.æ WinterÍs driving rains turned to springÍs mild deluges, and the crocuses crept out of the ground as if to say that nothing had ever changed.æ But that year in math, I crossed out all my mistakes instead of erasing them, and my pencils were still dotted with teeth marks.