Ask Him Why by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page A

locker with backup. Three of the girls in her group had materialized out of thin air to stand behind her and frown. These were the girls who had always treated me like I was nothing, after making it clear that I would never be welcome to join them, not anytime in this life or anywhere on this planet. So my sense of shame was on full alert before Stacey even opened her mouth.
    There were many things she could have said that would have rolled right off me, and I was prepared for all of them. Any insult or negative judgment would have been tolerable or at least survivable, but I was not prepared to be told that she knew something I didn’t.
    “Your brother is where he belongs .” She leaned forward and spat out the words near my ear like food she found inedible and refused to swallow.
    “My brother is . . . where? How do you even know where he is?”
    She laughed, which was the other girls’ cue to laugh, and they walked away, enjoying that nice laugh at my bruised and broken family’s expense.
    I ran—literally ran—down to the principal’s office. I rarely showed up there voluntarily, but it was the only place in school where I figured I could demand information.
    “I need to know where my brother is,” I panted, all breathless and scared, to the woman who worked behind the counter doing attendance.
    “Your brother? He’s home. He got suspended.”
    “No, not that brother. My other brother.” I was still oxygen-depleted, so much so that I could barely be understood.
    “Your brother Joseph,” I heard another woman’s voice say.
    I looked over to see the principal standing in her office doorway.
    “Somebody just said to me, ‘Your brother is where he belongs,’” I told the principal. “But how would she know where he is? I don’t even know where he is, and he’s my brother. Was there something in the paper this morning?”
    She nodded—gravely, I thought.
    “Do you have a paper?” I asked her.
    “No. But I read it.”
    “Where is he? Please tell me right now.”
    “The military is holding him in confinement. Because he’s a flight risk.”
    I stood a moment, catching up on my breathing. Then I realized that fear had been the only thing holding me up, and I was now in danger of collapsing. I could feel the core of me, normally rigid, go floppy and unsupported.
    I reached out for the nearest hard wooden bench, leaned wildly in its direction, and landed on it with a clunk. A moment later, the principal was sitting next to me, which was too bad, because I really wanted everybody to stay far away.
    “What were you thinking that had you so scared?” she asked me.
    Oddly, it was a question I hadn’t even considered, but when she asked, I found the answer was right there at my disposal, and not even very far under the surface at that.
    “I figured everybody thinks he deserves to be in his grave,” I said.
    “Not everybody thinks that,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder.
    My shoulder instinctively retreated.
    “I want to go home,” I said. “Can I go home?”
    A pause, during which my life was in someone else’s hands entirely, which more or less sums up the experience of being under eighteen.
    “Yes,” she said, “you may go home. I’ll write up the absence so it makes sense.”

    When I walked out of the office I felt my phone buzz once, so I pulled it out of my pocket and looked. It was a voice mail, and I could tell by the number that it was from Sean. It was also the second message from him in just the last few minutes. I guess I’d been too busy to feel the buzz of the first.
    Before I could even listen to it, my phone went off again, but this time in that pattern it buzzes when someone is calling. I looked up to see Sean at the end of the hall, his cell phone to his ear, his back to me.
    I waved, but he didn’t see me.
    He wasn’t the most handsome guy in school, Sean, but the more I looked at him, the more I liked looking. His skin wasn’t perfect, to put it mildly, but