Ask Him Why by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page B

he had intense gray eyes and shaggy hair that always looked like he’d meant every individual hair to be exactly in that wild and spontaneous place.
    He was already starting to feel like someone I knew.
    I walked up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, and he jumped.
    “You calling me?” I asked him.
    “Oh. Yeah, I was.”
    “I’m right here. Hang up.”
    He seemed off balance, and his face was a little too flushed, so I should have known I was in trouble.
    “I left you two messages,” he said.
    “I know.”
    “Have you listened to them?”
    “Not yet.”
    “So . . . listen to them.”
    “Sean . . .”
    “What?”
    “I’m standing right in front of you. Just tell me.”
    “Oh. Just tell you. Right.” But for an awkward moment, he didn’t. Then he did, and that was awkward, too. “I have to cancel Friday.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” A lot was going on in me, but none of it was good, so I worked hard to keep it inside where it belonged. “Well. Another time, then.”
    “Um . . . ,” he said. And then he trailed off, and I knew. I knew everything. A brick wall didn’t have to fall on me.
    “You said you wouldn’t do this.” I was already fighting back tears. They were old tears, I realized as I fought them. They’d been trying to get out for days. “You said I’m not my brother and you wouldn’t drop me just because everybody’s mad at him.”
    “I wouldn’t ,” he said. The bell rang, but we just stood there, ignoring it, alone in the hall together. Except it didn’t feel very together all of a sudden—it felt more like we were on two opposite sides of a dark and remote planet. “I swear, I wouldn’t. It isn’t me. It’s . . . They found out. That we’re friends. I mean . . . I don’t know if we’re friends, or . . . I don’t know yet what we are, but they found out.”
    “They?”
    “You know.”
    “Sean. If I knew, I wouldn’t be standing here with this stupid look on my face.”
    “The . . . you know . . . reporters.”
    A long silence while I breathed that in.
    “How did they find out?”
    “I have no idea. But they’re on me now wherever I go. They want to know all about your family. Anything I know. I keep telling them I don’t know anything. But then they started coming around the house and trying to get to me through my parents. And now my mom says I can’t ever see you or talk to you again. I’m really sorry, Ruth.”
    He stood there for a few seconds, probably waiting for me to say something. But I had no idea what to say.
    “I’m really sorry,” he said again, over his shoulder as he walked away.
    I erased the messages on my phone and then walked home, crying.

    I got microphones stuck in my face on the last block, our block, because my mother wasn’t there to defend me, but I just ignored them and kept walking, and kept crying.
    I heard a lot of questions, but I couldn’t really separate out the voices and I didn’t try. I just noticed the word “brother” seemed to appear in every sentence.
    Of course it occurred to me that I might end up on the evening news, crying like a baby, but there wasn’t much I could do to change that, and besides, by that time I really couldn’t find a place in me that cared.
    You can only save face for just so long before you wake up and realize you have nothing left worth saving.

    My father was home.
    Really, I just can’t tell you how out of the ordinary that is. I had to figure if it’s daylight, and my father is home, this must be The Twilight Zone . It wasn’t even lunchtime yet, and there he was, sitting on the couch drinking a large glass of something brown and quite obviously alcoholic, his face an impenetrable mask of nothingness.
    He looked up at me as though I was no one he’d ever met.
    “What are you doing home?” he asked. He wasn’t even looking at me anymore when he asked.
    “I was just about to ask you the same question.”
    I waited, but he never said more.
    I looked