Beautiful by Amy Reed Page A

over.
    â€œI have the alpha dog,” I say.
    â€œWhat does that make you?” Sarah says. She’s swinging her feet like a little girl, drowning in the giant sweatshirt.
    I look at her very seriously. “His bitch,” I say. She laughs timidly and I laugh back. She laughs again and so do I, and then we are both laughing as hard as we can. We are laughing so hard we forget it’s cold, we forget the rain, we forget Alex and Ethan and everyone else. There are just our faces and everything out of focus behind them. There are just our voices drowning everything out.
    Sarah is trying to catch her breath. “That’s a double entendre,” I tell her. She screws up her face, which makes me laugh again.
    â€œWhy are you friends with us?” she asks, finally breathing.
    â€œWhat?” I am starting to feel normal again. I smoke some more.
    â€œYou’re too smart to be friends with us. You should be hanging out with those kids in your class.”
    â€œI hate those kids in my class. They’re all boring assholes,” I tell her, blowing smoke in her face.
    â€œWhy do you hang out with us?” she says.
    â€œBecause I like you.”
    I hand her the pipe and she inhales, holds her breath, exhales slowly. “You like me?” she says.
    â€œOf course I like you.”
    â€œYou like him?” she says, nodding toward Ethan, who is attempting a handstand. I shrug my shoulders.
    â€œYou like her?” she says, motioning toward Alex, who is under the sleeping-bag coat, kneeling in front of Wes with her face in his lap.
    I look at Sarah and she meets my eyes and all of a sudden I feel like crying. I feel like telling her everything I have ever thought, every secret I’ve ever had, like that could somehow make all of this go away and we would not be freezing, we would not be watching the boys pee on things like dogs, we would not be breathing spray paint and exhaust fumes, we would not be sitting here pretending we are like these people, not like Alex with her face in someone’s lap, not like the boys going back and forth, not like all these people going nowhere.
    â€œYou miss where you used to live,” Sarah says as she reloads the pipe.
    I shrug my shoulders again. I feel like I miss something, but it couldn’t be that. I couldn’t miss living in the middle of nowhere and having no friends. I couldn’t miss being alone all the time.
    â€œWhat were you like there?” she says.
    â€œDifferent,” I say. “Boring.”
    â€œHow?” she asks, passing me the pipe. I inhale, feel the smoke softening the tightness in my throat and my chest.
    â€œI wasn’t very popular,” I say, which is the closest thing to the truth I’ve ever told anyone. “And I was good. I never did anything. I didn’t know anything about anything.”
    Sarah has a blank look on her face, and I’m afraid for a moment that I said too much. But after a while, she smiles and says, “That sounds nice.”
    â€œYeah.” I am thinking about the photos, the ones that are ashes, the people I’m not allowed to miss.
    â€œIt’d be nice to not know anything,” Sarah says.
    â€œLike if you could just go backward,” I say.
    â€œForget everything.”
    â€œI bet you can make yourself forget,” I say. “If you try really hard, you can make the memories disappear. You know how humans only use one-tenth of their brain? I bet if you just thought really hard you could control everything in your brain, even the subconscious stuff like in dreams.” I realize I am talking like a stoned person. “Does that sound stupid?” I ask.
    â€œNo,” she says. “I can do that.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œMake the memories go away. Make it like it never happened.”
    Sarah’s shivering again and I can’t stand it. I can’t standher so small and sad and freezing. I pull her hand out of the