The A-Word by Joy Preble Page A

because someone gives you something, doesn’t mean you have to keep it. Doesn’t mean you owe them anything.”
    Amber moved to the last unpainted tombstone. “Your brother gave you your life,” she said, so soft I almost didn’t hear her. “But you’re absolutely right. I need you to remember what you just told me.”
    It took a minute for all that to sink in. Because she had just told
me
that I didn’t owe Casey anything. “You ever gonna tell me what really happened to you?” I whispered. The words were out and I had no way of pulling them back in. Truth: I didn’t want to.
    Amber was silent again, for so long that I began to think that either she hadn’t heard me or she was not going to answer, which amounted to the same thing.
    But then she said, “I can’t,” after which she added, “Because I don’t know.” And the way she said it, I knew she was telling the truth.
    “Bo knows,” she said.

I had never been one for schemes. Before the AI (Angel Incident), I didn’t have a need for plotting and planning. I went to school. I hung out with Maggie. I watched TV, and I listened to music, and I annoyed my brother—and a long time ago I went with my dad to taste food at restaurants when he was writing his BBQ trail book.
    Even after things went bad and then worse, even after he disappeared and Mom spaced out and stopped working or caring, I didn’t think, “Hey, I’m going to dig into this. I’m going to solve this.” (Not even when I first got so sick because of the poison. Granted, I could barely function.) We looked for Dad, of course. We hoped that he would come back. It’s not like we didn’t DO THINGS. But eventually, I moved on. He was still missing, but I put it in the back of my head where it whirred like the guts in Casey’s laptop—eating up brain space and making me feel sad. But really, what could I do about it? Back then I was dying, and Mom was fading, and Casey was hanging out with Dave and smoking weed andworking two jobs and actively failing most of his classes even though he was whip smart. That’s just the way it was.
    Until the AI, I kept things on automatic. I got myself up. I got myself to school. I kept up my grades. I kept up appearances that we WERE FINE. Since we definitely were NOT, that particular job took a damn lot of energy. I ate the occasional stray snickerdoodle from Dave’s Mamaw Nell. Things like high school—or a social life or a boyfriend—seemed far off, like Mars or Uranus, or Pluto, which wasn’t even a planet anymore. If I thought about the future, it was this fuzzy thing, like static on a broken TV.
    Now, thanks to my brother, there was a future. Except that he was technically dead and there was this ENTIRE WORLD that no one else knew existed except for me. A world of glowing dead folk with Spidey senses that might work and wings that
did
work and an Angel Management System that had more loopholes and secret rules than the US tax system.
    Maybe that’s why right now, I felt different. I might not have my learner’s permit yet—although hopefully Casey would cart me over there on Monday—but I had helped catch an actual bad guy last year. It hadn’t gone that well, but I had done it. I had helped my brother solve the mystery of what had happened to our family. I had always been a strong Texan girl, but I was stronger now because of it. Now when I took care of myself, it was conscious, not just going through the motions. I knew what was out there. And I knew that I had to BE AWARE. Plus, I had kissed Ryan Sloboda like I’d always imagined a kiss should be! Better, even!
    If I could manage all those things, I could certainly help Amber Velasco figure out what had happened to her five years ago. Because no one should be in the dark about their own truths. Even people who sometimes annoy the hell outof you. That is what I figured when I woke up, after Amber had left and after I heard Casey stomp into his room around four. And that’s why I needed