Dark Side of Nowhere

1 Nowhere Fast Ethan died of a burst appendix. That's what we were toldand we had no reason to doubt it. Everyone on the street had heard the way he screamed. The pain must have been unbearable. Even after his parents had rushed him off to the hospital, his screams haunted me for days. We found out about it the next morning. It was during science class. We were studying the astronomers, and somewhere between Copernicus and Galileo, the announcement came hissing over the loudspeaker. It was a shockbiggest one I could remember. I mean, in this day and age, to keel over from something as stupid as appendicitis. I couldn't look over at his empty seat that morning. Although I tried to feel sad, all I could feel was angry. Roxanne, the last in a long line of girlfriends that had filled Ethan's seventh-and eighth-grade years, was blubbering away. That made me angry, too. I noticed the way she rubbed those eyes as she wailed, purposely smudging her mother's mascara that she always wore. It made her tears thick and black, so everyone could see from a mile away how verysadshe wasas if everyone should feel sorry for her, and not Ethan. On the other hand, Paula Quinn cried silent tears that she quickly wiped away. It was classy. It wasreal. I watched Paula rather than look at Ethan's seat or watch Roxanne's Cavalcade of Misery. In front of the room, Mr. Smith, our science teacher, spoke in solemn tones, using an all-knowing, all-comforting voice that he must have borrowed from Pastor Bob, our minister. "We'll all miss Ethan," he said, "but we have to remember that he's gone to a better place." Next to me, my friend Wesley flicked his hair back in utter contempta gesture he had learned from methen he whispered under his breath, "Better place? I'll bet." Up front, Mr. Smith lifted his eyes upward, as if searching for heaven in the flickering fluorescents. "Let us all observe a moment of silence in Ethan's memory." I flicked my own hair back contemptuously, showing Wesley how it was done. "Moment of silence, my butt," I whispered to Wes. "Ethan would have wanted a moment of heavy metal." That made Wes snicker. It sounded so rudely loud in the silence that it made me snicker, too, and my snicker set someone off on the other side of the room. It wasn't like this was funny or anythingbut sometimes, when something hits you so hard, your head kind of starts ricocheting off every wall. Suddenly laughter and tears feel like the same thing. More chuckles broke out around the room. Mr. Smith threw me a cold warning look, as if it were all my fault. "Jason...," he said, "don't you dare." Then Roxanne turned to us with her raccoon eyes and wailed, "What's wrong with you people!" That did it. The raccoon eyes, Smith's fluorescent gaze, and a dead friend. It was all so unreal, some confused part of our brains concluded that it must have been funny. Half the room burst out in snickers punctuated by sobs. Then my own brain took a bad ricochet, and I suddenly felt like heaving, so I burst out of the room, fighting to keep my breakfast from making a surprise appearance. "Mr. Miller!" Smith shouted after me, but I was already our the door, with Wesley following close behind. I stopped when I reached the water fountain in the hallway, and bent down to take a drink, hoping to drown my gut into submission. Wesley punched a locker hard enough to make it rattle, but not hard enough to hurt himself. It's a show, I thought, just likeShusterman, Neal is the author of 'Dark Side of Nowhere' with ISBN 9780765342430 and ISBN 076534243X.