NO ONE ELSE CAN HAVE YOU

Chapter 1: Hunting Season

My name is Kippy Bushman, and I am bereaved. Right now I’m bereaved on the toilet. Well, not like going to the bathroom or anything, more like using it as a chair. For some reason the motel put a television in here, so I’ve got the seat down and my pajamas on with my knees pulled up toward my face. When you’re sharing a motel room with your dad, the bathroom’s pretty much the only place you can have privacy. And the shower is pretty much the only place you can cry, if you want to avoid getting hugged. So I’ve been hanging out in here, watching a lot of Diane Sawyer, and occasionally taking off my clothes to cry my guts out.

Dom and I have been staying at the Great Moose Motel since last Saturday night. He says there’s no way he’s letting his Pickle run around when there’s a homicidal maniac on the loose. I’m getting a little claustrophobic, to tell you the truth, but I guess I can tell where he’s coming from, hiding us here. I mean they found Ruth in the corn behind our house.

Every so often while I’m sitting here thinking about her, my brain is bombarded by semi-normal thoughts brought on by too much daytime television. “Should I start taking vitamin D supplements?” “Do I need a paraffin wax treatment tub thing for my foot calluses?” It doesn’t seem fair, in a way, because maybe I should be sad constantly for the rest of my life if I’m the one who gets to be alive. But the weirdest part is when this other feeling creeps in: a sort of vague annoyance, like Ruth has gone somewhere and not invited me.

The thing is, we were supposed to have a sleepover that night. She was on her way over and the next day they discovered her less than 200 yards away from our back door. She almost made it. And the thing on top of that is I have a car and she doesn’t—didn’t—so I could have gone and gotten her. But I didn’t.

That’s the part that makes me keep climbing in the shower to cry. I should have picked her up. I should have gone and grabbed her.

Ruth Fried—pronounced Freed, like free, or freer—was my best friend. Around here, it’s first and last name every time you run into a person, at least to their face, no matter how well you know them. And if you can’t remember first and last, it’s ma’am or sir. No exceptions. Who knows who came up with our pleasantries, or how they did it, but that’s the way it is in Friendship, Wisconsin.

Anyway, people were always getting Ruth’s name wrong, calling her Ruth Fried, like a fried egg.

“Do you think it would help if I put some of those pronunciation symbols next to my name in the yearbook?” she asked me once. “I’m yearbook vice president, so I could probably totally do that—wait, sorry, does it sound like I’m bragging?”

“I think you’re very conservative with your power,” I told her honestly.

I thought pronunciation symbols were an awesome idea. But none of the other people on the yearbook knew what pronunciation symbols were, and didn’t think anyone else would, either, so they wouldn’t vote yes on it.

Certain memories of her like that keep playing on repeat in my head, but others I can’t even find. Unless I sit down and look through the yearbook, I can only recall her face at certain angles, like her profile in the passenger seat of my car. There’s one other recollection that won’t quit popping up, though, who knows why: how when we were little—maybe eight or nine—we saw this thing on TV about street performance, and afterwards we decided to make some money by dancing at the end of Ruth’s driveway. We didn’t realize that it was different in a city, and that no one would slow down on a rural highway to put change in our hat. We must have stood there twirling crazily for an hour before Mr. Fried came out and asked what we were doing.

Ruth was the only person I ever knew who wanted to be somewhere else as much as I did. The only one who got what I meant when I said, “Friendship as in you and me is great, but Friendship, Wisconsin sometimes feels like a bad dream that’s too boring to be called a nightmare.”