I catch Ash in the parking lot. He recoils as I trot alongside him, then relaxes when he sees who it is. He doesn’t slow his pace.
“I’m gonna getreamedat home for that,” he says.
“If you hadn’t done it, I think I might’ve,” I say. “I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit him.”
“Normally I don’t mind it here. Pastor Mitchell’s weird, but it can be calming. And Alissa always liked it. But that’s just...fuck. Another two minutes and he would have been talking about how suicides are tortured in hell for all eternity.”
“How do they believe things like that?”
“Their fucking brains are rotten,” Ash says. “They’ve never known what it feels like. They don’t get what it means to want to die, so they think there’s an easy answer. They think God can fix it, or if you justtryto be happy, you will be. They think we do this to ourselves.”
I glance at him at “we,” and his mouth snaps shut. He keeps walking, but he stares ahead, jaw clenched. He knows what it’s like to feel like that?
The sudden awkwardness makes me worry, so I try to change the tone.
“Alissa was too sweet to go to hell,” I say. “They would have assumed she got sent to the wrong place and turned her away at the gates.”
Ash laughs; the sound is a little broken, but then his pace slows, and he smiles. “Yeah. Clerical error on that one.”
“That never made sense to me anyway,” I add, “suicides going to hell. Life tormented them so much they felt like they had to kill themselves to leave it. Wouldn’t those be the ones that should get extra care in an afterlife? Treat them to a spa day for eternity, or something.”
“I like that. She’s getting a massage right now. Or chilling in a hot tub with some scented oils.” Ash wipes his eyes. “When we were little, she loved playing spa day. She’d pretend to be lounging on a chair and make me fan her with a leaf from Mom’s fig plant.”
“And you played along?”
“For like twenty seconds. Then I started hitting her with it.” He pauses. “I knew this morning was going to suck, but I didn’t think it’d suck this much.”
We stop at the far end of the parking lot. Ash drops onto the grass. After a moment, I sit beside him. It’s cold, but the sun is out and the day is warming up.
“Will your parents make you go back?” I ask.
“Definitely. To apologize to Pastor Mitchell, if nothing else.”
“Fuck that guy.”
“Yeah.”
He stretches out on his back and closes his eyes. His dark hair fans out in the grass. He’s frowning against the sun on his face, and the scar on his lip goes white in the bright light.
“Thanks for coming out here with me,” he says. “I think I might’ve started smashing things if I hadn’t calmed down.”
“Break a few side-view mirrors?”
“Headlights, windshields, the usual.”
“Your reputation at school would skyrocket. A real badass delinquent.”
He snorts and cracks one eye open to look at me. “My reputation? I have a reputation?”
I tuck my legs up and wrap my arms around them. Telling him about himself is kind of fun and, as a bonus, seems to be distracting him. “Sure. You don’t get to have a scar like that and not be super mysterious and scary.”
His fingers go to his lips. The movement seems unconscious. “Scary, huh?”
“You’re like the boogeyman to the freshmen. There’s a story going around that you fought off a serial killer.”
He outright laughs at that, deep in his chest. “What?That’s so stupid!”
“But itdoesmake you sound cool.”
