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He took fire.
He ate a grenade.
He accidentally shot himself in the leg. Twice.
“You really suck at this,” Ruby said.
“That seems to be the case,” he conceded.
Taking pity on him, she turned off the game. “You’re here about my brother.”
“Yes.”
“Do you actually want to figure out what happened to him? Seriously? Or is this more ass-covering bureaucratic nonsense?”
“The former.”
“Why?”
“I saw that video you posted a year ago.”
“Right,” she said. “And then you just decided to help.”
“Yes.”
She did a double take, saw that he wasn’t joking. “Okay. What do you want to know?”
“Anything you can tell me. What he was like. The kind ofcrowd he was running with. You said you don’t think he knew the young woman whose body was found with his. Did he date black girls?”
Ruby looked appalled. “That’s soracist!”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you assume there’s, like, atypethat dates black girls. And a type thatdoesn’t.”
“Okay,” he said. “Did Johnny just date people who he liked no matter their skin color?”
Her cheeks dimpled ever so slightly with amusement, the effect winning.
“Yeah,” she said, “he dated everyone. And everyone dated him. That was him. That was Johnny.”
Her eyes lowered and her face softened in that manner he’d seen time and again with Joey when emotion started pressing toward the surface. Evan knew to keep his mouth shut so as not to scare it back down inside her.
The room was warm, and the air bore the faintest tinge of incense. Several worms of ash lay in a cherrywood burner on the nightstand.
Evan marveled at how the room had been preserved, as if Johnny might stroll in at any moment and plop down on the bed. He wondered how much time Ruby spent in here playing video games, burning incense, occupying the space her brother used to fill.
“He was out ahead of everyone else,” she said. “Always in a rush—to practice, to a party, to fun. The first to drink, the first to have sex, the first to smoke pot. But he was the most naïve, too, somehow.” She pursed her lips. “His base setting was … faith in the world. He thought the universe was as loving as it presented itself to him. They talk about that as entitlement, but, man, I’d never want to be that kind of ignorant. He was my big brother, right? But also he was so … young. And kinda dumb. But sweet all the way through, you know?”
She picked at a fingernail. “And he was … beautiful. Like someone Lord Byron would’ve fallen in love with. He had this dreamystoner smile like from the seventies. He was insufferable.” She was crying. “And if he was just dead because an Acme safe fell on his head or because he drunk-crashed his car, then fine. But if someonedid thisto him? Justbecause? I don’t know how to live in a world where that goes unanswered.”
Evan said, “Me neither.”
She swiped away tears with the pulled-down cuff of her sweater, not breaking eye contact. There wasn’t a trace of embarrassment in her for crying.
“Look at that,” she said. “We agree on something.”
The moment sat there bright and pleasing between them.
