Read Online Ask Him Why by Catherine Ryan Hyde - Free Book Online

march into the fray for him, because I was just a solid person like that, and loyalty was the most important thing.
    But maybe it’s easy to tell yourself stuff like that when you know you won’t be put to the test for real.
    While I was thinking, I saw a piece of paper slide under my door, silently, and with no words or knocks to go with it. I walked over and picked it up, but all the movements felt less than real. Or more than real, I’m not sure which.
    It was a blog post that Aubrey had apparently printed off the Internet. A paragraph was highlighted in yellow, too sloppily I thought, not really following the lines of text, as if he’d been too busy or too upset to do it right.
    And it didn’t seem like a very professional or well-written blog to me, but maybe I was just anxious to find fault.
    The paragraph said this:
     
    Now it’s beginning to come out that Stellkellner told some of his fellow soldiers that he spent every summer, starting at age twelve, with Hamish MacCallum, the man who had this article written about him last year.
     
    The words “this article written about him” were clearly a text link, underlined and in a different color, but of course you can’t click on the paper of a printout.
     
    MacCallum, who emigrated from Scotland decades ago, lives in a house high on a bluff in Northern California, which he purchased because in Scotland he had also lived at the edge of a cliff over the sea, and had become accustomed to inviting potential jumpers into his house for a meal. It’s unclear whether Stellkellner met MacCallum in an aborted suicide attempt, but Stellkellner did tell his fellow soldiers that he met MacCallum when he was twelve, which would place the incident right around the time the press is saying he was institutionalized. Stellkellner reportedly told his former friends in Baghdad that MacCallum was “more of a father to him than his own late biological father or his adopted father.”
     
    Then the yellow highlighting ran out, and the article went on to say that this was unconfirmed, plus it wasn’t clear whether there was any connection between this information and the controversy at hand, and then I stopped reading.
    I folded the sheet of paper in half, and on the blank back of it I wrote, “I’ll believe this if and when I see it in the real papers.”
    I slid it under Aubrey’s door.
    Even as I did, I think I knew it was less of an “ if” and more of a “ when .”

    Sean called my cell phone about four p.m., around the time he would have been getting home from school.
    “Hey,” I said, my gut flooding with relief.
    “Sorry I didn’t call you back. I was looking at my phone in math class to see who called, and old Mr. Bertram noticed and confiscated it. I still don’t have it back from him.”
    “Oh,” I said. “That’s okay.” Then I added, “Sorry. I’m sorry I got your phone taken away.”
    “Whatever. Not your fault. I should have waited and called you back in the hall between classes.”
    He sounded okay, as if he hadn’t yet decided to treat me like the contagious disease I probably was, but I still needed to approach it as a tenuous reprieve.
    “So,” I said. “Is this all crazy, or what?”
    “I know,” he said. “Huh?”
    Then the conversation just died. And, in a small way, so did I.
    “So . . . ,” he began. “What did you want?”
    I felt my face turn hot, and probably red, and felt a sudden surge of the heartburn that had become the constant accompaniment to my life, like background music in a movie. I froze in silence for an embarrassing length of time.
    I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I’d needed to talk to someone, and still did, and worse yet that there was no one in my house—not even anyone in my more extended world—who could fill that void for me. That I’d had to turn to a boy who’d just asked me out for the first time and rush him into the role of confidant.
    It was all just so wrong now.
    “I was