Read Online Everything Changes by Jonathan Tropper - Free Book Online Page A

“They’re on the way.”
    He shook his head. “I’m already gone.”
    “Fuck you! Just stay with me.”
    “Believe me,” he said, his voice starting to get weaker. “I’d love to.”
    “We’ll be hanging out in your house in a few weeks and you’re going to feel really stupid about this.”
    “Tell Sophie about me,” he whispered. “When she’s older, I mean. Tell her what I was like, okay? Tell her she made me happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Just please, try to stay with me.”
    “I didn’t see this coming,” he said, more to himself than me. “I never would have guessed this.”
    “Please, Rael. For fuck’s sake, just hang on.” I was weeping audibly now. In the distance, I could hear the sirens. “You hear that?” I said to him. “They’re here. Just stay awake!”
    The sirens stopped and I pictured the paramedics grabbing their fat orange cases and heading urgently up the embankment to find us.
    “Zacky.”
    “Raely.”
    He closed his eyes for the last time and smiled. “We should have gone to fucking Vegas.”

Chapter 8
    Usually, whenever I leave Tamara’s house, I need Hope in the worst possible way. I run to her like a junkie to crystal meth, needing to believe that my reality is every bit as good as the insane fantasies I entertain in Tamara’s universe. Even before I’ve started the car, I’ve got one hand on my cell phone, ready to flip it open and say her name, to hear the reassuring steadiness of her voice on the other end, so firmly grounded in reality that it leaves no room for doubt, and to be whole again. “Hope,” I say at the voice prompt. I get her voice mail and leave her a message, not mentioning where I am, but telling her that I miss her and that she should call me. It’s six thirty, and I know she’s working late tonight.
    This is what happens. You’re in your car, driving slowly along the service road of the Henry Hudson Parkway as dusk turns into night and the headlights of passing cars are laying claim to the highway. (Ever since the accident, you will always choose service roads over highways.) You’re thinking about one woman while trying to reach another, and despite this apparent abundance of women, you feel lonely and desolate as hell, and, almost unconsciously, you drive to the house of a third, and the third woman is your mother. It has to be unconscious, because conscious, you’d know right away that it’s a big mistake. Somewhere, there’s a therapist sitting alone in his office, staring wistfully at his door, wishing for a patient like you.
    My mother and Peter live about a half mile away from Tamara, in the house I grew up in, the house from which Norm was ceremoniously ejected after the Anna incident. Said ceremony actually happened a few days after Norm was gone, when my mother brought the soiled linens from the crime scene down to the driveway and, using a can of lighter fluid, set them ablaze underneath our basketball hoop. The burn marks on the concrete became our foul line and out-of-bounds indicators.
    Peter’s on the front lawn raking leaves. When he sees me, his eyes light up and he waves with just enough abandon to reveal his condition. “Hey, Zack,” he yells. “What’s new and exciting?”
    “Hey, Pete,” I say, climbing out of the car. “How’s it hanging?”
    “A little to the left,” he says with a giggle. “Sweet ride.”
    “You know it.”
    He drops the rake and runs down the small slope of lawn to greet me, his arms dangling behind him in the awkward body language of the mentally impaired. His kiss is wet on my cheek, and his stubble leaves a mild burn as it scrapes my skin. He’s twenty-nine years old, short and stocky, bright in his own way, and as eager to please as a puppy. But no matter how happy Pete seems, no matter how well he lives in the aftermath of the chromosomal car wreck that took place during his creation, there’s still an undeniable element of tragedy to his