I Am No One You Know Read Online Free

The taste of it was like copper pennies in my mouth.
    Angry, my mother switched off the TV. “They’re just doing that for the TV cameras. All that attention, to make people feel sorry for them. ”
    I followed Mom out into the kitchen. I said, “Mom? It was Leo and Mario. I saw them with the baseball bat. They were the ones.” But my mother was at the sink, running water hard. She stood with her back to me, furious, shaking. Somewhere close by the telephone began ringing; we waited for Daddy to pick it up, in another room.
     
    N EXT DAY IN homeroom I was crying, sniffling. Wiping my nose with my fingers like a small dazed child. This was the third day afterJadro Filer’s death. My homeroom teacher called me to her desk to ask cautiously, “Is there something wrong, Lili Rose? Are you upset about something?” She knew the rumor about my brothers. “Are you sick?” I shook my head no. But the woman peered at me worriedly, touched my warm forehead with her fingers, decided I had a fever, and sent me to the school nurse, who made me lie down on a cot, took my temperature, noted that my teeth were chattering. Gently she scolded, “Lili Rose, you’re a sick girl. Your temperature is 101 degrees, that’s fever. Your mother oughtn’t to have let you out of the house this morning.”
    These words, like a curse, made me cry harder. The alarmed nurse called in the school principal, Mr. Mandell, who asked me what was wrong, why was I crying, and somehow it happened that I was telling him about Leo and Mario and the baseball bat; I was telling Mr. Mandell how afraid I was, how angry my father would be, I didn’t want to go home…Within a few minutes plainclothes police officers, one of them a woman, had been summoned to speak with me.
    That was how it began. And once it began, it couldn’t be stopped.
    It would become a matter of public record: the unsolicited, uncoerced, purely voluntary information provided police by the thirteen-year-old sister of two suspects in the Jadro Filer beating death.
     
    I WAS MOVED across town to live with my aunt Bea and uncle Clyde, who hadn’t any children. This was a practical move, better than a county foster home. None of the other relatives wanted me. My sister Mariana and her husband, my sister Emily. Never want to see her face again. She makes me want to puke.
    I had to change schools, too.
    I would live with my aunt and uncle for four years in their prissy little house on Pearson Street. Aunt Bea was my mother’s older sister. Uncle Clyde was a bricklayer. So boring, my mind drifted out the window when they spoke to me. In the beginning my aunt hugged me a lot, mistaking my passivity for sadness. She told me I’d learn to be happy with her and Uncle Clyde, I’d get used to my new home, my new room, things would “settle down” and after a while my parentswould forgive me—all of which, and I knew so at the time, was bullshit. The first few days I was stunned. I was too young to realize how the only life I’d known had been taken from me. Those swift uncalculated minutes in the school infirmary. The nurse gently scolding. Your mother oughtn’t to have let you. In my dreams in years to come I would mistake the school nurse for my mother. And there was Mr. Mandell crouching beside me. Lili Rose? What is it? Is there trouble at home? I had to tell them what I knew. I had no choice.
    In AA they tell you: nobody starts out thinking, as a kid, he’s going to wind up an alcoholic or a junkie. Add to that an alcoholic twice-divorced with no kids, age forty-three and counting. Add to that a daughter denounced by her family for ratting to the police on two brothers. Nobody starts out thinking she’ll be so defined, but there it is. Blunt and irrevocable as a headline.
     
    13-YEAR-OLD SISTER OF SUSPECTS
    PROVIDES INFORMATION TO PERRYSBURG POLICE
    Filer Death Investigation Continues
     
    So they moved me away. In an afternoon. I wouldn’t speak with Leo and Mario; I was spared