Mick Harte Was Here Read Online Free Page B

a
grief
counselor. Which sounds totally depressing. But Zo said he was kind of young, with longish hair, and he had on jeans.
    “You wouldn’t believe how many kids showed up to meet with him, Phoebe. So many came we had to move out of a regular classroom and into the cafeteria.”
    I think this is where I was supposed to act real delighted with the turnout or something. I didn’t, though. I mean we weren’t exactly talking about a bake sale here.
    Zoe softened her voice. “All I’m trying to tell you is that you’re not alone, Phoebe. A lot of his friends are hurting, too. Like Danny Monroe kept blowing his nose the whole time. And Rickie Bowie had his hat pulled down so far you couldn’t see his face.”
    I rolled my eyes.
    “Nobody could even say Mick’s name at first,” she told me. “That’s how bad it was. But then the counselor said that talking about him and saying his name were two of the ways we can sort of keep him with us, you know? And so we did it, Phoebe. All of us. At the same time. We all said ‘Mick.’ You should have heard it. His name filled up that whole big room, almost. And then we did it again. Only this time it was even louder. And the counselor said—”
    I hung up on her. I know it was wrong to dothat, but I didn’t
care
what the counselor said. And I didn’t care about how much better everybody felt after saying his name.
    I didn’t feel better. I would
never
feel better. Feeling better sounded almost disloyal, if you want to know the truth. And just to make sure I stayed as depressed and loyal as possible, I stopped in Mick’s doorway on the way back to my room.
    I hadn’t stopped there since the night of the accident. It just felt so different now, you know? So private. And off limits. Like a church altar or a cemetery or something.
    His door was still open. Pop hadn’t tried to shut it again.
    I looked in at all the stuff on his shelves, the tons of souvenirs and crap he’d collected over the years. It was mostly junk, but Mick called them his
treasures
, That killed me. His treasures.
    Like on the first shelf of his bookcase, he had the stupidest autograph collection you’ve ever seen. It was just these two old scraps of paper in a plastic cover. One of them was signed by Herb Fogg, the weatherman on Channel 3. The other was from some guy named Tweets who had been dressed in a bird suit at a local pet store opening.
    The second shelf was where he kept his favorite paperbacks—joke books and mysteriesmostly. It’s also where he kept the ceramic eyeball he’d made in art class one year. The day he brought it home, he snuck it into a package of defrosted chicken that my mother was fixing for dinner. You could hear her scream all over the neighborhood.
    “God, that was funny,” I said out loud.
    Over on his nightstand was the unopened cigar he’d found in the street coming home from kindergarten one day. It was the kind that new fathers hand out when their wives have a baby. The kind that has “IT’S A GIRL!” on the paper band at the top. But at the time, Mick thought it meant the cigar was a girl, and he named it Helen.
    There was a fly swatter on his nightstand too. It was part of a set, actually. The other two were hanging from a hook near his closet door.
    Mick had a
thing
about flies, I guess you’d call it. It started when he did a science report in second grade and found out that when a fly lands on your sandwich, it vomits on your bread. After that, whenever he saw one he pretty much went berserk until he killed it.
    He asked for the set of swatters for Christmas that year. He wanted two for his room (one was a “backup”), and another one that he could take to baseball practice and other outdoor activities duringfly season. He called it his mobile field unit (MFU).
    The MFU didn’t work out that well though. It was way too long for his back pocket and the swatter part kept rubbing on his shirt, which totally made him sick, ’Cause of the fly guts and