Narc Read Online Free Page B

don’t have the balls to send this letter.
    I should sign it “sincerely,” but that never sounds sincere.
    —A.

4 : Nothing To Wear
    On Saturday morning, I practiced my magic. I’d been working on the ultimate trick—levitation. So far, I couldn’t pull it off. I had to secretly balance on my toes, lifting myself a few inches off the ground. I tried it once in front of my little sister and fell on my ass. After a while, I just gave up.
    Time to get to work.
    I logged online and started Googling the names of people from school, plus the names on my list. Outside my window, the pigeons rustled and paced. I tugged back the drapes and saw a bird speckled like a cookie. I had named her Wendy, after the fast food joint that blinked across Biscayne Boulevard. In the flowerbox, she left a bunch of smooth, leathery eggs. Sometimes she disappeared for days. Just when I’d start to get worried, she’d fly home again.
    Me and my mom and sister had been living in this shitty one-bedroom apartment since Dad died. We had to move out of our house, near the Air Force Base in Homestead, to a cheap apartment in downtown Miami. Mom and Haylie shared the bedroom. My sister never stopped complaining about it. She was lucky. I got stuck sleeping on a Murphy bed in the middle of the spider-infested living room.
    In Homestead, it was all fields and farms. In downtown Miami, we were surrounded by fast food chains and motels with names like Seven Seas (although there was no sea in sight). I used to pass the same dead dog, sprawled at the exit for I-95, its face locked in a toothy snarl. It rotted there for days.
    Mom was barely functioning. She was finishing up her nursing degree and spent most of her time working at South Miami Hospital, taking care of strangers, while I stayed home with Haylie. We watched endless marathons of the Marx Brothers and lived off Ritz crackers. I helped her figure out her activity sheets on quadratic equations and forged Mom’s signature where it said, PARENT/GUARDIAN.
    Haylie refused to believe that Dad wasn’t coming home. Maybe that’s because he hadn’t been overseas long, then bam. We got hit with the news.
    The soldiers appeared on our front step on a Saturday morning. It was just after Dad had left for another photo assignment. He was never home long.
    Haylie was still in her pajamas, watching the Cartoon Network, while I munched leftover pizza for breakfast. I joked that she was getting too old for superheroes, but we always watched TV together. Mom was snoring in the back bedroom. She had just finished another late shift at the hospital. She hadn’t even taken off her scrubs, which I remember were decorated with tiny teddy bears.
    Haylie ran to the door. Two men in uniform stood there—a chaplain and a sergeant. Both of them were drenched with sweat.
    My sister knew. She started crying, and as I stumbled through the house, all the noises faded away, as if I’d floated into outer space, where sound doesn’t exist: the stupid, high-pitched giggles on TV, the dog yapping as if demon-possessed, the dishwasher churning because I forgot to set it last night. All silent.
    When I finally shook Mom awake, I didn’t have to explain.
    “They’re here,” I said.
    She shot out of bed so fast, she knocked over a lamp. I tilted it upright and plugged it back into the wall. What the hell was I doing? I didn’t want to go back out there. I already knew what the chaplain was going to say:
    “The secretary of defense regrets to inform you … ”
    They muttered the words cardiac arrest , just a fancy way of saying that Dad’s heart gave out. I couldn’t even imagine it. In my mind, I envisioned Dad charging across the desert with a camera around his neck. Maybe he was shielding his buddies from an IED. Or maybe he was taking aerial pictures from a plane that crashed over enemy territory. I replayed these images over and over, fast-forwarding and rewinding. None of them were what really happened.
    If I