Alligator Candy by David Kushner Page B

some truth, as awful as the truth was, helped me feel more connected to Jon.
    But all the new details, the descriptions and scenes that I read in the paper, stirred up another familiar emotion too: guilt. I couldn’t help imagining what might have happened had I not pressed him so hard to get me the gum. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone. Or maybe if I had protested more loudly, complaining that he wasn’t going to let me go, he would have given in and stayed home. This game of what-if was easy and addictive to play, and I twisted every possibility around in my head like a Rubik’s Cube. What if Jon had agreed to let me go with him? What if they wouldn’t have attacked had they seen two of us? What if they’d gotten us both? What if, somehow, I could have saved him?
    I felt guilty about feeling guilty, ashamed to draw attention to my feelings even if they were just inside my head. We spoke a lot about guilt in my house, but not related to Jon. Guilt was something that we joked about as a trait of being Jewish, how parents and grandparents would lament “You don’t call, you don’t write!” and so on. We had a gag gift in our living room: a small can of aerosol labeled Mrs. Rubenstein’s Guilt-Remover Spray. It smelled like roses.
    Beyond stirring up my guilt and confirming some of my vague memories, the articles had an unexpected effect too: creating even more mystery for me. Now that I knew some details surrounding Jon’s disappearance, the empty pages of my book seemed even more barren. What exactly did these guys do to Jon? Who were they? How’d they get caught? Where were they now? I did gather, either from the stories or from my parents, that the killers were in prison, and that the older one, Witt, had been sentenced to death. But rather than upset myself or my parents by asking more questions, I left that alone.
    The mystery didn’t grow just over Jon’s death. My questions concerned his short but full life. Ordinarily after someone dies, you talk about him or her eventually, sharing stories, laughs, memories, feelings that keep the person alive in your heart and mind. But because of the horror of Jon’s death, that ability was almost completely erased in my family. The pain was too great for idle memories. Instead, the silence prevailed. I felt doubly challenged, however, because I didn’t have the well of memories to dip into myself. I envied Andy and my parents for the memories of Jon that they had in their heads. I wanted those for myself. I wanted to know him. To feel him. I wanted to know who he was when he was alive. But I resigned myself to, at least for the time being, not knowing more at all.
    At thirteen, I was now older than Jon had been, a bizarre concept to me that seemed almost like something out of one of my comic books: how a little brother is transformed into a big brother. And because I was thirteen, I was becoming a bar mitzvah. As I stood on the bimah giving my bar mitzvah speech, looking out on the room full of friends and family, the memorial banners for Jon hanging in the lobby, I knew that many of them might be thinking the same thing as me when I thanked Jon for inspiring me with his memory: that I was becoming a man, while Jon would remain, forever, a boy.

22
    T HE DISTANCE between our sliding glass doors and the garbage cans outside around the corner of the house was maybe fifteen feet. But those fifteen feet I had to walk every night when taking out the kitchen trash felt like an eternity.
    Despite my burgeoning sense of freedom and adventure, I felt plagued by the dark side of possibility: the fact that while anything could happen in the best possible sense, terrible things could happen too—like getting attacked and killed by a stranger while I was taking out the trash. The usual reassurances—say, the rarity of someone getting hit by lightning, the unlikelihood of dying in a car crash—were easy for me to dismiss.