Diary of a Witness by Catherine Ryan Hyde

hung up the phone, he said, “She’s thrilled. She just could not be more thrilled. Now she gets to go back down to L.A. for the holidays and not walk past Sam’s old room anymore. She didn’t say that but I know that’s what she means. I’ve never heard her sound so happy.”
    “Great,” I said. But I knew that was a mixed blessing for Will. She could have at least sounded like she cared about him. She could have pretended to care. She didn’t even care that she didn’t care. It was sad.
    “Know what she said when I got home from the hospital?”
    I shook my head. Of course I didn’t know. But I knew it would be bad.
    “She said, ‘I needed those pills. Now what the hell am I supposed to do without my sleeping pills all month?’”
    “That’s it? That’s all she said?”
    “Oh. Well, no. That’s not the only thing. She screamed and cried for about an hour and said I was the only son she had left and I had no right to take that away from her. How dare I try to take her only remaining son? And then when she was all cried out, she got this weirdly stony look on her face and said that thing about the pills.”
    I think I just said something like, “Wow.”
    Anyway, back to today.
    Wait, no, I have to back up again. I’m sorry. I’m leaving important stuff out.
    Thursday I told Will that I’d have to go back to school Monday morning. Otherwise my mom would start to freak.
    “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go with you, so somebody has your back. You won’t have to worry. I’ll be covering your back.”
    “How?”
    “Leave that up to me.”
    The next day he came over with this canister of pepper spray he’d stolen from his mother’s purse.
    I said, “Will, if we ever used that on them, it’d be all over. As soon as they could see again, they’d kill us.”
    “Me,” he said. “They’ll have to kill me. You won’t be using it. You’ll just be minding your own business. They’ll have to come after me.”
    It seemed like a plan with some holes. Not to mention being a little … what am I trying to say? It’s like when you say they’re going to kill you, you don’t mean they’re going to kill you. And pepper spray seemed more like something you use on somebody who’s actually going to kill you. It felt weird, like the whole issue was not exactly life or death except in Will’s head. Like he took it and made it that way, and I couldn’t stop him.
    I felt like I was in the middle in this weird way that’s hard to explain. I wasn’t going to try to excuse those guys. Because they were plenty bad enough. But they weren’t as bad as they were in Will’s current brain. And I knew it.
    Just not what to do about it.
    But maybe it would make Will feel better to carry it. And it would never come out of his pocket if nothing went wrong.
    Maybe I should have said something. But I didn’t.
    So, back to today. Today we went back to school.
    Now, this was the first time any of those people had seen Will since he tried to kill himself. So it was like that silence thing all over again. But a little different this time. Not silent like pity, more silent like fear. Like they were afraid of him. Which I could immediately see was going to work on our side. I just didn’t know how long it would last.
    We never split up. When we had classes that weren’t together, I’d be slow to get up and gather my books, and by the time I got out to the hall, there he would be. Waiting to walk me to my next class. We just stuck together, and everybody left us alone.
    I still had really bad MTSD all day, but nothing happened.
    When we were walking home at the end of school, Will said, “Did you notice something interesting? How respectful everybody was? See, that’s the cool thing about carrying a weapon. You don’t even need to use it. Just carrying it changes you. Gives you more confidence. And then people know to stay out of your way.”
    I had a very different theory. I figured they all had the Lisa Muller syndrome.