The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson

danced in his eyes. I had to say something to calm him down, but he looked so far gone I wasn’t sure he’d hear me. He tightened his grip, pulling me up on my tiptoes. His free hand was balled into a fist. He had never hit me before, not once.
The wind shifted, swirling the smoke around us.
I braced myself.
The smoke made him blink. He swallowed and cleared his throat. He opened his hand, let go of my shirt, and started to cough.
I let out a shaky breath but didn’t move, afraid to set him off again. He turned his back to me, bent over with his hands on his knees and coughed hard, then spit in the dirt and stood up. The smoke shifted direction and I breathed in. Breathed out. On the inhale I was angry. On the exhale . . . there it was again. Fear. The fear made me angry and the anger made me afraid and I wasn’t sure who he was anymore. Or who I was.
High above his head, an arrowed flock of geese was flying south. The sound of their honking moved slower than their bodies, floating down to the bonfire a few heartbeats after they moved out of range. A cloud moved in front of the sun, dimming the light and shrinking the shadows.
My phone rang and Dad jumped up as if it had given him an electric shock. Without a word he grabbed it and pitched it into the fire.
    good morning want 2 go 2 paris? “Who’s that?” Dad asked.

_ * _ 34 _ * _
    Small, ancient men lead us up the mountain to their village. I can’t speak their language. My interpreter claims he can.
    Yesterday, the enemy set up grenade launchers on the flat roof of a house here. They fired at our outpost, corrected the angle and fired again. And again. Every shot looked like a small, red flower blooming across the valley. They rained destruction on our heads, distracting us so that we weren’t ready for the men who poured into our camp, weapons blazing.
    Nine of my soldiers had to be evacuated. Two died before they made it back to base. We killed four insurgents and captured four more.
    At the end of the battle, our air support fired missiles through the front door of the house, turning it into a hole in the side of the mountain.
    The old men take us there. A tiny hand, stained with blood and dust, pokes out of the rubble. The old men shout at us.
“What are they saying?” I ask.
“We got the wrong house,” the interpreter says.
We blew up a house filled with children and mothers and toothless grandmothers. The insurgent house sits empty, a stone’s throw away.
The ancient men yell at me and shake their fists.
I understand every word they say.

_ * _ 35 _ * _
    “Fifty people saw you at the game,” Topher said. “Stop lying.”
    The first-period cafeteria was quiet, everyone in mourning for the death of another weekend.
“I’m not lying,” I repeated. “The whole thing was weird. He’s weird. Isn’t he, G?”
Gracie nodded, absently chewing on a fingernail. Something was up with her; she had no makeup on, her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and it smelled like she hadn’t brushed her teeth.
Topher reached across the cafeteria table and tore a piece off my muffin. “He said he tried to text you a million times.”
“He exaggerated,” I said. “He texted me twice. Then my phone died.”
(I was not about to explain how.)
I’d spent the rest of Saturday watching cooking shows. Dad stayed by the fire, his back to the house. When I woke up at noon on Sunday, a brand-new phone, expensive, sat on the kitchen table next to a note that read Sorry . He came home a few hours later, his arms heavy with grocery bags. I put the food away and made a pot of chili. He watched football, the volume turned up loud enough that I could hear it in my room, even with my music cranked as high as it would go.
I knew that he was waiting for me to say thanks, but I didn’t want to. Buying me a new phone we couldn’t afford was pathetic. His “sorry,” didn’t mean anything.
Enough. Thinking didn’t help anything.
I pulled myself back to real time. “It