“It’s not gonna work.”

“What do you know about it? Course it’s gonna work.”

“No, it’s not. I’ve seen you try a million times and it’s not gonna work this time just like it didn’t work last time and the time before that and the time—”

“Shut up, Raymond. I can’t focus with you griping like this.”

I fell silent, annoyed for some reason that Luke had called me Raymond instead of just Ray. Luke rolled halfway out from under the old car he was working on. He had a big smudge of grease on his cheek and his blonde hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. He tilted his head back so he could look me upside down in the eyes.

“You’ve got something there on your face,” I laughed.

“This is the face of a working man,” he said. “But by all means, keep sitting there on your butt criticizing my methods.”

“You mean there’s a method to all that banging you’re doing?” I said.

He grinned, then wheeled back under. “You just wait and see!” he called out, voice now muffled. I leaned back against the wall of his garage, watching the late afternoon light filter in through the open door. Little dust particles floated in the beams and slowly fell to the cold concrete, and I absentmindedly traced my name in the dust until my fingertip was black.

I didn’t know much about cars; I honestly didn’t know much about anything except running in circles around a track. But I liked hanging out with Luke, even if we spent most of our time in his stuffy garage while he worked on the car. He was funny and a little off-beat, and he already felt like an old friend. It was hard to believe we’d only met a few months before.

I clearly remembered that day. It was late January and I was walking around the neighborhood, exploring the streets I hadn’t been down yet. That winter I had taken to going on long walks after school despite the freezing temperatures. It was a way to stay out of my house and away from my family—ever since my little sister’s accident earlier that month it was hard to be around my parents.

This walk had been particularly cold, my breath fogging as soon as it left my mouth, like I was smoking an invisible cigarette. Even the trees seemed to shiver, their bare branches shaking in the wind. I walked with my head down, watching the lines in the sidewalk pass. If I took bigger steps, I could cross the squares in only two strides. I chanted the steps in my head, noting the telephone poles that stood every twelve steps, then started back at one . . . one, two, three, four, five, six . . . I liked the monotony it provided, the excuse to think of nothing else but the next step I had to take: seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven—THUNK! Something heavy from above banged into my head, then tumbled down at my feet. It was a dirty white tennis shoe. Odd. I rubbed my head with a gloved hand, looking up to see where it had come from.

Above me, a boy clung to a telephone pole, hand outstretched as if to catch the shoe that had just fallen. Its pair was clutched in his other hand, his arm wrapped around the pole. It looked like he had been untying them from the power line. He was balancing one foot on a single metal rung sticking out from the side. The rungs lined the pole all the way to the bottom, like a makeshift ladder.

“Oh god, I’m so sorry!” he called.

“Um, it’s ok,” I shouted back, still rubbing my head. “What are you doing up there?”

“Just wanted to see if these shoes would fit.”

“You what?”

“I wanted to—oh, just give me a sec. Here, catch!” With that, he dropped the other shoe in my direction and started making his way down. I caught it and watched him climb, using the narrow metal rungs, which were only wide enough to hold one foot at a time. He was moving surprisingly fast, completely unfazed by the height.

Suddenly, one of the rungs gave out underneath him, clattering to the concrete. He held on for a second, but lost his grip and started to tilt back, arms waving. It seemed to happen in slow motion. I ran forwards with the vague idea of catching him, my arms outstretched. WHAM! He crashed into me, and I found myself flat on my back, his body on top of mine. We both just lay there for a bit, breathing hard.

“Wow! That was insane!” he panted, scrambling up. He grabbed my arm and pulled me up, a smile on his face. “You ok?”

I gingerly rubbed my head again, wincing, “Yeah, I think I’m all right.”

The boy stuck out his hand. “I’m Luke.”

“I’m Raymond, but most people just call me Ray,” I said, grasping his hand. He seemed to be about my age, maybe sixteen or seventeen.

“I’m sorry about dropping that shoe on you, and falling on you.”

“It’s all right. Happens all the time.”

“Really?”

“What? No, that was a joke.” I gave a half-hearted laugh.

“Oh,” he paused, then said with the same enthusiasm as earlier, “Say, want to come to my place? It’s not far from here. I’ll show you an old car I found the other day!” I stared at him for a bit, startled by the sudden invite. Something about his wide smile felt disarming yet welcoming at the same time. He wasn’t the kind of guy I usually hung out with. I preferred people I could figure out in the first conversation, people who wore stereotypes like a badge of honor, normal people. This guy, Luke, felt . . . unpredictable.

Before I could give my response, Luke grabbed the shoe from my hand—I had forgotten I was holding it—picked up the other one from the sidewalk, and started towards his house.

“Well are you coming?” he called over his shoulder.

My only other options were to keep walking in the cold or go back to my house, so instead, shrugging, I jogged to catch up.

Now it was early summer, and I was still waiting for Luke to repair that stupid car, the one he had shown me the first time I went to his house. He kept announcing he had finally fixed it, then turned the key in the ignition only to hear the motor feebly grumble to life and then promptly lose all will to live. I was betting this effort would be no different.

“Ready to give her a spin?” Luke asked, pushing himself out from underneath the car.

“Oh, I’m ready, but if it doesn’t work we’re getting the hell out of this garage. It’s way too hot in here, and I think the dust is giving me lung cancer as we speak.”

Luke rolled his eyes, nimbly vaulting over the low door and into the driver’s seat.

“All aboard!” he said.

With a groan, I got to my feet and climbed over the door into the passenger seat. The car was an 80s red convertible that desperately needed a coat of paint and could use some new seats; the old tan fabric was ripping at the seams. I still didn’t know where he had found it—I didn’t know where he got most of his random crap.

Luke was like a magnetic force that attracted all the broken and random junk no one else wanted or noticed anymore. Those things piled up around him, stuffed into the nooks and crannies of his life. He had a collection of old cracked vinyls, drawers full of bottle caps, stacks of dusty books, and photo albums stuffed with random pictures. And he proudly wore the white tennis shoes he had almost broken his neck for that day we first met. Apparently, he had created the ladder himself, nailing in old tent spikes as he climbed up. No wonder one of them gave out.

And one memorable day, he had shown up at my door with a mangy orange cat in his arms, and told me I had to keep it cause his mom’s allergic. The thing smelled like peaches, but was filthy and had a ripped ear. I wondered if Luke had sprayed some of his mom’s perfume on it to make it seem more appealing. Luke deposited the cat in my arms, and I watched him walk back down the road towards his house a few blocks over. Then, I dumped the thing on my front porch and went inside. Well what do you know, two weeks later and the damn cat still hangs around my house and I can’t get it to leave. Luke had a way of making things stick, and his collecting obsession knew no limits or social norms.

I was wondering if the cat was still on my porch while I watched Luke jam the key into the car and close his eyes. He seemed to be saying a prayer—I’m not sure to who cause I know he’s not religious. He took a deep breath through his nose, then breathed out slowly through his mouth.

“Okay, okay, enough of the melodramatic crap, you’re killing me with the suspense,” I laughed. He glared at me, but gave the key a turn, and I heard the engine turn over, once, twice, and then it was purring.

“Luke, you did it!” I yelled. “You. Did. It.” I punctuated each word with a slap to the dashboard. He was staring in astonishment at the wheel, and my words seemed to filter into his ears slowly, like he was underwater. Then, a huge grin split his face, followed by a smug look of triumph.

“Well of course I did, told you I would,” he said in an annoyingly nonchalant tone. But I guess he deserved some bragging rights after working on it for months. “Ok, let’s see what she can do.”

He eased the car out of the garage and onto the street. I held my breath, waiting for the engine to fail, but it only grew stronger, growling contentedly with new life and purpose. Our shouts of triumph cut through the quiet suburban air, but we fell off when old Mrs. Thompson, watering her flower beds, gave us a reproachful glare.

“Don't mind her,” Luke laughed. “She’s just jealous my garden looks so much nicer than hers.” I shrugged, not convinced Luke’s jungle of a yard was Mrs. Thompson’s idea of a “nice garden.” Though I had noticed that over the spring Luke’s front yard had slowly grown from a neat lawn with a few bushes to a tangle of young trees and flower beds. I had assumed that plants had become one of the many things that had caught Luke’s eye. It was impressive how many trees he had planted in such a previously austere space. It gave the yard a wild, out-of-place look, to see a small jungle in the middle of suburbia.

I wasn’t sure where we were driving, but Luke seemed confident so I let him take the lead on navigation. The wind felt crisp and refreshing after being holed up in the garage for so long. I didn’t start getting nervous until Luke pulled onto the highway.

“Hey, do you really think the engine can take this?” I had to raise my voice over the wind as Luke picked up speed.

“You’re always worrying about stuff, Ray. Chill out, it’ll be fine,” he replied.

As the sun started sinking below the horizon, a weak orange spread across the sky, tinged with a faint pink, and dense pines loomed up on either side of the two-lane highway.

“Not much of a sunset tonight,” I said.

“I think it’s nice. Kind of looks like watercolors. Hey, um . . . how’s the cat doing? Have you named her yet?”

“Yeah, I’m calling it Peaches,” I lied, thinking of its odd, peachy scent.

“Oh, cool.” He paused, and I could tell that wasn’t the question he had really wanted to ask.

He bit his lip, then blurted out,“Ray, how are you holding up?” I glanced over to see him gripping the wheel, eyes looking straight ahead. “I know we never really talked about it, but I want you to know if you ever need anything . . .” He trailed off awkwardly, and I stayed quiet.

“So you know about that, then?” I finally said.

“Yeah, my parents told me when we started hanging out, that there was some kind of car accident—”

“She’s dead, Luke, what else is there to say?”

“A lot more, I think.”

“This isn’t really any of your business. I don’t want to think about this.”

“Well as your friend, I’m making this my business. You need to talk about this, process your emotions. Whatever happened is gonna eat you alive if you don’t let it out.”

“Yeah? ‘Eat me alive.’ Don't you think that’s a little dramatic? Why do you care so much anyways?”

“I just . . . think it might help if you could talk about it. I’ve never even heard you say her name."

“Fine. You want to know what happened? One day everything was happy and normal, and I had friends, and I talked to my parents, and the next day, Natalie was dead.”

“What happened to your friends?”

“I don’t know, they all just sorta of left.”

“And what, I don’t count? Aren’t we friends?”

“I don’t know, are we? Or am I just another thing for you to fix? Another poor, broken thing that came crawling to you for help, and you just couldn’t wait to get started on your new project!” I said, raising my voice more than I intended. “Now that you’re done with the car, you need something else to work on? Well guess what. You can’t fix something like this. Someone like me.” I paused breathing hard. “And also, I didn’t name that stupid cat Peaches, I didn’t even take it inside. Wanna know why? Because it’s not my cat, Luke! It’s not something for me to take care of!”

Suddenly, the engine gave a loud splutter, the whole car vibrating, and then with a loud bang the engine died all together. Luke veered off onto the side of the road.

“Well there goes the engine,” I said, not trying to hide the accusatory tone from my voice. It was an unfortunate spot to stall out. A dead possum was just a few feet away, and I could immediately smell its stench. The thing’s head was mostly intact, but the body had been crushed nearly in half. Blood dried on its mouth like a sick imitation of lipstick, and its intestines, swarming with flies, piled out of a ripped stomach. The site and the smell was nauseating.

I looked away, back to Luke to see what his plan was. He had hopped out of the car and was moving towards the lid. I wondered if he had any chance of fixing whatever was wrong. But Luke moved past the car, and instead squatted down beside the possum. I didn’t know how he could get so close to it without vomiting.

“Hey, what are you doing man? Can you fix the car?” I said.

“I’ll look at that in a second. This poor old possum sure took a beating.”

“What’s the possum got to do with it?” I said, annoyed.

Luke didn’t reply right away. Instead, he reached out and carefully picked up the possum’s head, holding it in his hand.

“Oh, come on, that's gross,” I groaned.

“Do you ever feel sorry for these guys? It’s like nobody cares that they’re smashed up on the side of the road, left for the vultures.”

“And how are you going to fix this one?” I said, surprised by the sarcasm in my tone. “It’s just playing dead, isn’t it? Just needs a stitch or two, a bath and some dinner and it’ll be alright?”

Luke dropped its head, standing up abruptly.

“Even I know when something’s unfixable,” he said, looking at me. I could hear the hurt in his voice, a hurt over something greater than just my jibe. A sudden wave of guilt washed over me. Maybe I had been pushing him away, putting up walls, but how else could I handle what had happened to my sister? It wasn’t something I could talk about. The words stacked up my throat, but they refused to come out, choking me.

Luke popped the hood, shielding him from my view as a billow of smoke streamed out.

“Well lucky for you, I’ve left some tools in the trunk. Or maybe we should just walk back, since I guess I’m so bad at fixing things,” he said.

“Luke, look I’m sorry—”

“No, no need to apologize, Ray. I get it, it’s too much to ask you to be vulnerable with me. We’ve only known each other a few months, afterall. I guess that’s not long enough to really be friends.” His voice was icy, and he allowed the popped hood to hide his face.

I looked down at my hands, listening to the soft clinks and clanks as Luke worked on the engine. I had pushed away my friends, my parents, everyone who knew me, expertly disentangling myself since January from the messy web that was my life. Was I really going to lose Luke too? But I wasn’t ready to talk about my sister. As much as Luke had come to mean to me, I just couldn’t give him that part of myself yet.

Luke slammed the lid down. “I think that should do it,” he said, still avoiding looking at me. I could now see the dead possum again with the hood back down; I had forgotten it was there. It still lay prone on the side of the road, and I felt an unexpected sadness that we were leaving him there, “for the vultures,”’ as Luke had said. Something suddenly became very clear to me as I looked at the bloody mess. There were enough broken things in this world, in my life, without me adding my friendship with Luke to the list.

Luke threw the tools in the back trunk and stalked over to the drivers side. For the second time that day, he slid the key into the ignition and paused. I watched in quiet anticipation, and he eventually turned the key. The engine gave a soft sputter, then began to purr again as it had before. There were no excited yells this time, the magic of the car fading with our argument. And then, staring straight ahead at the possum, waiting for Luke to pull out, I knew what to do. It was weird, but I thought it an oddly fitting way to make my apology.

“Wait, give me just a minute,” I said, hopping out of the car.

“And I thought you were desperate to get out of here,” Luke muttered.

I made my way over to the possum, looking down at its mangled body. I could feel Luke looking at me, his curiosity winning over his anger. I squatted down beside it, just as Luke had, suppressing a gag from the smell. Then I gingerly took it in my hands. The body felt relaxed in death, limp and helpless. I cradled it in my shirt, guts and all, and walked back to the car. I gently nestled it in the back seat, closing its small, beady eyes. The possum had left a vague imprint of its insides in slime and blood on the gray fabric of my t-shirt. I glanced at Luke, wondering if he was disgusted, or at least very confused. But he just had an amused look on his face, a soft smile playing across his lips.

“I’m assuming you’ve got some kind of plan?” he asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” I said, relieved the bitter tone had left both of our voices, the novelty of my action easing us out of our anger. “Let’s head back to your place.”

“Whatever you say,” he said.

Luke pulled a U-turn and started driving back the way we had come. We sat in silence again, but this time there was less tension in the quiet. Thankfully, the brisk evening wind blew away the possum’s smell.

The trees kept whipping by, and soon we were taking the exit back towards our neighborhood. We slowly pulled up to his house, parking the car on the street. The sun had finally slipped beneath the horizon, and as dusk transitioned into night, the small trees in his front yard loomed up as if out of nowhere. I got out of the car and looked in the back. The possum was still there—it had not miraculously sprung back to life on the ride home. But maybe there were other solutions to its problems, even in death.

I turned to Luke, who now stood beside me. “Do you think you could grab—”

“A shovel? On it.” He headed towards the garage and disappeared inside. I wrapped the possum back in my t-shirt, holding it as carefully as before, then waded into Luke’s jungle of a yard. The trees were about my height, and their young green leaves brushed against my shoulders as I passed them. I stopped at a sapling smaller than the rest, knelt down on my knees, and laid the possum’s body on the ground.

It looked more at home here than beside the hard pavement of the highway, and the growing darkness hid the more gory details of its appearance. Soon Luke materialized beside me, holding two long shovels. He passed one to me and we set to digging without a word, as if this had been the plan all along, the whole reason Luke had fixed the car in the first place and driven it down that highway.

The shovels bit into the dirt near the base of the sapling, casting it off with a soft sigh. Crickets and frogs chirruped while a warm summer breeze rustled the leaves. I couldn’t help but think of a different grave, a different funeral, while I dug. This time, though, the memories seemed to come softer, easier to remember, to feel, like I could reach out and hold them in my hands, cold and limp and fragile.

Tears collected in my eyes dripped down my face onto the ground. Though they tentatively leaked from my eyes, they opened a floodgate in my mind, and this time I didn’t stop the images of that night rushing back, or the sentences falling from my lips. I imagined them splashing into the dirt beside my tears as I finally put words to my memories and told Luke the story I had kept inside of me since January, the story of how my sister died:

It was still cold and snowy the week after New Year’s, and with the holiday season over, it felt like all the festivity had been sucked out of the air. Even the snow looked more gray than white. I was sitting at the kitchen table, laptop open, trying to finish an essay due the night before school started back from break. My watch beeped, telling me it was midnight. The house was dark; everything was quiet.

I heard the soft padding of someone walking down the stairs and looking up, surprised that anyone else was still awake. It was Natalie, and she was heading for the front door, bundled up in her down coat and scarf. I could tell she hadn’t noticed me sitting there, watching her sneak towards the door.

“Where ya going?” I asked. She jumped about a foot in the air, whipping her head around.

“Oh, it’s you,” she laughed nervously. “Could’ve sworn you were Dad.”

“People say I look more like him every year,” I laughed. “And you’re sneaking out of the house because—”

“Because it’s the big bonfire tonight. You know, the one they always do before school starts back. Be a good little brother and don’t tell Mom and Dad I’m going, they’d kill me if they knew.”

“You still go to those? Aren’t you seniors supposed to be above all that now?”

“Oh come on, you know it’s going to be a good time. You could still come!”

“Can’t, I have to finish this essay.”

She sighed. “You’re no fun.”

I rolled my eyes. “Just be careful driving. It’s snowy out there!” I called as she carefully closed the door behind her.

I finished my essay and went to bed before she got back. But, in the morning she wasn’t in her room when I went to see what was taking her so long to get ready for school. And her car wasn’t in the driveway. A sick feeling settled in my stomach as I watched a cop car pull up to our house and park in the spot her car should have been in.

He must have knocked on the door, been invited in. Then gently explained to me and my parents that early that morning they found a car on a deserted highway that had careened off the icy road and crashed into a tree. They had traced the plates back to our house. But I don’t remember anything past seeing his car where my sister’s car should have been, and replaying my last conversation with her over and over again in my mind.

After that is when I started avoiding my house, when I stopped really caring about anything. I missed most of the track season. My friends wondered where I had disappeared to, but after a month of ignored calls, they stopped trying to reach out. I couldn’t really blame them. And I never told my parents about that final conversation I had with Natalie. I had never told anyone.

When I stopped talking, the hole now reached three feet into the earth. I stared down into

the dark grave, feeling like my guts were now spilled out beside the possum’s, glistening in the moonlight.

“So I guess it really was my fault,” I said. “If I had just told her not to go, or gone with her and kept her safe, or told my parents-–”

“How could that be your fault?” Luke said, cutting me off.

“What do you mean? I could have stopped the whole thing from happening! If I had just said something—”

“Your sister made her own choices, Ray.”

“Yeah, but what about my choices?”

“I don’t know. You can’t change what happened, but you can’t drown yourself in your own guilt thinking about all the what-ifs. That burden isn’t yours to carry.”

I stood there quietly, thinking. Those reasons that had once felt weak and flimsy in my own head, but when Luke said them, they sounded true, even obvious. I felt so much lighter now after telling him the story, like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Maybe . . . maybe he was right. I turned back to the possum.

“Let’s finish what we started.”

I lifted up the small body and set it in the grave, arranging it so it looked like it was curled up and sleeping, its tail tucked around its furry body. There was a soft sh sh sh as we shoveled the dirt back into the hole. When the final shovel-full had been tossed on top, I patted the mound down and stepped back to admire our work.

“It’s just missing one thing,” Luke said, walking away. He returned carrying a large stone, which he nestled on top of the grave. We just stood there for a bit, in the darkness of the trees.

“I think I need to go home now,” I said eventually.

“Want a ride?” Luke asked, gesturing to the car still parked on the street, just visible through the leaves.

“I think I’ll just walk.”

I emerged from the trees and began to walk down the sidewalk. Then, I began to jog, enjoying the feeling of the summer breeze on my face, listening to the sounds of my shoes hitting the pavement.

My mind was blank, quiet, and I let my feet guide me down the road, taking unconscious turns. The street lamps created pools of light on the pavement, and they intermittently bathed me in their glow until I entered the darkness again. Soon, I was standing outside of my house, not sure if I was ready to face what was inside. I slowed down, stepping on the stone path that made little islands in the uncut grass, and walked up the creaking steps to the porch.

Light spilled out of the windows, and I saw my parents sitting together at the kitchen table in quiet conversation. I went to open the screen door, unsure if I would sneak up the stairs or brave the kitchen, when I nearly stepped on the cat. She was curled up on the doormat, and I noticed her there just in time to back up. She sat up, tucking her paws daintily against her furry stomach, and gave a soft meow as if to say hello.

I stared down at her, wondering what she had been waiting for all this time, wondering why she thought I would finally care. I bent to pet her, and she let out a soft purr as I rubbed her head. The dirt had fallen off over the weeks, but the faint smell of peaches remained. I scooped her up into my arms and held her to me. She was a soft ball of warmth against my chest, and I could feel our two hearts beating together.

Here, at least, was something that was still alive, not yet cold and still and broken. A small, pulsing life that needed me. Cradling the cat in one arm, I opened the door and brought her inside to introduce her to my parents, ready to tell them a hard story, but a story that would give them a piece of their daughter back, and a piece of their son as well.