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in her head. I waited. But she just kept opening her mouth and not saying anything.
    “Are you ashamed of him?”
    “No! Of course not.”
    “Then why didn't you ever take his picture?”
    “Well, honey, it's just that …” Another long wait. Another minute of my life I'd never get back.
    “ What? It's just what, Mom? Spit it out.”
    “Well, it's just that those are all special occasion pictures. You know. We took pictures of the family when one of us was doing something special.”
    “And Bill never did anything? Is that it?”
    “You're blowing this all out of proportion,” she said. You could see her make that shift in her head, where she decided to act defensive to make me go away.
    “You're unbelievable,” I said.
    Then I went into the kitchen and took my drawing of Bill off the refrigerator. It wasn't really that good. I took it into the living room and tore it up right in front of her.
    “There. Now we have no pictures of Bill. What are we going to do about it?”
    She just rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette. She never answered. Like, what's new?
    I threw the pieces up into the air, and we both watched them flutter down onto the rug like confetti. Then I went away, which I'm sure is what she'd wanted all along.
    After school that day I wrote a letter to Nanny and Grampop. It said, “Please take a picture of Bill and send it to me. So I have something to remember him by.”
    Otherwise you could look around this house and think maybe he was just a dream I had. Maybe he really never existed at all.
    The night after that Mom and Zack had a fight. A big one. And then, the next night, they had another.
    I spent about six whole days up in that tree, alone, pretending I might wake up in a whole different world. And that's all it was, too. Pretending. All the time I knew it was stupid, and that I was too old for that junk, but somethingabout it being Zack's idea made it seem a tiny bit less than impossible.
    The night he left I woke up when his motorcycle kicked over. I climbed down fast, but he was out the driveway and headed down the street. I ran after him for almost two blocks, yelling his name as loud as I could, even though I knew he couldn't hear me.
    My throat hurt and my lungs were ready to burst, and besides, the neighbors were turning on their porch lights and coming out to see. So I just waved my arms in case he looked in his rearview mirror, but I should have known he had no cause to look back. I kept thinking if I could get on the back of that bike, I could disappear with him. Forever. Then he turned a corner and he was gone.
    When I got home I rousted Mom out of bed. “Where did Zack go?”
    She said, “Don't you yell at me, young lady.”
    I didn't even know I'd been yelling. But I also didn't care. “I have to know, Mom. I have to know where he went, so I can write to him.”
    “I don't know,” she said. “I don't know and I don't care, so get out of my room and let me get some sleep.”
    That pissed me off, that she talked to me like that. It pissed me off that she made Zack go. I guess really I'd been pissed at her ever since Bill got taken away. I guess I'd been sitting on this big ball of blaming her for everything. It's like I'd been afraid to even start with that. It was like a locked-up thing I was afraid to even open.
    I took that ugly pottery lamp off the bedside table andsmashed it on the floor. Just for a split second I watched it start to fly apart, and then the room was dark. I waited. To see what she would do. Nothing. I couldn't even hear her moving.
    I went to stomp out, but on the very first step I got a big sharp piece of pottery in my foot. I wanted to yell out, but I didn't. It'd be weak. Besides, it was my fault that crap was on the floor. I had no right to say ouch. I didn't get to cry.
    I hobbled out into the kitchen and turned on the light, and pulled the piece of lamp out of my foot, and put on a Band-Aid so I wouldn't keep bleeding on the floor. I didn't clean up