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Back When the Light Went Out Save as PDF
Chapters (46)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Part One
  6. 1
  7. July 11
  8. 2
  9. July 11
  10. 3
  11. July 11
  12. 4
  13. July 11
  14. 5
  15. July 11
  16. 6
  17. July 11
  18. 7
  19. Part Two
  20. 8
  21. July 11
  22. 9
  23. July 11
  24. 10
  25. July 11
  26. 11
  27. July 11
  28. 12
  29. July 11
  30. 13
  31. July 11
  32. 14
  33. July 11
  34. 15
  35. Part Three
  36. 16
  37. 17
  38. 18
  39. 19
  40. 20
  41. 21
  42. Acknowledgments
  43. Excerpt from What You Left Me
  44. About the Author
  46. Back Cover

My dear Ruby stood alone at the edge of the parking lot, legs crossed over one another as she smoked one of her pointless cigarettes. Her eyes were trained on the people walking up. Earlier in the day, I’d told her to stay outside the tent until I arrived. In all the spectacle of the actual event, I’d forgotten to find her. There she was, waiting for me. Like always.

The rest of our old friends would never bother to do that. No surprise. They always noticed my presence; never seemed to notice my absence.

It was a testament to my resilience that I didn’t end up as the odd man out in the years after Marley’s death. Nick explained to everyone what happened that day. How I resisted. It didn’t change the fact that the whole town—and our whole group—wanted it to be me who pulled the trigger. I was an Elmer’s Glue addendum to my older sister’s friends. An eleven-year-old girl who could never get it right for most of them. Always making things bigger than they were. Whatever I happened to be on any given day, I was always too much of it. Too sensitive. Too tough. Too imaginative. I was the one who had to go everywhere, “because our parents said so,” the ultimate indisputable argument to a group of unsupervised kids. Ranked eighth out of eight in terms of importance.

1. Marley (15 years old)

2. Aidy (14 years old)

3. Teeny (13 years old)

4. Bigs (13 years old)

5. Harrison (14 years old)

6. Ruby (12 years old)

7. Nick (11 years old)

8. Me (11 years old)

An order as fixed as Earth’s rotation.

I was the youngest, the most emotional, perceived as the general worst to most everyone else in the group. But I was the one who saw what happened that day. The witness, not the villain or the victim. I was the one who got the task of representing the tragedy. Representing our whole group: the kids of Albany Lane.

I was the one who’d spent the last five years carrying Marley everywhere I went.

July 11

Five Years Prior

An antique clock in the shape of a birdhouse hung over the couch in Marley’s living room. The small, stuffed bird that lived inside burst out every hour on the hour. I’d studied him often over the years, waiting for his grand appearance every time the big hand landed on twelve. He was an odd-looking thing. He had a mottled brown underbelly and a grayish-brown chest. A distinctive black plume jutted out from the crown of his head, with a matching black bib under his beak. His front door would swing open, and he’d slide forward on his perch to chirp out his cheery tune, a brassy smattering of notes that had gone flat over the years.