A Game of Firsts (The Forest of Hands and Teeth) Read Free Page B

been able to look into Raf’s eyes right after he came back and there was nothing there.
    Not the boy I’d once wanted to kiss, not the boy who was always over for dinner helping himself to seconds, or the one who’d once pulled Danny out of the passenger seat after a car wreck on the way to school.
    My brother cried as he forced the saw into his friend’s neck, pushing his weight against it to sever the spinal column like they’d instructed on TV. Afterward he knelt on the roof, screaming. It was the first time either of us had ever killed something that had once been alive. I couldn’t see how it would ever be the last. Not in this new world.
    “ T HEY WERE ALL MY friends,” Danny whispers.
    I open my eyes to find him rolled on his side, facing me. The attic is stuffy, the air rancid and filled with moaning and scratching from below.
    “Who were?” I ask.
    “Everyone in your stories. They were all my friends. Germaine. Leroy. Micah.”
    I lift one shoulder. “So?”
    He rolls onto his back. The sun crams through the hole in the roof, turning our attic into a sauna. In a few hours the tree will start to shade the eastern slope and we’ll crawl outside and look for rescue, but for now we’re trapped.
    “You knew them better than I did,” he finally mutters.
    Because of the sense of pain in his voice I want to protest, but I don’t. “Who was your first?” I ask instead and in answer he rolls away.
    I let the silence fill the space between us until it grows so wide it could swallow the world. There’s a question neither one of us has had the courage to ask no matter how many times we discuss what to do next.
    “Are we going to make it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    It’s the most honest answer either one of us has.
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