glycerine raze i can't remember who killed who. i think his dad killed his mom and then he killed himself. rob wasn't dead, but his parents were. that was why he didn't show up at school. all the girls were sitting at their desks and crying. the principal told us if we needed to talk to someone it was okay. i looked at peter. he wasn't crying. i wasn't crying either. we didn't know what we were supposed to do. we thought there was something wrong with us. death was something i saw happen in movies. rambo pumped a million bullets into the bad guys and blew them up with grenades and i thought it was the best thing i'd ever seen. i wanted to be him. i watched the third "rambo" movie so many times the tape should have disintegrated. i knew it wasn't real. nobody really died. those were actors who pretended to get killed, and if they did a really good job of pretending, maybe they'd get brought back to life in another movie so they could die all over again. maybe a shark would eat them. maybe they'd get thrown out of a plane or something. the hero never died. it didn't matter if he was wounded and outnumbered and outgunned. he always found a way. then this kid at our school got leukemia. his dad was always paying for advertising space in the back of the yearbook. he was always smiling. we all went to the funeral. i looked at this boy i never knew lying in a box. he was twelve. he looked like he was six. he was so small. he had no hair. his skin was a colour i didn't know skin could be. this wasn't a movie. this was real. people died. not just old people. not just evil people. children who never did anything to hurt anyone. they died too. their fathers could pay for all the advertising space in the world and it wouldn't make a difference. it would just be ink on paper in the back of a book no one cared about. his name was roberto. he was the hero in the movie of his father's life. and he was dead. the rob who wasn't dead came back to school. he seemed okay. we had a party at ashley's house in the summer. she was leaving to go to some other school in some other city. she was rob's girlfriend. i married them. "dearly beloved," i said. "we are gathered here today to join these two people in holy macaroni." i stole that from an episode of "perfect strangers" where balki had to stand in for a priest. i said "for butter or for moist" instead of "for better or for worse". that got a good laugh. ashley didn't laugh. she didn't smile. she didn't say anything. when you're young and you've never lost anyone, i don't think you know what an ending is. you think everything you care about is going to last forever, or at least long enough to leave a mark. you don't understand that every day you wake up you're a walking miracle, because you're still alive. and when you love someone and it's the first time you're able to name what you feel, you don't think you'll ever feel that way about anyone else. just thinking about that person not being there anymore makes you ache. you feel old before you know what old is. you don't know anything. you have no idea how lucky you are. some of the kids danced to "glycerine" under the veranda. i watched the day disappear. rob had his hands around ashley's waist. she put her head on his shoulder. he didn't look sad. he was twelve years old and his heart was breaking, but it wasn't the end of the world. it was just the end of this. he knew that. he knew more about endings than all the rest of us put together. 211010 ... tender square the range of emotional nuance in this piece is such a stunning sight to behold. wow. 211010 what's it to you? who go blather from