Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📕

coast of Wisconsin. A storm had brought them there, thrashing their boat and their bodies against the rocks. DJ was never allowed to see them, which made it worse. He imagined his brothers’ broken bones, torn skin, crushed heads. He pictured their last moments, when they knew they would die. He later found out they had drowned, had already been dead before their bodies were broken, but the images still remained.

The night after they were found, his father brought DJ home. He said nothing in the car, spoke no words when they arrived at their stuffy, empty house. People came over every few hours during that first week, neighbors and church friends filling their refrigerator with lasagna and weird hot dishes. Then came the funeral and, after that, silence.

For days after, Josiah didn’t speak. DJ tried asking him questions. He tried pretending to fall and hurt himself. He did the things he knew annoyed his father the most: played Charles’s drum kit in the barn, whistled loudly while he peed, drank from the orange juice carton. None of it made a difference.

Then he remembered the plant. It was in his mother’s sunroom, the special sanctuary his father had built for her when they bought the house. The leaves were a bright, eye-catching red; she had planted it herself using seeds from the bigger version growing wild on the farm. He had brought it to school for show and tell once, without asking his father, and when Josiah found out, he had screamed at DJ until the vein in his jaw turned purple. He told him the seeds on the plant would make him sick and it was too dangerous to bring to school.

Maybe the plant would wake his father up.

DJ brought it out to the dining room table and set it in the center, pushing aside a week’s worth of dirty dishes to make room. He left it there and went up to his room when he heard Josiah coming. He expected to hear his father’s feet stamping up the stairs any second, but they never came.

When he went down for breakfast the next morning, his father was sitting there, drinking his coffee with the plant in front of him. It was like he didn’t even see it.

The anger swirled in DJ like a funnel cloud. His brothers were gone, but he was still here, and if his father didn’t even notice the bright colorful buds on this sacred plant, then what hope did he have? Then it came to him: if he got sick, his father would have to take care of him.

When Josiah left for work, DJ plucked one of the pods from the plant, cracked it open, and popped the brown seed in his mouth. It was oily, but not bitter.

DJ picked up his backpack and went to school.

At lunch, DJ’s stomach started cramping when he ate his peanut butter sandwich. His mouth and throat burned like he had swallowed a lit match. By the end of the day, his body was radiating fever. He stumbled home holding his gut and collapsed on the sofa with a glass of lukewarm water on the coffee table. He awoke to a sensation he’d never felt before: the pressure of father’s rough palm on his forehead. Josiah picked him up and brought him to his own bed, laying him down on what DJ knew was his mother’s side, even though he’d never had the chance to see her resting there.

He drifted back to sleep.

The next day, his father stayed home from work and cared for him, leaving cool compresses on his forehead and feeding him tepid broth. He sat by DJ’s bed and read from the Bible, just like he had every night before Thomas and Charles died. There was a warm comfort to it, the sound of his father’s voice wrapped around the poetry of Psalms and the wisdom of Proverbs. Those were his two favorite books; all the advice you needed in the world was right there—that’s what Josiah always said.

DJ shifted between sleep and wakefulness without being conscious of the transition. Once he opened his eyes and his father was lying down next to him, eyes closed and tears streaming down his face. “Please,” he was whispering. “Please, not him. You promised me.”

Each time that he woke, he only felt worse. A doctor friend of Josiah’s came and scanned his body, and DJ thought about telling him, but his father refused to leave the room, and he couldn’t bear the idea of the wrath he knew his confession would inspire.

But when the doctor came back the next day, DJ couldn’t even move, his entire body a mass of sore, dried-out muscle from days of vomiting and diarrhea. When he saw the grim expression on the doctor’s face, the childlike expectation that he would soon feel better was finally replaced with a spark of terror. “Can I talk to you alone?” he whispered to the doctor. The man looked at DJ’s father, who hesitated before leaving the room.

As soon as DJ whispered what he’d done, the doctor picked him up and rushed him out of the house. Josiah followed along, barking questions as the boy was shoved in the backseat of the doctor’s car. Both men got in the front, and the doctor gunned the engine.

The time at the hospital came and went in flashes. There was the needle in DJ’s arm and the beeping of machines and the concerned faces hovering over his as he opened and closed his heavy eyes. Then suddenly he was awake and remembered what it was like not to be in constant pain, not to feel like someone was turning his stomach inside out. His father was next to him, but when he saw DJ’s eyes open, his face did not look relieved. There was something else there instead, a darkness DJ had never seen before.

Three days later, he was allowed to leave the hospital.

Josiah said nothing to him when they