Where We Used to Roam by Jenn Bishop (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📕

that he’s the same Austin he was a year ago. Even though I know that’s not possible.

“I’m okay. I just—I tripped.”

“Let me get some bacitracin for you,” Mom says, squeezing past me to go inside.

“I already took care of it.”

“You know, sometimes I forget how much you’ve grown up.” Mom does that little smile and head tilt that makes me think she might cry.

“Mom, stop,” I say, and she does. I head into the backyard. Austin follows me out to the couple of worn-out Adirondack chairs and sits down first. There’s a football resting in one of them, and he picks it up and starts gently passing it from one hand to the other. “You going to tell me what happened?” He gestures to my shirt.

“Do you remember Becca’s kitty blanket?”

“That ratty old thing? Yeah, what about it?”

And so I tell him. About what happened at Camp McSweeney, but also what happened before and after. How maybe my friendship with Becca is kind of like the kitty blanket. I still need it, even though it isn’t everything it once was to me.

Maybe it isn’t just that I was outgrowing Becca this year but that she was outgrowing me, too. This summer we both made new friends. Even if Tyler is two thousand miles away now, I know he’s there for me, just like Delia is for my mom. And he gets it, everything that’s going on with Austin. Probably more than Becca ever could.

“I hope people still aren’t making fun of her when school starts.” I pick at some flaky paint on the chair.

“You think people will still remember?” Austin leans back in the chair. With his longer hair, he doesn’t look so much like star-quarterback Austin anymore. But he doesn’t look like he has problems with drugs either. I guess there’s a lot you can’t tell just from looking at a person. “In September? Em, middle school moves waaaaay too fast for stuff like this. Trust me, it’ll feel like a blip by the time you’re back in school. Everyone will have moved on over the summer. There’ll be five billion other things to care about.”

“Really?” It’s hard to imagine at first—all I can think of are those last few days at school and the endless meowing. But then I think about this summer and how much can change in just a month.

I don’t know what I was thinking, imagining we could go back to the people we used to be. Like the buffalo. They came back from almost dying off, but it’s not like things went back to the way they were before. They couldn’t roam the plains anymore. There were too many people. The whole country had changed.

You can never really go back.

And even if I could, would I want to?

Would I really want to be the Emma who’d never been friends with Kennedy and Lucy? Who’d never met Tyler? The Emma who’d never traveled two thousand miles by herself and lived in Wyoming for the summer? The Emma who’d never saved a buffalo?

I don’t want to be that Emma again, even if I could.

Is that true for Austin, too? Or does he want to go back to before, even if it’s impossible? There’s so much I haven’t asked my brother. So much I want to. All summer long, I couldn’t. But now he’s right here, in the chair next to me.

“Austin,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Why did you—” I start and stop. He’s looking right at me. One hundred percent at me, like how he used to. “Sorry. It’s just, I don’t understand why you would do drugs. Your life before, it was perfect.”

“Perfect?” He laughs, and then his eyes shift to something off in the distance. He sits there so still that for a second I think maybe I shouldn’t have said it. Maybe after what happened the other day, it’s too soon.

He chews on his lip, and I worry he’s going to cry or lash out at me. Something. But he doesn’t. He says, so plainly, “Nobody’s life is perfect, Em. If there’s one thing I learned at rehab, it is definitely that. But I don’t know.… I don’t think there’s one why. At least for me. There are a lot of reasons, and I’m still—I guess I’m still untangling them. If that makes any sense.”

Even though I’m not entirely sure what Austin’s saying, I nod. Because he’s finally being honest with me. He’s telling me his truth.

But maybe there are some truths you can’t tell with only words.

“Hey, Austin?”

“Yeah?”

“I need to run inside and get something, but can you stay right here? I’ll be right back. It’ll only take a second.”

“Sure, Em.” He’s still holding that football in his palms when I leave him to get my sketchbook.

I think I know what to make for that art contest.

* * *

WHERE WE USED TO ROAM

EMMA O’MALLEY

AGE: 12

MIXED MEDIA

When Delia and her family returned from Yellowstone, she mailed my stuff back to me. Three big boxes of the mess I’d left behind in my room: all the stuff Tyler and I had found and then some. And of course my Becca box.

The idea came together as I talked to Austin that morning in the backyard, and right away, I knew which box made the most sense. I found it in the entryway closet, way up at the top. The shoebox that used to hold Austin’s football cleats.

Once my stuff arrived from Wyoming, on the inside of the box I glued pictures from those magazines Tyler and I had found at Goodwill: images of the plains and the beauty that once belonged to just the buffalo and the Native Americans. And in the center I tacked that portrait drawing I made last November in art class. The one of Austin.

I decoupaged the outside of the box with newspaper articles about the opioid epidemic. They weren’t hard to find. The Boston Globe had at least one in every issue. I cut them out every day for the rest of