Sol didn’t cry, all through the night, but he was very quiet. And the next day, Sunday, when his friends got together and talked about it, he still didn’t say much, even when they found out that Roxanne was actually dead.
Everyone reacted differently. Brandon wanted most to get the details straight. Chad felt bad for Adam: “I wonder what’s going to happen to him,” he said. Lenny cried, a whole lot, and he wasn’t ashamed. And Al was a complete contrast: it was spooky how he just stared blankly into space and at the ground with a cold face. But they were all quiet to some degree.
There wasn’t much else to say. One of their friends was dead, shot in the head by another friend, Adam. Except for Sol, they had all witnessed it. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, but she took six hours to die, and the fact that she was dead was the news the morning brought.
Around noon they all decided to go out to Adam’s house to see how he was doing. They took Chad’s car. Chad put the key in the ignition and suddenly Black Sabbath blared where it had left off; he reached forward and ejected the tape. “Not today,” he said quietly, smiling. He started the car and they drove back to the scene of their party the night before.
Sol had left early, before the third keg was cracked, but he had known the basic details of the shooting almost as soon as it had happened. He hadn’t been home fifteen minutes when his father, the town pastor, got a midnight call, and when he came home he told Sol, who had stayed up waiting, what had happened. For the benefit of Sol, before they went up the steps to Adam’s doorway they all stopped together and pointed to the place on the front lawn where Roxanne’s head had fallen. The blood was dried to the color of dirt on the grass. A couple of rains, maybe even the dew, would make it go away.
Inside, Adam sat on the couch in his living room, his eyes red from crying. Two of his cousins were there with him. One of them got up to answer the door, and he immediately ushered everyone into the kitchen and offered them beer. He said the police had come and gone and would be back later; apparently they had been convinced that Adam wasn’t going to go anywhere.
They all went into the next room and sat with Adam. They each made a few lame attempts at encouragement, then Chad got up and turned on the television. A football game was on, and they watched it for a while without talking. When it was halftime, Chad got up again and turned the television off.
“I guess we should go,” he said, but they didn’t stand up right away.
“Thanks for coming out here, guys,” Adam said finally, and they each went over to him and one at a time put a hand on his shoulder.
“We’ll stick with you on this,” they all said, and Sol said it too, but at the same time it hurt for each of them to say this, because they knew that their next stop was to go visit Roxanne’s boyfriend, Bobby, who had been out of town the night before.
The same odd silence was at Bobby’s house, even though Bobby’s position was hardly the same as Adam’s. He offered them all sodas and they watched the rest of the football game, and they all got up to leave after that, saying few words.
Sol still didn’t cry, not yet, but he decided he would go back later, alone, to the spot that Roxanne had fallen.
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