One evening in early July, Evan sat in his bedroom watching that year's American Idol finale on Youtube.

That year, a fellow named Lee DeWyze had won the entire season, the show's ninth. He was a short, bearish twentysomething from Chicago with a husky voice and an unassuming demeanor. He sang unthreatening acoustic rock and Adult contemporary hits by artists like Simon & Garfunkel and Snow Patrol.

Evan had watched the moment live in late May, only a week or so before Jason's suicide. He'd watched it repeatedly on Youtube many times since. He found it comforting, distracting.

He needed distractions. In addition to the sudden gaping hole that Jason had left in the family, Evan's eleven-year-old sister Maddie had been the first one to find Jason after coming home early from a friend's house. Although it initially appeared that Maddie had weathered the incident with her sanity intact, that assumption had quickly proven to be short-sighted, and she had been committed to a mental institution the week after and remained there since.

Jason had been cremated, and Evan and his parents had scattered Jason's ashes the previous Saturday at a family-only ceremony in Leland, exactly a month after Jason had taken his own life at the age of twenty-three.

Jason left no note explaining his actions, but he'd stated very ominously and deliberately the week before that when he died he wanted to be cremated and scattered over one of the Great Lakes. At the time no one in the family had thought much of it, but as the initial shock of his death began to subside, they remembered his request.

So that's what they did, driving the four hours north and holding the somber observance on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan. They dumped Jason's powdered remains into the waves and then drove back, all in the same day. They kept it between just the three of them. No friends or extended family.

After graduating high school, Jason had served a tour and a half in Afghanistan, but he had been other-than-honorably discharged from the military nearly two years before. As a result, there was no honor guard and no help from the government to pay for the memorial service.

Though the funeral had been as inexpensive as the family could manage, the costs of the service coupled with Maddie's ensuing hospitalization and Evan's dad's most recent layoff had crippled the family's already fragile finances.

The previous few nights Evan had heard his parents talking fiercely with each other about losing the house, truncating Maddie's recovery by taking her out of the hospital before her brain was balanced, moving somewhere else and starting over. Evan's dad joked at one point that perhaps he should start making meth. Evan's mom spontaneously burst into tears.

Evan watched Lee bend over and dissolve into his own tears as Ryan Seacrest shouted out his name amid the seizure-inducing glitter and gleam of the Idol mainstage. Confetti rained. Blue and white flashed. Music blared and Lee sang U2's "Beautiful Day." He looked like he'd just made it into heaven.

Evan watched Lee, the look of salvation and accomplishment on his face.

He opened a new window on his laptop and went to Google. He typed. He hit search.