Finally Dad showed up to take me home from this horrid place. He hadn't visited much through all of this, and he didn't look overly thrilled to be seeing me now.

"Hey champ, time to go home."

So that's what I did: I went home. The car ride with Dad was unbearable. We were going back to our New York apartment, and it was a long drive from Maine to New York. Dad spent the whole time talking about his job and how he got a new car, and other phony nonsense. The more he talked the madder and madder I got. I got so mad that I finally snapped.

"Hell dad, did you even care about Allie?!" Dad almost swerved off the road when I yelled that, but I didn't care; let us crash! To hell with it all. I kept yelling, "Your youngest son just died and you didn't even cry, you didn't even cry!" Hell, I was crying now. I don't even know where my outburst came from. I guess I was just so angry I was willing to fight with anyone. Dad looked like he was rearing up to hit me or something, which I guess I deserved, but instead he pulled over and got out of the car. He walked to the side of the road and put his head in his hands and started crying. I kind of started freaking out because I've never seen my dad cry before. I got out of the car and sat down on the side of the road and sat next to him, I wasn't really sure what to do or how the hell to comfort him. So I kinda put my arm around his shoulder but it was real awkward. But then he started hugging me and telling me he was sorry, and how he was such a horrible dad and all that crap. I hugged him back— we were just sitting there on the side of the road, bawling our eyes out and hugging.

Finally we stopped and got back in the car and drove the rest of the way home in silence. When we finally got home I ran to my room and flopped onto my bed and immediately fell asleep. They had me on so many painkillers I kept falling asleep.

When I woke up the sun was just rising and the apartment was completely silent. Eerily quiet. In those few hours I felt the most lonesome I have ever in my whole entire life. It wasn't home without Allie; just an empty apartment filled with painful memories of him.

I went into his room and sat on his bed. His room was the second smallest; the old guest room which now belongs to Phoebe is the smallest, but Allie's bed took up half of the room, making it feel smaller. The room looked as if Allie had just left to go outside. Everything was in the same position as it was when he was alive. The bed unmade and his clothes were strewn across the room, and notebooks were left open on his desk. I found myself skimming through them even though I knew there was no point to it. His words sprawled across the paper made me feel closer to him, as if he was on the bed tossing a baseball in the air and catching it, listing off definitions of Latin root words for a test. The papers were all school stuff, nothing special. No secret letter, no last goodbye; just empty notes. I read through them almost hungrily, searching for— I don't know what— a reason, I guess. Some type of explanation for all this shit. But I didn't find anything.