I stand at Allie's grave. Mom and Dad decided it was important that I saw it, even though I protested. It felt wrong for Allie to be laid to rest in such a mundane place surrounded by dead things, as if he himself was just another corpse that needed to be thrown away. I was alone, everyone else left, driven away by the rain. I only just convinced them to let me stay, telling them I could walk home. They probably thought I was crazy, since I didn't want to come in the first place, but now that I was here it felt wrong to leave. I hated that it had to rain. All the other people grieving at the gravestones of their dead ran to their cars and probably went home to nice dinner and fire, but the dead don't get to go home. No, they have to stay right here and get rained on, which was bullshit. I knew that Allie's body was in heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand that he didn't get to go home, so I decided as long as he can't go home neither would I. I sat down next to his gravestone and talked to him for a while. I didn't talk about anything new, only the old stuff. All things we used to do together like chasing ducks at the old lagoon, racing each other up and down the street on our bikes, and how he would always lose and demand a rematch, and how the loser had to buy an ice cream cone for the other and he never protested. I just told him the things that made him, him.

But through this I kept having the same nagging sensation at the back of my mind that he wasn't listening, and I kept trying to push the thought away, but I knew it was true. He was gone, and I would never see him again, and the thought made me so damned lonesome it killed me. I wanted to scream and yell my pain out to the universe for everyone to hear. I wanted make everyone stop and listen. I wanted to make them all sit and listen as I tell them about what a good kid Allie was, what damn good kid he was, and how they all missed it.

But I didn't. I didn't do any of that. Instead, I sat at his grave; I just sat and let the rain pour on my face, feeling as it soaked me to the bone, but I didn't care. After a while I couldn't stand the atmosphere of the whole damned place filled with crumbling headstones and long forgotten memories of people, so I left. I started walking home, but that's when I saw it; a rye field, like that poem by Robert Burns, "If a body catch a body coming through the rye," and I don't know why, but I needed to be in that field. I felt as if I was hanging over a cliff and that the rye field was the only thing that was going to keep me from insanity, so I ran toward it as if each step would save me from falling, from disappearing. I ran to that damned rye field and screamed and yelled and let out a mighty yawp to the universe and I just let myself go mad.

While standing in that field, the wet rye stalks brushing my shins, I decided something. Maybe I couldn't save my brother, but I could do this; I could scream and I could yell and I could be the catcher in the rye.