Am I dead? Or am I dreaming? I keep seeing Frank.

I think that everything in my world seems to begin and end with Frank.

Thats just the way it is. I can’t explain it, I don’t really understand it. Sometimes I hate being this close to one person because I am always a little afraid of losing him.

Sometimes I stop and imagine what I would do if he weren’t around and I have to stop because I can feel the panic rising inside of me.

What would it be like without Frank around? What if he had never been around? Would I be the same person that I am now, would I be a detective? Would I have the same friends, the same relationships with other people?

Maybe, maybe things would have been similar, maybe I would have been friends with Chet, although probably not with Biff, or Phil, or even Tony for that matter. They say that if you could change one tiny moment in history that you would change the face of the world today, that it would become almost unrecognizable.

Everything and everyone that I love are connected; they are all part of some complicated web that someone outside of my control has chosen to weave for me.

What if, what if……at the moment there’s nothing to think about except what if. What if Frank had never been born?

Chances are Biff Hooper would have kept bullying me and that he and I would have ended up enemies. Chances are that we would have ended up fighting instead of talking and both of us would have ended up in trouble.

I would never have been friends with Phil and I would never have learned so much from his quiet, gentle manner.

What if no-one was around to tell me to calm down, to teach me to use my head a little more instead of my heart?

Would I have ended up being a detective? Probably not. Let’s face it; detectives need to keep a cool head, not one of my strong points. Yes I can analyze and can come up with answers but only because Frank has taught me how, the same way that I thought him to trust his instincts at times.

If I had never become a detective I would probably just be a regular kid, going to school, playing football, working part time in Wal-Mart or Prito’s Pizzas. If I had never become a detective…

…Iola Morton would still be alive today.

Would she? Is it that simple?

Someone once told me that everyone’s time on this earth is limited. That there is nothing you can do about it. Each of us has a certain amount of time, and we cant do anything to change that.

Maybe that’s true, maybe its not. It’s hard to believe that anyone would want Iola Morton to die at 17.

What would be the point? What good came out of it? All I could see was tears and sadness, the tears of a family missing there only daughter, of a brother missing his little sister, of friends trying to deal with a loss that they never imagined would happen.

But however difficult it is to believe, I guess that some good comes from everything. A death like that, it brings people closer to together. It brought all of us together, it cemented our friendship. We stood side by side at that grave and I know that each of us made a silent promise that we wouldn’t do it again, that we wouldn’t go through this again.

But even if the explosion had never happened, I probably wouldn’t have ended up with Iola, because I wouldn’t have been the same person, I wouldn’t have been the Joe Hardy that she was so attached to.

I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want to leave Frank alone, because I know that if he died I wouldn’t be the same person anymore. I couldn’t be. How can you function normally when you are missing half your body?

How could you get up in the morning and sit on the veranda eating breakfast alone, how could you lie in bed at night and not be able to hear the person in the next room breathing deeply as they slept?

How could you give so much time and emotion to other peoples problems, to their missing kids and injured husbands, when you have no support, no-one to rationalize, to make things easier?

Frank will find me. I don’t know how but I know that he is looking for me now, he is putting all the pieces of the puzzle together and coming up with possibilities and then he is chasing down each of those possibilities until he gets closer and closer.

I know it can’t be easy for him; it can’t easy to play the cool and calm detective when you want to cry yourself to sleep every night.

Fenton Radley never had a brother, maybe if he had, things would be different. Maybe he wouldn’t have built up so much anger against his father, against my family.

In many ways I think Fenton thought of himself as an only child, his sisters all stuck together and excluded him.

One of the problems with being an only child I think is that you learn to spend a lot of time in your own imagination. It’s easy to retreat into your mind and to imagine wild stories and scenarios.

You can hold fictional conversations and play out whole days in your head, and after a while they begin to seem almost real. That’s where the danger lies. Imagination is a great thing, but not if it begins to be preferable to real life.

I wish that I could imagine myself out of this room.

What am I going to do? Three days. Three days here alone. Three days without food. Three days without water. My skin has shriveled up against my bones, it looks so strange, and I can see the outline of the bones in my arm. I can’t think straight, not for more than a couple of minutes.

I’m scared now. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I’m scared of the dark, I’m scared of the silence, its all around me, closing in on me, the walls are closing in, I can feel it, I can feel the rooms getting smaller and smaller, I can feel my skin stretching against my bones, I can feel myself slipping away, I can feel myself dying.

Panic, panic welling up inside of me. Oh god, please, please, please….

Footsteps…

Am I imagining them or are they real? The lines are so blurred right now.

Fenton?

The door is opening, I can’t see, my eyes wont open, I don’t know who’s there. Radley again I guess, back to sit and stare at me, back to look at me die, maybe even back to kill me.

I have to fight him, I have to get out, I can’t stay here I can’t handle this anymore, I have to get out, I have to get out, I have to……

Arms, arms around me, arms holding me close. I want to push them away, I’m scared.

Something’s wet on my forehead. Someone’s crying, someone’s holding me and crying. I can feel their tears against my skin, warm and moist and salty. Tears sliding down my face and into the corner of my mouth.

I know that arms. I know those tears. I know that voice.