Dante was crying again. And I felt mean because I didn’t feel like crying. I didn’t really feel anything for the bird. It was a bird. Maybe the bird didn’t deserve to get shot by some stupid kid whose idea of fun was shooting at things. But it was still just a bird. I was harder than Dante. I think I’d tried to hide that hardness from him because I’d wanted him to like me. But now he knew. That I was hard. And maybe that was okay. Maybe he could like the fact that I was hard just as I liked the fact that he wasn’t hard.
