The Best of Friends

by Lucinda Berry

a wheelchair because he couldn’t hold himself up to walk. Andrew and I practically carried him into his locked room. His nurses allowed me to clean him up once the investigators had bagged all his clothes. I laid him in the tub and bathed him like I haven’t done since he was an infant, running the washcloth over his body and face again and again. Every part of his body was limp. His arms dangled like a doll’s. He gazed up at the ceiling, eyes unfixed, unseeing, as I washed away the blood of his best friends since preschool. The front door of the police station opens, interrupting my thoughts. All of us