All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien

Author:Tracey Lien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

How do you sum up a life? How do you capture who a person was, what they meant to you, and who they could have been? When Constable Edwards finally sat across from Ky with a notepad in hand, Ky didn’t know where to start. She listed off Denny’s schooling achievements—things she knew about his grades, his awards, the extracurricular activities he did during recess and lunch. She talked about his friends—how he was closest to Eddie Ho; how, for as long as she could remember, their primary recreational activity was playing board games and watching cartoons; how it didn’t take a genius to see that they were both sweet and innocent and dorky. She spoke in generalities and clichés—good kid, good brother, wouldn’t hurt a fly.

As she watched the constable sporadically scrawl onto his notepad, distracted by the noise outside the room, nodding without looking up at Ky, she wished he’d at least pretend to care, pretend that she was, if not the most important person in the world, at least someone who wasn’t completely invisible to him. Because if he would only look at her, acknowledge that she was someone who was still hurting, she would have shared more, gotten specific. She would have told him how most people thought that Denny was a quiet person who didn’t have a lot to say, but the truth was he had so many opinions—he just didn’t share them with everyone. She would have told him that Denny was one of the most sensitive and perceptive people she knew—he could always tell when something was wrong even though he rarely knew the right thing to say or do. And she would have told him that despite Denny’s awkwardness, despite his routinely letting the wrong words out of his mouth, at times he blew Ky away with how well he understood her.

“I guess I’m just worried I’ll never change,” Ky had told him on one of her last visits home, after another of her explosive mother-daughter tantrums. “When I’m away from Cabra, I feel like I’ve shed my old skin. But whenever I come back here . . .”—Ky gestured to their surroundings; they’d walked downtown to buy chicken chips from Red Lea—“it’s like I didn’t shed anything at all. It’s like I’ve just flipped a switch, you know? And my old self was there all along.”

“Dormant,” Denny said, stroking his hairless chin.

“Yeah! It just . . . I dunno. It scares me that our old selves follow us everywhere, and they’re lying dormant, and all it takes is a flip of a switch and we’re pieces of shit again, you know?”

“If you can be self-reflective like that, then I think you’ve changed,” Denny said.

“I guess.”

“Everyone changes, whether they like it or not.”

Ky had looked at Denny then, wondered whether behind his boyish face was a wrinkled old man.

“You’ve been pretty consistent,” Ky said.

Denny stared at the ground as they walked.

“Do you think you’ve changed?” Ky asked after a beat.

Denny shrugged.

“Probably. Yeah,” he finally said.

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