

I can see it-the rain-slicked road and the flashing lights of ambulance and police cars cutting through the darkness of night, warning those passing by: catastrophe has struck here, please drive slowly. What they do not know, the cause of the argument, is crucial to the story of me. The story lurking underneath and in between the facts of the one they can see. What they do not know is that there is another story. It is, in other people’s opinions, not important to the story. No one ever says what they were arguing about. In a few weeks, Finny would be turning nineteen.

It was raining, of course, and with his girlfriend, Sylvie Whitehouse, he glided through the rain in the red car his father had given him on his sixteenth birthday. I wasn’t with Finny on that August night, but my imagination has burned the scene in my mind so that it feels like a memory.
