Excerpt from That Time I Loved You by Carrianne Leung, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

After Mr. Finley joined the spirits of the dead animal heads in his basement, Carolyn got sent to her grandparents' place in the country. We waved goodbye as her grandfather's wood-panelled Ford station wagon pulled out of her driveway and wound down our long street. We chased it until it turned left onto Samuel, and kept waving long after the car had disappeared. I thought I saw Carolyn crying as she drove away. For a long while, it seemed like their house was empty, even though we knew her mother was still there. A month went by, and it was put up for sale. We wondered if the brains were finally cleaned up or whether someone had painted over them.

Georgie Da Silva took to sitting on a lawn chair in his garage with the doors wide open, and everyone who passed by could see him sitting right by the spot where his mom died. For the first few days, his Italian and Portuguese gang gathered around him, gently punching him in the arm and sitting on the ground at his feet, listening to the radio and smoking quietly. Some brought flowers and laid them on the driveway. But when that ended, it was just Georgie, staring at some spot on the ground for hours each day while we played Frisbee football up the road.

It barely rained that summer, and in the sweet, warm air, we made the hours worth it. We met in the morning, dew still on the grass, to play baseball, ball hockey and that game that was a cross between tag and hide and seek, stopping only for lemonade at someone's house and baloney sandwiches for lunch, staying out until the first street lamp flickered on. Sometimes we would forget all about the suicides because our games would be so fun, but then a kid would come running up the street with some new observation to report, and we remembered. It was too difficult to play hard and be scared at the same time.

Excerpted from That Time I Loved You: Stories by Carrianne Leung. Copyright © 2019 by Carrianne Leung. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.