Chapter 5

I didn't have a date or anything so I hung around with this friend of mine. Mal Brossard. We messed around in the snow for a while. It was still coming down really hard by the evening. Looked pretty as hell though. Mal suggested that we get a bus into town, get a hamburger and go and see a lousy movie. I hate the movies, so I stuck around my dorm and decided to to Stradlater's crappy composition.
I stared out of the window for what must've been like an hour. I was staring at the snow. Like I said, I thought it was pretty, it looked nice and white. Anyway, I couldn't really think of a room, or a house, or anything like that. I put on my red hunting hat and tried to think. Besides, I ain't too crazy about describing houses or rooms anyway. so insteead I wrote about my Brother, Allie's baseball mitt. It was a really descriptive subject. It really was. It was a left-handed fielder's mitt. Allie was left handed. It had loadsa' poetry scribbled all over it. It was all over the fingers and the pockets, everywhere. Allie's dead now. He died of leukemia. He was eleven. Two years younger than me. He's been dead three years. He was very intelligent, he really was. His teachers were always sending letters to my parents telling them just how intelligent he was. He was probably the most intelligent member of the family. I guess I kinda idolized him because of it. Idolizing my kid Brother... i no how strange that sounds. He had red hair and the weird thing is, people with red hair are supposed to be really angry. Not Allie. He couldn't get mad at anything. He was the nicest guy ever. God he was a nice kid.
I cried like hell when he died. I was only thirteen and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed. All because I broke all the windows in the garage. I slept in the garage for a while. I slept there the night he died. I broke all the goddam windows with my fists. I Damn near broke my hand. I can't make a proper fist with it anymore.