Betsy handled it differently. There were times she tried to throw herself into her other projects, but grief made everything feel heavy, as if she were in one of those dreams where you’re running through deep snow, where every movement feels as though you’re swimming through a pool of syrup. Then there were times, like now, when she wanted to bathe in the grief. She wanted to let it all crash in and destroy her anew, with an almost masochistic glee.

She cleaned up dinner, got the twins ready for bed. Ron still wasn’t home. That was okay. They didn’t fight, she and Ron. Not once since Spencer’s death. They hadn’t made love either. Not once. They lived in the same house, still made conversation, still loved each other, but they’d separated as if any tenderness would be too much to bear.

The computer was on, Internet Explorer already up on its home page. Betsy sat down and typed in the address. She thought about her friends and neighbors, their reaction to the death of her son. Suicide truly was different. It was somehow less tragic, gave it more distance. Spencer, the thinking went, had clearly been an unhappy soul, and thus the boy was already somewhat broken. Better someone broken gets tossed away than someone whole. And the worst part of that, for Betsy at least, was that it actually made some sense, this awful rationale. You hear about a child who was already starving, dying in some African jungle, and it isn’t nearly as tragic as the pretty little girl who lives down the street getting cancer.

It all seems relative and that’s pretty damn horrible.

She typed in the MySpace address-www.myspace.com/Spencerhillmemorial. Spencer’s classmates had created this page for him a few days after his death. There were pictures and collages and comments. In the spot where one usually placed the default picture, there was a graphic of a flickering candle.

The song “Broken Radio” by Jesse Malin with some help from Bruce Springsteen, one of Spencer’s favorites, played. The quote next to the candle was from that song: “The angels love you more than you know.”

Betsy listened to it for a while.

In the days after Spencer’s death, this was where Betsy spent most nights-going through this Internet site. She read the comments from kids she never knew. She looked at the many pictures of her son throughout the years. But after a while, it turned sour. The pretty high school girls who’d set it up, who also bathed in the now-deceased Spencer, had barely given him the time of day in life. Too little too late. All claimed to miss him, but so few seemed to have known him.

The comments read less like epitaphs than some arbitrary scribbling in a dead boy’s yearbook:

“I’ll always remember gym class with Mr. Myers…”

That had been seventh grade. Three years ago.

“Those touch football games, when Mr. V would want to quarterback…”

Fifth grade.

“We all chilled at that Green Day concert…”

Eighth grade.

So little recent. So little truly heartfelt. The mourning seemed more for show than anything else-public displays of grief for those who really didn’t mourn all that much, her son’s death a speed bump on the way to college and a good job, a tragedy, sure, but closer to a résumé-enhancing life requisite like joining Key Club or running for student council treasurer.

There was so little from his real friends-Clark and Adam and Olivia. But maybe that was how it was. Those who really grieve don’t do it in public-it truly hurts, so you keep it to yourself.

She hadn’t checked the site in three weeks. There had been little activity. That was how it was, of course, especially with the young. They were on to other things. She watched the slide show. It took all of the photographs and kind of made them look like they were being tossed on a big pile. The images would rotate into view, stop, and then the next one would come circling down on top of it.

Betsy watched and felt the tears come.

There were many old photographs from Hillside Elementary School. There was Mrs. Roberts’s first-grade class. And Mrs. Rohr- back’s third grade. Mr. Hunt for fourth grade. There was a picture of his intramural homeroom basketball team-Spencer had been so excited by that victory. He’d hurt his wrist the game before-nothing serious, just a little sprain-and Betsy had wrapped it for him. She remembered buying the ACE bandage. In the photograph, Spencer was holding up that hand in victory.

Spencer hadn’t been much of an athlete but in that game, he had hit the winning basket with six seconds left. Seventh grade. She wondered if she’d ever seen him happier.

A local policeman had found Spencer’s body on the roof of the high school.

On the computer monitor the pictures continued to swirl by. Betsy’s eyes grew wet. Her vision blurred.

The school roof. Her beautiful son. Scattered amongst the debris and broken bottles.

By then everyone had gotten Spencer’s good-bye text. Text. That was how their son told them what he was about to do. The first text had gone to Ron, who’d been in Philadelphia on a sales call. Betsy’s cell phone had received the second, but she was at Chuck E. Cheese’s, the arcade-pizzeria where parental migraines are born, and didn’t hear the text come in. It wasn’t until an hour later, after Ron left six messages on her phone, each more frantic than the last, that she found the text sitting on her phone, the final message from her boy:

I’m sorry, I love you all, but this is too hard. Good-bye.

It took the police two days to find him on the roof of the high school.

What was too hard, Spencer?

She would never know.

He had sent that text to a few other people too. Close friends. That was where Spencer had told her he was going. To hang out with Clark and Adam and Olivia. But none of them had seen him. Spencer had not shown up. He had gone out on his own. He had pills with him- stolen from home-and swallowed too many of them because something was too hard and he wanted to end his life.

He had died alone on that roof.

Daniel Huff, the town cop who had a son Spencer’s age, a kid named DJ who Spencer hung out with a little, had come to the door. She remembered opening it, seeing his face and simply collapsing.

Betsy blinked away the tears. She tried to focus again on the slide show, on the images of her son alive.

And then, just like that, a picture rotated into view that changed everything.

Betsy’s heart stopped.

The picture was gone as fast as it had come. More pictures piled over it. She put her hand to her chest, tried to clear her mind. The picture. How could she get to that picture again?

She blinked again. Tried to think.

Okay, first off. It was part of an online slide show. The show would repeat. She could simply wait. But how long until it would start up again? And then what? It would fly by again, staying in view only a few seconds. She needed a closer look.

Could she freeze the screen when it came back on?

There had to be a way.

She watched the other photographs swirl by, but they weren’t what she wanted. She wanted that other picture back.

The one with the sprained wrist.

She thought again back to that intramural game from seventh grade because she remembered something a little odd. Hadn’t she just been thinking about that moment? When Spencer wore the ACE bandage? Yes, of course. That had been the catalyst, really.

Because the day before Spencer’s suicide, something similar had happened.

He had fallen and hurt his wrist. She had offered to wrap it again, as she had back when he was in seventh grade. But instead, Spencer had wanted her to buy a wrist sleeve. She had. He had worn it the day he died.

For the first and-obviously-last time.

She clicked on the slide show. It brought her to a site,slide.com, and asked her for her password. Damn. It had probably been created by one of the kids. She thought about that. Security wouldn’t be great on something like this, would it? You were just setting it up and letting your fellow students use it to put whatever photographs they wanted into the rotation.