What happened? I’m still alive. My face hurts. I touch my upper lip, and my hand comes away with blood. The airbags didn’t go off. Did I hit my face on the steering wheel? Why is there glass?
I look to my right to—
Sylvie!
Where is she? Did she get out?
And then I see her.
On the other side of the low median we hit, sprawled across the wet asphalt.
She’s crumpled. Surely broken.
I am…okay. I can move.
Get to Sylvie. Tell her to lie still.
Make the call.
Get Sylvie to the hospital.
Go home to Autumn.
With a plan in place, I climb out of the car and run across the rain-soaked pavement to her.
I fall to my knees in front of Sylvie, putting my hand to the ground. It’s wet—
jack
one
“Phineas Smith is dead.”
“Lexy,” I say. It’s too fucking early for her to call. It doesn’t matter if we’re sleeping together again. “Stop being a drama queen,” I groan into the phone and roll over in bed.
“Jack. I’m not kidding.”
“Lex, I don’t care how pissed you and Sylvie are at him—”
“Finn died last night, Jack.” She raises her voice. “That’s what I’m telling you. He died. He’s fucking dead.”
I sit up.
“Bullshit.” It’s still too fucking early for Alexis to be calling me because Finn finally dumped Sylvie. The sun is hardly up.
“Finn’s dead, Jack,” she says. “I just got back from the hospital with Sylvie and her parents. There was an accident. Sylvie has a concussion, but Finn died.”
“Bullshit,” I say again, because it has to be. No. No?
“Yeah. Finn’s gone.” Alexis is crying. She’s actually crying.
“Fuck,” I say. “No. How?”
This can’t be real.
This really can’t be real.
Surely she’s going to say that he’s in a coma or clinically dead and on a ventilator, but there’s still a chance? There’s got to be some hope?
“What? I can’t understand you, Lex.”
I strain to listen. Outside, birds are singing. The sky is clear after the rain.
“How the fuck did Finn get electrocuted?”
It’s like pounding my head against a wall, the way I’m trying to find the comfort or hope that’s supposed to be in every bad situation. There is none.
Finn is dead.
I try to make it right.
Okay, I say to myself. Finn is strong. He’ll learn to live with—
But no.
There has to be some way this can be undone.
But no.
This is death.
I hung up with Alexis a few minutes ago. I’m supposed to be getting ready to go by her place, but I’m sitting on my bed.
“Finn’s dead,” I say aloud.
We have to go back in time and fix this, I think.
Time travel is not an option. Except every problem in life has a solution. If you think hard enough, work hard enough, there’s a solution. Right?
I need to tell Finn that he can break up with Sylvie over the phone. That’s the solution.
But it’s already done. He’s gone.
My mind spins, trying, trying, trying to find a way out of this maze. There’s got to be a way I can think this into not being true. Death is so final. Over. Done. Finn.
“I’m going to his house,” I say into my phone as I pull out of the driveway. My voice is shaking.
After I hung up with Alexis, I was frozen, staring at everything and nothing, trying to make sense of it. Then I called for my mother to come to my room like when I was a kid waking up after a nightmare. I didn’t trust my legs to work.
Mom sat next to me on the bed and held me, and I told her the news. It’s been years since I’ve held on to her like that, like I’m drowning. With six other brothers in the house, it took a serious injury to get one-on-one time with Mom. She stroked my hair, and as my sobbing slowed, I remembered the last time I’d needed her like this, when I’d cracked my shinbone in sixth grade. It had seemed like an eternal wait in the emergency room before I’d been given pain medication, though my mother had sworn it was only twenty minutes.
There’s no medicine for this pain.
Eventually, Mom asked about Finn’s mother, and I said I didn’t know how she was. That got me out of bed. Mom was hesitant to approve my plan, but after I used her line back at her about Finn not being lucky enough to have a big family like ours, she told me to go ahead.
I pull the car out of the driveway and hold the phone against my shoulder with my cheek so I can use both hands to turn. Finn would tell me that using both hands doesn’t make up for talking on the phone in the first place.
“But everyone is coming over here,” Alexis says.
“I’m gonna check if his mom needs anything. I’ll be by later. Are Vicky and Taylor there?”
“Yeah, b—”
“Lex, I’ll be by. I should do this.”
“Why?”
“I—He was my best friend, Lex. And she’s been important to me. You know that.” Alexis and I talked about deep stuff at least sometimes.
“Sorry, what? Jack, I gotta go. Everyone is arriving. I know. I can’t believe—”
I hang up. Finn was right about Alexis and me.
Our last conversation.
It hits me again.
I won’t be able to tell Finn that he was right about Alexis.
He’d called me to tell me that I was right about Autumn, or really, that I was wrong. He had a funny way of seeing it.
That had been last night—no, evening?
The day before that, I’d woken up in a blanket fort Finn had built for Autumn. They’d been snuggled into each other like littermates, Autumn snoring like a freight train.
Is she in love with him too, or is she an honest-to-God sociopath? I’d wondered as I watched them together.
I’d not put the odds in Finn’s favor. So when he called to say she loved him back, I asked if he was sure.
“All the way sure,” he said. He sounded so happy.
He’s dead now.
Finn’s dead.
But he can’t be.
My breath quickens. I pull the car to the side of the road and rest my head against the steering wheel.
What if it was mistaken identity or a mix-up at the hospital?
Alexis said Sylvie saw him herself. Saw him dead.
Dead.
Finn.
This is a new world. Finn is dead.
I am numb.
Finn’s driveway is a pain to get up and down because of the hill, so I park on the street and cross the lawn. His house looks the same as always, though his car isn’t there.
Finn isn’t going to be inside or upstairs or on his way home.
Finn is never coming home again.
With that thought, all the never-agains come crashing down on me, and I’m frozen in place, standing on the grass he’ll never complain about mowing. He’ll never kick another soccer ball or play a new video game. Finn will never tell me another story or joke. He’ll never study for another test, eat another burger, roll his eyes at me, or watch that new superhero movie we were looking forward to in December.
It’s all done.
Finn’s story is over.
His whole life.
That was it.
Not even nineteen years, and he’ll never, ever do anything else ever again. Finn won’t go off to college or celebrate his birthday. He won’t get another haircut or get the oil changed in his car. He won’t bite a hangnail on his thumb or buy another CD. Finn Smith has done everything he will ever do.
He won’t get to be with Autumn.
The memory of his joy last night hits me again.
The thing is I’ve always hated Autumn. The first time I met her, she was ignoring Finn on his birthday. Then she kept ignoring him for, I don’t know, the next four years? It was only in the past two years that when he talked about her (when I’d tolerate it), it seemed like she’d warmed back up to him. Somewhat.
Then, suddenly, Autumn breaks up with Jamie and starts spending every minute with Finn. I was pretty sure that was proof she was as evil as I’d always suspected. But I had fun hanging out with him and Autumn those couple of times. I’ve always understood why Finn was so into her. I’d just never understood why he’d hung on so long when it was clearly never going to happen, and I was preparing myself to spend my first semester of college getting Finn through another Autumn abandonment.
So I hadn’t really processed what Finn told me over the phone last night. It had seemed impossible, what Finn claimed had happened between them, but he’d been so sure, so happy. He was so certain that she loved him.