But this also was Sam. This photograph was Sam. There was 100 percent no way of denying that this photograph, this twenty-five-year-old Polaroid, showed two people with their arms around each other, laughing as they were frozen forever in faded sepia: Aunt Helen and Sam.
It did not feel immediately different, being immortal.
Alvin found that when he wanted to sleep, he could sleep. If he would rather stay up throughout the night reading, he could choose to do that too. Similarly, he ate because he liked to eat, but his stomach never rumbled with hunger, nor did his eyes ever close with fatigue.
He settled into a state of general contentment. He did not get sick. He did not feel out of sorts. Everything was very even, like a boat plunked in the middle of a calm, windless sea. Floating gently along, but with no sudden lurches to either side.
He had drunk the potion without a second thought, because Margo was so scared to be alone, to be the only one. He had drunk from a little bottle labeled Everlife Formula, and he had felt nothing at all, not even a chill as the liquid traveled down into his stomach and settled there.
“Is it supposed to do something?” he’d asked Margo, who was watching him, still dirty and blood-covered from her fall off the cliff.
“It’s already done it,” she said and shrugged, and then they’d gone home together and found that they could either sleep or stay awake. They’d chosen to sleep.
Now, after a little bit of time, Alvin wondered if he hadn’t made the stupidest decision of his relatively young life.
But how could he have done any differently?
He hadn’t had a choice, really.
He’d only been trying to be a good older brother.
—from Alvin Hatter and the Overcoat Man
21
I stayed up all night, without changing my clothes or brushing my teeth or washing my face.
I hadn’t been able to read anything else in the red journal, but I had read the others, pored over them with an intensity that did not wane, not even at three in the morning, not even at four.
Sam’s name wasn’t mentioned in any of them. And they were filled with pictures, but he wasn’t in any of those either.
They were fascinating, despite that. My aunt grew up in front of my eyes. My aunt got the first sparks of inspiration for the Alvin books. My aunt wrote about Margo’s hair color, eye color.
But she hadn’t mentioned Sam at all.
Which was nice. I’d almost managed to convince myself that I’d made the entire thing up.
But then eventually there was nothing left to read except the red journal. It was lying innocently on the floor, just a few feet away from me.
Something in there would explain everything. It had to.
Something in there would tell me what I needed to know, would reassure me of the impossibility of a boy who didn’t age, not a single day in twenty-five years.
I opened the journal on my lap, holding my breath, holding my guts inside me even though they were trying their best to wiggle free of their tethers.
My father and Aunt Helen, teenagers, friends. They looked so similar and at the same time like completely foreign strangers. Would I be friends with these people if they walked into my life now? Aunt Helen said yes, but I wasn’t so sure. My father’s face had a smugness that wasn’t there anymore; Aunt Helen looked perpetually bored and entitled, qualities I had never once seen on her grown-up face. There were pages after pages of the two of them, in swimsuits at a backyard pool I didn’t recognize, surrounded by friends I’d never known, watching a movie on a floral couch, playing catch in the middle of an empty, twilight street. They looked like pages from a magazine, a story on what it was like to grow up on another planet, in another time.
I flipped page after page, and then: him.
Sam and Aunt Helen eating Popsicles on a wooden bench. Sam and Aunt Helen holding a small turtle. Sam and Aunt Helen sharing a milk shake, one tall glass and two straws, exactly like in a movie.
It was much, much too early, but I took the journal and crept across the hallway to Abe’s room and tapped on his door with just my index finger while I called him over and over, hearing his phone buzz on the nightstand within, worrying it would vibrate right off the edge and onto the carpet without him waking up.
I didn’t want to just go in because my brother was known to sometimes sleep naked, and with everything else I was dealing with now, I certainly didn’t want to deal with getting that particular image out of my head. It would be stuck there for all eternity, right alongside the time I saw my parents half undressed in their bedroom (I didn’t know they were home; they didn’t know I was home) and the time I accidentally found naked photos of Jackie on Em’s phone (she told me to look up a number for her, forgetting that she’d left the screen on photos of her girlfriend’s most naked bits).
So I kept calling, and the phone kept buzzing, and I kept knocking as loudly as I dared to, hoping more than anything that I wouldn’t wake my parents and have to answer their many questions, including Why aren’t you in bed? and Why are you holding that photo album like you’re scared it’s going to come to life? and Why are you trying to wake your brother up? You know how he gets in the morning.
In a perfect world I would have been able to wake up Abe, but this was not a perfect world, and I’d forgotten that my mother was working yet another overnight, and so when I fell backward in the hallway, landing on my butt and cradling the journal like a misbehaving baby, she was there, standing over me, dressed in scrubs and crossing her arms over her chest like she wasn’t quite sure what she was seeing.
“Lottie?” she asked, and I nodded slowly in the dim light (I hadn’t even noticed she’d turned it on) as she leaned against a wall and studied me. “I’m sensing a crisis. Do you want to come downstairs?”
I followed her without saying anything, making my way down the stairs with both hands gripping the banister, the journal tucked under one of my arms in a complicated death grip. We went into the kitchen, and she wordlessly dished out two bowls of ice cream, putting one in front of me as she sat next to me at the kitchen table. She took a bite of hers first, made a comically funny ahhh face, then leaned back in her chair.
“Okay. What’s going on, my love?”
I think Sam is immortal?
I think I’m losing my mind?
I get so anxious at night, all the thoughts of death piling one on top of the other, that sometimes I can’t sleep, and I’m exhausted until I try closing my eyes and then I am one hundred percent resolutely awake, drowning under the certainty that I will one day be brutally murdered in the midst of some random home invasion.
“I think something really weird is happening,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Ninety-nine percent of my words had left me, and here I was with only the vaguest of answers.
“Weird how?” she asked. Then, “Just to get the Mom stuff out the way: Are you in trouble? Are you hurt? Is someone you know in trouble?”
“No. No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”