“Maybe we aren’t one soul after all,” I say, and it’s even more terrifying out loud.
His hands fall to his sides, his fingers curling awkwardly and uncurling more awkwardly. He never did know what to do with his hands. They always seemed a bit floppier than hands should be, like there’s a bone missing, the common-sense bone that tells you what to do with your hands.
“Oh,” he says.
His sadness is everything. He tries to hide it, like he can hide anything from me, but of course I catch how his breath hitches, the way he stiffens and the way his eyebrows flicker, the way his nostrils widen to suck in a little more air than he would otherwise need. I reach for his hands. I take his awkward fingers and wrap them in my own.
“Maybe I don’t have a soul at all,” I say.
He relaxes. Immediately, he unwinds against me.
“Well,” he says. “You are a ginger.”
“Maybe I have a ghost.”
“A ghost,” he repeats dumbly.
“A ghost,” I confirm, but I don’t elaborate. I’m too tired to think it through. I don’t know what first made me think it, but it sounds right out loud. I don’t have a soul at all.
I lean my head back against his shoulder and cross my arms, still holding his hands so that his arms come around me. “You were never in love with me, you know.”
His hands immediately start sweating in mine. His chin fits on top of my head and I feel his throat bob along the back of my skull as he swallows, and it’s kind of comforting. “That’s not true,” he says quietly. “You don’t get to say that. Look, Janie. We don’t have to talk about whatever happened. I won’t even ask, if you want. But god, Janie, if you don’t think that—that I don’t—”
“You don’t,” I say. I press myself against him, hard, so that his heartbeat bleeds into my body and shakes my spine. “What if you never knew me, Micah? Not really. You love the dreamer and the painter and the ninja who used to jump through your window. What if that girl isn’t real? Then what? You don’t love the bitch. You’ve never even met her.”
He laughs a low laugh that I feel everywhere. He leans his face into my hair, so that I feel the shapes of his lips when he says, “Trust me, Janie, I have.”
I don’t argue, but I just don’t think that’s true.
after
DECEMBER 6
“Micah? Micah, are you with me?”
“I’m with you,” I say. I think I say. “Where are you?”
Someone sighs. Lately there is always someone sighing around me. The lights are bright, the harsh kind of bright. The lights are spinning but nothing else; nothing is spinning but everything is wobbling.
“Can I go to sleep now?” I ask, and I don’t hear the answer.
Janie Vivian is dead.
When I woke up in the hospital on the day after the bonfire, the first thing I asked Dewey was if she was there. I remember that now. My head hurt because it had split open when Dewey punched me and I hit the ground, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t remember anything after the day she moved.
It was still raining outside and I wanted to know if I could see her. If she was on the same floor as me. Dewey told me that she wasn’t. Eventually, eventually it came out that she was in the morgue, and the world exploded and rebuilt itself without that particular detail.
The doctors, the nurses telling me again. I remember, and it hurts. I remember how apocalyptically it hurt every time, every single time, they told me she was dead. Janie Vivian is dead. I remember my dad, sitting beside me and saying in his quiet voice that on the night of the bonfire, Janie Vivian fell into the quarry and never came back out. They kept telling me and I kept forgetting.
Eventually they stopped trying. I could understand a world where she was in Nepal, though I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t text me back. I could understand a world where she was distant but not lost. I couldn’t understand a world without her.
I remember forgetting.
And there’s more.
God, there’s so much more.
“Dewey? Oh, fuck, Dewey. Dewey.”
“Yeah, I’m here. Micah, it’s fine. It’s gonna be fine, we’re going to the hospital. We’re in an ambulance because you’re too fucking tall to carry. You idiot. It’s going to be fine.”
“Dewey, the fire.”
“Uh, let’s talk about the fire later. Go to sleep. No, wait. Shit, don’t listen to me. Don’t go to sleep. Are you listening? Micah. Stay awake. We’re going to the hospital, okay?”
“No. No, no no, I don’t want to go to the hospital again. I don’t want to, I don’t want to. Oh, god, Dewey, do they think I set the fire?”
“It doesn’t matter right now, just shut the hell up—”
“Dewey, I remember. I’m starting to remember. I remember that Janie’s dead. Oh, god, she’s dead. She drowned. You kept telling me about it.”
“Yeah, you kept forgetting. You’re really fucked up, okay? Just take it easy.”
“But I remember the fire too.”
“Micah, don’t—”
“I remember the match. Dewey, I remember dropping the match. Did I tell you about that? They think I set the fire, and I remember a match. I just don’t remember when. I don’t.”