“Sorry,” I say. “Tons of strain.”
Dr. Taser nods sympathetically. “Do you feel more like talking about Janie today? Maybe we can try a happy memory again?”
I look up. Her eyes are dark, her head is cocked, her posture as welcoming as posture can be. I ask her, “You ever dissect a sheep heart?”
She looks startled, but I plow on. “I haven’t either. We were supposed to for Anatomy and Physiology, but—well. It doesn’t matter, I never wanted to. I took the class because Janie was taking it. Anyway, I did the dissection online today, and there was this picture of a human heart without fat or muscle in the introduction to the lab. It was just the veins.”
“And you wish Janie could have seen it?” asks Dr. Taser, typing away on her iPad.
“She already saw it,” I say, and both Dr. Taser and Janie frown at me. “She saw it in seventh grade at Lorraine Bay National Park.”
I told her about us, about that day. Ander Cameron’s mom had been our chaperone. She had been a decent person. She brought us cookies. Not sure what happened to Ander. Anyway, we collected rock samples and dirt samples and identified plants and shit, and then we had lunch on this big hill. Janie had Lunchables, the nacho kind that came with a candy bar for dessert. I remember because I was jealous. My dad packed me a hot ham sandwich that wasn’t supposed to be hot. Afterward, everyone started rolling down the hill. Dewey dragged me into it, but it actually really hurt—it wasn’t, like, some groomed country club hill. There were trees. There were branches sticking up and bugs under rotting leaves and poison ivy. So eventually Dewey ditched me, which he always seemed to do, and I sat at the top of the hill and looked up.
“What are you doing?”
I jumped when Janie plopped down next to me, and then I looked around. “No one’s paying attention,” Janie said by way of explanation. “They’re too busy rubbing themselves in poison ivy. I hope Robbie gets it on his dick.”
She and Robbie had just broken up. God, I just remember looking over at her, looking and wondering how she did it, how she was so damn comfortable. We’d just watched the sex video thing the week before, and Mr. Endero made us say penis three times without laughing to get into the room. I told Janie about it later, and she looked at me straight in the eye and said, “Penis. Penis. Penis. Grow up, Micah.”
I could not. So maybe that was why she started leaving me behind.
“So?” said Janie. “What are we looking at?”
Just the sky, really. Above there were only tangles of branches and the sky. And I was about to tell her that when she spread her arms and took a deep breath.
“Oh,” she whispered, and I didn’t need to look up anymore. “I see. I feel it now, Micah. Like the sky is falling down. It makes my lungs hurt. The sky is falling down and my breath is too small to hold the air. Micah—you feel it? The world is growing bigger. I can feel it.”
Then she fell back. The ground thudded and I was freaked, because she said the world was growing bigger, and I thought it would swallow her. Pull her away.
But it didn’t. We just kept staring at the sky and we didn’t get poison ivy.
“The sheep heart looked just like that,” I tell Dr. Taser. “The trees.”
“That does sound like a happy memory,” she says, sounding pleased for the first time. It’s not happy, really, because Janie doesn’t know that the trees looked like a heart and she never will because she’s never going to do the dissection because she’s dead and buried and I still don’t remember most of how that happened. But what a nice note to end on.
I shrug. “I guess. I went back to the bus after that.”
She blinks. “Why?”
“She wanted me to. We were never supposed to talk to each other in public—people stopped rolling down the hill and so I had to go. I left her. That’s what friends do.”
But that’s not what friends do, and Dr. Taser hands me her iPad to Google friendship to prove it. She pushes a notebook into my hands and tells me that it’ll help to write down what I remember. And then, finally, she lets me leave.
In the waiting room, I sit on the couch and wait for Dewey. My license is still suspended and my dad is at work, but Dewey offered to give me a ride, presumably because he’s the reason I’m here.
“Hey,” he greets me as he pulls up in front. “You get your head fixed? Ready to drink responsibly?”
“Screwed on all the way and ready to be deadened by alcohol,” I say, climbing into the passenger seat, “which I feel like you owe me.”
“I’m out of Canadian, but got the cheapest whiskey in Iowa in the trunk. Just . . . take it easy, okay?”
“Janie’s dead,” I tell him.
He keeps his eyes on the road. “You’ve mentioned.”
“I remember the bonfire,” I say. I stare at the backs of my hands, going finger to finger, counting. “The bonfire. I remember most of what happened before, I think. The week of is still fuzzy, but I remember the Metaphor disappearing. God, she was pissed.”