“I’m so sorry, Matt.” Impatience is scaling up my insides. Stay with him, I tell myself, he’s listening. “This doesn’t feel right, though.” I gesture at the whole party and everyone who I know is watching me. “Please, I know, but…but you’re my brother. Please, Matt. This doesn’t feel good to me. Does it to you?”
Matt’s voice is soft. “It’s okay, Lake. It’ll be over soon. It’s…it’s…it’s okay.” He glances over at the glittering pool. “The quadriplegic accidentally drives himself into the pool. A real tragedy.” He wears a wistful quarter smile. No sarcasm. “But quite poetic.”
“No, Matt,” I say softly so that I’m sure no one else can hear. “No, I know what it’s like to drown.” I shut my eyes tightly. Maybe if the memory had been mine all along it would have faded with time. The edges would have worn dull and I wouldn’t feel like the air is being slowly squeezed from my lungs all over again. Matt is going to die. The pressure of the water is going to set fire to his lungs. It’s going to drive him crazy until he can’t stand it anymore and he opens his mouth to take a breath and, despite knowing that he’s surrounded by nothing but wetness, he’ll be surprised. He’ll think there’s been a mistake and it won’t be over nearly as fast as it should be. And there will be no turning back.
“I’ve missed you,” I say. “I’ve missed you for all these years. My brother. The one who built canal systems in the sand and read to me about talking lions. I missed you like you’d been dead for five years. But you never died. You’re still my brother. It’s my fault for not realizing it before. And this…feels wrong. It is wrong. Please, Matt. I don’t know if being resurrected changed me, but I don’t want the person that you are, the one right this second, to die. And I don’t think I have it in me to use my resurrection choice. So please, I’m asking you not to leave me with that choice. You don’t want to go through dying. I can absolutely promise you that. So don’t. You can have the life you should have been living all along. I know that you avoided looking for it because of…because of me.” I take a deep, shaky breath. And rest.
The arches of his eyebrows collapse, his forehead crumples, the corners of his mouth twitch downward. I want to throw my arms around his neck because he’s there, my brother, my brother is there.
And then the music cuts off. A bell chimes three times. No, no, no. It can’t be time. Not yet.
As if reading my mind, Jeremy reappears. “It’s go-time, buddy.” He nods at me and wraps his hands around the wheelchair handles.
“Matt, tell them,” I say.
Matt gives me a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “We’ve come too far, Lake,” is all that he says. That layer of sweat that coats his forehead, it’s the only thing that gives him away. I watch in stupefied silence as Jeremy takes him from me. The crowd thickens all around, putting bodies between me and my brother.
There’s roaring in my ears. The sadness in the room feels infinite. This is happening. There will be pain and then there’ll be nothing.
I should be stronger for my brother, who watched me die and broke his back trying to save me. I should hold his hand, comfort him, but the booze has turned me spongy and my legs are practically useless.
Through a space in the audience, I watch Jeremy stand up straight. “I commit—” His voice cracks and he has to push his fist into his mouth to recover. “I commit my friend, Matthew Devereaux, to death.” Again, his voice rises in pitch. It’s uncomfortable watching him. There’s none of the hard-line joy that I witnessed at my first death party. Jeremy touches Matt’s shoulder robotically. Matt stares at the rim of the pool.
Somebody should have given him a drink, I think. Too late. Too late. It’s all too late.
“So that he can return to this life anew.”
The crowd comes alive with muttering undertones. Matt looks up from the pool. He turns his head and stares straight at me, like he can see that I’m hiding here. A coward. Matt’s never been a coward.
I shrink into myself. Then I actually stumble backward.
I hear another boy’s voice, more confident. “In front of these witnesses, do you go willingly into the darkness?”
I can’t stand to listen to another word. I turn my back to the pool, to Jeremy, to my brother, at which point I accidentally careen into a goth boy in a black skirt and army boots. He catches my elbow and I use his shoulder to balance, afterward pushing off him like a boat shoving away from a dock.
My feet crisscross over each other. The vodka swirls around in my head and makes my cheeks tingle. The thing I want most is to get away. I knock one of the fancy abstract paintings crooked on my way out of the cold glass tomb of a house.
Feeling for my keys in my pocket, I click the lock button so that the car horn blares. I locate my car parked down the street. How long has it been? A minute? Two minutes? Three? Long enough to have no one left?
The second I sink down onto the leather seat, I dissolve into sobs, the kind that send violent tremors through my body, like I’m being electrocuted.
I manage to shift the car into reverse. I tap the bumper of the car behind me before I put the car into drive. It lurches as I switch between the accelerator and the brake. At last I free my car from the parking space. I barely push my foot down on the pedal, almost idling down the deserted street. I can hardly see. There’s no such thing as windshield wipers for the drunk and crying.
Three blocks down, a stop sign seems to pop out of nowhere. I slam on the brakes and the wheels screech to a halt. The nose of my car is nearly a car length into the intersection when a pickup truck whizzes past, honking.
I drop my forehead to the steering wheel. My whole body has erupted in shakes and quivers. I shut my eyes and picture the explosion of the Jeep’s windshield. Crystal shards raining down on blacktop. The piercing sound of screams and the deep-blue sky.
Another car swerves to miss me. I peel my face from the wheel and let my foot off the brake. Driving as slowly and as carefully as I can after far too many vodka shots, I pull into an alley beside a gas station and dial the number of the only friend I have left in this world—if I have even that. Then I curl up in the backseat and wait.
I wake up to the sound of knocking and peel open my eyelids. A nose is pressed against the car window, smearing the glass with puffs of fog.
“You guys can’t sleep here.” The man’s voice is too loud. I squint up at him, confused. Sunlight sears my skull. The man has a too-tan face the color and texture of leather, with black patches of balding hair plastered to the sides of a melon-shaped head. “Can’t. Sleep. Here.” He taps on the glass. The gold chain around his neck glints in the sun. “Do you hear me? You’ve got to leave.”
I groan and push up on my elbow.
“Oof!” The thing I push up on grunts. “Watch it.”