“I’m not picky,” I said.

“Okay, got it,” he said then. “Here’s one: I plan my funeral.”

“You what?”

“Yeah. I keep notes on a document on my computer.”

I frowned. “That’s actually a little disturbing.”

He turned to me then, like I might get the wrong idea. “I’m not suicidal, understand. I don’t want to die. I’m just aware that I could die. At any moment. And, if I do … I want a kick-ass funeral.”

Of course, now that I knew he had almost died, the whole thing made sense. I could see why he might have started thinking about it, anyway. Why he kept thinking about it was another question.

“What is a kick-ass funeral, exactly?” I asked. “Are we talking like a New Orleans marching-jazz-band parade? Or, like, skydivers? Fireworks?”

“Those are all great ideas.” He gave me a little sideways smile.

“What, then?”

“Just a normal funeral … but cool. I don’t like organ music, for example. So I made a playlist. You know, of favorites.”

“Like?”

“Oh, you know. Maybe some Talking Heads. A little Curtis Mayfield. Some Johnny Cash. A little hint of James Brown. And, of course: Queen.”

“Sure,” I said, “Queen goes without saying. At a funeral.”

Duncan gave me a look.

“I guess ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ is too on the nose.”

Duncan pointed at me. “Great rhythm-guitar line, though.”

“Is your funeral a sing-along?” I asked. “Wait—is it karaoke?”

“No, but that’s not a bad idea. I’ve got some poems set aside, too. One I found about harvesting peaches and, you know, the cycle of life, and another one about the death of the spider in Charlotte’s Web.”

“You’ve really thought about this.”

“Nobody wants a shitty funeral.”

I thought about Max’s funeral. “Aren’t they all ultimately kind of shitty, though?”

He shook his head. “We’ve set the bar too low. We can do better.”

I lifted my hands in surrender. “Fair enough.”

He nodded. “And, then, you know … I typed up a few words.”

“You wrote your own obituary?”

“Eulogy.”

“What does it say?”

“It stresses how handsome and heroic I am—”

“Naturally,” I said.

“And mentions my Nobel Prize and my Pulitzer.”

“Fair enough.”

“And then, at the end, there’s a dance party.”

“In the church?”

He frowned at me like I hadn’t been paying attention. “None of this is happening in a church. This is a beach funeral.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a little sting in my heart as this theoretical scenario suddenly shifted to feeling far too real. More quietly, I said, “Max had a beach funeral.”

“Did he?”

“It was packed. You wouldn’t think you could pack a beach, but he did.”

Duncan recognized my shift in perspective. “I wasn’t here yet. For that.”

I let out a long breath. “You would have loved Max so much.” I looked over, then added, “He would have loved you, too.”

Suddenly, I couldn’t help but think about how sad this conversation was. Not just remembering Max, and the unbelievable day when we’d all said goodbye to him, but the idea of Duncan planning his own funeral. As funny as he was being about it, it said a lot about what life had led him to expect.

We fell quiet for a bit. The wind off the Gulf—that steady current washing over us—was relaxing me. It was almost like a micro-massage. The stress was draining away, but in its place was something like sorrow. But not only sorrow. Companionship, too. I let go of his arm and fell into the comforting rhythm of just walking side by side with somebody.

We had survived the Iron Shark. And so many other things, too.

That really should have been enough.

But of course, I wanted more from him. Couldn’t help but notice how our hands kept accidentally brushing past each other as we walked. Each time it happened I felt a little jolt. It would have been so easy to edge a little closer and just give mine permission to find a way into his.

But what if he said no? Or—worse—what if he said yes?

I was in an impossible situation. One I had no idea how to get out of. Mostly because I wanted to be there so badly.

After a while, Duncan said, “Thank you for telling me about your epilepsy.”

I pointed at him. “That’s need-to-know information, by the way. Don’t use it against me.”

“I won’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”

He did look serious. “Yeah, well,” I said, walking on, “I’ll believe you when I believe you.”

“You’ve been through some hard things,” he said.

“Sure. Who hasn’t?”

“It’s just—you kind of seem like someone who doesn’t have any problems.”

“Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t have any problems?”

“What I mean is, you seem like a person life has been kind to.”

I frowned. “Why?”

“I don’t know. You wear all those crazy polka dots and stripes and pom-poms. You wore rainbow suspenders the other day.” He looked down. “You are literally wearing clown socks right now. You’re just so … weirdly happy.”

“You think I’m happy because I don’t know any better?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dude—I’m not happy because it comes easily to me. I bite and scratch and claw my way toward happiness every day.”

Duncan squinted at me, like that almost made sense.

“It’s a choice,” I went on, feeling like I needed to make him see. “A choice to value the good things that matter. A choice to rise above everything that could pull you down. A choice to look misery right in the eyes … and then give it the finger.”

“So it’s a hostile kind of joy.”

He was mocking me. “Sometimes,” I said defiantly.

“Is that a real thing though?”

“It’s a deliberate kind of joy. It’s a conscious kind of joy. It’s joy on purpose.”

Duncan squinted like he really wasn’t sold. “In clown socks and a tutu.”

“I’m telling you. I know all about darkness. That’s why I am so hell-bent, every damn day, on looking for the light.”

twenty-one

That night changed everything.

Nothing like a near-death experience, a walk on Seawall Boulevard, and a little adrenaline-inspired oversharing to promote interoffice bonding.

When I got to work on Monday, Duncan was friendly.

Friendly.

He greeted me pleasantly, the way nice people greet each other, and then he walked with me toward the courtyard. And that’s when things got really crazy.

The courtyard …

Was full of children …

Blowing bubbles.

I froze. I frowned at Duncan. “What is going on here?”

Duncan just smiled.

I reached over and poked my finger into his shoulder, as if to check that he was not a hologram.

Confirmed: flesh and blood.

I had woken up that morning with a terrible oversharing hangover, aghast at the amount of talking we’d done, the things I’d confessed to. I didn’t go around chatting about my epilepsy. It wasn’t something I shared with people—especially not people who were … complicated.

I’d wondered what it would be like to see him again.

Duncan was truly impressive at compartmentalizing. No matter how much fun we had doing Babette-mandated activities outside of school, he remained totally wooden and impersonally professional at school. Sometimes, after we’d had an especially fun time, he’d be extra cold the next day, as if to get us back to neutral.

Fair enough. As long as he didn’t paint anything else gray, I wasn’t going to complain.

Getting dressed that morning, I went extra cheerful, as if to confirm visually that he couldn’t get me down: a pink-and-red sweater set and a blue-jean skirt—and red knee socks with little pom-poms on them.

I’d spent the whole morning holding my shoulders back and battening down my emotional hatches to prepare myself for whatever glacial, stoic, all-business expression I was about to encounter on Duncan’s face.

He wasn’t going to disappoint me, dammit. I was going to be un-disappointable.

But now here he was, smiling. And waiting for me to smile back.

Standing in a courtyard full of bubbles.

Every single kid had a colored bottle—red, blue, orange—and a little wand. Some were blowing, and some were running around, trying to harness the wind. The teachers were there, too.

And, of course, Chuck Norris was running around like a lunatic, trying to catch the bubbles in his mouth.

“What is going on here?” I asked.

Duncan shrugged, suppressing a smile, and said, “We’re blowing bubbles,” almost like What about bubbles don’t you understand?

“Am I still asleep?” I asked Duncan.

He smiled. “If you are, then I am, too.”

“Why is this happening?”

Duncan said, “The teachers asked if we could have a bubble party during homeroom.”

“And you said yes?”

“I said yes.”

“You never say yes.”

“This time, I did.”

“But … why?”

Duncan looked away and surveyed the kids. Then he gave a little shrug. “I don’t know. You convinced me.”

“What—the other day?” I asked. “How, exactly? All we did was almost die!”

He shrugged. “I guess you reminded me of something. Something important. And that was enough.”