“Sit,” he repeats, and it’s gentle. Not a command. Not a request. Just the only thing left to do. “There’s no reason to keep hiding in the bathroom. Hide here. There’s a force field, you know.” He lowers his voice when he says it, like he’s telling me a secret and then just barely hints at a smile that no one but me would catch before he puts it away and sobers, adding quietly, “No one will bother you.”

So I sit. He’s on the backrest and I’m on the seat. We don’t touch. We don’t speak. We aren’t even at eye level with one another. And today, for the first time since I came to this school, the courtyard isn’t nearly so horrible after all.

CHAPTER 31

Josh

My grandfather died this morning. Nothing changed.

I thought, when he died, I would crack and cry and get drunk and throw shit because it was over, because he was the last one. But I didn’t. I didn’t break down. I didn’t punch holes in the wall. I didn’t start fights with every as**ole in school. I just kept going like nothing even happened. Because it was all so incredibly normal.

***

“Where are we going?” Sunshine asks when she climbs into my truck. I don’t feel like being here. The garage doesn’t offer me anything today. That workshop is the only thing in the world that I count on, and I don’t want to think that it’s powerless for me right now. I’d rather just leave it for a little while so I don’t have to be afraid that I’ve lost that, too. I don’t really know where we’re going. I just want to go.

We drive for a long time. I haven’t said anything since we got in the truck. I never even answered her question. Sunshine is good with silence. She leans her head against the window and looks outside and she just lets me drive.

We end up stretched out in the bed of the truck, staring up at the sky in the parking lot of a closed down car dealership.

I haven’t started counting yet. I wonder if it’s just me or if it’s like that for everybody; that every time someone dies you start counting how much time has passed since they’ve been gone. First you count it in minutes, then in hours. You count in days, then weeks, then months. Then one day you realize that you aren’t counting anymore, and you don’t even know when you stopped. That’s the moment they’re gone.

“My grandfather’s dead,” I say.

“If we had a telescope, I could show you the Sea of Tranquility.” She points up at the sky. “See? Up there on the moon. You can’t really tell from here.”

“Is that why you have a picture of the moon in your bedroom?” At this point I’m an expert at going along with her tangents.

“You noticed that?”

“It was the only thing on the wall. I thought you were into astronomy.”

“I’m not. I keep it there to remind me that it’s bullshit. I thought it sounded like this beautiful, peaceful place. Like where you’d want to go when you die. Quiet and water everywhere. A place that would swallow you up and accept you no matter what. I had this whole image of it.”

“Doesn’t sound like a bad place to end up.”

“It wouldn’t be, if it were real. But it’s not. It’s not a sea at all. It’s just a big, dark shadow on the moon. The whole name is a lie. Doesn’t mean anything.”

Her left hand is resting on her stomach, opening and closing. She does that all the time but I don’t think she realizes it.

“So your warped fascination with names extends beyond people?”

“They’re all lies, really. Your name could mean to excel and you could be useless and crap at everything. You can put a name on anything, call it whatever you want, doesn’t make it real. Doesn’t make it true.” She sounds bitter. Or just disillusioned.

“So if they’re all such meaningless crap, why are you so obsessed?” I can’t count how many mutilated newspapers she’s left on my kitchen table once she’s cut her way through the birth announcements. At first, I thought she was one of those girls who takes pre-naming her future children to the extreme, but apparently it’s just some weird hobby.

“Because it’s good when you find one that does mean something. Makes all the empty ones worthwhile.” The faintest smile crosses her face and I wonder what she’s thinking about, but she doesn’t give me the chance to ask.

“Where do you think he is?” she asks, still staring at the sky.

“Someplace good, I guess. I don’t know.” I wait and she does too. “I asked him once if he was afraid. Of dying. Then I realized it was kind of a shit thing to ask someone who’s dying, because if they weren’t thinking about it before, they definitely would be after.”

“He was upset?”

“No. He laughed. Said he wasn’t afraid at all. But he was on a lot of drugs by then, so he wasn’t all there. He told me he already knew where he was going because he’d been there before.” I stop because I think that’s all of my grandfather’s craziness that I want to share. He wasn’t always like that. Just at the end, with the drugs and the pain. But then she’s looking at me with the curiosity of a hundred questions in her eyes and I feel like I have to answer her. “When he was like twenty, he was working construction and he fell and his heart stopped, so I guess he was technically dead for like a minute or something. He told the story a thousand times.”

“Then why would you think it was the drugs talking if you’d heard it before?”

“Because he always said he didn’t remember. Everyone asked him if there was a light and all that bullshit, but he always said he couldn’t remember any of it once he woke up. Then the night before he left, he sat me down and said he had two things he wanted to give me‌—‌one final piece of advice and his last secret. And that’s when he told me that he always remembered it, where he went when he died. He said he remembered exactly what it was like.”

“What did he say?”

“He said there wasn’t really any form or sense to it. That it was like feeling without knowing. Like a fever dream. Like the dream of second chances. He said the only part of it that had definition was a porch swing in front of a red brick house, but he didn’t know what it meant at the time so he didn’t say anything about it to anyone. Then he showed me this old picture of him sitting with my grandmother on a porch swing in front of the red brick house she lived in when they met.”

“That’s sweet,” she says, but there’s almost something like disappointment there and I wish I was allowed to reach over and touch her face or her hand or anything.

“Yeah, it’s sweet,” I say, not meaning it. “Except he didn’t actually meet her until three years after he had that accident; that’s why he didn’t get it at the time. But once he saw that swing and that house, then he knew. He knew he wasn’t supposed to die. He was supposed to come back so he could meet her because his heaven was where she was, even if he didn’t know it at the time. And that’s why he wasn’t scared.” I turn to see her watching the moon, the ghost of a smile playing on her lips where the disappointment was a minute ago. I look up at the sky to see what she sees and she moves closer and rests her head on my chest. I don’t care if it’s only because she’s cold or the metal truck bed is hard as hell. I don’t question it; I just close my arm around her and pull her into me like I’ve been doing it for years. “Like I said. Lots of pain killers.”

***

“Was it good advice?” she asks on the drive home. Her head is resting against the window and she’s watching the road go by.

“What?”

“You said your grandfather gave you one last piece of advice. Was it good advice?” She’s sitting up now and facing me.

“No,” I laugh, when I think about it. “I’m fairly certain it was the worst piece of advice ever. But I’m going to blame that on the drugs, too.”

“Now you have to tell me. I have to know what qualifies as the worst advice ever.” She twists her body towards me and tucks one of her legs under the other.

“He said,” and I’m almost embarrassed telling her this, “that every woman has one unforgiveable thing, one thing that she’ll never be able to get past and for every woman it’s different. Maybe it’s being lied to, maybe it’s being cheated on, whatever. He said the trick in relationships was to figure out what that unforgiveable thing was, and to not do it.”

“That was advice?”

“I warned you. He also told me there was a raccoon in the kitchen that night. So…”

“Do you believe it?”

“About the raccoon or the advice?”

She looks at me and tilts her head impatiently and I glance at her before turning back to the road.

“You tell me. You’re a girl. You’re not one of those girls who wants to be called a woman, right? Even though you’re almost eighteen? That just seems weird.”

“Please don’t,” she says dryly.

“So what’s yours?” I ask.

“My advice?”

“No, your unforgiveable thing. Apparently you must have one.”

“Never thought about it.” She turns back to the window. “I’m guessing murder is out.”

“Murder is out. You’d be dead, so the forgiveness would be a moot point.”

“Not necessarily, but we’ll say so for the sake of argument. I guess I’d go with loving me too much.”

“Loving you too much would be unforgiveable? I’m going to pull a McAllister on you and require supporting details.”

“Too many obligations. People like to say love is unconditional, but it’s not, and even if it was unconditional, it’s still never free. There’s always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won’t be happy unless you are. You’re supposed to be who they think you’re supposed to be and feel how they think you’re supposed to feel because they love you and when you can’t give them what they want, they feel shitty, so you feel shitty, and everybody feels shitty. I just don’t want that responsibility.”

“So you’d rather no one loved you?” I ask. I wish I wasn’t driving so I could look at her for more than a second.

“I don’t know. I’m just talking. It’s an unanswerable question.” She pulls her foot out from under her and puts her head back down against the glass.

“Worst advice ever,” I say.

***

I’m used to being alone, but tonight I feel more alone. Like I’m not just alone in my house, I’m alone in the world. And maybe that’s its own blessing, because now, I never have to do this again.

Tonight when I climb into bed, I don’t even bother to count.

CHAPTER 32

Nastya

I didn’t stop talking immediately. I talked right up until the day I remembered everything that happened, over a year later. That was the day I went silent. It wasn’t a ploy or a tactic. It wasn’t psychosomatic. It was a choice. And I made it.

I just knew that suddenly I had answers. I had all the answers to all the questions, but I didn’t want to say them. I didn’t want to release them out into the world and make them real; I didn’t want to admit that such things happened and that they happened to me. So I chose the silence and everything that came along with it because I wasn’t a good enough liar to speak.

I always planned to tell the truth. I just wanted to give myself a little time. A chance to find the right thing to say and the courage to say it. I didn’t take a vow of silence. I wasn’t suddenly struck mute. I just didn’t have the words. I still don’t. I never found them.