Chapter 5
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Don’t Threaten Me with a Good Time” by Panic! At The Disco
Anxiety creeps in at my seams. What happened to me earlier?
Sudden-onset narcolepsy? A seizure? Why does my brain keep playing me a compilation of some other chick’s greatest hits, and should I be worried this is more of the same?
Am I even skipping school, hand in hand with a boy I met under a library table, or did I make this up too?
Taking out my earbud, I pass it over to Bas, kicking the heavy skirt of a spruce tree.
Dreams can’t hurt, right? Chewing on my chapped lip, I scan the copse floor, littered with dead limbs sloughing bark and sodden from the latest flash flood.
Bending down, I grab the biggest, spikiest pine cone I can find.
I squeeze it tight between my palms, pressing down as hard as I can, my skin whitening under its jagged teeth.
It… kinda hurts? Uncomfortable more than anything else.
“So why did you steal a stethoscope?” Bas asks, dragon-puffing steam into his cupped palms.
My hand flies to my neck, smacking the tool’s rubber hosing. Crap.
“I didn’t mean to steal it,” I admit, unlooping its pincer headphones from around my neck. “I just…”
I don’t know how to finish. What do I tell him?
That I’ve lost my mind? That I couldn’t put the stethoscope down because I heard an ocean in my veins?
Because all day today, I keep getting these flashes—asphodel, an endless sky, black water—and when I blink back to reality, I’m once again in my own body with the taste of salt and copper in my mouth, a penetrating lightning strike of fear.
Bas frowns, stepping closer. “You okay?”
“I don’t know,” I admit, the words tumbling out. My fists spasm, catching awkwardly on the chest piece of the stethoscope, and it hurts. It hurts, and somehow knowing that I’m awake feels so much worse. “The nurse tried to listen to my heartbeat, but I don’t think she could.”
I can’t follow the thought through. Miserable, head throbbing, I turn away, avoid his eyes, dig the toe of my combat boot into the earth so I don’t have to face his patient gaze head-on—and you know what?
No. Anger spills into the riot of my head, coal into a ravenous furnace, burning out the anxious fumes.
Am I really afraid of what he’ll say when I tell him—or just afraid I’ll risk my heart, make another friend, and inevitably lose him?
It’s time to be brave. Time to stop flinching, time to stop running, ripping out my roots every time I plant them.
Time to choose.
“Hey, I know this is mega weird,” I venture, “but can I try to listen to yours?”
Bas grins, the freckles on his nose crinkling. He tries to cock an eyebrow at me but can’t move one without the other and ends up wiggling them both like a caterpillar rave.
“Easier ways to get my shirt off, but if you wanna play doctor, a gentleman doesn’t kink shame.”
Despite the tightness in my chest, I laugh. “Stop, I’m serious.”
“Who says I’m not?” Glancing around, Bas plops down on a felled log and throws himself back like a damsel on a chaise lounge, a dramatic arm cast over his eyes. Not that it lasts long. He can’t resist checking my face to see if I’m laughing. Peeking under his sleeve, he blows me a kiss.
My chest creaks. My rib cage strains, holding back a stirring in that strange ocean. I breathe his name.
Something in the way I say it, and Bas softens. He sits up, face falling serious.
“Yeah, all right, if you want,” he says. “Doubt you’ll hear much, though.”
My stomach jolts, hope and dread warring for territory. I hold the stethoscope up to what cloud-dimmed light punches through the remaining leaves.
“Why, does this look broken to you?”
Bas shrugs. He tips his head at the mossy patch on the log beside him. “See for yourself.”
I hesitate at his tone. So solemn and…old somehow. Like he’s been here before and knows what will happen. But a small smile breaks across his face, and I grab the stethoscope, throwing myself down next to him.
It’s time to be brave, I remind myself. I’m done running.
Hyper-aware of his scent, the soft vibration of his gray hoodie against my corduroy jacket, I pincer the stethoscope into my ears, swallowing down the way my blood pounds when my hip accidentally brushes his.
Grin widening, Bas winks. I ignore him. Ignore my own flaming blush, too, my traitorous body burning white-hot all the way up to my hairline.
I’d give anything for a breeze right about now, but the sky seems determined to spite me, clouds evaporating in a rare cascade of unimpeded sunlight, spilling down the back of my neck.
Abruptly, the woods fill with birdsong. The leaves stir, trees sighing awake.
The distant sound of traffic filters to us from far away, dregs from another world, the whisper of cars passing not unlike waves.
Swallowing, pretending my hands are shaking from the cold, I press the listener to his heart.
“You’re not going to hear anything through my hoodie.
” Bas plucks the hem away from his body, holding it out.
Stuck in the moment, I can’t move. My eyes fix on his, teeth clamped down on my inner cheek.
I want to know, I do. I want this. But I can’t help feeling like I’m standing with my toes curled over a high ledge.
If I take this next step, I’ll plummet, and there’s no way back.
His fingers on mine lighter than a ghost touch, Bas takes my hand. He pulls it closer, hesitant, like he expects I’ll melt into the mist at any moment, salt-struck and hissing. God, maybe he’s right. Is this what ghosts feel like? This swelling tear inside my chest, the pulsing hum in my ears?
My world narrows to this singular moment, our hands doubled, his calloused fingertips guiding me through the interior of his clothing. Together, we press the listener into the skin of his bare chest, blazing with a feverish heat. I hear—
(A wall of flaming arrows loosed, hanging like stars over the open ocean—)
(A laden shroud deposited in sea-foam, a sleeping body headed home—)
(Reeds on a riverbank, the slow chuckle of an oar ceaselessly treading—)
Nothing.
That is not a heartbeat.
My eyes fly open, seeking his. Time loops around us, spiderwebbing outward. Bas stares, his night-sky eyes fixed on mine, patient as the sleeping earth, an emotion in his gaze so huge and vast and ancient I don’t know its name.
My thoughts break. I shatter. For a second, I’m everywhere and nowhere, too big for my body, my soul another lost leaf in the wind. Except, I am the wind. I am the leaves, the soil, the sleeping roots. I am—
My chest seizes, shattering into coughing.
The moment breaks. I slam back into my body, bent over and hacking up an inconvenient lung.
I sink my fingernails into rotting bark to ground myself, blushing hard.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Don’t know what weird fantasy worlds my broken brain keeps escaping into.
Time didn’t freeze. And Bas isn’t anything stranger than a teenage boy regretting his decision to skip class with the new weirdo—
Except he closes his fingers over mine again, pries the stethoscope from my numb fingers, and presses the flat of my palm to the silent place where I should have heard his heart beating. Where I should feel it beating now, his pulse point utterly silent beneath my fingers.
“Told you,” he says, barely more than a whisper. “Us dead kids gotta stick together.”
I… don’t know what to do with this. Swallowing hard, I choke down something worse than butterflies rioting in my—apparently empty—rib cage.
This is crazy. I’m crazy. I search his eyes, the lines of his mouth, the place where his nose wrinkles when he laughs, waiting for the joke, the punch line, the insult, anything.
Because of course he has a heartbeat. Nobody just doesn’t have a heartbeat.
I force a smile, but it shivers flat.
“So it is broken,” I mutter. I pull my hand out from under his, shove the stupid tool deep into my carpetbag where I don’t have to keep looking at it.
Bas doesn’t move. The look on his face doesn’t change.
“Or we are,” he says.
Something like a laugh snags sideways in my throat. I cover my fear with sarcasm. “Don’t you think it’s too early for ghost stories?”
Pushing off the log, I tug my coat tight around me despite the unusual warmth in the air. Bas stretches out his legs, barely two feet away from me, and yet his distance aches like some strange and vital thing peeled away from my own bones. A missing piece.
But that’s crazy. I shake my head, shake it off, half surprised I don’t hear a rattle.
God knows there’s gotta be a screw loose in there.
This is crazy town, population me. So why do I have this bone-deep certainty I’m missing something?
That here I am in the woods, surrounded by breadcrumbs, but I can’t figure out where they lead?
I can’t help thinking… what if he’s right—what if it’s not the stethoscope that’s broken?
Bas scoffs. The seriousness falls from his face, and he breaks back into his familiar, easy grin. With elaborate offense, he grips imaginary pearls and gasps in fake outrage.
“Are you calling me easy? I’ll have you know I never tell a girl a ghost story before the third date.”
His humor makes it simple to shove my scrambling thoughts back into the deep, dark recesses I won’t touch. I laugh—a real laugh this time. “Shut up,” I say, and step forward, reaching out a hand to haul him off the log.
Only, my bag bumps against my leg. Inside, I feel my phone vibrating.
“Oh, shit,” I mutter.
With Bas on his feet, the crack in my stomach splitting wider every second, I fumble my phone awake. The lock screen scrolls with missed calls, one after another.
Missed Call from Mom 11:49 a.m.
Missed Call from Mom 11:50 a.m.
Missed Call from Mom 11:51 a.m.