Chapter 6 #2
Bas crouches. He drags a cinder block close, pulls the package open at the seams, candies heaped up in a pile on top.
The human ghosts draw closer. Dangerously close, empty mouths working soundlessly, nipping shreds of energy from the air.
Thirty feet behind us, the lights in the convenience store flicker.
But Bas doesn’t flinch. He takes my hand again and stands.
Solemnly, his eyes on the approaching shapes, he nods.
“Grandpa candies for Grandpa ghosts.”
His words punch me in the chest. I can’t hide the way my eyes leak, even in the steady drizzle. I hurt, every bone seized in a vise grip, grieving down deep in my gut, and yet I feel—so vindicated.
He gets it. Bas understands. He feels it, too, this wretched helplessness, dogged by a need to fix what everyone says can’t be mended.
I can tell he shares the infuriating futility of it, the awful impotence that carves my soul like a jutting broken bone, forever whittling me down with a damning need to witness.
We can’t stop them from suffering, but we can bear it with them. We—we owe them this.
I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but I know I owe them this.
Flinching from their pain would dishonor their deaths, their suffering, and I can’t do that to them.
Not when they’re hurting already. I have to look at them, each and every one, remember them when they can’t remember themselves.
I must stand with them, to show them that they’re not alone.
I’m here.
For all the little good it does, I’m here.
Scrubbing a hand over my eyes, my runny nose, I grab a caramel, hold it out. My feet carry me forward, hand extended, caught up by a bone-deep need more natural than breathing. An offering. An apology. A purpose—
Bas catches my hand, fingers tangling, gently but firmly drawing me back.
Startled, I snap into my right mind, scrambling away from the outline of a hand about to touch my own.
Oh my god, what was I thinking? Its touch would have killed me.
The ghost would have consumed every electrical spark in my body and wandered off down the road without missing a beat. I almost just died.
Bewildered, I turn, gripping Bas’s hand so hard I must be hurting him, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
He scours my face like he’s looking for something, pale behind his freckles, the almost desperate way he cups my cheek in one calloused palm.
Caught in the bonfire blaze of his focus, my breathing stops.
Time smears around us, disjointed and unnecessary.
Language melts straight out of my head. Something like a dream, a memory, flickers in the corner of my eye, blue-lit by ghosts. I smell flowers, cold black water—
But the moment breaks on the sharp upturn of his grin, trembling only slightly. Shaking his head, Bas turns away.
“There’s a car coming,” he croaks, swallowing a lump in his throat. Tugging me behind him, we run, hopscotching out over the parade of mice and vole ghosts and into a neighboring yard.
A decommissioned police car rounds the corner, marked with the school district instead of a precinct.
We plunge back into the woods, ducking down in time to watch the security officer idle past, eating a cheeseburger with a look of intense boredom.
Not a second later, a black van flies in the opposite direction, and I swear the school nurse is driving it, her face hard and intense, snarling with tooth-chipping enunciation into a headset.
Muffled in the underbrush, Bas mutters a baffled swear. Turning, he demands, “They’re sending G.I. Jane after truants now?”
“Apparently,” I whisper back, laughing. “Let’s get out of here.”
We retreat into the woods. Chips crunching in my carpetbag with every bounce, we dodge from one thin strip of trees to another, darting across yards and behind houses.
Bas takes every window as a challenge, executing perfect barrel rolls behind cover, his stealth hampered by my wheezing laughter and elephant grace.
Together, we wander the woods, talking about anything and nothing, outrunning ghosts and imagined pursuers until the school buses scream past, open windows spilling out childish roars.
Bas turns, a question in his eyes. I shake my head. I don’t want to go home. Ideally, I’d never go home. But I don’t know how to say that, explain the weight of my mom’s and my history, so instead I kiss him again—
(Inevitable and golden, sunbeams leaking through his smile. Finally here, finally welcomed, finally home, home, home—)
Bas loses his balance, tipping over into a bank of leaves. Entirely by earbuds and by accident, he drags me with him. I land on his chest, rolling aside in time to keep from crushing all the air out of him. I settle for putting his hand to sleep instead, tucking my head in the crook of his arm.
Questions tap at my teeth so hard I fight to swallow them.
I want to ask—did he fall because he felt it too?
The un-memory of sunshine and the sensation of home?
But I can’t bear the answer, the risk it won’t be yes.
I don’t want to be the thing that shatters this perfect moment with my pervasive strangeness, so I keep my mouth shut, my lips (for the moment) to myself.
Shoulder to shoulder, I stretch out, swiping a one-winged angel shape into the musky pile of rotting leaves.
A spider skitters across the back of my hand.
As long as it’s not a tick, today I don’t even mind.
Fingers splayed in dappled sunlight, I reach for a fallen branch and build my passenger a bridge.
The song in our shared earbuds ends. Fumbling for the MP3 player, I hold it up between us.
“Is it your turn? I can’t remember.”
“Got any oldies?” Bas grins. Leaves crunching, he sits up clutching an imaginary microphone, dips an elaborate Tommy Tutone: “Jenny, I want your number…”
My chest feels so full of moths it might explode.
I protest, grinning. “That’s not how the song goes.”
Wiggling his shoulders, Bas shifts into TLC. “And I wanna give you mine.”
“That’s not how that goes either.” I laugh.
Bas shrugs, flopping back.
“Guess you’ll have to teach me, then. Let’s start with the alphabet.” Contacts up and typing laboriously, he spells out, “J-E-N-N-Y.”
A spark in my fingers, tingling up my whole arm, I lean over, type in my number.
After a moment of intense concentration, he texts me a picture of a wall-mounted singing fish.
Ignoring the stream of missed messages and angry texts, I set it as his user picture.
And after hesitating a handful of seconds, I save him under BIG MOUTH, the unspoken final word—Bass—our secret.
I can’t resist stealing a selfie, though.
Just one perfect picture of the two of us, temple to temple and grinning with leaves in our hair.
And if I was anyone else, I could save it as my background picture.
I could show it to the world without caring.
But if I was anyone else, I wouldn’t be here, hoarding a perfect stolen moment with a boy I met under a library table.
I make a secret folder in my phone to hide it, tuck it away in a password-protected partition where my mom won’t find it. Somehow, it makes the day seem smaller. Ordinary. Tawdry. Something to be embarrassed of.
Another text flashes across my notifications. I turn off the screen.
I don’t know what my face looks like just then, but Bas must sense something.
He flops over belly first into the leaf pile and surfaces like a whale, heaving giant armfuls of forest bracken everywhere.
I catch a mouthful of mulch, spitting and swearing, but it can’t chase the taste of blue raspberry, or the way my heart swells when he emerges from the pile with eyes glittering just for me.
Clawing up a wad of rotting leaves, I throw it in his stupid, perfect face.
Bas falls back, clutching his heart, rhapsodizing about his wounds and impending death.
Laughing, I try to get him back on his feet but it’s apparently too late for him.
He dies elaborately, dragging us both down twice before I can struggle him to standing.
The moment lingers. Time hesitates like a fingernail snagging cheap tights, a single thread pulling taut before the snap—
Bas thumbs a streak of mud off my chin. His eyes so soft and dark in the setting sunlight, he slots the earbud back into my ear, tying us together again with the solemnity of a ritual.
I can’t help remembering the way he looked at me, offering Grandpa candies for Grandpa ghosts. Like he recognized me as someone, something… else. Something bigger and stranger than a girl at a library table.
Like he was waiting for me to recognize him.
Quietly, he says, “Let me walk you home.”