Chapter Twenty-Three Lee
“What are you doing this summer?” a voice said.
Lee blinked hard, his eyes adjusting to the light.
He was sitting on the scratchy couch in his apartment, his laptop balanced precariously on his knees. The gray sky had turned
to off-white paint and the sterile sting of cheap lighting in student housing. The scent of charcoal and grilled burgers floated
through the open balcony door.
James was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a slice of pizza in one hand.
James, who was whole and alive, his eyes safely in their sockets.
One moment, Lee had been sitting in his room with Sen, and now he was somehow back in his college apartment.
Lee Turner had forgotten this moment, but it rushed to him now in vivid colors. He remembered the way he’d propped open his
astronomy book with his phone because it was old and stiff and wouldn’t stay open to page forty-five. He remembered the box
of pepperoni pizza that James had brought back from a club meeting and offered to Lee, which he’d declined.
“Are you traveling?” James asked when Lee didn’t answer.
Lee looked down at his textbook, though he had forgotten how to read, how to breathe, how to think.
This moment was somewhere between a memory and a fantasy, for he could remember being here but now held all the knowledge of what came after.
Could he change what happened next if he acted differently now?
Run , he wanted to say to James. Get out, now.
“I don’t know,” was what Lee actually said, because those were the only words he could find in the darkness of his mind.
James took a bite of pizza. He chewed as he watched Lee, as if waiting for more. Lee watched him swallow, James’s Adam’s apple
bobbing. Lee snapped his gaze back to his textbook and pretended to read, holding his breath because he was sure James could
hear his screaming thoughts. He would call the police on Lee for a murder that hadn’t happened yet. He would kill Lee right
now to stop it from happening.
But what James actually did was much, much worse.
“I’m thinking of going to Asia,” James said after he finished the last bite of pizza, reaching for a napkin and wiping the
grease from his fingers, one by one. “Have you ever been to Cambodia?”