Page 33 of What You Left Me

Back and forth, Petra slips from one world to the other, neither sturdy enough to fully support her. The plane flies forward. Uncorrupted white-bread land stretches on for miles.

Martin grabs Petra’s shoulders. “Ask Spencer about the pact. Tell him the letters are in my closet. Top shelf, in an envelope inside the Foamposites box. He’s the only one in the world, aside from me, that knows what that means. It’ll prove I’m me.”

Petra blinks, the first after a long sleep, the real world almost flickering into steadier view.

17

SUNDAY, JUNE 10

Whoa.

We return to our regularly scheduled programming: the grayness and the nothing and the feelings that aren’t really feelings but aren’t anything else.

Martin McGee here. Not gone but not back. Incapable of forming coherent sentences when caught inside the dreams of one very smart girl. Once again stuck in this place I’m going to call the Between, because it seems to be the blurry edge that separates life and death, a line where one world ends and another begins. A first-blink pressure that holds me right in the middle of both. I tipped toward one end but didn’t fall all the way—which is good, don’t get me wrong—but I’m really wishing I could’ve overcorrected, and y’know, woken up.

• • •

It is unusually cold—a crisp, steady, air-conditioning kind of chill. My heady is buried into a crevice. No blanket covers me. I’m not at home, I realize, shooting upright, panicked by unfamiliarity. I rub my eyes, hoping against logic that this uncomfortable vinyl couch will transform into my bed. The world comes into clearer view. Cameron’s head is at my feet. Daniel spoons her. Aminah’s sprawled out on the carpet below us.

That’s right. We spent the night. This is the waiting room.

I rise up, tiptoeing over bodies to make my way into the adjacent bathroom. A mirror is on the wall, but I don’t bother with it, too groggy to comprehend my face. It’s too early. Or too late. My sense of time seems to be lost.

My mind keeps slipping back into my dream. I’m piloting an airplane. My family and friends are all dead. Ryan Hales is waving his arms at me.

Martin appears.

Martin is dead.

Martin says he isn’t.

Ask Spencer about the pact. Tell him the letters are in my closet. Top shelf, in an envelope inside the Foamposites box. He’s the only one in the world, aside from me, that knows what that means. It’ll prove I’m me.

The words push me out of my liminal space and into the unnerving stillness of the empty bathroom. I flush the toilet and wash my hands with my head down, accepting reality but not needing to see my part in it.

A voice, one I know must be my own though I don’t quite recognize it, as certain and steady as a line of permanent ink, emerges from the deepest parts of me, telling me my dream was as real as right now. Martin was there.

I need to find Spencer.

• • •

I died.

I can say it now. I’m past the point of being afraid. How can I be? Ithappened.I don’t know how I know it, but I know. It’s like when you say the wrong thing, but the other person plays it totally cool. It doesn’t matter that neither of you acknowledge what happened. It can’t be denied, no matter how much you pretend it’s all good.

There was a phantom pain, and it grew stronger and stronger until it left me altogether.

I left myself.

I was gone.

Then just like that, I was back in Spitty’s dream.

So I’m not pretending. I’m not trying to act like I’m making all of this up or I’m the one who’s dreaming. Not anymore. I came back from dying. That means I have to fight.

• • •

“Where are you going?” Cameron asks me. She has on her favorite shirt, a gray tee with an ironed-on profile shot of a young Art Garfunkel. Freshman year we studied the symbolism in Simon and Garfunkel’s music for honors English. Cameron got obsessed and made the Art shirt, calling him her fellow redheaded-underdog-kindred-spirit-good-luck charm. It started out as nothing more than a laughable anecdote in a laundry list of her bizarre ticks, but with every A plus that came out of wearing the shirt, and every B that happened when she forgot, we’ve all started to believe in the power of Art, at least a little. She put it on before we left for the hospital. She’d happened to pack it in her swimming bag.