Page 35 of What You Left Me

I let go of her hand. “It’s about to get so much weirder.”

• • •

Petra’s the one who showed me what it is to fight. In her dream, she screamed like Spitty did when the car hit. She said, “I can’t go too.”

Too.

Like someone had gone before her. Someone who she’d been thinking of a lot. Or at least enough to dream of three times. We were about to crash headfirst into this jungle that’d totally overrun everything until she screamed “No!” with so much force that the plane changed course.

It should’ve been over, but she fought.

And there I was, tongue-tied, trying again to explain just where it is that I am. Trying to fight as she did. Then it started. Dream skipping. If where I am now is inside a blink, what happened then was the action of blinking. I ping-ponged back and forth so much between there and here that I rushed through everything I wanted to say. For a dude who used to get yelled at for talking too much, I’m still no good at using the right words. There’s so much I’ve never been able to say right. Or at all. But I got the point across before she tossed me back to here: my pact with Spits.

Grandpops died when I was nine. I’d never lost anyone before him. Adults tried to baby me. Katie was a wreck because she was there when it happened. My other friends couldn’t relate. There was just Spitty, whose mom passed away the year before we got really close. He came to Grandpops’s funeral. After the service, his dad dropped him off at my house to sleep over. All night we brainstormed a way to stop this horribleness from happening again. Neither of us understood how someone’s body just stopped working. It made us so mad. You couldn’t give us a person to love then take that person away.

Of course, we were a pair of nine-year-old boys. We thought there was an option of not dying at all. Actually, I’m pretty sure I thought that was an option right up until a vehicle smashed into my body on a sunny Friday afternoon in June. Anyway, if one of us happened to mess things up—go on and die—we created a plan for the other person.

We never talked about it again, but I know Spitty still remembers. That day bonded us forever. A pact, written on loose-leaf and sealed with a spit promise. A pact to keep us from hurting the ones we love.

• • •

“Why is it always more difficult on the way back?” I ask Cameron as we try to reverse our steps.

“It does seem to take longer. We should’ve written down what the woman said.”

“No.” I hesitate. “Never mind.”

“What?” she asks, her tone teetering close to annoyance but masked with the perfume of her curiosity.

“Never mind!”

“Come on! You can’t just start to say something then stop!”

“It’s too strange to say.”

“Great. I love strange things.”

“Promise you won’t think I’ve lost it?”

“Promise.”

We both agree to turn left down a somewhat familiar corridor, reaching a new set of elevators.

“Martin isn’t dead.”

Cameron’s finger hovers over the down arrow. “I mean—” She peters off, afraid to say what she’s really thinking, which is that it sure seemed that way when Katie and her dad ran out of the waiting room. We all fell asleep waiting for news, but they never returned, and the nurses wouldn’t tell anyone anything.

“The pact thing I said to Spencer—Martin didn’t tell me that at graduation. He told me in my dream.”

Cameron plunges her finger onto the down button. The doors open instantly, and we both enter, following the same parallel lines we did riding up.

“He said he isn’t dead. He’s just stuck. He thinks he did die for a minute, but he came back. Then he said the letter thing. Told me that would prove it was really him. And look how Spencer reacted. He couldn’t believe I knew that.” My words sound absurd once spoken, but however bizarre, they express my current truth. There’s no denying the look on Spencer’s face.

Cameron inhales for what must be the first time since I started spewing my fantasticality. “Does this have anything to do with what happened at Daniel’s yesterday?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“Survey says for best accuracy, you have to choose one answer.I don’t knowis not an option.”