Page 59 of Haunted

“That was…” I start.

“Amazing,” he says.

Misguided, I wanted to say. But I like his answer more. I lie there, looking at him, this handsome man gasping for breath because of me. He’s got the Marine Corps anchor on his bicep, which I think is standard issue when they finish basic, but other than that, he looks like the boy I knew in high school.

He studies me. “Do you remember the first time we met?”

I’m surprised by this change of topic. “The first day of ninth grade?”

“No, before that.”

I shake my head.

“It was at a birthday party at Captain Eddie’s.”

“Was it?” I try to think back, but then shake my head. “There’s like a wall there. I don’t remember almost anything before the day of the fires. I mean, it’s all there. I’m sure of it. But it feels like a dream. Sometimes I know people and I don’t know how it is I know them. A name will come into my head and I think, oh, that’s so-and-so. They’ll think we know each other. But I don’t remember anything at all. Like it’s locked up.”

“Does it scare you?”

I look at him. Lance would fight my battles without question. I decide to tell the truth. “Yes. But I can handle it.”

He takes a deep, dissatisfied breath. “Was that what happened with Krista Chambers?”

“I couldn’t even place her. It was mind-numbing, the panic. I feel like I’m in a town full of ghosts, and they all seem to know me and want a part of me, but they’re all strangers.”

He takes it in, and I watch him put something away. He has just found out that the thing he’s carried since he was seven happened to a boy who isn’t in here anymore. He wants to pull at it. He wants me to remember, and he isn’t going to ask me to, and I can see exactly what it costs him to swallow it. “It’s okay,” he whispers. It isn’t. But he says it anyway, and he rearranges the pillow so that we’re sharing it, and I realize that this is the first time I’ve ever had pillow talk in my life.

“No, it’s not,” I say. “You deserved more than that. You always did.”

“Can I tell you something?” he says.

“Please.”

“I told your aunt about my seventh birthday party,” he says. “There was a boy there in a Kermit the Frog shirt who came over while I was bleeding, and hugged me, and told his whole class I was his best friend.”

I wait for it to arrive. Nothing arrives.

“That was you,” he says.

“Oh.”

It ought to be the largest thing anybody has ever told me, and there is nothing there at all.

He reaches up and tucks my hair behind my ear. I don’t fight it. I kiss his wrist when it’s passing by my mouth.

He smiles at me. “Anyway, we met again in the sixth grade, and by the ninth grade, when we had started at Farley, I realized how much you’d sunk into yourself. I wanted to be someone special for you.”

“You idiot, you were already special for me.”

“Well, I didn’t know that.”

“So, since I had been living with this shadow for such a long time, I thought, at least I can protect him. But I can’t do that if I’m still weak. So I decided I was going to be strong, because my best friend, Parker Bishop, needs a friend he could count on. And then I realized that I didn’t want you to be my friend. I wanted you to fall in love with me.” He cringes. “I really didn’t understand as much about how this happened then, so I wasn’t really thinking about, you know, how you felt about it.”

I laugh. “I was obsessed with you. Are you kidding me?”

His smile is huge. “Really?”

“Finish the story, Lance.”