COUNT DOWN THE STARS

CHAPTER ONE

[Dedication:
For Lujia.
Your star is the handle part of the Medium Dipper.
If there’s a heaven, get a message to me.
I want to show you about me and Kas—so let me start at the beginning.]

The first time I saw a person die, I was thirteen years old.
On that day, Kas and I were sitting outside a café, sipping our rapidly melting strawberry milkshakes through disintegrating paper straws. Lex, his older brother, was at a table a short distance away. We’d made it clear that we wanted him to pretend that he didn’t know us, but he kept stealing glances in our direction, squinting against the sun.
“That man.” Kas pointed. “How long does he have left?”
I sighed. I wasn’t sure why nobody believed that I could see how long a person had left to live. Couldn’t they see it too? Maybe it was just a game, although whenever I teased someone in the way Kas was teasing me now, they always frowned and looked away. I’d been suspecting that I shouldn’t be able to see it. That I had some sort of power, hopefully an angelic power that would save the world someday.
“Where?” I asked, shifting position so that my gaze followed his finger through the mess of people lounging inside, away from the sun. The heat didn’t bother me.
“There,” he replied, gently taking me by the wrist and guiding my finger until I, too, was pointing. “He’s got a hat on.”
It took me another moment to see the person in question. It was a little old man with a baseball cap and sideburns, stooped over a cane as he waited in line with an elderly woman, presumably his wife.
As soon as I noticed him, my heart stopped for a second, and I sucked in a sharp breath. It felt like the world had frozen, trapping me in limbo, where I could blink again and again until I was sure of what I was seeing.
“What?” Amusement flashed across Kas’s face.
I steadied my shaking hands against the table. Numbness crept up my fingertips, into my hands, down my wrists, arms, reaching my elbows before I found the words.
“A minute,” I said softly. “He has less than a minute . . .” I could see the countdown, dropping below fifty seconds now, then forty-five, then forty.
Panic began to set in. My first instinct was to call emergency services or rush over to help, but then it occurred to me that neither would be helpful, as nothing had happened yet. And no one else could see this countdown. They wouldn’t understand. At the same time, it occurred to me that I didn’t want to stay here anymore. There were plenty of perfectly capable people to handle any situation that arose.
My legs trembling underneath me, I got up. “Let’s go.”
Kas grabbed my arm, forcing me to sit down again. “No,” he replied, his voice firm, cold. “Stay.”
The numbness had now spread to my shoulders and was creeping towards my chest. Thirty seconds left. My mouth felt dry, preventing me from screaming, though I wanted to.
“Why?” I whispered instead. “I don’t want to see it . . . please, let’s just go.”
“Because I don’t believe you,” he replied firmly.
I shook my head slightly, unable to believe what he was saying. My abilities had largely been hidden from the world. I had always assumed my family could see it, too, like everyone else, so I had only mentioned it a few times in passing, perhaps pointing out a person who only had a week or two left. My parents would always laugh along or else tell me not to point or stare or to act so morbid all the time.
After I’d begun suspecting that this was not normal, I’d talked to Kas about it in detail. He couldn’t see it. Worst of all, he didn’t believe me. No, that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that I could see a person right now—was watching them—and they had only twenty seconds left to live.
“Please,” I pleaded, trying to move.
Kas didn’t let go of me, his eyes fixed through the window and into the café. He was stronger than I gave him credit for, and at that moment, I hated his strength. It felt unnatural. brutal. I wanted to shout for Lex, but he’d just think I was messing with him and start pretending to ignore us again.
If a catastrophe, like a natural disaster or a bomb or something else was headed our way, I would have been able to tell, but no one else had pure seconds left. Most were in the decades. A pregnant woman with ten months left. My heart clenched in my chest, like it always did when I saw something particularly sad like that.
Fifteen seconds remained.
I closed my eyes.
His grip on my arm tightened, a silent command to watch, to stay, but I couldn’t bring myself to look. The seconds continued to count down. The rhythm was cruel in its steadiness. Why was it me? Why was it me who had to see this? Why couldn’t everyone know? Only a few seconds left. The numbness encircled my heart and began to squeeze, cutting off my breath. My hands were shaking uncontrollably now.
I opened my eyes a fraction to look over at Lex. If anyone else could see the countdown, it was him. He was the only one who'd believed me without question. Or maybe he’d pretended to believe me just to make me stop talking. I wasn’t sure which. Right now, he was devouring a comic.
“Come on,” I whispered. “You don’t have to believe me, but let’s just go.”
“I don’t think you’re lying,” Kas replied softly. “I think you’re seeing something. But I need you to stay. Just a little longer.”
I wanted to kick him or shout at him. This wasn’t a game. I didn’t want to see this, and I certainly didn’t intend to draw a spectacle every time I did.
I saw the old man’s body shudder as the final second passed, just as the countdown disappeared, his knees buckling beneath him. His wife beside him screamed. The sound sliced the air like a hot knife.
He fell, the cane slipping from his grasp, his body folding into the people.
Everything felt like it had been shattered like glass. I pressed my fist against my mouth, stifling a small sob. Strangely, I wasn’t able to cry. Kas let me go, his hand slowly pulling away from my arm, his eyes wide with shock.
He believed me now. But I didn’t care.
It didn’t matter what he thought of me.
And then, he took my arm and helped me up. It was what he always did because he was so impossibly gentlemanly to people all the time and because I walked with a slight limp after having surgery to repair my knee, which I’d hurt in a fall last year.
I caught a glimpse of Lex’s confused expression. He put away his comic book and jogged after us. Kas gestured for him to come over and they spoke quietly in their language, which I still hadn’t made an effort to learn, even though I had known them for almost three years. That was strange, since I already spoke three languages, so adding a fourth wouldn’t be too difficult.
They finished the conversation. Lex looked back, and I didn’t want to watch the expression on his face. He said something in a soft voice which I was pretty sure meant something like, Shouldn’t we go help? Kas shook his head.
Leaving our milkshakes there, we began walking. Out of the shade of the huge umbrella over the table, the sun was relentless, the midday heat bearing down on us. We were all quiet as we walked together, turning the corner and back towards my house. There was no reason to speak. I had nothing to say anyway.
“I believe you, by the way,” Kas finally said as if that would bring me any comfort.
“Mm,” was all I could manage in return. It wasn’t much of a response, but my feelings had all collided somewhere in my stomach which made it hard to say anything.
I bowed my head and continued to limp down the street. The doctors had all told me I’d be able to walk properly within a few more months, but although I was getting better, that didn’t make it any less hard to miss track practice.
My eyes burned but I refused to let tears fall. This wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I really could have done to prevent it from happening. Still, in a way I felt guilty. Maybe the old man would have wanted to know he was going to die so soon. Maybe everyone else wanted to know exactly when they were going to die.
“You okay?” Lex asked.
I looked away and nodded, conscious of the fact that I’d been staring at him. Of course, I wasn’t the only girl who had done that before, but I was doing it for a different reason—because I could only know how long a person had left to live by looking at them.
Other girls didn’t have this ability, as far as I knew, but they stared at him anyway. Lex was seventeen at the time, tall and muscular, his face carved from sharp angles. He would look nice in a twentieth century black and white photo, standing in front of a window where only one half of his face was visible.
Kas gave my hand a small squeeze as we stopped at my front door. The garden was wilted and brown, dead or dying. I tried to smile at him, but it felt like everything was decaying at a pace only I could see. The odd thing was that I couldn’t see my own countdown, just everybody else’s, even when I looked in the mirror. Which was not a nice thought. Still. I wouldn’t want to know when I was going to die and spend the rest of my life waiting for the inevitable moment. It would be a sad way to live.
“You don’t have to do this alone,” he said. His voice was always quiet, but it was gentler than usual.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Figure it out. All this.” He made a sweeping gesture as if the motion alone could explain everything. “Maybe there’s someone else who can see it. The countdown.”
I could hear sirens wailing in the distance. The sound sent a jolt of panic through me. I forced it down, swallowing thickly, but my throat felt like it was closing.
“Maybe,” I said after a moment, my hand hovering next to the doorhandle, afraid to touch it, to end this second.
The two boys lingered there for a second. I half-expected them to ask me how long they had left, but neither of them did. They looked at each other, shrugged, and said goodbye to me. I smiled, although it was shaky.
I kept my eyes fixed on them as they turned the corner and began walking to their block. I didn’t know why I felt dizzy—because of the heat, or because of shock. Maybe it was both.
I stood outside for a moment longer before I turned around and went inside, shutting out the world behind me as I closed the door.

Comments for this chapter

• Wow, this is really good. I'll post as i read through the chapters... this seems like the type of idea that would have been done a million times before but i've never seen it so either way this is really creative. also how did you read my mind about if she could see her own count? that's some really good writing. i wanna know what happens next

  Comment by poibleps on May 22, 2025

  Liked by 1

• thank you for all your comments!!

  Comment by rose on May 28, 2025

  Liked by 0

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CHAPTER TWO

Three years later, the old man still appears in my nightmares. He demands for me to have told him when he would die, down to the second. He demands for me to have rushed into the café and told him that. He shakes his cane and then folds forward and his wife screams even though she doesn’t appear in the nightmare.
I always wake up sweating, my hands shaking, my face cold and my body numb. The same numbness that I felt on that day returns to me, thick, choking.
And although Kas swears he never told anyone, and Lex says the same, somehow the entire school knows about my ability. Somehow, the principal prevented it from spreading further, otherwise I could make a fortune out of looking at people and telling them when they’re going to die. I actually do make kids pay for me for it, ten dollars a future, like it’s something that can be sold.
Some believe me, but of those who do, many of them don’t want to pay ten dollars, or don’t want to know how long they have left at all. It makes sense to me. Once you know something it’s hard to forget it on purpose. Still, I have made almost two hundred dollars, which makes twenty people. This is almost enough to buy some secondhand Chanel products like most other girls have.
Most people are skeptical, though. They have a reason to be. In all of my sixteen years, I’ve never heard of anyone who has this ability. People tell me I must be special but I’m really not.
Now, Kas and I sit at the park beneath a spreading tree. The tree is flowering; white petals drift to the ground, to our laps. We sit close, but not too close. People will talk. Kas has grown up since we were in middle school. There are lines now around his lips and eyes and a certain hardness to his expression that a smile can’t quite wipe away. He does still smile, though. His crutches are propped up against the bench.
The air is silent. Not even the wind blows. No birds are calling, which is unusual for March. It’s just the sound of our breathing, steady and in sync. He reaches over and gives my hand a small squeeze. He can tell I’m thinking again.
I was the only person who didn’t cry after the accident because I could see, like I can always see, his countdown. I knew that he would recover. I’d tried to explain this to his parents, but they ended up screaming at me. You promised us he had time. Well, he did, and he woke up. Gotten better. Eventually. But not entirely.
“You got that look in your eyes again,” he teases.
“What look?” I blink hard, trying to erase whatever he’s seeing, though I know I can’t avoid it. He can always read peoples’ expressions, especially mine.
“The look you get when you’re thinking about something important.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t important.”
“Right.” An amused smile flickers across his lips and I can tell that he doesn’t believe me. That’s fine. I was lying anyway. “You got really quiet is all. Wanna get lunch somewhere?”
“Sure. Where?”
He shrugs. If there is one thing that I hate about him, it’s his inability to make decisions.
It’s almost time to head back to school together, a ten-minute walk away for us. We have fifth period together. I wonder if we’ll end up eating anything. Often, we don’t. I prefer to sit somewhere together, talking quietly or observing the world. Lunch is not as important as this moment, here, right now.
“I can get us sandwiches,” I suggest. “You can walk back.”
“No, I can come with you.” But he winces as he leans over, grabs his crutches, and pushes himself up, wincing again as he stands on shaky limbs clamped tight in leg braces. I privately wonder if he ever takes those off. Another part of me wonders if his legs have awful ugly marks on them from the braces. It occurs to me he always wears pants to keep them off his skin, even in the middle of summer. I try to imagine the shape of his legs and I find myself blushing.
“What?” he asks.
I tell him. One side of his mouth twists downwards, his eyebrows go up, eyes wide.
“See?” I say. “Sometimes just don’t ask what I’m thinking.”
“Lesson learned.” He stumbles slightly and grabs the other crutch. “Okay. Ready.”
“Sure?”
He rolls his eyes at me. I sigh, but we begin walking anyway. My knee has completely healed but I lost almost a year at track team practice. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world, as I don’t want to be a professional athlete and can still compete in college anyway.
We chat as we walk, mostly about unimportant things, people at school and homework. Kas pauses for a second and lifts his hand to point at a single bird in a spreading evergreen, tweeting in a melancholy way.
“Cedar waxwing,” he says.
I make a face. The bird has a flat, square head and looks like a poorly whittled wooden object. I don’t know why it’s called a waxwing because its wings are definitely equipped for flying; it takes off and flies across the street to an identical tree. I can’t understand why animals do that sometimes. It’s not like the street looks that much different from the left side.
We continue walking but at a slower pace now. Kas’s crutches scrape against the pavement with every step. The sound used to get on my nerves, but only because I hate those crutches, and I hate that he can’t walk without them. I’m not good at depending on things like that.
He’s grown used to them, though. Sometimes, I think he forgets he even uses them. He will still sometimes get up and try to take a step without them. That never ends well.
We turn the corner but as the sandwich shop comes into view, Kas says quietly, “I’m not hungry.”
“Okay, I’ll get something, and you can walk back now,” I say, but inside concern is bubbling in my chest. Everyone loves our local sandwich shop. Everyone. If anyone doesn’t love it, then I don’t know about it because I will refuse to ever speak to them. It’s that good.
“No, don’t eat alone,” he insists. “That’s kind of weird.”
“Fine, but we don’t have much time. We gotta to be back in . . .” I glance at my watch. I’m more than used to seeing time since there is a literal countdown for everyone I spot. But I panic. “We have seven minutes to get back to class. Come on.”
A freezing blast of AC hits us as we step inside the shop, along with the good smells of cheese and onions and balsamic. The girl behind the counter is set to die in sixty-four years and three months. She’s got time. Her eyes flick towards Kas, the leg braces, the crutches, the way his clothes fit a little too loosely, the touch of unnatural white against his cheeks above the otherwise heathy flush.
I wish I could stop people from staring at him. I sometimes catch myself doing it, though. But I do it because I’m looking at his countdown, something that I’m always aware of.
“Go sit down,” I offer. “I’ll order.”
He shakes his head. “Too much work to get back up.”
The girl waits for our order. “I want . . . a caprese,” I decide after looking at the menu except I pronounce it as cap-reese and she tries not to laugh. What am I supposed to have done? Be fluent in Italian?
I pay, using what little money I have left on my credit card. We wait there for a few minutes as she makes my sandwich, then wraps it up in the brown paper that makes the crinkly sound I love so much. She puts it in a paper bag and rolls the top up.
For some reason, this reminds me of the way Mom used to pack my lunch for me when I was in elementary school. No fancy lunchbox, just a brown paper bag, the top rolled up, and everything inside of it. Sometimes she’d include a gold star sticker from a secret stash I never found. I wish she still wrapped my lunch like this even though it isn’t considered cool in high school.
We have three and a half minutes to get back to class by the time I nearly snatch the paper bag from the hands of the girl-behind-the-counter. I know we’re going to be late. Fortunately, our English teacher, Mr. Brady, is younger, maybe twenty-five, and won’t tell our parents or anything. He gives the impression of an undergrad. A mature but fun-to-be-around undergrad. He also gives the impression that we are on a first-name basis with him since his last name sounds like a first name. A false impression.
The cold air fades as we step outside. There is a single perfect moment when everything is just the right temperature, but it fades too quickly. Outside, it’s hotter than it should be for March, which isn’t even supposed to be spring yet.
“Do you want to stop for a second?” I ask Kas, glancing over at him.
“No, I’m fine,” he says, but his hands are white around the knuckles and his breath is now coming in shallow gasps. He always tries to pretend that he’s fine. “Need me to carry something?”
“I’m okay.”
Somehow, we arrive at the gate only five minutes later than we should. As we ascend the steps leading to the main entrance of the school, Kas puts aside his crutches, and I take his arm, gently helping him get up them. Last year, I got nearly half the school to sign a petition for a wheelchair access ramp, but it has yet to be built. There are more pressing issues, like the fact that the tiles on the roof that are falling off, the plumbing pipes which broke in a hundred places over the winter, and the increase in salary the teachers are demanding. I can understand.
It's a struggle to make our way through the halls, which are big and grey and empty, when no one is out save us and the occasional student on the way to the restroom.
We arrive at class almost ten minutes late. Fortunately, Mr. Brady just says hello and tells us to take our seats. Most teachers would be giving me dagger eyes, but he just turns around and resumes lecturing about some ancient Roman author or debater or whatever. A name and bad drawing are scribbled on the blackboard. I sit down and whip out my notebook. I’m not going to be the valedictorian, but I get pretty good grades, and I don’t intend to let my GPA die in flames because I’m late to class.
Halfway through class, Kas turns around. He’s holding a piece of paper out to me. I squint at it, but I can barely make the words out because the sunlight streaming through the big window is mutilating everything in that direction. Kas hands it to me. It’s a note from him—no one else would spend so much time on their handwriting. The paper is folded in half and on the outside, in immaculate script, is:
FOR AZALEA’S EYES ONLY!!!
Wow, okay. I unfold the note.
Thank you for walking back with me.

Comments for this chapter

• The pace is good, it's not too fast but also not boring. :D

  Comment by poibleps on May 22, 2025

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CHAPTER THREE

As I put my notebook away, a boy approaches me. His name is Daniel Byun; I think his parents are from Korea but I’m not sure since I don’t speak the language. He looks Asian, though, with spiky black hair and sharp dark eyes set in a pale face with a sharp jaw. He bothers me, not because he did anything wrong, but because every time I see him, I’m reminded of a terrible fact. He is going to die in less than a day.
Yes. Daniel. Daniel Byun. He is going to die on Friday. This will probably be the worst Friday of my life. Yet I won’t tell anyone that—people will freak out and accuse me of witchcraft or something. They aren’t supposed to know that my ability is real, not yet. By the time it’s proven to someone that it is, I hope to be far, far away.
And today, he is holding out ten dollars to me.
“So,” he says, shifting his weight. I look up at him, then down again, taking extra time to zip up my backpack. I want this room to be empty when I answer the inevitable question.
“You want to know how long you have left?” I ask.
He nods.
“Keep the ten dollars,” I say. My voice feels like it’s being strangled. A hoarse sound comes from the back of my throat before I choke it down. “Spend it on something nice for yourself.”
Daniel just looks at me.
“Daniel.” I point him to my chair and lean against the desk to steady myself. He sits down. Everyone is gone except for Mr. Brady who is lingering around an annoying moment longer than necessary.
“So?” he says for the second time as he lowers himself into the chair. He should be a baseball player. For Korean—for anyone—he’s tall and athletic, with broad shoulders and the type of tough muscular build girls would kill for.
“Daniel . . .”
We’re just repeating ourselves at this point and this is getting nowhere.
“Azalea,” he says just as firmly. I wince. No one calls me by my full name.
“You,” I say, feeling like a death angel, “you . . . Daniel.” I say his name again for affirmation. “You are going to die in sixteen hours and thirty-four seconds.”
He snorts. “What?”
I really wish I was joking, but I’m not. He might believe me, or he might not but he is going to die.
“So, right now, I should go around saying goodbye to everyone?” He’s talking like this is a game. He doesn’t believe me. Why should he? I can’t exactly prove it to him right now.
“No, no, no,” I say quickly. “Look, if people know, then they’re going to think I set this up in some way.”
“You? Set this up?” He stands up. “You know you’re lying as much as I do.”
“We’ll see.” This is not an appropriate response directed towards a boy who is not going to see another sunrise. I should say something else, something nicer. There is only one kind action I can think of performing. I reach into my backpack and extract a battered minifigure.
Daniel Byun’s eyes get twice as big in his face. He doesn’t know that the entire school has been made aware of his minifigure obsession.
“Here,” I say. “He’s from a show you like, I think?”
“Oh, wow. Wow.” He takes it, holds it up to the light, turning it around and around there. “Wow,” he says again. “This is limited edition. They don’t make these anymore. Wow. Thanks, Aza.”
I smile back. If it makes him happy . . .
The minifigure used to belong to a boy I met at summer camp five years ago. He’s dead now. He was sick with cancer. He only had a few months left to live, and I told him that.
His name was Ben.
He was the first person who ever heard about my ability and believed it.
Daniel is still standing by the desk, turning the minifigure over and over in his hands. He doesn’t believe me; he’s never going to get the chance to fully appreciate it. To appreciate anything. I take a deep breath and turn away, wiping a tear from my face.
On the verge of bawling, which is embarrassing enough as it is, as I exit the classroom I run straight into my current crush. You probably assumed Kas is my crush but that isn’t true; I like a boy called Jack.
His blond hair is swept perfectly like he styled it with a tiny comb or maybe an advanced toothpick. Unfortunately, that only makes him more attractive. And unfortunately, he already has a girlfriend who is much prettier than I am. (That same girl also dated his older brother, Dax, at one point, but Dax is now in jail, so I’m not sure what to think. Especially about my crush choices. As if a crush is really your choice.)
“Uh, hey,” he says.
My face burns. I’m sure everyone can see how hard I’m blushing right now.
“Hey,” I stammer. “Sorry.”
Daniel Byun stuffs the minifigure in his pocket and calls out. “Jack! Guess what?”
Oh, no. This is bad. He’s going to announce to the whole school that I just told him he’s going to die in less than a day. And then he is going to die on Friday morning. I don’t know exactly what will happen after that, but it is not going to be good. Maybe no one will learn about this until Monday, and I will have a torturous weekend before an even more torturous week.
I rush out of the room, careful not to run into anyone this time. Straight to the girls’ restroom. Perhaps worse than all this is the fact that I just collided with my crush while I was about to cry and without makeup. I quickly put some lip gloss on in front of the mirror next to another girl doing the exact same thing. I can see her countdown reflected in the mirror: twenty-seven years.
Time. She has time. Daniel Byun doesn’t have time. I need to convince him that he doesn’t. I rush out of the bathroom but before I can find him, it’s time for sixth period to begin, and I don’t want to be late again.
Kas isn’t here today, though, something I realize with a sinking feeling as I look at the empty desk where he usually sits. Of course he isn’t. He told me about this yesterday. He has some kind of “appointment” during this class, which means that for today I’ll be alone. An “appointment” in this context probably means a stupid physical therapy session which he loathes above all things, including frogs, which before the accident I assumed were his worst fear.
But maybe news spreads faster than I thought. Right now, he should be in the car with his mom. Somehow, though, he knows what I said to Daniel Byun, because my phone pings loudly with a text from him:
Azalea Mae Park. Why is Daniel convinced that he’s a walking ghost?
I bite my lip hard enough to taste blood. My hasty reply is:
He is NOT a walking ghost!!
Kas takes a moment to respond, but when he does, his text says:
No one is gonna believe you about this
And then:
When he you know does pass away people are going to be convinced that you did something really bad that made it happen like on purpose
And then:
Lex thinks you’re an idiot
Perfect. I put my head down on my desk. One day, something is going to go right. It has to. It has to. Class is starting so there is no chance of finding Daniel right now. Maybe I can catch him before seventh period, although it seems unlikely, since he is just one of hundreds of kids and could be anywhere.
I realize we’ve barely spoken before I gave him the minifigure. I find myself wishing I had the chance to get to know him more, before . . . this. Most people regret not having spoken to someone, given a compliment or a kind word, after they die. But I end up over-complimenting people, acting too kind, in a way that makes me come across as fake.
That’s the problem with this ability. Everything happens too late. I know I should have told Daniel sooner. But what would I even have said? “Hey, I can see the future! Oh, and by the way, you’re going to die tomorrow . . . good luck!”
The other problem is that I don’t know how he is going to die. Or exactly how much people will blame me for it. If it’s a car accident or something—the thoughts going through my head right now don’t make the situation any less horrible, but still—then that’s an accident.
Why did he have to ask me now? Why couldn’t he have just been happy not knowing? On his last day . . . it would have been easier if this was ninth grade, tenth grade, not right now . . .
The teacher drones on. Roman history, philosophers, whatever. I can’t concentrate. Halfway through, I raise my hand and ask to go to the bathroom. The teacher doesn’t even look up at me from his lecture notes, which is lucky, because by the time he notices I have taken my entire bag with me, it is too late.
I know I should probably go to seventh period, but what’s the point? I won’t be able to focus on anything. Taking a deep breath, I decide to go for a walk outside; maybe the fresh air will clear my head. There is a light wind that makes everything feel cool and crisp, compared to the morning, which started out much too warm for the season.
It feels wrong that just earlier today I was in math class, and after that I was buying sandwiches, and now this . . . now that I’ve told Daniel, it has become reality. Before, I could almost forget about it. Death is just the next part of life, and I didn’t think there was any reason to dwell on it.
Now, though, I really regret not telling him sooner. Even if he didn’t want to know. Even if I couldn’t entirely convince him that it was the truth. It would have been better. At least, in my opinion, which is often wildly wrong.
The fact remains that he has about fifteen-and-a-half hours left.
By this point, I’ve almost reached the edge of the school grounds, but Daniel is waiting by the gate. His friends are gone, and his phone tucked in his back pocket. His face is fixed on the sky. He squints against the sun like he’s trying to beat it in a staring contest.
“Hey,” I say in a small voice.
“Azalea.” He says it like the name of an exotic dish he’s never heard of. The worst part is that he refuses to look at me.
“Um, Daniel,” I start. My voice dies in my throat.
“I know what you’re going to say,” he replies, his gaze shifting, shifting, to look at geese flying in an awkward V-shape northward.
“You don’t believe me?”
“No.”
We are standing on the two opposite sides of the gate as if one of us is in prison. I press my face to the cold iron bars.
“Pretend,” is the first word that comes out of my mouth.
He turns to look at me. “What?”
I shake my head, gathering my scattered thoughts. “Pretend, just for a second, that I’m right.”
“Okay?”
I smile, despite everything. “You’re not pretending, Daniel.”
“I’m not going to listen to you,” he snaps. “This . . . this doesn’t scare me. I’m not gonna pretend to be in the dream world you’re living in like some stupid kindergartener.” He spits the last word. “If you’re right about this then you would have told me a long time ago.”
“You never asked,” I reply meekly. “Not everyone wants to know.”
His eyes flash. “This is different!”
“No . . .” I want to reach out for him through the gate, take his arm, carry him with me to my own reality. It’s what Kas always does when I’m not understanding something. Closes his hand around my wrist and we shut our eyes and pretend that we are in a different place entirely.
But I don’t reach. I can’t. My hand feels glued to my side, refusing to budge an inch.
“Please,” I say quietly. “Pretend.”
Daniel sighs, the fight leaving his eyes. “Fine,” he grumbles. “What do you want me to pretend? That I’m walking on some rainbow?”
I glance at the countdown above his head. “Pretend that you’re going to die in fifteen hours and twenty-four minutes and thirteen seconds.”
“Okay. Pretending happening.”
“Good,” I say softly. “What’s the first thing you do?”
He thinks about it for a long moment. Then another equally lengthy moment
“Maybe say goodbye?” I suggest gently. “To your family . . . or your friends . . . or the people that matter.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m good at pretending. I know I wouldn’t want to waste my time saying goodbye. People would treat me like I’m dead already, you know?”
I nod, tears threatening to spill. He’s talking as if he has already accepted it. It’s what I wanted—for him to understand—but it still hurts.
“So what would you do?” I prompt after another long second.
“Live,” he says. “Like, really live.”
I manage a small smile. “That’s a good idea,” I say.
For one moment we stand there together in the beautiful fading afternoon, the orange sunlight sliding over our faces, our hands, across the schoolyard, across the brick building, before it is covered by a dark cloud that leaves the world muted but nonetheless complete and pure.
“I still don’t believe you,” he says, but his voice is uncertain now.
I can’t think of anything to say to this.
He sighs. “You can’t expect me to actually believe you. I don’t know why I even told you all that just now. You’re a freak. You know that? Your hair is freaky and your name is freaky and your clothes are freaky. Everything about you is freaky.”
My temper flares. “Your face is freaky.”
Daniel’s mouth opens and closes.
I take a few deep breaths, trying to work out some kind of apology, but all I can say is:
“I’ll see you around.”
Which is a lie.

Comments for this chapter

• dfsfdkjfhdkjfhdsk this is so good

  Comment by poibleps on May 22, 2025

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• dfsfdkjfhdkjfhdsk this is so good

  Comment by poibleps on May 22, 2025

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• Hi, small typo, it's temper flare not temper flair. Also, THIS IS SOOO WELLL WRITTENNNN. tbh i feel bad for azaela, that's a lot of pressure when they barely know what to do yet.

  Comment by T. D. Soots on May 23, 2025

  Liked by 1

• @T. D. Soots omg lol i see that….I’ll edit ty for catching

  Comment by rose on May 23, 2025

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CHAPTER FOUR

The next day, Wednesday, everything is cold and quiet. Frost paints my bedroom window. I look at my phone and see the screen filled with dozens of texts. Most are from numbers that I don’t know.
I roll over. They’re all similar. About Daniel. How late is it exactly? I’d turned off my alarm the night before, knowing that I wouldn’t need it the next morning. I won’t be going to school today. I need time to think. About what, I’m not sure.
I squint at the clock. Seven. Seven is too early considering how long I stayed up last night. Thinking. About something. I blink, trying to clear my head. Seven. Everything feels foggy.
And then it hits me.
Daniel Byun is dead.
Daniel. Is. Dead.
My phone buzzes again, a new text from a new number. I swipe the texts away with shaking hands but pause when I get to one from Lex. Aside from a few particularly colorful words and random gibberish, his text roughly translates to:
When his family takes you to court and charges you with murder, I’ll defend you.
This is good. I try to breathe. It’s okay. It’s fine. Lex goes to law school. He can fix this for me. Possibly, he can get his dad, who’s already an accomplished lawyer, to defend me.
Or maybe I don’t need a lawyer. I try to calculate exactly how fast I can move permanently to another city. Before I can work this out, Mom knocks on my bedroom door.
“Aza, are you awake?”
“Yes,” I say. My voice is a miserable squeak.
Mom opens the door which is the last thing I need. “Are you sick?” she asks, coming to sit on the edge of my bed and feeling my forehead. I hastily turn my phone off before she can see. “Hmm. You do feel a little warm.”
“Yeah.” I pretend to cough and sniffle for her benefit. “Can I stay home today?”
“Of course. I’ll tell the principal that you’re not feeling well.” She pulls away. “You’ve been so stressed lately,” she says, her eyebrows drawing together in concern. “You didn’t eat last night.”
“I wasn’t hungry.”
“Okay. I’ll make you something to eat, but then I have to leave for work.”
“Thanks,” I whisper as she leaves.
I can hear Dad downstairs banging around in the kitchen, making breakfast. Everything feels so far even though my parents are just a floor away. Daniel is dead. Daniel is dead. Daniel is dead.
My phone rings with a call from an unknown number. I hesitate, then take a chance and pick up.
“Um, is this Azalea?”
My heart stops. It’s Jack. My crush since freshman year. It’s really him. How does he have my number? Who told him? There’s no time to wonder.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I say, then immediately regret it, wishing I had a smoother reply, although my numb brain completely fails to reach for one.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say.
There’s a moment of awkward silence.
“So, I, uh, heard about what happened,” he says.
“What happened?” I ask.
He hesitates. “I thought you knew. Everyone’s been saying that you were the one who told Daniel he was gonna . . . you know what I mean.”
“No, no, I said all that,” I correct myself. Big mistake. Should’ve lied. I can’t lie. “But what happened to Daniel? How did . . .” My voice trails off.
“Oh. Well. I haven’t been able to keep it exactly . . . private. I tried, Aza, I swear. But there were so many people. I mean, I didn’t say anything, but someone else must have.”
“There were other people?” I breathe.
“Yeah.”
“There? When he . . .”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“People you know?”
“Just friends from school. You’ve seen them.”
“And . . . they’re okay.”
“They’re fine. Well, not exactly. But no one else was hurt if that’s your question.” Jack clears his throat, erasing every trace of emotion that has made its way into his voice.
“But you were there?”
“Yeah, I was there. I saw everything.”
“So . . . what happened to Daniel?”
“Aza . . .” He chokes up, then collects himself and goes on. “He jumped.”
“He what?”
“You know that old bridge, near the train tracks?” His voice is soft, gentle, like my mother’s voice when she used to read me stories so many years ago. “He’d been acting weird all afternoon, saying things like ‘it doesn’t matter’ or ‘what would happen if it just ended’—skipped three periods. I thought he was just messing around. But then he got up on the railing . . .”
I know this bridge. People have died jumping from it, even those who land in deeper water, away from the rocks. It’s always obvious that it was a suicide, or a suicide attempt. But Daniel wasn’t sick; he didn’t have depression or anything; as far as I know, his life is—was—okay.
Which means this is my fault.
The blood drains from my face. “Oh my god.”
“We tried to stop him,” Jack continues. “We really did. We told him to get down, but he just kept walking away from us . . . walking on the railing . . . and then when I tried to grab him, he jumped.”
“And just like that?” I whisper.
“I didn’t, uh, watch it.” Jack clears his throat again. “But it was over quick. He hit his head on the rocks below, and, uh . . . what you said. Just like that.”
Daniel Byun jumped.
Daniel Byun is dead.
“It’s my fault,” I blurt out.
“No. No. It’s not your fault, Aza. If anything, it’s mine. I shouldn’t’ve tried to grab him. We could’ve convinced him to come down some other way.”
I shake my head fiercely even though I know he can’t see me. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I shouldn’t have told him.”
“What exactly did you tell him?”
“How long he had left. I told him he had sixteen hours. That was a bit before one o’clock.”
Jack is silent.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” I laugh bitterly. “He must have died around four-thirty in the morning. Five, maybe?”
Still, Jack says nothing.
I’m not even going to ask what on earth he and his friends and Daniel were doing up so late by that bridge because there’s no point in knowing.
“I believe you,” Jack finally says.
I snort. “That helps.”
“No, I actually do. You were miles away. You couldn’t have done anything.”
“People probably are going to think I played games with his mind or something,” I mumble.
“If that’s true, then play with my mind. Right now,” Jack replies firmly. “Tell me that I’m going to die tomorrow.”
“But you’re not,” I protest. “You’re going to die in sixty-one years and five months.”
“That long, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That long.”
Jack pauses, then says quickly, “I gotta go. School. Talk later?”
“Okay,” I say. “Sure. And also, I, um, I like your hairstyle.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
I hang up, blushing. I can’t believe I just said that. Although the entire conversation was so awkward already that I couldn’t have saved it. He has my number now, though, and I didn’t even have to try.
Still. Daniel is dead. And Dad pokes his head around my bedroom door.
“Kas is here to see you,” he says.
I immediately pull the blankets up to my chest. “Let me get dressed.”
But Kas is already pushing my dad away to stand in the doorway instead. He closes the door, and despite my dad’s protests, locks it.
I stare at him, horrified. “No, no, no, get out.”
He sighs. “This isn’t really the time. You don’t exactly look hot with your hair like that anyway.”
Self-conscious, I immediately smooth my hair down, tugging it into a tight braid.
“Thought you wouldn’t be here by now,” he says after a second.
“And go where?”
“School, probably?” Kas smirks. “We’re probably not missing anything important. Still.”
“I don’t want to go back,” I whisper. “You know what people will say about me . . . you always know.”
My eyes burn, but I refuse to allow myself to cry. I barely knew Daniel, and no matter what other people might say, this isn’t my fault. So why do the tears threaten to fall? Things like this . . . they happen all the time and I can’t control them. I can’t really control anyone’s future.
Kas’s eyes travel to the posters above my bed—all of them are of singers. I avert my gaze, embarrassed. I’ve never had someone in my bedroom before besides my parents since I put the posters up. He looks away from them after a second. A hint of a smile twists at his lip.
“Are we going to talk about what happened?” I ask.
“No.” He shifts uncomfortably, gritting his teeth as he pushes himself up further on his crutches, clearly tired. “Can I sit down?”
I instantly feel guilty. I sometimes forget about the accident, even though every time I see him, I’m reminded of it. You promised us he had time.
“Sit here,” I say, letting the blanket slip down from where it covers my body up to my neck until it falls into my lap, relieved that at least I’m dressed.
Kas sits on the edge of my bed with a soft sigh, propping his crutches up against it.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine. But you aren’t.” He reaches out for me and closes his fingers around my wrist. At first, I think we’re going to pretend, but Kas stays silent. His hands are strong, his palms rough and callused, but at the same time they are impossibly gentle.
“Can you stay over for a while?” I ask.
“If you want me to.”
“Please,” I say. “If we’re alone, we’ll have to think about . . . all of this.” I frown. “You’re not going to ask what happened to Daniel?”
He sighs. “I don’t really wanna know. Not yet.”
Downstairs, the front door closes, which means my parents are leaving for work. I know they’re probably okay with Kas staying here; our parents have known each other for years now, since we were just starting middle school, and they trust him.
“Remember when we first met?” I ask with a small smile.
He shakes his head. “Not really.”
The accident left him in a coma for nearly a week and stole more than his body. It took some of his memories, too. At first, he couldn’t remember anything, not even his family. Eventually, it came back to him, but not everything. Maybe never everything.
“It was in science class. First week of middle school.”
Kas hesitates, trying to remember. “We were . . . dissecting something.”
“Sharks,” I say.
“Yeah, really small sharks. I remember that part. You yelled at me for some reason, right?”
“You dropped your shark on my new shoes! I had every reason to yell at you!”
“Did I get in trouble?”
“Oh, yes. I cried about it for hours. I’m surprised you didn’t get expelled. But I still feel bad for being such a baby about it.”
“And yet, you became my best friend.”
My heart clenches up a little bit at the words best friend but I don’t doubt that it’s true. I push the feeling down. “Do you want me to tell you about something else?” I ask.
“Okay.”
I think about it for a moment. Then I begin to tell him about something that has nothing to do with school, with Daniel Byun, with dead things. I tell him about the time we tried to make one of those “time capsule” things in his backyard. It was the summer of seventh grade, and, having forgotten about the shark incident, we had already become best friends.
“What did we put in it?” he asks.
I struggle to remember. “A broken watch,” I say. “And a toy car. And one of Lex’s comic books. And . . .” I can recall the last thing clearly, but I don’t want to say it.
“And?” he prompts.
“And a list of everything we were going to do together when we grew up.”
He remains silent for a few moments, his eyes fixed on the blanket between us, pink fleece with embroidery I did myself, his fingers tracing absent-minded patterns on it. When I look at his right hand, I notice with a flash of panic that his knuckles are split, a dark scab forming over the bone.
“What happened to your hand?”
“What?” He hides it quickly behind his back. “Nothing. Just slipped.”
“I can tell when you’re lying, Kas.”
“I know,” he says.
“Write me a note about it later,” I say. “About what happened. Please?”
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
And then we’re quiet again.

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• now i cant stop reading

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CHAPTER FIVE

Monday comes way too quickly. I pretended to be sick all of Friday and most of Saturday, just so that Mom would leave me alone. This didn’t work as well as expected. Instead of nagging me about my homework, she spent her time worrying about me.
I can’t bring myself to tell her or to tell anyone who hasn’t already heard. The school sent an email on Monday morning just before school about Daniel’s death, although they didn’t say what happened, and they didn’t say anything about me. Now, slipping into class during first period ten minutes early to avoid the inevitable gawking in the halls, I wish they had. I wish everyone could know the truth, the real truth, from someone they could believe. Someone who isn’t me.
The classroom is empty. I slump over my desk, resting my head against my folded arms. I close my eyes, and when I open them, there’s a girl standing over me.
I sit up straight, blinking in confusion. It takes me a moment to recognize her as Rosie Chen, who is one of those people who knows exactly how smart and pretty they are and uses it to their advantage. Last year, she copied my entire science project, and since she’s so popular, no one took my side. The entire ninth grade class turned against me in that moment, defining me as an outsider. She’d convinced them that I had copied her project.
I glare at her as she stands there in front of me, her hands resting on her hips, one foot slightly in front of the other. Her jet-black hair is in a ponytail, swept in a careless but somehow attractive way over one shoulder. I can just imagine a boy’s eyes over her slim body, her captivating smile. But that smile is fake. It never reaches her eyes.
I can picture somebody’s hands on those impossibly shapely hips right now. They could be Jack’s hands, or Kas’s hands. In my mind, the picture begins to form already, those hands that held me through so much now given up to Rosie. In this picture, the hand with the scab across its knuckles it is tracing its way across her miniskirt, and then it takes her wrist.
“What do you want?” I snap.
She raises one eyebrow. “No need to be so harsh, Aza. I just wanted to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk about Daniel Byun. You already know that I didn’t do anything. Ask anyone—I wasn’t even there.” The words are out before I can stop them.
“I know you didn’t do it.” She leans against my desk. “Jack already told me the whole story.”
Jack told her the whole story? I’d thought we might have something going on after the phone call yesterday, but apparently not.
“People will talk,” she continues. “But you’re a smart girl, Aza. You know I can help you.”
“How, exactly?”
“I mean, everyone knows I’m gorgeous. When I walk past a mirror I gotta stop for a few seconds because I’m so stunning. Like, seriously.” She tosses her hair back. “You know I can talk, and people will believe what I say.”
I’m officially lost in this conversation.
She leans forward, poking me in the chest. “Point being. You want me on your side. If I say I believe you, everyone forgets about this by Friday. If I say I don’t . . . well, you don’t want that.”
I fold my arms over my chest. “Thanks, but I don’t need your pity. No one believes I did anything, because I didn’t.”
The universe, however, believes otherwise, and is intent on humiliating me as much as possible. At that very moment, a group of kids walk in, and immediately all eyes go to me. Some point openly. Many whisper amongst themselves.
I duck my head and refuse to meet their gazes. It doesn’t matter if they look confused or nervous or want revenge in the worst possible way on me. I won’t let them see how much this hurts right now. How much I regret not telling Daniel Byun that he was going to die.
But I can’t help myself. I glance at their countdowns. Fifty years, sixty, seventy. One girl has three months left. My heart freezes in my chest. Her name is Arcadia; she lives a couple blocks south from me and we often sit just a few rows apart from each other on the bus. Of course, I’ve noticed her countdown before. I always notice it, the same way that anyone else would notice whether someone’s standing next to them.
Three months.
Arcadia has been sick for a while now. She lost all her hair about three months ago and I think she’ll be in a wheelchair soon, judging by how slowly she moves across the classroom, as if her body is made of lead. My heart still refuses to cooperate with my body. Before Daniel, I would not have told her about this so that she could enjoy the rest of her life. I would have even been able to ignore it. Now, I will.
I stand up. My legs feel like jelly beneath me. I feel as if I’m moving through muddy water as I wade over to her. The classroom is still mostly empty but there are too many people here, too many people looking at me, talking behind their hands. About me. All of it’s about me. Sometimes I wish I were the center of attention, but I’m usually thinking of a cute guy. Not this.
“Hey, um, Arcadia?”
She looks up at me as she takes her seat. The light through the window casts an odd, yellow light across her face, bringing out the unhealthy shade of grey that stretches above her cheekbones but above her eyes.
“Um,” I say again, unsure of how to tell her this, especially because everyone—and I mean absolutely everyone—is staring at me like I’m a rare and interesting specimen.
“Yeah?” Arcadia’s voice is soft, but it’s not gentle. It is the kind of softness that, I would presume, comes from a predator about to strike and kill its prey. A sort of calculated, delicate sweetness.
“I just thought you should know . . . about your countdown,” I mumble. “You’ve got three months left.”
Her gaze drops to the floor. She looks defeated. Her face, which is usually pale, now looks as if all the blood has drained from her body. I study her shoes, black platform high-tops that will probably smash right through the floor someday.
Someone breaks the quiet with exactly what I don’t want to hear:
“There she goes again. She’s so obsessed with death.”
I wait for Arcadia to say something. Her pale lips move against her grey face, the sunlight sliding further across it.
“I’m really sorry,” I whisper. “I just thought you should know.”
Somehow, everyone hears me, but no one else speaks. We’re all waiting for Arcadia’s reaction. She lifts her head and looks me right in the eyes. When she speaks, her voice is as cold as ice.
“You’re crazy.”
My heart plummets. I thought she might believe me. Instead, she turned it around on me. Students collect around her, cheering like she just ended a war or saved a starving country. Equal numbers are booing me. Everyone’s talking at once, the noise overwhelming. I can hear everything no matter how hard I try to shut it out. Rosie yells, “You just like to hurt people, right? You like to make things worse. You’re only making it worse for yourself.”
Only crazy people like to hurt others but that’s exactly what Arcadia just called me. You’re crazy. Part of me wonders if this is true. No one else can see the countdown. What if there is something wrong with me? It’s possible. Anything’s possible.
I didn’t kill Daniel Byun, and if nothing else, at least I know this.
The class continues to clamor, and I can’t last the two minutes before the teacher should walk in and start preparing lecture notes for the day. I need to escape, but running away feels like defeat, and I will not be defeated by this.
“Hey! Shut up!”
I look. It’s Kas. This might be the first time I’ve heard him raise his voice, and clearly, the other students are shocked too.
He stands in the middle of the classroom, his blue eyes blazing with fury unlike anything I’ve seen in him before.
“Y’all shut up,” he repeats.
Strangely, everyone remains quiet, looking at him. He isn’t much taller than me, and anybody could knock him down with a push. Nonetheless, no one is about to argue with him right now. He intimidates about twenty kids to the point that they’re afraid to breathe too loud with a look alone.
For my part, I just stare at him. He’s not supposed to be here. We have different classes during first period.
“Aza,” he says, and looks at me. “Don’t let them do that to you.”
I try to say something but my voice stays strangled in the back of my throat and all that comes out is a squeaky sound like a dying mouse.
Kas turns upon the nearest boy. “Did you hear that? She’s not gonna let you treat her like that anymore.”
The boy takes a couple of steps back. “Woah, I wasn’t doing anything.”
“Yes you were. You were standing in this room.”
“Bro, standing in this room doesn’t even qualify as—”
“I did not ask your opinion!” Kas’s face flushes with anger, dark spots of red and purple high on his cheeks. “You don’t get to treat someone Aza like this. She isn’t a source of entertainment.”
The boy takes a few more steps back, lifting his hands to shoulder height, but Kas has already turned away. He moves slowly, but every step commands respect. Eventually, the classroom door closes behind him with a bang.
Rosie nudges me in the ribs. I wince, pulling away.
“That’s your boyfriend?” she asks.
“That is not my boyfriend!”
“Could’ve picked someone hot.” She looks after Kas, even though he’s disappeared. “He can barely even walk. How do you expect to—”
“Rosie. Stop. Now.”
“Or what?” she taunts.
“Or I’ll—” I clench my fists. “I’ll hit you.”
She raises her eyebrows, and our eyes lock. I’m very ready to slap her, but after a moment, she looks away.
I push past people and sit down at my desk, ignoring the stares that follow me. I can’t believe she would think Kas is my boyfriend. I’ve never had a boyfriend, never had a kiss, even. It would be sad to die without a kiss. It would be sad to die in eleventh grade, like Daniel did, like Arcadia will. It would be heartbreaking, actually.
I’ve changed my mind. It would be better to know how long I had left. If someone knew, I’d want them to tell me.
I’ve also changed my mind about charging ten dollars for this piece of information. Mom was right when she heard what I was doing. I shouldn’t do it. Even she—even my own mom—she doesn’t believe me about the countdown, but she doesn’t need to worry. She has thirty-four years.
I open my phone. A text from Kas.
Wszystko bedzie w porzadku.
I don’t know what it means, but I think I understand.

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CHAPTER SIX

Later that week, I’m in the principal’s office.
I’ve never been here before. The walls are white; the curtains are blue; the chair is far less comfortable than it looks. The principal herself, Ms. Hedge, sits with her hands folded on her lap across the desk, her sharp, hawk-like grey eyes fixed on me.
While in school, I’m good at staying out of trouble. Mostly because I try to be nice to people, knowing that some don’t have very long left. Ms. Hedge has only four years now; six when I started. Unfortunately, I’ll have graduated by the time her countdown is up. Now part of me is wishing she didn’t exist.
What I’m in trouble for, I’m still not exactly sure. I hope it has nothing to do with Daniel Byun. Everyone has been talking about it all week, nonstop. Their voices echo in my ears even now, ringing endlessly. I wanted to skip school again, but I knew Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me, and I didn’t want to make them worry. They don’t know what happened. Maybe they won’t ever know. It would be better that way.
I rarely mention the countdown anymore. It isn’t real to them. It isn’t real to anyone but me. And that thought makes me feel more alone than any other thought in the world.
Ms. Hedge doesn’t move, her thin shoulders back, her face pinched, body stiff. How does she sit so still? I fidget nervously, my nails biting painfully into my palms, my shirt suddenly too itchy.
“So,” she says, “I thought we needed to talk.”
She thought? She thought something? That’s actually dangerous. Whenever Ms. Hedge thinks, it’s usually about how to humiliate, punish, or expel the first kid in her way.
“Okay,” I say in a tiny voice.
Ms. Hedge sits back slightly in her chair. “Do you know why a student in your class, Rosie Chen, has sent me a note concerning you?”
My face feels very, very cold. “I . . . no.”
“Well.” She opens one of her desk drawers and reveals a neatly folded note. “Rosie handed me this yesterday, claiming that you’ve been threatening her.”
“I—what? I haven’t done anything!”
“She claims that on Monday morning, you threatened to hit her in front of the majority of a class during first period.”
Oh. Right. My heart sinks. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Hm. But I think you did, Aza. You’ve been distant lately. Distracted, unable to participate in group activities. Several of your peers are concerned.”
I don’t bother to ask who. I know they aren’t really concerned. They just want a reason to get me in trouble. It feels like everyone here hates me.
“They say you’ve developed an obsession with . . . death,” Ms. Hedge continues. She almost whispers the last word. “Is this true?”
I shake my head. “No. Why would I do that?” I ask, my voice trembling slightly. It’s very possible that she might know about the countdowns, but does she believe it? Does she even consider believing whichever traitorous student told her about them?
Ms. Hedge lets out a short sigh through her nose. “We’ll talk again later. For now, know that if I receive another complaint from a student—including Rosie Chen—I will have to get your parents involved.”
I make myself smaller in my seat. The feeling slowly is returning to my face, although my hands burn with anger. I can’t believe Rosie reported me. I didn’t say anything after she copied my science project. I thought she’d apologize eventually, but she never did.
She’s just another person who’s out to get me.
“Is there anything else?” I finally ask.
Ms. Hedge opens her mouth, then hesitates. “Yes, there is. Several of your teachers have expressed concern about your lack of participation in class. I thought it would be a good idea for you to work on a group project.”
This is the worst thing she could possibly do to me. I loathe group projects with passion. They are merely designed to do the maximum amount of damage to a teenager’s social life for the benefit of adults who think it will help them with bonding or something equally idiotic.
“W-what kind of project?” I stammer.
“You could organize the athletics carnival,” Ms. Hedge offers. “So far, we’ve had no volunteers.”
“But I’m already athletic,” I protest weakly. It’s true—I’m good at track and want to compete in college. After I get a medical degree, that is.
“Exactly!” Ms. Hedge smiles at me. It looks wrong—her teeth stick to her thin grey lips and her face crinkles like old paper around her lips and eyes. I duck my head away from her creepy grin.
“Can you explain?” I ask.
“You’re set to be a star on the track team,” Ms. Hedge states. “This is why I’d like to pair you with a student who, ah, isn’t as athletically gifted for this activity.”
My mind immediately runs through the possibilities. Georgina. It has to be Georgina. If anyone isn’t athletically gifted, as Ms. Hedge so politely puts it, it’s her. I doubt she’s ever tried to run a quarter mile. If she did, she would have failed. Miserably.
“I have already selected a student,” she continues, her smile finally gone from her face. “I’m sure you two will make perfect partners.”
I hold my breath.
“I’ve decided to pair you with Kacper Kozlowski,” she says.
It takes me a second to recognize the name, but when it clicks, my heart sinks. “Kas?”
“Yes. I believe he’s in your grade?”
“He is.” I lick my dry lips, unsure of how best to explain this to her. “I’d love to, but Kas isn’t—an athlete.”
“I understand that, but he doesn’t need to have athletic ability to help organize this event.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, and when I reopen them, she’s still looking at me in that same cold, impassive way as before.
“Do you have any questions?”
“No—no, not exactly,” I stammer. “Can I go back to class?”
She sighs. “Yes, you may go back to class. I expect you as Kacper to meet me at the track tomorrow after seventh period so that we can discuss this.”
Halfway back to my classroom, I still can’t believe this. Is this her way of taunting me? I slip through the door as quietly as possible, but everyone notices me except the teacher. Of course. Kas is sitting at his usual place at the front of the room where they always put him specially, so he doesn’t have to walk too much, per my personal request. He seems completely unaware of what has just taken place. I wonder how he will receive this news.
I learn the answer during sixth period when Kas turns back and mouths something. I frown at him, unable to understand.
He scribbles something on a piece of paper but before he can hand it to me, the teacher is there. Mr. Johnson’s face is all wrinkles, his hair nearly white, although I’ve heard he isn’t older than fifty. Hard life, I guess. But it isn’t nearly over yet; he has twenty years.
“Passing notes in class, Mister Kozlowski?” he snaps.
Kas immediately tucks the note behind his back. “Um. No, sir.”
Mr. Johnson holds out his hand. Reluctantly, Kas surrenders the piece of paper. He unfolds it and looks as if it has personally offended him before he puts it in his pocket and strides back to the front of the room.
Not good.
Maybe Ms. Hedge will decide that volunteering Kas as an organizer for the athletics carnival (of all things) is a bad idea. Unfortunately, this would be the first time he’s gotten into trouble, like me, so she might not, and I’ve heard she likes his dad, although that’s likely just a rumor. I don’t think she’s ever met him.
“Now, let’s continue with our study of integration,” Mr. Johnson says, but again I drift off, my thoughts occupied by Daniel and by the carnival, but mostly Daniel. And Rosie Chen. I still can’t believe I said I would hit her in front of everyone—and that she took it to the principal. She knows I didn’t really mean it, and anyway, she was asking for it.
The worst part about it is that Rosie was right. She was so right. I need her on my side. She’ll spread rumors about me. She’s practically the queen of rumors around here. More often than not, rumors become reality to people when they’re spread by somebody like her.
I resolve to talk to her as soon as I can. I’ll need to work up an apology that sounds genuine, which will probably be harder than writing a major essay for English class, since I would rather eat a live frog than apologize to her. She doesn’t deserve it, but I really have no choice.
When class is over, Kas motions for me to come with him with a small shake of his head. He can’t use his hands much while walking, so we’ve learned to communicate almost exclusively by head motions and sighs. Which is why I give the tiniest exhale, and he is the only person who notices it as I follow him through the packed corridors and outside the school, out into the open air and the brilliantly green grass which is slowly growing again after the season of frost.
“Let’s sit over here,” he says.
I don’t need to ask where here is because he’s already moving towards it. Here turns out to be beneath the spreading oak tree in the middle of the lawn. Usually, the shady space beneath it is occupied, but we got here earlier than everyone else.
I take Kas by the arm and help him sit down there. We lean our backs against the trunk. I tilt my head back, turning my gaze upward, and squint through the foliage into the pinpricks of light which make up the clear blue sky.
“Nice day,” Kas says after a second.
“It is.”
“What I was trying to tell you in class was that Ms. Hedge told me that we gotta do some group project together.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” Kas replies.
I raise my eyebrows at him. “So why did Mr. Johnson take the note?”
He blushes slightly. “Okay, I did write a couple of other things, but we don’t need to talk about them right here.”
“Let me guess. Something about—”
He places a hand over my mouth. “No, no, no. Stop. I’ll text you about it later. There are people watching, Azalea.”
My eyebrows go up even higher on my face, now disappearing into my bangs. “We’re using full names now, Kacper?”
He winces. “You don’t have to botch the pronunciation.”
I sigh. “My fault for having a proper American name.”
“Never met anyone called Azalea.”
“That’s because no one reads good literature. You know Harper Lee?”
“To Kill a Mockingbird?”
“Yeah. And you know Miss Maudie, how she’s always talking about her flowers? She’s got azaleas in the book.”
“Azaleas are supposed to be flowers?”
I swat his arm. “Yes, of course they’re supposed to be flowers!”
“Really pretty ones, I bet.” He studies my face for a moment.
I look away. Now it’s my turn to blush. “Don’t act like that. Anyway. What was I saying? Right. About Harper Lee. And Miss Maudie. Right. But my parents named me for the azaleas in the story.”
“They’re a symbol of something?”
I bite down on my lip. “I don’t really know. I think they’re just flowers.”
Kas is quiet for a moment, and then he says, “I think the azaleas are supposed to be the one thing that’s pretty in the book. Flowers are pure. And innocent. There’s nothing else pretty in that book. Like, the one thing you can actually feel okay about caring about are the azaleas—people were shamed for caring about civil rights and black people and all that—but anyone can care about flowers and nobody’s gonna say that’s wrong.” His eyes are still fixed on me. He has blue eyes like the sky. “So you’re a representation of purity and innocence?”
He’s beautiful, I realize. I know I shouldn’t be thinking about that, and I know he shouldn’t be, but he is. His eyes are sharp and clear, and his lips are the natural rose color most girls would kill for. His dark hair is windswept, effortlessly stylish, his cheeks flushed slightly pink; he could be in a painting of a prince. It was never a surprise before the accident that girls would do their best to keep me away from him.
I hear myself say, “I don’t consider myself particularly innocent.”
Kas smirks. “I heard about what Rosie said.”
I roll my eyes. “She’s such a crybaby.”
Kas looks at the sky with me. Finally he says in a quiet voice, “Let’s just forget about Rosie, okay?”
“And Daniel?”
“And that. And the stupid carnival.”
“I’ll try,” I say. “Where did you get your name from?”
“I don’t know. I think one of my uncles? I never asked,” he says. “It doesn’t have any real meaning. Not like Azalea.”
“We could pretend it does,” I suggest. “We could pretend that it’s . . . the color of the sky in April.”
“You’re wonderfully imaginative.” Kas leans over and picks up a rock. “There. We can say that Kacper means ‘chunk of granite’ or whatever this is made of.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer to be the sky than a random rock?”
“No, actually,” he says. “When you’re the sky, you gotta watch over the entire world, and when you’re a rock, you don’t need to watch over anything.”
I smile. “Maybe, but it must be pretty boring to be a rock. I’d rather be the sky.”
His fingers close around my wrist. “Okay,” he says. “Pretend you’re the sky.”
I look up. “Pretending happening.”
“What do you see?”
I think about it for a moment. “Everything,” I say. “Everything on this earth.”
“Exactly. Including all the wars and suffering there are.”
“I can see good things, too,” I protest. “I can see us here under this tree. I see two people who are happy right now.”
“But we aren’t,” Kas insists. “You feel guilty and alone since Daniel died. You’re still thinking about what Arcadia said. Everyone has a gift, but to everybody else, your gift brings death to others.”
I sigh. “The sky can’t know that.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But the sky can definitely see that I can’t walk without these stupid braces and equally stupid crutches. And I think it can see that I’m hungry. Wanna get lunch somewhere?”

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The next afternoon, as promised, I show up at the track right after school and wait by the bleachers. Ms. Hedge arrives right on time, but Kas is nowhere to be seen.
We stand there awkwardly for ten or fifteen minutes. I do a couple of laps in case she expects me to test the course or whatever, but mostly to clear my head. My mind is still full of the word crazy, the one Arcadia used on me a few days ago, the one everyone’s repeating behind their hands about me today.
I haven’t seen Rosie today, which is lucky, but I know she’s already used her influence to spread dozens of rumors through the school about me. And there is nothing in my power that I can do to make it stop.
The sound of my feet hitting the track echoes against the building. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this place so empty before. I never come here except during running practice, and the football field is always occupied by that team. Now, it’s just me running endlessly around and around, my shoes slapping the red surface. I keep running. My face becomes flushed, sweat dripping from my temples, but I don’t slow down.
Eventually, Ms. Hedge calls me over and says that if Kas isn’t coming then we’d better start. She looks murderous. I don’t even know why Kas didn’t show up. He knows we’re supposed to meet here, and he never misses something like this unless it’s important. I don’t think he would have forgotten.
Worry begins to creep into my chest, but it’s quickly replaced by panic as Ms. Hedge asks me what I’ve come up with so far.
“For—for the carnival?” I stammer. “Well, I, um, I’ve been really busy with homework. I wasn’t able to . . . write a proposal.”
She breathes a short sigh. “I wasn’t expecting a proposal, but I thought you and Kacper might have met about this. You’ve had over twenty-four hours, after all. This is supposed to be a group project.”
“Oh. We’ve done that,” I lie. “We were thinking about basing the carnival around . . . running. We could split into teams and have relay races to . . . build team spirit? We’ll be learning how to—to work towards a collective goal. Where the goal is to win shared prizes,” I finish weakly. My phone vibrates in my pocket, but I don’t dare look at the text right now.
I expect her to frown at me and shut the idea down, but instead, she looks moved. And she smiles. It’s not one of her calculating smiles; it’s almost genuine. “That’s a wonderful idea.”
Encouraged, I continue. “That’s not all we’ll have, of course. We could have other types of races, too. Four hundred meters, eight hundred . . . and then distance races.”
“What about prizes?” she asks.
“What about them?” I ask as my phone vibrates again.
“Surely you know the school doesn’t supply the prizes.”
Welp. I didn’t think about that. “What kind of prizes should we have?”
“Oh. I was under the impression you were at last year’s carnival,” she replies disapprovingly. I was, but I mostly hid behind the fence and tried not to be seen until the activities I’d been forced to sign up for were over. “We usually bring board games, plushies, posters—”
“Sorry. Plushies?”
“Yes. Plushies. As I was saying—” She frowns. “Do you have an issue with plushies?”
“No.” Actually, I have many problems with plushies. Including the reasons why a high schooler might want to win one.
“I’m sure you could find some interesting plushies to purchase,” she continues smoothly. “Do you have any other questions about the prizes?”
“I’ll take care of it,” I blurt out without considering the implications of this statement.
“Alright.” She checks her watch. “I’ll have to talk to Kacper about his absence today, but make sure you two bring a proposal to my office by next Monday.”
“Okay,” I say.
She stands up, smoothing out her skirt, and nods to me before she leaves. I pull my phone out of my pocket the moment she’s gone.
It’s Kas. There’s a missed call, and then a text from him.
AZALEA MAE PARK. CALL ME RIGHT NOW.
This boy is obsessed with capital letters. But it’s probably urgent, since he took the time to use my full name. So I take a seat on the bleachers and call him.
There’s a second after the line connects and before I hear his voice. When I do, it sounds like he’s in the car judging by the background noise.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Why didn’t you come to the meeting after school? Ms. Hedge looked like she wanted to murder you.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Did it go okay?”
“It was fine. Are you okay?”
There’s a breath of silence. I can hear the faint murmur of his mom’s voice. I don’t know his parents very well. His dad is withdrawn, disapproving. Kas and Lex can always make my mom laugh or talk for hours about sports with my dad, but I wonder if their dad even likes me. Their mom is always nice, though.
“Kas?”
“I’m here,” he says.
“I asked if you were okay,” I say. “I’ll take that as a no.”
I can almost hear him smiling, then pressing his lips together. “Okay, you’re right. I don’t really know if I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
He sighs, the sound crackly through the speaker. “My dad’s really upset with us right now,” he finally replies. “Me and my mom. And Lex is taking his side on it. He kept yelling at my mom over the phone.” He takes a shaky breath. “I hate it when he yells like that.”
I swallow back the heavy lump in my throat. “Is it bad?”
“Mom says she wants a divorce,” he whispers.
I rest my forehead against my hand, unable to think of anything to say. I knew his parents fought more than they should, but we rarely spoke about it. There are always other things—like Daniel and Rosie and the way everyone in school looks at me like I’m what Arcadia called me yesterday. Crazy. My parents are always nice to each other, so I can’t relate.
Kas is always the one who knows how to make me feel better, but I’m not sure I can give the same to him. I sit there with my mouth open, trying to form words.
“I’m really sorry,” I say.
“Don’t worry about it. I just didn’t think I could go to the meeting like this,” he replies. “Mom wants me at home right now.” He hesitates. “They know about Daniel Byun. Dad says he doesn’t want me talking to you anymore. I don’t think I’m going to listen.”
I want nothing more than to put my arms around him and hold him against my chest like a small child. He doesn’t deserve this. “You don’t have to listen to him,” I say. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
There’s a pause, before he says, “I’m really sorry about missing the meeting. Did you come up with something?”
“Yes, but she needs a proposal by Monday. I can write it.”
“No, no, I’ll write it,” he replies firmly. “Forget about it. I’ll send it to you tomorrow.”
“God, you’re the best,” I say.
I can detect the smirk in his voice. “I know.”
“We’re supposed to bring prizes, too,” I say. “Ms. Hedge said something about posters and plushies.”
“Oh,” he says. “I can bring prizes. Don’t worry.”
“Kas, really, I can do it,” I insist. “You already have enough to worry about.”
“I’m not doing very much at all,” he replies. “You still have to make the schedule, design the activities, and get kids to sign up for the races.”
When he says it like that, it does sound like a lot. “I’ll get my mom to pay for the prizes, though,” I say. “Or half of it.”
“Okay,” he says. “Do you know why Ms. Hedge decided to pair us for a group activity?”
“Not really,” I say. It’s not like she’s trying to force us to become friends. Which means she’s probably up to something even more sinister. “Do you?”
“No idea. Maybe she thinks we complement each other,” he says. “Like . . . bread and butter.”
I giggle, even though I think it’s cute that he finds us a good match. “You’re terrible with analogies,” I say. “And you’re making me hungry.”
“Fair point,” he says. “Can I be the bread?”
I roll my eyes, though I know he can’t see me. “You’re impossible.”
“I know. But you like me anyway.”
I snort. “That’s debatable.” I can see Rosie Chen making her way across the football field from the other side with a group of friends. She hasn’t seen me yet, likely too preoccupied with talking about me. For a moment I don’t know how she would have known I was here, but then it hits me. Right. She does cheer practice at this time. “I’ll call you later,” I say.
“Okay. Bye.”
Before Rosie catches sight of me, I slip through the gate in the fence that surrounds the track and run to the parking lot at the back of the school. It’s pretty much empty at this time. I glance over my shoulder. Rosie either didn’t see me or doesn’t care, which seems less likely.
Maybe running away is a good idea. I could just leave my phone here and start walking. No one would have to know where I went. Not even my parents. Eventually, they’d lose hope of finding me. I’d go somewhere far away, as far as Europe, change my name, get a job and an apartment with flowers on the balcony and birds sitting on the windows. Kas would go with me there if I asked him to. Living in Europe was on our list of everything we wanted to do together when we grew up. We’d said we wanted to live in Paris where we could see the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and the Notre Dame from the rooftop all at the same time.
I sit on the curb behind one of the parked cars. We could do it. I speak French already. We could escape all of this. But then all of my problems would just follow me there. I’d mess up again. It’s not like I can only see the countdowns of Americans. And I would just want to run away all over again.
There are many, many reasons we can’t ever live in Paris, but for now, I decide not to think about them. Reality will eventually crush my dreams anyway. There’s no need for me to destroy them too before they have a chance to blossom. A life without dreams isn’t much of a life at all.
Eventually, one of my dreams is going to escape reality. It is going to grow wings and fly away and take me with it. I don’t know when that day is going to be, but that’s fine, because I know it will happen. It has to.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

When I wake up the next morning, I look at my phone and see a text from a number that isn’t saved to my contacts. For a moment, I think that it’s from Jack, but when I open it, I know instantly that it’s from Rosie. It has to be. There’s no message, just a link, which I hesitantly open. It’s a picture of me at the track, walking through the gate. My heart drops. She saw me. She took a picture of me. The caption reads,
When you think you can run from crazy
I zoom into the photo. Yes, I’m definitely recognizable by anyone at school who’s seen this photo. No one would miss my red hair and long legs. No one would miss that ugly purple backpack I wear.
There are dozens of replies to the post, hundreds of likes. And it was only posted yesterday afternoon. The most popular reply, which comes up as the first one, reads:
We all know you unalived Daniel. You’re going to pay for this.
I turn my phone off, tears stinging my eyes. I can’t believe she would post a picture of me, even if it’s only of my back and doesn’t include my name, without my permission. But this is what revenge is like.
I can’t hurt anybody. I can’t even think about taking my own revenge against Rosie, no matter how horrible she’s acting towards me. Part of me wants to be as cruel as she is so that she can see how much it hurts. I know I can’t. It’s beyond my comprehension how she can, because I know that even if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to make someone hurt on purpose. It’s not in me. I can bicker with my friends for hours, and I did tell Rosie that I’d hit her, but I could never do that. How can Ms. Hedge believe I really meant that?
“Aza?” Mom asks.
I quickly mop my eyes with the corner of the blanket. I was crying without even realize it. “Yeah,” I say.
She opens the door and pokes her head around it. “Come down and help with breakfast,” she says, then catches sight of my face. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, fine,” I reply, almost too quickly. I push my hair out of my eyes, smoothing it back into a ponytail.
She hesitates for a fraction of a second, then steps inside the room. “Your dad and I have been talking,” she says.
“About what?” I ask with a sinking feeling. I wonder if Ms. Hedge has sent them an email about my behavior. If she has, I will seriously consider quitting school for good. Unless I’ve already been expelled. But Mom doesn’t have a matching look on her face.
“Well,” she says, “it’s about your friend Kas.” She always says your friend Kas for some unfathomable reason. “We’re a bit concerned by the amount of time you’ve been spending together.”
This is not what I expected. She knows we’re just friends. She knows it will always be that way. We’re not supposed to ever be together. I open my mouth to say something, but before my numb lips can form words, Dad comes into the room too.
“Good morning,” is all I say.
“Morning.” He looks at Mom as if for confirmation. She gives a tiny nod. “So,” he says, taking a seat on the foot of my bed, still facing me. His hands are folded in his lap. This means he’s ready to have a serious conversation with me.
“I was just telling Aza that we think she and her friend Kas are spending too much time together,” Mom explains softly.
“Right.” Dad clears his throat. “We’re a little worried about this. We know something’s going on with you, and his family hasn’t been exactly . . . stable.”
“His family isn’t part of this,” I force out. “We’re just friends. It’s fine. Really.”
“I know you think that,” Mom sighs. “But sometimes—”
I lift my hands to my face. “Please, let’s not have this conversation again,” I plead. “Kas isn’t like that.”
“His parents are just concerned you have a bad influence on each other,” Dad says bluntly.
“His parents said that?”
Mom nods stiffly. “They called us last night.”
This is worse than I thought—we’re supposed to be organizing the entire athletics carnival together and now our parents don’t want us talking to each other anymore. Bad influence. It feels too much like the word crazy. Privately, I wonder if Mom and Dad are more concerned about Kas’s influence on me, or my influence on him.
Mom’s eyes move to my phone, which rests on the nightstand. “I thought we discussed not having that in your room?”
“I’ll take it downstairs,” I say immediately. It needs to charge anyway.
She gestures to it. “Can I see what you were doing?”
I know better than to argue. If I say no, she’ll look at it anyway when she thinks I can’t see her. There’s nothing to hide from her, anyway—just things I don’t want her to see. I put in the passcode and hand it to her before I realize that the first thing she will see is Rosie Chen’s post.
Her face immediately changes, her eyebrows drawing together and her lips forming a thin line. “Is this you in the picture?” she asks.
“Yes,” I reply slowly. I can’t lie to her. Even if I could she’d obviously be able to recognize her own daughter. It’s not really a question whether this is me in the photo.
Mom scrolls down and I know she’s reading the posts. “Who’s Daniel?” she asks before something registers in her brain and her eyes widen. “Daniel Byun? The boy who died?”
“Yes,” I reply, grimacing. “Daniel Byun. The Boy Who Died.”
She scrolls back up and I know she’s looking at the post again. “Who is this?” she demands, then shows it to Dad, just long enough for him to read the caption and the first couple of comments. “Who posted a picture of you?”
I sigh. “Her name is Rosie. We don’t exactly get along.”
She tosses my phone onto the bed and places her hands on her hips. “Where does this Rosie girl live? I want to have a conversation with her.”
“Mom, no, it’s fine,” I say hastily. “Really. I’m fine. I know she posted that picture of me, but she’s been picking on me since freshman year. It’s nothing new.”
“And you didn’t tell us?” Mom sits down on the edge of my bed, looking defeated. “Why is everyone saying that you were involved in Daniel’s death?”
“I—” I’m at a loss for words. “I didn’t—”
“Aza,” my dad interrupts. “We know you weren’t. We just want to know why everyone thinks you were.”
“The countdown,” I reply. “I know you don’t believe me. Almost no one does. They think I’m crazy.” Tears burn in my eyes again, but I swallow them back. The entire story spills out—what I told Daniel, the call from Jack about what happened to him, Arcadia, Rosie. Lex. Kas. The only two people in the world who believe me because they saw with their own eyes that it’s real.
I’ve never mentioned the man I saw die when I was thirteen to anyone, but now I do. I tell them about the way his body crumpled, folded, like a wasted sheet of paper, collapsed into the people. About how we knew we couldn’t help him. About how I didn’t tell him in the few minutes I had. About how Kas made me stay there even though I wanted to get up and run. And the way it still appears in my nightmares. About the reasons I told Daniel that he had less than twenty-four hours left only when he asked me, and how much I regret that—how much I regret telling him, but at the same time not telling him sooner. About how he never really got the chance to live.
I tell them about how everyone thinks I’m crazy. About how alone I feel, being the only person who can see the countdown. I tell them about how I sometimes wonder if I am crazy and just unable to realize it. What if everyone’s right about me? What if I am what they say I am—a death-obsessed psychopath who enjoys hurting people for personal benefit?
Eventually, my voice chokes up too much to continue. It’s a crime to cry in front of my parents. It’s a crime to be weak. I hate the fact that I am weak but not everybody has to see it. Tears are private things that should be kept secret. Not everyone needs to know about them.
I clench my fists around the blanket, smooth my hair, clench them again. I wait for my parents’ reactions. I wonder if they’ll be upset at me for keeping this from them for so long. It’s not my fault that they never asked for the details, but part of me still feels guilty about it; they could have helped me, made it better.
Dad clears his throat. “We believe you can see the countdowns,” is the first thing he says.
“And we’d never, never think you’re crazy,” Mom adds.
“Okay,” I say in a small voice.
“That being said . . . we know how it feels to be the only one,” Dad continues. “We’re just surprised that you didn’t tell us.”
They haven’t spoken together in private since I told them all of this, but they use the royal we when they speak, which means that they must both have already formed strong opinions on this subject. Which means they were expecting something like this to happen.
“Okay,” I say again. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” Mom replies. “We’ll talk to Rosie’s parents. What’s her last name?”
“Chen. Her name is Rosie Chen.”
Mom says something racist, and I wince. School tried to teach me to treat all people equally, but at home, it’s a little different.
“We’ll talk to her and her parents about this,” Dad assures me.
My phone buzzes. I look at each of them and they nod. I pick it up. Lex has sent me a message, which is actually toned-down for him:
Kas just sent me the post Rosie made. I looked it up and it’s not actually legal for her to have shared that picture. We can sue her.
I smile despite myself. Lex was always like this even before he went to law school.
Three dots appear on the screen, then disappear, then appear again. His next message reads:
I already told her to take down the post. She doesn’t know it’s me.
Thanks, I reply. When I put my phone down Mom and Dad are still watching me, but they don’t ask any questions.
“Just know that if you need to talk, we’re here,” Dad says.
I nod, the heavy lump in my throat making it difficult for me to swallow. I hadn’t expected them to be so kind about it. I hope Mom isn’t going to do anything too bad to Rosie, but I don’t try to stop her. She gets up, muttering something under her breath, which I’m glad I don’t hear.
Once my parents leave, and I’m alone in the room, I breathe a sigh of relief. Now that they have Rosie Chen to think about, maybe they’ll forget—at least temporarily—whatever Kas’s parents said to them about me.

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CHAPTER NINE

When I show up to school on Monday, Kas doesn’t even so much as look at me.
I try to talk to him but he just turns away, completely ignoring me, acting as though I don’t even exist. Beyond that, everything seems normal on the surface. In class, he’s still always the first to answer questions. But during lunch, he sits with a new group of friends. Usually, he sits alone. Or with me.
He does the same thing on Tuesday.
Finally, after school, I walk right up to him and ask him what’s going on. He just looks away.
And that hurts more than I’ll ever admit.
Now, I know that I’ve probably led you to make several assumptions about us, which include:
1. Kas and I instantly “clicked”
2. Our friendship has always been picture-perfect
3. We understand each other fully
I wish all of those things were true, but that is not how life works. When I told Kas about the shark dissection and how he dropped his preservative-soaked animal on my foot, I didn’t mention to him the horrible things I yelled at him. Or the disappointment in his mother’s eyes after the principal called her to pick him up from school.
There was—there still is no reason for him to remember how lost his entire family had felt. His father often travelled overseas for work trips back then, and his mother couldn’t find a job as she spoke only broken English. They both needed their sons to do well in school, stay out of trouble, and earn high grades.
On that day, some part of my messed up sixth-grader brain had understood how fragile love is, even love between parents and their children, and how it can be bent so easily. And that I’d bent a little piece of Kas’s mom’s love for him by getting him in trouble.
He doesn’t need to remember the tears that glistened in her eyes while the principal explained how much he’d hurt my feelings, even though I’d exaggerated everything, a perfect actress in a bad comedy.
Right now, I wish the last few seconds would be erased from my mind. That instead of turning away, Kas would smile at me like he always does. Always. His smile lights up his face and makes his eyes sparkle. I love that smile.
“Kas,” I try again, but he’s already walking away. I think that if he could, he would run.
This has something to do with what our parents said. Bad influence. I can’t really believe he’s actually listening to them. At least Lex has been keeping me updated on his campaign to get Rosie to delete her account; so far, he’s only gotten her to delete her post by scaring her with legal information. I know he and Kas might not be talking right now since they’re on two separate sides of a family issue, but maybe he can convince Kas that I’m not a bad influence, no matter what their parents say I am. I write,
Any idea why Kas is acting like I don’t exist?
He doesn’t respond immediately. He must be in class. I realize with a start that I should be in history by now. For a fraction of a second, I consider skipping—at what point in my life will I need to recall the birth years of ancient Roman thinkers? The disciplined part of me wins, though, and I bolt down the hall.
About half an hour later, I get the message I’ve been waiting for:
If you ignore him then he’ll stop ignoring you.
That makes no sense, but I know better than to argue with a law student. It might actually work. I resolve to ignore Kas as much as I can from now on.
That afternoon, I put my plan into action. I sit as far away from him as possible in class, taking one of the unoccupied seats at the very back of the room. It’s hard to see the board from so far away, but I can barely concentrate.
Thursday comes. I sit at lunch by myself in my corner watching people. Rosie Chen and her friends are laughing too loudly on the other side of the cafeteria. They pretend not to be looking at me, but that doesn’t work because they’re staring. Kas sits with Jack and some other kids. They used to treat him differently because of his disability, because he can’t play sports with them, but now, it’s as if his crutches have become invisible. He is literally on fire, his eyes shining and his face glowing as they laugh.
Jealousy twists in my chest. Why can’t I make friends like everyone else can? Why am I always ostracized? Even before people knew about the countdown—before I told literally everybody about it, like they’d take me seriously—I was always lonely, being an only child without many people to talk to at home. For all of elementary school, I was the quiet one, the shy one.
He catches my eye for a brief moment when he glances at my section of the room. I refuse to look at him. When I turn back after a few moments, he’s acting as if he never saw me. And just a few short days ago he yelled at the entire class. It wasn’t the first time he stood up for me but I think it’s the last.
I don’t want people to see the hurt inside me, but I wish I could show it all to him in some way—show him my bleeding wounds and tell him you did this to me. As if he’d care. I want to believe that he will, but I know that he won’t.
I tell myself that next time he catches my eye I will hold his gaze until he breaks it. I won’t be weak like this. But he doesn’t look my way again.
I’m not good at ignoring people. I try my best to ignore Kas all of Thursday but it’s hard not to keep glancing his way across the classroom, even though we sit as far away from each other as possible, like that makes it any easier to forget the past.
And I do my best to ignore him all of Friday.
The day drags on slowly. Time stretches to a crawl, the clock hands pulling themselves along sluggishly, like their gears are soaked in tar. At lunchtime, I think about getting something from the cafeteria, but I’m not hungry. I miss going to the sandwich shop with Kas already.
When I go to my locker to grab my stuff on the way home, since I’ll need it for the weekend to come, I notice two things. Number one and less important, Rosie is walking away from my locker with an innocent look on her face, which gives me the strong suspicion that she’s trying to figure out the combination on it. Number two and more important, when I open my locker, I see a crumpled piece of paper.
I unfold it. It’s not Rosie’s handwriting, which is good; that means she can’t get at my stuff.
Azalea:
Screw Rosie. I don’t blame you for Daniel.
Who would have given me this? My first thought is that it was Kas. But the logical part of me knows that it isn’t him. He’d never send me something so factual, and it isn’t in his handwriting anyway.
It feels good to know that at least someone doesn’t blame me for Daniel’s death when the rest of the world has found reasons to hate me. I just want to know who this someone is. I study the handwriting closely. It’s more of a scrawl, a few hasty lines and dots across the page, like it was written in a hurry. Probably a boy, then, judging by how clumsy and messy they are in all other things. (In my opinion. They probably say the same thing about girls.)
Having decided that it has to be a girl, I mentally go through the list of all the girls who might have sent this message. There’s not a person in the school who doesn’t know me, but who could have opened my locker? I haven’t told anybody the combination on it. Someone who’s good at picking locks. Maybe I should start a lock-picking club and see who joins it. Before Ms. Hedge finds out what I’m doing, that is. I’m already on thin ice.
Thinking about Ms. Hedge makes me think about the upcoming athletics carnival. Since Kas didn’t send anything to me all weekend, I’d written something up and sent it to Ms. Hedge, but I know that we need a real proposal soon; she won’t be happy with what I sent to her. Now that I’m basically doing this thing solo, I’ll have to spend actual time on it. Which means no watching my favorite shows in the evenings. Instead, I’ll have to plan a stupid carnival nobody wants to go to.
On the way home, I check my phone. No texts from anybody. I look at Rosie’s latest posts. None of them are about me, which is good, but the one she did post about me has thousands of views. I silently thank god that she didn’t put my face in it (I would definitely get Lex to sue her for that) but it isn’t much of a relief—everyone still knows it’s me.
Maybe I could dye my hair, wear colored contact lenses, buy new clothes, and change my name. If no one recognized me, they could treat me like everybody else. Eventually, the idea of Aza would drift from their minds, overtaken by the latest gossip.
Unfortunately, Mom wouldn’t be okay with me dyeing my hair, so I guess I’ll just have to stick with being me.
Being me isn’t fun.
I look at my emails. Ms. Hedge still hasn’t said anything. There are a few promotions, notifications from school that some of my assignments have been graded, some fundraiser project being run a girl I knew in elementary school but barely talk to anymore. I reload the app. An email from Kas appears.
My heart clenches painfully, rising to my throat and constricting it. If he’s going to yell at me, he should have done it in person. If he’s going to put a virus on my phone that sucks out my personal information when I open this email, I’m definitely not talking to him anymore. If he’s going to spread lies about me, he wouldn’t be sending an email with a list of those lies.
Taking a deep breath, I click on it. There’s an attachment that reads “Proposal”. I open it and let out my breath in one long sigh. It’s all there. Perfect formatting, perfect language, perfect everything, so impeccably perfect I find myself wondering if he slept at all while working on this. I scroll through it. It’s fifteen pages long. That’s about three times as long as any paper we’ve written for school which means he probably put about three times more effort into this.
The email itself says:
The ninth commandment says that you’re not supposed to lie. I promised my parents that I wouldn’t talk to you anymore or even look at you when we’re in school.
Writing an email doesn’t count as talking. Hah. Bet they didn’t see that one coming.
Already sent the proposal to Hedge. I said it was a team effort. If she has a problem with it, tell her to talk to me.
Relief crashes over me like a wave, overwhelming in its weight, causing my body to fold forward until my elbow rests on my knee, my cheek against my palm, fingers twisting at loose curls. And then it’s gone. Just as quickly, my eyes fill with tears.

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CHAPTER TEN

At least one thing hasn’t changed: Kas is still Kas. Maybe he won’t talk to me anymore, but I know he’s the same person. He writes fifteen-page proposals and follows the commandments like he’s actually as religious as his parents and then finds loopholes in them.
I can see him and Jack that afternoon while warming up before track practice. They slowly walk down the hill, through the gate, and towards the field. Kas moves slowly with his crutches but Jack matches his pace. They’re talking. Jack is holding a football. A couple more boys catch up with them. They stop at the football field, at the very edge, their shoes barely touching the grass. Five, six more boys show up. There’s going to be an impromptu game. Maybe the football is a magnet and every boy has the opposite magnet inside of him because I count fourteen of them.
More talking. Someone nudges Jack. He nods. Kas is talking to someone, shaking his head but I know he’s smiling at the same time. I can’t play, he’s saying. I know exactly what he’s saying. I always know.
Someone hands him the football anyway. They boys fan out, ready to pounce. Kas sets his crutches down. I know he can’t take two steps without them. What is he doing? He pauses. I can see his shoulders tensing. Two pretty girls are walking in their direction. His eyes travel to them for a moment. From the other side of the track I see all this as I stand there, half-hidden behind the soccer goal, my face pressed against the thick white ropes, my arm wrapped around the pole.
He doesn’t see me. He hesitates a moment longer, then throws the ball. The boys scramble, shout, tackle, laughing. Kas smiles again as he watches them. His eyes are shining. His impossibly straight and white teeth are shining in the sun. In fact, he’s shining all over. I can see the well-toned muscles in his arms, his chest, and suddenly the fact that he’s nearly paralyzed from the waist down doesn’t matter to me. My heart drops. Am I really considering that he looks hot, after everything he’s done to me?
The girls have stopped and are watching the game. The boys horse around, showing off. But I just stand there, my cheeks burning. It takes all I have not to storm over to Kas and demand why all he sent me as an email—one email—not even a text, which doesn’t count as talking either.
Then it occurs to me that maybe he just sent the proposal for the carnival.
Maybe he doesn’t want to talk to me.
I watch the game and tell myself I don’t care. But as the rest of the track team arrives and the whistle blows, I see a text from him.
AZA I CAN SEE YOU COME OVER RIGHT NOW
I freeze, then turn slowly to look at him. He’s standing on the other side of the field, but I can tell he’s looking at me. The other boys are gone now.
I type back:
What do you want from me?
Three dots appear for an endless moment before his reply comes through.
Come over first. Then I can talk to you.
I shake my head at him although I’m not sure he can see me. I stuff my phone back into my pocket. He’s ignored me for so long. Now he can see how it feels. But I can’t help myself from checking my phone again when he sends me another text:
Pretend you’re the sky.
I hesitate. Everyone else is stretching, chatting, but I close my eyes anyway for a moment and pretend. I see myself—I see all the anger and hurt in me—and I see Kas—how he must feel, scared to disobey his parents and make things worse for his family, but at the same time scared of losing me as his friend. When I open my eyes again, he’s still standing there. His eyes are fixed on me. I hold his gaze. Then I text him back:
You should at least say sorry.
There’s a pause.
I’m sorry. I’ll buy you a chocolate cake.
Cake does sound really good right now, but I’m not going to let him off the hook this easily.
You should give me an actual apology.
I wait for his reply, but it doesn’t come. After a minute he turns and walks away.
Fine.
That evening, when I get home after practice, I see a cardboard box on the front porch with the word fragile scribbled all over it. The top lifts away.
Inside is the biggest chocolate cake I’ve ever seen in my life. Written in icing is:
Cake is a form of apology
I sigh. Classic Kas. At first, I don’t want it, but the smell is irresistible. He must have made this cake himself because I’m not sure any store on Earth sells desserts this large. It could probably feed the entire population of this city for a few months. Where did he get such big cake tins? And where did he even learn how to bake?
Another problem: How will I bring this inside?
I sit down next to it. Eventually, I stick my finger out and swipe it along the chocolate frosting on the side, then lick it, knowing that I’m being disgusting but not caring. Creamy sweetness melts over my tongue, rich chocolate with still-warm cake sponges and frosting and a hint of vanilla.
This is a pretty good apology, but part of me knows I’m going to forgive him for everything anyway, because my mind is full of the way he looked after the accident, when he had a fifty-fifty chance of living. I know I’m close to losing him just like I was then, and no matter how upset I am, I don’t ever want to feel that way again.
After I heard about the accident, I emptied my school backpack and then re-filled it with snacks, bringing extra in case Kas wanted some, and my magic red scarf. My parents were at work, so I left them a note and walked to the hospital, where I lied to the nurse that I was his sister. Although we look nothing alike, I could tell why she believed me when I was allowed into the hospital room; I could barely recognize him.
I take another lick of frosting. I remember reaching out to take his hand and finding his fingers cold like ice. I waited for him to squeeze back, but he didn’t. No one else was there yet, just me, alone there for a few minutes before the nurse came in to prep him for surgery, waiting, and then crying.
When I dried my tears, I could hear him breathing, shallow and ragged, painful in his chest. I pulled his hand close to my cheek and pressed it against my face, his white limp cold hand I was sure would never touch me again. Doctors came in and a nurse gently moved me out of their way and I heard something about a possible amputation at the waist because his legs were so damaged. I was already picturing myself at his funeral, tossing flowers onto his body, and then I looked at him, really looked at him, and realized there might not be much of anything left of him for a funeral.
His parents came in after a few minutes, but I barely noticed them. His mom pushed me away and said something in a high-pitched voice. She started crying, too; so did his dad. The nurse told them not to touch him or move him, but his mom put her head against his chest and sobbed, the salt of her tears mixing with his blood and the scent of her perfume.
The next thing I remember clearly is sitting in the waiting room, looking at my phone but not knowing who to text, hugging my knees to my chest with my backpack yesterday. A nurse came over at one point and asked where my parents were. I replied that they were with my brother, like Kas’s parents were my parents too, and she nodded and asked me if I wanted some water.
I ate all the snacks I’d brought with me by myself and wrapped the magic scarf around my neck. I prayed then. I’d never prayed to anything or anyone before but I prayed then.
I also remember seeing Jack for the first time that day while I was praying in the waiting room. He came in with his mom. I knew he and Kas were friends and did football practice together three times a week, but I’d never seen him because we went to different schools. Jack saw me and said, “Hey.” I said, “Shh. I’m praying right now.” What a great pick-up line.
I lick the frosting again. It’s too good to resist anymore. Pushing the bad memories away, I go inside and bring a fork and paper plate to the porch, where I sit on the step and dig out a slice of the huge cake.
I stay there waiting for my parents to come home from work, for their cars to pull into the driveway. The sun sets slowly in a haze of pink, orange, red, gold that fades into blue and purple as silver stars emerge slowly from the inky blackness. Mom texts me, letting me know she and Dad are going out that night and asking me if I’m okay. I say that I am. I hope they have fun on their spontaneous date. I’ve never been on a date before and I have no idea how it feels. I kind of wish I did.
It starts to rain. At first, it’s a mere pitter-patter splashing against my shoes, but before long the clouds break open. Water splashes down in fat droplets, forming puddles on the walkway and driveway. I fix my gaze upon the ominously gray sky, thick clouds sliding across the stars, and then at the ground, which is dark with rain.
When I look up again, I see Kas standing at the gate.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

He doesn’t touch the iron bars, but in the haze of mist rising from the sidewalk, it looks like he’s already on my side of the gate. I stand up slowly, then walk over to him, my legs moving by themselves and my heart pounding painfully in my chest.
I stand a few feet away from him and cross my arms over my chest, giving him my hardest glare. He doesn’t say anything at first, just looks at me. I can’t remember the last time he looked this small. I definitely can’t remember the heavy sadness that is in his eyes.
“Why are you here?” I snap, my voice more bitter than I intended, but he doesn’t flinch at the harshness in my words.
“I don’t really have anywhere else to go,” he says. “And I wanted to see if you tried the cake.”
I hug myself tighter against the downpour. “Do you really think cake is a good enough apology for ignoring me for almost two weeks?”
“I guess not?”
“That’s not funny,” I say, my voice low.
“I know,” he says. “I wasn’t joking.”
“Then? Do you have anything to say to me?”
“Yes, actually,” he says. “I have a lot of things to say to you, but I don’t want to tell you all of them right now because I’ll probably need to wash my mouth with soap afterwards.”
I raise one eyebrow. “Kas, is this your idea of an apology?” I demand. “Because you’re not very good at apologizing.”
“I know,” he says. He looks away from me, looking at the sky, even though there’s nothing much to see up there. I can see him chewing his lip; I can see the blood that forms there. “I guess I should give you some kind of explanation,” he says, still not looking at me.
I sigh. Now we’re getting somewhere.
“At first,” he says, “I didn’t know who to choose: you or my parents. They said I shouldn’t talk to you, and I listened to them, even though I didn’t want to. They’ve been so upset at each other lately . . . they’re going to get a divorce next week.” He takes a shaky breath in.
I’ve spent much of my life trying not to cry in front of people I care about and I can feel my eyes filling with tears, too. “Kas,” I say.
“No, don’t say anything,” he replies, his voice smaller than I’ve ever heard it before. “I really don’t want you to say anything. Anyway. I tried to listen to my parents. Have you ever read a book called The Alchemist?” he asks.
I say nothing because I haven’t. He’s not listening to me anyway.
“It says, ‘Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World and it will one day return there.’ I didn’t understand that before. Now I do.”
“And . . . you listened? To your heart?” I ask.
“I sorta started paying attention to it after a while.”
“Not funny,” I say.
“Stop interpreting everything that comes out of my mouth as a joke,” he says.
“Fine,” I reply. “Don’t make so many stupid jokes and it’ll be easier for both of us.”
We stay silent for a little bit. Finally I ask,
“What do you mean, you don’t have anywhere else to go?”
“My parents don’t want me at home,” he replies softly. “I finished the cake and when they came back, they were fighting again . . . and my mom yelled at me for using the big tins. I was trying to explain that it was supposed to be an apology cake, and she told me to get out.”
“And not to come back?”
“Not to come back,” he confirms. His voice is so quiet.
“Come inside,” I say. “You’ll freeze out here.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t,” he replies. “I know I chose you over them, but . . . I just can’t.”
“Stay here, then,” I say. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
I run inside, nearly tripping over the cake in my haste, and find my dad’s rain jacket and an umbrella. He’ll understand.
I go back outside, opening the umbrella above my head, although I’m so wet by this point that I’ve made puddles throughout the hallway inside. I open the gate. Kas is still standing there, his head bowed against the rain.
“Lean on me,” I say.
He hesitates, then lets me take his crutches and lean them against the fence. I steady him by holding onto his arm, helping him into the rain jacket, then hand him his crutches.
“Thanks,” he says softly as we stand together. I hold the umbrella above our heads, shielding us from the downpour.
“I’m still mad at you,” I say, though we both know I don’t really mean it.
Kas and I stay there for a long time together. We sit against the gate. I prop our umbrella against it. Our bodies are close enough to be touching, but it doesn’t feel awkward. Not with him. He was always more like a brother to me than a best friend or even a boyfriend.
“Did you like the cake?” he asks.
“It was delicious.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” he replies. “I’ve never baked before.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Really? You must have a natural talent.”
He laughs softly, the sound warm and gentle. The rain is coming sideways; I adjust the umbrella. I wonder when my parents will be back, then realize that I want tonight to last forever. It’s late, and I’m tired, but the wet cold and the mud beneath me force me to stay awake.
“Do you want to talk about something?” I ask. Most of this past hour has passed in silence, except the sound of the rain and the sound of cars and the sound of our breathing, slow, in and out, in and out, comforting.
“About what?” Kas asks.
“Anything,” I say. “Just . . . start talking.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Let’s start with why you didn’t text me earlier,” I suggest, glancing at him—his face is turned away, fist clenched. He’s not used to talking about himself or his feelings.
He smiles slightly. “Cause I’m stupid?”
I roll my eyes. “Obviously. And?”
“And nothing,” he says. “I thought if I ignored you, you wouldn’t care about me anymore.”
“What?” My throat tightens.
“I just don’t know how to be a good friend to you,” he mumbles, looking at the ground, his fingers tracing small circles in the flattened grass. “Not right now. When we were younger, it was . . . easier. We didn’t have to worry about as many things . . . I just wish I could make things better.”
“Better how?” I ask gently.
“Like . . . fixing everything,” he says. I can tell he isn’t used to talking about this kind of thing. “My parents . . . and my legs . . . and everything.” Here, he takes a deep breath. “It would be better if we stopped being friends. I hate that you’ve gotta look out for me and take care of me so much.”
“That,” I say, “is the most ridiculous thing that’s ever come out of your mouth.”
“I can say more ridiculous things if you want.”
“I’m being serious, Kas. If I didn’t want your friendship then I would have just left.” My eyes sting with hot tears. “Remember? After you woke up you told me I could just leave.”
He shakes his head, a slight frown on his face. “I don’t remember.”
“Good,” I whisper, pressing my body against his.
He pulls me closer. “I just wish we could have a happy ending,” he says softly. “But I know we can’t.”
“That all depends on your definition of happy. If you think a happy ending is me and you living in a castle somewhere up in the clouds where we can do anything we want then I think you’re an idiot. That’s just having things. Having doesn’t mean you’re happy. Look at Rosie—she has everything a girl could want and she isn’t happy. That’s why she hurts people. To cover up the fact that she’s not happy at all.”
“Fair point,” he says.
“Right now,” I say, “I’m happy. Very happy. Sitting in the rain right here and freezing my butt off while we talk about happiness like Freud or someone.”
A smile curves his lips. “Do you actually know about Freud?”
“No,” I say. “We had to learn about him at one point, but I forgot everything. I don’t even know if he had a theory on happiness.”
When you look at my life, you probably don’t think that I have everything. But for me that’s fine right now. It doesn’t matter if Kas can’t walk or if my parents are gone on a date or if our house is small with a leaky roof or if my grades aren’t as good as I want them to be or I don’t have many friends or I’m the schoolwide gossip. I don’t need to think about any of that. Life is a gift. Life is beautiful. I want nothing else right now.
“I’m not mad at you anymore,” I tell Kas after a moment. I don’t consider myself to be overly forgiving; I just hate it when people are hurt because of me, and I want to do anything to make it better for them, even if that means forgiving them when maybe I shouldn’t.
“I know,” he says.
For a while, we say nothing. The rain stops falling for a brief ten minutes. I consider going inside, since I’m freezing cold and soaked through, but I don’t want to leave him outside like this. His parents won’t worry about him. Maybe they are as distant to him as they are to me. Something changed between Kas and his family after the accident. I don’t think they see him as the same energetic, lovable little boy. He’s more serious now and it’s harder to get a smile out of him, but he’s still the same person. I thought his parents, of all people, would be able to see that. But I don’t think they can.
I finger the wet grass beside me. It’s finally growing again this spring, the dead yellow blades from last autumn decayed into the dirt, new green shooting from the ground.
My fingers touch something soft. I pull back instinctively, then realize it’s a flower lying separated from its bush. The petals have a washed-out look and lay there, limp and sad as the rain begins to fall again. It’s a flower that must have fallen from an azalea.
“Look,” I say, showing it to Kas.
He smiles softly, then looks away again. After a moment, he points at the poplar trees on the other side of the street. “Mockingbird,” he says.
I squint through the darkness, although my eyes have long since adjusted to the night gloom. I can’t identify the species of birds like he can, but I can see it at the very top on the thin white dead branches there, like the golden star on a Christmas tree. Triumphant.
“The world begins again / not wholly insufflated / the blackbirds in the rain / upon the dead top branches / of the living tree / stuck fast to the low clouds / notate the dawn / their shrill cries sound / announcing appetite / and drop among the bending roses / and the dripping grass,” I announce to no one in particular.
“What?”
“William Carlos Williams,” I say. “He was a poet.”
His smile widens. “Azalea Mae Park, I think I’m officially in love with you.”
“What?”
“I am,” he says. “I know that I have a lot of time to tell you that, but maybe not a lot of chances, so I won’t be afraid to say it. I love you. Really. More than anything.”
“Kas,” I say, because no intelligent words come to my lips. I don’t have anything else to say.
He holds up a hand for me to stop. “I’m being serious,” he says. “More serious than I’ve ever been in my life.”
It feels like everything is rising up inside of me, threatening to carry me up, up, up, towards the clouds, towards heaven. I’m drowning in this painful sort of joy—painful because my chest is tight and aches, making it difficult to breathe properly.
I don’t say anything back. I always thought that the first time someone (other than my parents) told me they loved me, I would have something to say in return. Something beautiful that made an already romantic moment even prettier. I open my mouth, then close it.
Kas doesn’t say anything either. He barely even moves. He gazes at me for a moment longer, then turns his head away, leaning back against the fence, looking up at the sky.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

On Tuesday, Ms. Hedge finally says something about our proposal for the athletics carnival. She seems very impressed and says she’s glad we’re building “new team-building skills” which is as stupid as it sounds. I didn’t even finish reading the proposal—it was too long—and I doubt she did either, but she seems almost . . . moved by our “extensive thought and effort” which I’m pretending I actually put into this project.
But she reminds us that the athletics carnival is scheduled very soon, so I need to do some real work for this.
First, I read through the proposal, which takes me about an hour. It’s just so complicated. I hate it when Kas writes like he’s from the eighteenth century. We had to read Herman Melville in class once—God, that was horrible—and this proposal reminds me of that. It just uses so many double negatives. Even so, it’s a thorough proposal and I can see why Ms. Hedge was impressed.
We plan—rather, Kas plans—to have six races of varying distances. I give the details a twice-over. The shortest race will be four hundred meters, once around the track. The longest one will be four kilometers—ten times around the track. I have to set up cones of different colors to let people know where to start. And I have to get people to sign up to humiliate themselves under the sun in front of the whole school on a Friday afternoon. Who would even do that?
I sigh. Kas has planned everything out so perfectly, so immaculately—the races will be relays to contribute to building team spirit (this guy knows how to win Hedge over) and to allow everyone to spectate and cheer their teammates on while they rest. Great. What if there’s not enough people for the relays? Will I have to run? Usually, the organizers sign up to promote the event but obviously Kas won’t. Maybe Ms. Hedge will make me run twice as much to make up for that. She seems like the type.
Then, I read the section on prizes. Kas absolutely stole my idea about bringing posters and plushies as prizes (actually, it was Ms. Hedge’s idea in the first place but that doesn’t matter) and he has a budget for it all. Ms. Hedge even approved that budget and said the school would pay for it. Kas is also promising refreshments. I don’t know where he’ll get those from; I can bring water and ice in a cooler, but that’s it.
My mind drifts away from the thoughts of lemonade and soft drinks and back to what Kas said to me. I love you. Really. More than anything. I know he means it. Doesn’t make it any easier to understand it.
I can’t decide if I love him too. I’m not even sure what love is. Warm? I don’t feel warm when thinking about him, but maybe that’s just the weather. I know what it’s like to have a crush on somebody. Whenever I think of Jack, my heart stutters a little bit and inside I secretly am thrilled knowing that he has my number, that maybe he doesn’t want to talk to me anymore because of Daniel. And then I feel cold and numb and empty in my chest when I think about Daniel. I just don’t think being in love feels like that.
I scroll through the rest of the document. Most of it is thanking Ms. Hedge (for what, exactly, I’m not sure, because I for one don’t feel very grateful that she signed me up for this project). I wonder why Kas even spent the time to write all this junk, which encompasses a whopping two pages. It’s not like Ms. Hedge can hate me any more than she already does.
What else has Rosie Chen said about me? I find myself unable to keep up with the latest gossip at the best of times. There’s always the “news” which is basically just repeats of stuff that happened last year with a bit of a twist. Some girl broke up with her boyfriend because he forgot about their anniversary; did you hear this girl went on a diet; some kid gatecrashed someone else’s birthday party; somebody dyed their hair a crazy color. The list is endless. Endlessly boring.
I sigh, pushing my chair back to kick my feet up onto my desk. The carnival is on Friday, and today is Tuesday. At least we have a solid proposal and a principal who has a new favorite student. I would have expected no one to outdo Rosie but judging by the screenshots Kas sent me of her reply, apparently, he has.
At that moment, he calls me. I swipe to answer him, making myself comfortable on my purple beanbag cushion and stretching my legs out in front of me.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he says.
There’s a moment of silence. We’ve spoken since that night out in the rain when he said that he loved me, but we haven’t really had a deep conversation. School and life have been in the way. I wonder if he wants to talk about it, or if he’s going to tell me he didn’t really mean what he said.
I pull my knees up to my chest, settling into the warm fabric of the cushion. My mind wanders, wondering where this conversation will go. I hate awkward pauses, but I don’t say anything.
“You doing okay?” he asks finally, his voice a little hesitant, a little uncomfortable.
I sigh. “I guess? I just finished reading through the proposal. Ms. Hedge probably thinks we’re geniuses, and I didn’t even do anything to help.”
I can almost hear him smiling. He doesn’t laugh too much, but he does smile. “Well, you are kind of the genius. Most of the time,” he teases. “I just like to make things look fancy.”
I giggle, but then the heaviness settles over me again as I think about what he said before—I love you—and it feels like someone has placed a weight on my chest. I sigh again.
“What about you?” I ask, trying to keep my voice casual. “Are you okay?”
This time, the silence feels like it lasts forever. I can hear him breathing, the sound just a faint crackle over the line. I think he’s trying to decide whether to lie, and if he tells the truth, what part of the truth he wants to tell me.
“I’m fine,” he says after a moment. “My mom let me come home. Said she’s sorry. I think she meant it? I don’t really know.”
“And you parents are still . . .”
“Yes,” he says. “Friday. I don’t need to be there. It’s been building for a while . . . now they’re just making it official. It’s just . . .”
“You don’t need to work on the carnival anymore if you don’t want to,” I say.
“No, I want to,” he says quickly.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he says.
“You know what?” I say. “We say ‘okay’ way too much.”
“Okay,” he says. I start to talk but I can hear him laughing, a real laugh. “I mean, it’s a good word. Very, um, I don’t know, flirty.”
I can feel my face heating up and I’m glad that he can’t see me. I want to say okay again but I picture him and see his countdown. And then I picture one of us at the other’s funeral which helps me talk properly. “Bye,” I say instead, and he hangs up.
I drop my phone onto the cushion and walk over to the window. I can see my reflection in it. Whenever I think of someone, I always think of their countdown too, the same way that I think of the fact that they have two legs. I just wish I could see my own countdown.
I rest my forehead against the window. There has to be someone else who can see the countdowns. Being the only one who can see them would be sad and lonely and generally just not fun. This is how the rest of my life is right now, but I can’t be one-of-a-kind. I’ve never been special—my grades are fine, but I’m no honor roll kid, and I haven’t invented anything or done any kind of community service, never won any awards except one for piano when I was in elementary school, good at running but not great. Just good enough. My mom used to call me Miss A- when I was younger (and still does sometimes) because I’m so used to being the bottom ten percent—of the top ten percent (of course—any less would disgrace my family name).
I think of Arcadia, who has three months, and my chest squeezes painfully for a second before I remind myself that I’ve done everything I can for her already, which is telling her. Even though she acts like she hates me, maybe she’s secretly grateful.
I tell myself not to feel bad for her. Not to treat her like she’s already dead. When she is, I know I won’t be allowed to cry because I didn’t know her. The only people who will be able to feel sad are those who were her friends, those who probably hate me even more than she does.
No. I won’t be sad for Arcadia. Once a person is dead you can’t bring them back and there’s no point feeling anything about them because they won’t know. But I will be sad for myself. I will be sad because I will be blamed for her death just like I was blamed for Daniel Byun’s death and in the end they will both be dead.
I can’t even believe in heaven now. I was never raised to believe in any god but for a while I was convinced there was some kind of higher power who protected us and gave us miracles sometimes but now I’m sure there isn’t. If there was a god—and a heaven for that matter—wouldn’t the people who died sometimes give us some sort of sign that they were still with us? If I went to heaven I’d definitely have time to send something back down there.
“Aza?” Mom calls from downstairs.
I sigh and open the bedroom door. “Yeah?” I call down.
Her voice changes immediately. “Don’t yell at me from up there when I’m talking to you!”
I come downstairs.
“I’m going to give GG a call,” she says. “I want you to talk to her.”
“Oh,” I say.
There’s a reason that I don’t want to talk to GG, especially with my mom around. My only surviving grandmother thinks every day is Tuesday. I can barely remember what she looks like by now. When Mom calls her, I mysteriously vanish until several hours later, which is usually time for dinner. GG has been in a nursing home since over a decade before I was born, and I’ve only met her in person once. I remember her as tiny and wearing huge white mittens which she refused to take off.
My other three grandparents died before I was born. I never got to meet them. If they were like GG, then part of me is glad.
“I really would love to, but I have a lot of homework,” I reply. It’s a poor excuse, but it’s mostly true—I do have some stuff to get through for physics and philosophy, my two most hated subjects. No one needs to use them. They’re just there for decoration on my college applications.
Mom raises her eyebrows. “Really? Was that what you were doing while upstairs this entire afternoon?”
“No,” I say in a small voice because I haven’t even touched it yet.
“Exactly,” she says. “What were you doing instead of your homework?”
“Talking,” I say in an even smaller voice.
“Talking to Kas?” she asks, her eyebrows now disappearing into her bangs. “I thought his parents—”
“—are fine with it,” I interrupt. Which is kind of a lie.
“But did you check if your father and I are fine with it?” When I don’t answer, she just sighs and turns away. “We can talk about this later. Let’s call GG.”
Turns out that GG also has something to say about my (partially existent) romance life. She’s yelling into the phone at what I estimate is one hundred and thirty decibels, equivalent to a jet engine. Mom has turned the volume down almost all the way and it’s still too loud.
“Who is he? Who is the boy you’re always talking about?” GG shouts at me through the phone.
“Um, you mean Kas?” I ask, blushing. Mom looks like she’s biting back a smile. I edge further away from the phone, which looks like it’s about to explode.
“Which one now? Oh yes! That one! Kas! I remember him! The one with hair! Why haven’t you brought him to meet me yet?”
“It’s a bit complicated,” I reply because I can’t think of anything better to say.
“Complicated?” she shouts. “Why, when I was your age . . .”
Eventually, it’s over. I curl up on the couch and watch TV for a bit, trying to take my mind off of everything. I can hear Mom making dinner for us, to be served when Dad gets back from work.
I come into the kitchen to help her and find her chopping onions. “You know,” she says without preamble, “you should bring your friend over to meet GG. It could be good for both you and her.”
“Mom,” I say helplessly.
“I’ll tell the nursing home you two are coming over this Friday.” She turns to me. “It’ll be good for you. I promise.”
“But why do I have to bring Kas?” I ask. “I thought you didn’t like him.”
Mom sighs. “It might be good for him, too. And I know GG can sometimes be a bit much to handle alone.”
“Why don’t you just come?” I ask. The last thing I want to say is that bringing Kas to meet a crazy relative is not what I want to do—not when he said he loved me, not when we’re close to a first date or first kiss—but this is also the first thing that keeps coming to my lips.
“I have work,” she replies shortly.
Before I can think of any other compelling arguments, Mom has thrown the onions into the pot and called the nursing home. Then she calls Kas’s mom. She puts the call on speaker so that she can use her hands to chop tomatoes and add spices. They chat for a while. After the usual pleasantries are over, Mrs. Kozlowska agrees to send Kas over to my house. It sounds like our parents have worked things out together, although I don’t ask how or why—adults are weird.
I wait for Kas’s mom to say that he doesn’t actually want to come. Instead, she insists that he’ll be delighted. I’ve never seen him delighted about anything.
This will not be good.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mom has not considered several things when signing Kas and I up to spend Friday with my grandmother, including:
1) We have school in the morning
2) We have a carnival to set up for in the afternoon
3) We have to run the carnival in the evening
Obviously, we have to skip one of those, so we talk for a bit and decide to skip school, which is arguably the least important. So on Friday morning at eleven, I stand outside the nursing home, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, wishing I could be swallowed up by the concrete beneath me. The street is quiet; a woman pushing a stroller comes by on the sidewalk, cars rush past, but there is no other sign of life; no voices, no birds, no distant city sounds. The nursing home is a stiff white building which rises six unblinking stories into the sky.
At eleven-fifteen, Kas shows up. He looks exhausted. I realize he must have walked all the way here since his parents are going to make their divorce official today. Now I understand why his mom was fine with leaving him with me—she didn’t want him to come with them, and she didn’t want him to spend the day at home by himself either. She worries about him—because he was hit by a car the last afternoon she left him completely alone.
We don’t say anything to each other. Instead, we go inside. The nurse at the front desk is wearing a green uniform and her nametag says “Janet”. She has short grey hair and twelve years left. I give her my last name and she nods, but a frown deepens on her face as she looks us over.
“You can’t bring your crutches,” she tells Kas, gesturing to them.
“What do you mean?”
“They make too much noise. You’re going to the second floor, and the sound will disturb the patients on the first floor. We’ll get you a wheelchair.”
Color rises in his face. “I am not using a wheelchair.”
“Fine,” she says. “You don’t need to. But you can’t bring your crutches. You can leave them here—we’ll have someone take care of them until your visit is over.” She glances at her monitor. “Room seven, second floor,” she tells me, and only me, now ignoring Kas completely as a nearby orderly rushes over and takes his crutches from him. “Have a great day.” She turns back to her monitor.
“Here, lean on me,” I say, offering him my arm.
“I don’t need that,” he replies with an edge to his voice, but after two steps (holding onto the front desk—Janet doesn’t notice) he stumbles.
I catch him before he falls. “Don’t be an idiot. Let me help you.”
After a moment of hesitation, he sighs and lets me hold onto him. “I hate this,” he mutters, taking a tiny, hesitant step forward. I tighten my grip, trying to keep him steady.
“I know,” I say. “You’ll get better, you know that? You won’t have to walk with crutches or anything.”
“Yeah, right,” he says.
“I’m serious,” I reply. “See? You can already walk without using them.”
“Kind of.” He looks behind us. “We moved . . . two feet. Congrats.”
“Positive attitude, remember?”
He snickers. “You sound like Hedge.”
“Exactly. This is team building right here. We’re learning cooperative skills.”
As we approach the elevator, Kas pulls me to the left. “Stairs,” he says, pointing up the flight of steps. It’s not long—I can see the second floor from here—but I shake my head. “Come on,” he insists. “I’m not using the elevator like some kind of invalid.”
I don’t think this is a good idea at all, but I get onto the first step. Kas grabs the railing and together we pull him up the first step. Then the second step. Then a third. He stops for a second and wipes the sweat from his face. Fourth step. Fifth. I never imagined that getting up a flight of thirty steps would be so difficult.
I pull him up the sixth step. “We should have taken the elevator.”
“No, I’m—” He stops, trying to get his breath back. “I’m fine,” he finishes.
I roll my eyes as we climb the seventh and eighth steps together. At the ninth step, he falters. I pause with him. He grips the railing so tightly that his knuckles are white.
“How many more?” he asks.
I count them. “Twenty-one.”
His face pales at the thought. I can see that this is harder for him than he wants to let on. His breathing has become shallow already, and we aren’t even a third of the way through.
“Let’s just go back down,” I offer gently.
He shakes his head firmly. “These stupid stairs are not gonna defeat me.”
“Kas, taking the elevator isn’t defeat. It’s just not being able to do something. Yet.”
He grins, pulling himself up the tenth step. “You’ve become a walking, talking motivational poster.”
“Very high praise,” I say. He takes another painstakingly slow step, then another, but nearly falls backwards. I grab his arms, gritting my teeth as I pull him up. This is way harder than it should be. It would have been a much better idea just to take the elevator. I keep reminding myself of this fact, but it’s not helping.
At step twenty, we sit down together on the staircase for a moment.
“Stupid nurses,” Kas says after a second. “I always hated my crutches, but now I realize that they are my Entire. Freaking. Life.”
“So you like them now?” I tease.
“No. I hate them even more.”
“You prefer struggling like this every day?” I ask, nudging him lightly.
He swats my arm.
“When we first met each other, you didn’t have this much attitude,” I say. “You were always so . . . quiet and respectful. The only thing that was not to love about you was the yellow jacket you always wore.”
He frowns. “I don’t remember that.”
“It was a really weird color. Almost like highlighter yellow. It annoyed me so much for some reason. You told me once it made you a golden boy.”
“A what?”
“I’m not kidding.” I suppress a giggle behind my hand. “Kacper, the golden boy in his yellow jacket.”
He looks mortified. “You know what—I’m glad I don’t remember that,” he says. “I must have been stupider than I realize back then.”
I laugh. He pushes me lightly. I push him back and glance behind us at the ten remaining steps. Ten very long steps. Ten steps of eternity. Ten steps before we exit hell and go into second hell which I guess will be a long hall to room seven. “Are you sure you want to keep going?”
“Bez pracy nie ma kolaczy,” he says.
“What?”
“Without work, there is no cake,” he translates.
I don’t question it, helping him up. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. He stops, his breath coming in short, labored gasps. Twenty-four. My arms are tired, but I don’t give up. Twenty-five. He pulls his hand out of mine.
“Let me do the last five by myself,” he says.
“No,” I counter with equal force, grabbing his hand again. By now I expect that you’re thinking ooh Kas and Aza are holding hands now, well yeah, it’s not like that. The first time I held his hand was about a month and a half after our disastrous first meeting. And it didn’t even feel weird. It only felt safe.
He manages another two steps before stopping again. “I can’t believe this.” He stares at the next step like it’s personally offended him. “I can’t believe you’re dragging me—literally—up a flight of stairs.”
“I’m honored,” I say. “There’s no one else I would rather be dragging up the stairs. No one else would still be complaining about their wounded pride at this point. Also, everyone else would have probably quit. Come on.” Step twenty-eight, twenty-nine. “Last one,” I say.
He nods. His face is ashen, all the color gone from his normally healthily flushed cheeks and his lips tinged with blue. He looks like he might pass out. Before I can react, he slips, striking the steps painfully. I gasp. He grabs onto the top step and crawls up it on his hands and knees. “I’m fine, really,” he says, his voice faint. His body trembles as he struggles to stand up again. “See? I did it.”
“Okay,” I say. “Lean against me.”
“Aza,” he says.
“Kas,” I say.
He eventually does. We go through the door that leads to the second floor, opening to a wide white hall. Janet is waiting there with a wheelchair.
“I thought you might need this,” she says. I sigh gratefully. “Did you really take the stairs?” she asks Kas.
He blinks, looking disoriented. His eyes eventually focus on her. “I can taste victory.”
“Sit down,” she says, gesturing to the wheelchair. “I’ll take you to room seven. Your grandma doesn’t have to see you using it, don’t worry.”
Kas opens his mouth to explain but stops. “Okay.”
I walk a short distance behind them. The hall is empty. We reach room seven, and Janet leaves us standing there. I knock on the door, which is also white and bears a gold plaque which reads ROOM 7: DEVEREAUX, my mother’s last name at birth.
“Come in,” GG yells from the other side of the door.
I glance at Kas, who looks much calmer than I do. I push open the door very slowly and peek inside. I can see part of her body, obscured by a fuzzy pink shawl and seated in what looks like an extremely fluffy armchair on the far side of the room.
“Don’t just stand there,” she yells at me.
“This will be great,” I whisper to Kas out of the corner of my mouth as we step inside together. He closes the door behind us with his free hand.
It is GG—as tiny as I can remember, but without the mittens. The window which she is seated by is overlooking the city—rather, looking directly into the taller buildings, with a sliver of blue sky visible between each row. She turns to me. Her face is weatherbeaten, tanned and puckered up at the lips like a lemon.
“Hello,” I say. “It’s nice to see you.”
She frowns at me. “Do we . . . oh, it’s you, Aza! You’ve filled out quite a bit, haven’t you?”
Kas makes a sound that I really hope is not a laugh because the situation is less than funny.
“Um, maybe,” I say, unconsciously crossing my arms over my chest. “This is Kas. My friend.” I motion to him with my elbow.
“Ah, yes. The one with hair.” She nods. “You seem much handsomer than the last boy Aza brought to meet me.”
I frantically try to convey to him, mostly through made-up signs, that I’ve never done such a thing before, but he’s not paying attention to me.
“Lovely to meet you,” he says, shaking his head the tiniest bit at me. It’s clear (to me) that this is a gesture to make us walk forward. “May I sit?” he asks, gesturing to the stool across from her chair.
“Be my guest,” she replies. “Hmm,” she says as I practically push him onto it and retreat several steps. “Your legs are . . .?”
I want to ask how she can tell, but Kas only smiles. His voice is much softer than before. “Yes ma’am.”
“Hmm,” she says again. “Shot? Vietnam?”
“Um . . . car accident. Drunk driver hit me.”
“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”
“No, we haven’t,” he replies. He leans forward slightly, looking straight at her. I’ve never met her eyes before in my life; she intimidates me, but obviously not him.
“I distinctly remember your face,” she replies. She looks like she’s enjoying this conversation. “I’m sure we knew each other before the war. Have you met my husband yet?”
Her husband has been dead for thirty years. I decide not to mention this.
“Not yet,” Kas replies.
“He came to visit this morning.”
“Oh,” he says. “Where did you meet each other?”
“Finally, someone with a fascination in my life!” Her eyes brighten. The thousand-year-old blank stare within them flickers and then dies as her voices on an almost conspiratorial tone. “We met when I was a girl in Paris, working at a factory. I had this job sewing mittens. Very fine work. I was a turner. The mittens would come inside out from the sewing, and I would turn them the right way around.”
“Very interesting.”
“I could go on and on forever,” she says, waving her hand dismissively. (She probably could.) “Tell me a bit about yourself. When are you and Aza getting married?”
He doesn’t flinch. “Actually, I’m only sixteen. I’m only two months older than Aza is.”
“Sixteen?” She raises her eyeglasses. “I could have sworn you were thirty. You look the same age as my husband. Hmm.” She turns to me. “Your mother tells me you two are planning some kind of . . . carnival together. Tell me, will it be worth watching? Will there be acrobats, lions, the great magicians themselves?”
I lick my lips, unsure of how to explain this to her. “It’s a carnival where you run to win prizes,” I say.
“And you run too?” she demands, as if she’s asking me if I eat lice for breakfast.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Don’t you ‘yeah’ me, girl,” she snaps. “The disrespect of young children these days! Don’t you agree?” she asks Kas, who bites his lip to keep from laughing.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I think we should go now,” I say. “We have to get everything ready for the carnival. It’s been nice to see you again, GG.”
She barely nods at me but smiles when Kas says goodbye to her. I pull him outside before she can start talking again.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“That was horrible,” I say, closing the door behind us and fumbling for some kind of lock to make sure she doesn’t come to yell shame on my family or something. “She actually seemed to like you.”
He shrugs. “My grandma lived with us while I was little. She’s a bit like GG. I’m used to it now. She moved away from America, though, after I started going to elementary school, since there was no one to watch her at home, and because she was kind of like my babysitter. We just didn’t need each other anymore.”
I’m relieved to see him talking, because it’s bringing the color back to his face, and it distracts him as I steer us toward the elevators. He tells me about his other grandparents—his other grandfather, who was a famous actor, and his other set of grandparents, who met when they were babies as refugees of the war. Both couples had married young but had children later in life.
The elevator dings and we awkwardly step in. I press the first-floor button, sticky with overuse. We press ourselves against each side of the tiny box. I feel like a prisoner being taken underground. The air is thick and sweaty, difficult to breathe. There’s a jolt as the elevator finally stops. I half expect the first floor to not be waiting for us as the doors slide open, but it is. Janet is at her front desk again. She looks like a leaf in her uniform.
“Did you have a pleasant visit?” she asks as she hands Kas his crutches from behind the counter.
“That’s one way to describe it,” he says.
Once we’re outside, he turns to me. “Can we call someone to take us to school?” he asks. “I really don’t want to walk there.”
“Of course,” I say. “But my mom’s at work right now, and my dad’s in Ohio or something on a business trip.”
“Don’t you have some kind of long-lost cousin who can pick us up?” he asks.
“I don’t have any cousins,” I say.
“That’s . . . unfortunate. I have sixteen full cousins, three half-cousins, and more second cousins than I can count.” He opens his phone, scrolling through his contacts.
“Right,” I say, trying to think of someone to call. I don’t have any aunts or uncles in the state. I debate calling my mom, but she’ll be upset that I bothered her at work—if she even has the time to answer the phone. “Wait. You can call Jack. You two are buddies, right?”
“Kind of,” he says. “But, like, football buddies. It’d be weird to call him. And, like, some things happened. Other stuff. And his brother. Dax.”
I nod. Dax is in jail. I don’t actually know why, though. But I wonder what he means by other stuff. Were he and Jack fighting? From what I know, Jack considers him almost like a brother—they’re more than football buddies, they’re good friends.
“Do you prefer walking?” I ask.
He sighs. “That’s like asking me if I prefer death by humiliation or death by exhaustion.”
“We could take the bus,” I say. “I don’t have cash, but we could make the driver take pity on us.”
He gives me a look. “Have you ever tried balancing on crutches, surrounded by people you don’t know, while some guy rips around corners at ninety miles per hour? It’s not fun.”
“Fine, we don’t have to do that,” I say. “We can either walk, or we can take the bus, or we can think of someone to call.”
He looks like I’ve just given him a death sentence. “Okay. I’ll call Lex.” He dials the number. “This will be really awkward. We haven’t talked all week.”
I know better than to ask him for details. I start to walk away to give him space to talk, but he motions for me to stay next to him. They have a short conversation in their own language. Lex agrees to pick us up. I breathe a sigh of relief.
About fifteen minutes later, a black SUV pulls up by the nursing home. I shade my eyes against the sun. The light is bright, but weak, offering no warmth.
Lex swings his legs out of the car to open the back door for us. He’s wearing sunglasses and cargo jeans. “What up?” he asks as I high-five him.
“Hi,” I say.
We get into the car. The cold air slaps my face, and I wrap my arms around myself. The doors slam closed and Lex steps on the accelerator, throwing us backwards in our seats. I’d forgotten how fast he drives.
We talk about the carnival for a while. We don’t have much time to set up and get our sign-ups, since it starts at five. Participation isn’t mandatory, but the buses will be leaving at seven, which means most of the school will have to stay, regardless of whether they want to or not. I know most of the football team and baseball team will run to show off for the girls on the cheerleading team. But beyond that, there’s almost no one who will sign up, and we need fifty people to do this.
“Tell me something embarrassing about Kas,” I say, leaning forward in my seat.
Kas covers his face with his hand. “Kill me now.”
Lex laughs, turning a corner without slowing down. “Okay. There was this one time that he accidentally ran into a glass wall at our aunt’s house. At full speed. Our aunt had to replace the entire wall because there was a huge crack in it.”
“Were you okay?” I ask, turning to Kas, whose cheeks are flushed purple.
“Not really,” Lex answers for him. “Whenever he says something ridiculous, I just remind myself that it’s not him, it’s the wall he ran into. He had a concussion and had to stay at the hospital for six hours. There was this other time when he got his head stuck in a fence.”
“Wait, how?”
“He was five. We were at a zoo, and he wanted to see the penguins up close.” He shakes his head. “Last time we ever went to a zoo. They had to bring firefighters to cut the fence so he could get out. He was fine, just emotionally scarred.”
“For life,” Kas adds, trying hard not to smile.
Lex slams the accelerator, and we speed across a street just before the light turns red. I brace myself against the seat. “When your legs get better and you get your license, please promise me you won’t drive this fast,” I tell Kas, feeling like my eyeballs are going to come out.
He nods, his lips tight, looking sick.
Finally, the ride is over. I scramble out of the car and help Kas out too. Lex speeds off. I sigh, grateful to have my feet on the ground again. The school is quiet still—everyone else is in class. But we have a carnival to prepare for, so we head to the football field. It looks so much bigger when it’s completely empty. Endless meters of red track stretch in an oval.
I was hoping Hedge would be here to help me set up, but of course she isn’t.
“I’ll go get the prizes,” Kas says. The prizes have been in the basement, still in the boxes they were shipped in, and I haven’t even seen them. I notice that he looks paler than usual, exhaustion making deep lines around his eyes, but he’s trying not to show it.
“Okay, I’ll just set up here,” I say.
I run to the gym and find some cones, which I place around the track. Kas promised refreshments, but I don’t see that happening, so I go to the cafeteria and convince the lunch ladies to give me seventy bottles of water.
“What do you mean, seventy bottles of water?” they ask.
I show her a note which says, By order of the school nurse, at least seventy (70) bottles of water will be present at the start of the athletics carnival to mitigate the risk of physical injury to competitors. No, the school nurse never wrote anything like that, but it seems like something she’d do.
The lunch ladies look at it, then look at my innocent expression, and within five minutes I stagger back outside carrying three twenty-four packs of bottled water.
By this time, Kas is back with a group of boys. Two are setting up several fold-out tables in the middle of the football field. Others are carrying the boxes from the basement. Kas is standing off to the side. He looks tired, maybe even more than before, and keeps swiping at his forehead, at the sweat there.
I walk over to inspect the prizes, tearing open one of the boxes. It’s hard work—I should have taken off the tape first. I grit my teeth and rip at the cardboard with both hands.
One of the boys—I don’t know his name—holds up one of the plushies he’s taken out of another box. I’m left without words. I was expecting the plushies to be in the shape of bunnies and unicorns, but this one is in the shape of . . . poop.
“Kas?” I say, my voice trembling, hesitant. I pull out one of the posters and immediately put it back—I will need to bleach my eyes after seeing that. “Kas,” I say, louder. “What in the world?”
Everyone is staring at him—and he doesn’t even look serious, he’s acting like this is a joke, trying not to laugh. He never mentioned what kind of posters and plushies he’d use the school’s money on, which I realize now was intentional, because Hedge would never have allowed this.
Jack is here too. He pulls out one of the posters and winces, letting it roll itself back up as he drops it back into the box. “What the hell?”
“Kas!” I snap. “What. Is. This?”
“No comment,” he says.
“Yes comment! Oh my god. I can’t run the carnival with these as prizes.” I bury my face in my hands. “Okay. Guys, leave the stuff in the boxes. And put the boxes on the table. People can just stick their hands in them and pick the first thing they find. Or we can pick for them. So long as no one sees. Including Hedge. Especially Hedge.” I’m debating whether crying is appropriate at this point. I pull out another plushie from a different box. It’s not in the shape of poop—it’s worse. Much worse. I look around for some strong acid to wash my hand in.
We put the boxes on the fold-out tables and walk away like we can truly leave this behind. I grab Kas and pull him aside, my fingers clutching his shirt so hard that my nails dig into his arms.
“Kas, what were you thinking?” I hiss. “We’re going to get expelled for this!”
He shrugs. “My idea. Not yours.”
“But you said the proposal was a team effort!” I grit out. “What if someone takes pictures of this? What if my mom finds out? You’re—you’re—I don’t know what you are!” I release him suddenly and stalk off.
My face burns. I look at the boys, who are at the track where I placed most of the cones. Kas joins them. They talk and laugh. I glare at them. They all look the same, with their messy, curly hair and long lashes that somehow look so hot. The only thing that’s really different about them is their countdowns. One boy has seven years left. Most of the others have over fifty.
I grab the sign-up sheet which I left on one of the tables and walk over to them. “Do you want to sign up?” I demand the group at large.
Hesitation, shuffling of the feet. Signs that a person doesn’t want to do something but doesn’t want to disappoint a pretty girl (or one who looks like she might kill the next person she sees).
“Come on,” I say. “You don’t have to take the prizes if you win, you know. When you win, I mean. Like, y’all are so buff. Very. Very ripped. Trust.”
After a struggle lasting an entire four minutes, I get them to sign up, and they drift off in separate directions. I refuse to look at Kas, instead heading towards the school building. Classes will be out in five minutes, and I can catch people in the halls during break.
I get five more sign-ups before classes start again. A miserable number 11 stares at me from my paper. The carnival will start in less than two hours. I need more people to sign up. Maybe I can talk to one of the coaches.
I find Coach Tucker, from the football team, and nervously approach him. He’s almost six-four, huge and muscular, and people say he’s tough on his players. There’s a story that he once made a boy run a hundred laps around the track for talking back.
“Excuse me?” I say in a small voice.
He turns around. “Oh! I don’t coach a women’s football team anymore, sorry.”
“I’m just wondering if you could get your players to sign up for the athletics carnival this evening,” I say in an even smaller voice.
“Does it involve running?” he asks. His voice is much softer than I would have expected after hearing him shout on the field so much while I’m in track practice.
“Yes, it’s all running,” I say. “Everywhere from four hundred meters to four kilometers.”
“Sign the entire team up,” he says. “I’ll tell them practice is cancelled for today.”
I smile. “Thanks. How many people?”
“Fifteen.”
Feeling much better now that a twenty-six is on my paper, I decide that I should probably talk to Kas again. I shouldn’t have spoken to him so rudely, even if I still can barely believe the prizes he bought. I want to make it up to him before the inevitable Descent of the Hedge.
I jog back out to the track, holding my paper against the clipboard as the wind threatens to pull it from my hands. He isn’t there.
“Kas?” I call out.
I realize he collapsed, then I see him, then see a person lying on the ground, then realize he’s lying on the ground. I see the blue sky and the green grass and the red track and I see myself running towards the shape that is him faster than I ever have run in my life.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I drop to my knees beside him. One of his hands still holds his crutch, but the other one is lying a short distance away, like he fell and didn’t try to get up. I grab his other hand. His face is white, his forehead covered with sweat. He looks even worse than he did at the stairs. The stairs. I shouldn’t have let him go up them. It was too much for him—I should have forced us to turn around. It’s afternoon by now; we’ve been busy all day, first visiting GG, then setting up for the carnival which has taken us nearly two hours already. Knowing him, he probably forgot to eat anything this morning. I put my hand on his chest and feel the faint rise and fall of his breath, but it’s barely there.
Panic sets in. My brain attempts to push down the irrational fear that I might lose him because, like always, I can see his countdown, and I know he’ll be okay. But the panic still comes, overwhelming me, spreading as a cold feeling from my hands to my chest.
“Kas, wake up,” I say, shaking his shoulder. He doesn’t respond.
I let go of his hand to get one of the bottles of water. My nails scrape aimlessly against the plastic wrap covering the twenty-four pack of bottles before I tear it open with both hands and wiggle a bottle out.
He’s still lying exactly as I left him. I unscrew the bottle cap with shaking hands and pour some into his mouth. He coughs weakly but doesn’t wake up.
“Kacper,” I say, starting to cry now, hot tears of panic sliding down my cheeks. “You have to wake up.”
Kas doesn’t move. His breathing is shallow. My heart pounds against my ribs as I shake him again, more urgently this time. “Kas! Come on, open your eyes.” The coldness has become numbness now, creeping towards my lungs, my heart, threatening to suffocate me.
This time, his hand twitches, just barely. Relief surges through me. “There you are,” I whisper.
He makes a small sound, his eyelids fluttering open. I wipe my face quickly, not wanting him to see me crying. He blinks, dazed.
“Drink some water,” I say. He takes a tiny sip as I hold the bottle to his lips again, then turns away. I screw the cap back on, my hands still trembling. “You scared me so much,” I whisper. “Do you remember anything?”
He shakes his head. His lips part like he wants to say something but doesn’t have the energy. He tries to sit up, but I push him back down gently.
“Don’t move yet,” I say. I check him for visible injury, but there’s none. I hope he didn’t hit his head when he fell.
Guilt crashes over me like a wave. I should have noticed that he wasn’t okay earlier—he looked exhausted, sick, and this is my fault. I can’t think of an adequate apology right now, so I stay quiet. Instead, we look at each other without speaking. My eyes sting with tears again.
The first thing he says is, “I’m starving.”
“Did you eat today?” I choke.
He frowns. “I forgot.”
“That’s a no, then.” Anger replaces the fear I felt earlier. “What were you thinking? You should have at least eaten something for breakfast! Now look what happened!”
“You sound like my mom.” He pushes himself up onto his elbow and immediately winces. “This is so embarrassing.”
“Of course I’m going to sound like my mom because I actually care about you, if you haven’t noticed!”
“Okay, don’t yell,” he says. “I’m fine. Seriously.”
“No, you are not fine.”
“Just don’t freak out,” he says. “It’s making my head hurt.”
“Don’t freak out?” I repeat incredulously. “What else am I supposed to do when I find my boyfriend unconscious?”
He smirks. “Boyfriend?”
“Kas,” I say. “You know I didn’t—”
His smile widens. “You’ve never called me that before.”
“Shut up,” I whisper, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “Do you know what I thought? I thought you were dead.”
“I feel like it,” he murmurs, squinting up at the sky. “Actually, I kind of wish I was dead, since I know you’re going to yell at me now.”
“Why would I yell at you?”
“About the prizes,” he says. “It was worse than what you saw, trust me. You barely even scratched the surface.” He closes his eyes, still lying there on the track. “I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I didn’t really write that proposal,” he admits. “I got one of my more . . . eccentric acquaintances to do it for me. And the prizes. And everything. I swear, I didn’t know they would order those prizes, but there was a no-return policy or whatever, and anyway, I was out of ideas.”
My eyebrows go up. “Oh? Who might this acquaintance of yours be?”
“Rosie Chen.”
I attempt to close my mouth, which is hanging open in shock, and find that my facial muscles are frozen solid. I try to say something, but all that comes out is a strangled sound reminiscent of a dying bird.
“I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says, looking up at me. He doesn’t look like he’s joking. He’s dead serious. And not smiling.
“Acquaintance,” I say.
“Well, maybe a bit more than that. We were dating earlier this year. My mom knows her dad from work, and we had this family dinner thing, and I asked Rosie out at the end of it, and she said yes. Anyway, we only went on a couple of days before it ended. We didn’t . . . go home with each other or anything like that.”
I try to commit his face to memory before I mutilate it with something heavy. The sharp lines his cheeks make, the shadows around his lips and eyes, the way a curl of hair falls perfectly over his forehead, the whiteness of his teeth, the angle his nose makes relative to his jaw. His face is still pale and sweaty. His eyes look so tired.
I hear myself say, “Did you kiss?”
He nods.
“Was it nice?” I ask. My voice sounds like it did when I was in kindergarten.
“I don’t know,” he says, shifting his gaze away from me. “I don’t really remember what it felt like. We don’t talk anymore. She just felt bad because my parents are getting divorced and she offered to help with the carnival and I told her she could. I didn’t expect her to do . . . this. Really.”
My mouth feels dry. “So, you told her your parents were getting divorced before you told me?”
“Not . . . exactly. The thing is . . . my mom and her dad . . . it’s like . . . well, it’s kind of like . . . she knew him . . . like more than a friend . . . and yeah. That’s why my dad wants a divorce,” he finishes. “He doesn’t want somebody else’s kid.”
“I thought you—”
“No, no, I am,” he clarifies quickly. “And Lex is too.”
“Your mom is . . .”
“Yeah.” His face twists in the wrong way for a moment, before he takes a deep breath, relaxing slightly. “Three more months, and I’ll have a little brother.”
“She couldn’t, you know, have an abortion?” I ask, mouthing the last word.
“We don’t believe in that,” he says. “It’s too late now—the state won’t let her get one this far in.” He sits up slowly. “I hoped for a while that she’d have a miscarriage,” he whispers. “That’s why she told me to leave that one night—after I said I hoped the baby wouldn’t survive. I don’t wish that anymore. Still. Can you get me my crutch?” I hand it to him and help him to his feet. “I’m really sorry,” he says. “I didn’t want you to find out like this. I just didn’t know how to tell you.”
“You didn’t have to,” I reply softly. I will not let him see how much this hurts. “You’re allowed to date anyone you want. Including Rosie. I can’t lie to you and pretend that I don’t care. But I won’t be mad at you.”
“I know,” he says. “That was a long time ago, though. I meant what I said about being in love with you.”
“It’s fine if you don’t,” I say, swallowing back a sob, emotions taking over. “Really. I’m not . . . I’m not allowed to go out with you or anything. My parents wouldn’t let me. Maybe it would be better if you found someone who’s allowed to have feelings for you. And I could . . . I don’t know. If you want to go out with Rosie, or anyone else, I’m fine with that. We can still be friends. Promise.”
“Okay,” he says.
I nod and force myself to look away from him. “Let’s go somewhere where there’s shade. I’ll get you something to eat. You’ll faint again if you don’t bring your blood sugar back up.” I turn away so that he can’t see me crying. “Stay here,” is all I can say, walking away, covering my mouth with my hand to stop myself from making any sound.
He’s not allowed to see me cry. In all the time we’ve known each other he’s never seen me cry and I have to keep it that way. I think about Jem from To Kill a Mockingbird, which is my favorite book of all time, and how he risked his life because his dad had never whipped him and he wanted to keep it that way. I can hear Kas saying my name and I can hear his crutches click-clicking against the ground as he walks after me. I start running. Everything is just too much.
“Aza, wait,” he says. “Wait.”
I keep running. I don’t know where to go at this point. Anywhere is better than here. I run into the school building, elbowing people aside, all the way to the girl’s bathroom, where I lock the door and collapse against one of the sinks, crying loudly. Every bit of sadness that I’ve been holding inside since Daniel died comes rushing out all at once. I press a napkin against my face, but it’s quickly soaked with my tears. How could Kas have kept this from me? More importantly, how could he hid this from me? Shouldn’t I have known if my best friend was dating my arch-nemesis? The whole time things were normal between us when in reality they were anything but?
I know I shouldn’t have left him out there when he just passed out—but I couldn’t let him see how weak I am.
When I feel arms around my shoulders, I don’t pull away from them. I look at the mirror—my face is blotchy from crying, and standing behind me is Arcadia. I stop crying immediately. I should have checked that the bathroom was empty before locking myself in.
“Shhh, hey, it’s okay,” Arcadia says, pulling me into a hug.
I try to pull away but she holds me tight. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you. I’m really sorry. I’m telling you the truth, I swear. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I don’t want you to be like Daniel when you had to find out at the very end.”
“It’s fine,” she says. “I swear, it’s fine. I wanted to know. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing stupid things and then regret it.” I press my face into her shoulder; she holds me tighter, her arms impossibly gentle. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have called you crazy. What’s wrong, though? Boy trouble?”
“Kind of,” I say.
“Is it about Kas?” she asks as she releases me.
“Yeah. Apparently, he was dating Rosie Chen.”
Arcadia snorts. “I never liked that girl. She believes you, by the way. Most of us do. We just don’t want to admit it. She’s pretending she doesn’t to believe you just cause she wants to make your life even more miserable. She hates that Kas chose you.”
“He chose me?”
“Of course he did. Why do you think they broke up? Because he didn’t like her hairstyle?”
“No, I thought they broke up because of something that was going on between their parents.”
“The way that Rosie put it to me, he ditched her because he wanted you,” she says. “Why are you so surprised? You know he loves you, right? He does. Really. Some kids were talking trash about you a few weeks ago, and he fought them to defend you. Sent one of them to the hospital for a dislocated shoulder. He’ll really do anything for you.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Now you do,” she says. “The things most girls here would do with that boy. Rosie likes to pretend he isn’t hot, but he literally sets the room on fire when he walks in. And he’s so kind. You know that about him, don’t you? He’s always helping me whenever he can. Even before he knew I was sick, he’d always carry extra things in his bag for me between classes.”
“Then why does he like me? I’m not kind like he is.”
“You’re seriously the kindest girl I know,” she says. “It’s just that people aren’t nice back, so you think you’re doing something wrong.”
My chest warms, but I look at my reflection and sigh. “Maybe, but I’m not pretty.”
Arcadia giggles. “No, pretty definitely isn’t a word I’d use to describe you. Seriously.”
My face continues to stare back at me. “I know,” I say.
Arcadia is still giggling. “Definitely not pretty,” she says.
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I. You aren’t pretty. Girl, you’re beautiful. I’m not even saying this to be nice to you. Don’t you see how boys look at you? You should be a model, no kidding. You have no idea how many kids are dying to get you on a date.”
“Then why does no one ask me out?”
She laughs. “You’re way above their league, that’s why. You’re smart, you’re pretty, your parents are successful and have money—they know they don’t stand a chance. You’re not easy, that’s why. Girls who get asked out are easy. You just gotta act the part now. I swear, I’m being completely honest with you. I wouldn’t tell this to anybody else.” She examines our reflection. “Doesn’t your mom ever tell you how beautiful you are?” she asks. “Or do you have a sister?”
“No, I don’t. And my mom doesn’t really tell me things like that.”
“Ask her when she gets home, if you don’t believe me,” she says.
“Okay,” I say.
“So I hear you’re planning the carnival this evening,” she says. “I’ll sign up.”
“Oh, thanks,” I say. “You don’t have to—”
“I really want to,” she says. “While I still can.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll sign you up for sure. And . . . don’t tell anyone I tipped you off about this, but the prizes are a disaster. A total trainwreck. You don’t want to see them unless you’re planning on replacing your eyeballs.”
Arcadia giggles. “Got it.”
Someone bangs on the bathroom door, yelling something that sounds urgent from the other side. I hastily push my hair out of my face and hide my mouth behind the napkin, since my nose and lips are still bright red from crying.
I check my watch—it’s four-thirty, so it’s not time for the carnival yet. I should go get more sign-ups. I hope Kas has found a way to do that. If this isn’t about the carnival, it must be urgent.
Arcadia unlocks the door and opens it.
It’s Ms. Hedge.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ms. Hedge stands there with her hands on her hips. She’s smiling, but it’s not a smile. The smile says, I’m imagining the great pleasure I will obtain in seeing your corpse rot. This means only one thing: she’s found out about the prizes.
“Ah, I thought I’d find you in here, Azalea,” she says.
“Hello,” I say, my voice a bit muffled from behind the napkin.
“Do you happen to know where Kacper is?” she asks. “The carnival is going to start in thirty minutes, and right now, I need to talk to both of you together about a certain, ah, situation which has arisen with the preparations.”
“I saw him at the track five minutes ago,” I say. “I think everything’s ready—I can finalize the sign-up list in the next fifteen minutes.”
Ms. Hedge gives a small nod. “Do that, please. We checked at the track, but Kacper isn’t there.”
I shrug, trying not to let myself worry. “I don’t know where he went.”
“I’ll send some people to look for him,” she says. “How many people have signed up already?”
“Twenty-six—no, twenty-seven.”
She frowns. “I thought you needed fifty?”
“I’m working on it,” I reply.
“Good,” she says. “I do need you to get all fifty names in there, though. I’m calling the entire school out to the track at four forty-five and I need that done by then.”
“Understood,” I say.
As soon as she’s turned and walked away, Arcadia touches my arm to get my attention. “I can get some people to sign up. If Rosie does, then half the girls in the school will. Don’t worry, she still thinks we’re besties.”
“Thank you,” I say, my shoulders sagging in relief. “I’ll run and get you the sign-up sheet—I left it out at the track—you don’t need to come with me. And I need to check for Kas.”
“No, no, no, I’m coming,” she replies.
I smile. “Thanks.”
I match her pace, slightly slower than mine, as we make our way to the track. A few students are collected there already, but I know more are coming. I get the sign-up sheet from where I left it on one of the fold-out tables. Arcadia seems about to peek at the prizes, but I stop her before she can.
“What is this for?” she asks, pointing to the seventy-one water bottles on the ground.
“That’s, um, decoration,” I say. “Actually. Those are supposed to be refreshments. We said we’d bring some in the proposal.” Rather, Rosie said that.
Arcadia takes the sign-up sheet and walks over to a group of nearby girls with confidence in her step. I watch her, but my smile fades as I wonder where Kas went and if he’s okay. Did he pass out again? Did he drink any water?
Fifteen minutes later, we have all fifty sign-ups. I take the list to Ms. Hedge, who nods and tries to look pleased with my work. She’s not doing anything about the prizes, which means that she might not know about them.
“Did anyone find Kas?” I ask.
She nods. “He’s over there.”
I follow her index finger as she points to a place in the growing ground. I can see part of him. He’s talking to some friends over there. Arcadia is still getting more sign-ups for extras. I sigh in relief. I was worried that he’d passed out again or something equally awful. But he looks fine—not normal, because his face is still pale—but fine.
“You really care about him, don’t you?”
I spin around. It’s Rosie. She’s smirking at me.
“Hello, Rosie,” I say stiffly, thinking of how she reported me for threatening her, how I’m on thin enough ice with Hedge already, and how she looks actually really cute with a new shade of lip gloss.
“I see the way you look at him,” she says. “Like he’s everything to you.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Why does that matter to you?”
She shrugs. “I just wanted to talk, Aza. There’s no need to get all defensive.”
“Very nice,” I say. “You can talk. But not to me.” I turn away.
“Hey—” She catches my arm. “We don’t have to do this. I didn’t ever do anything to you.”
“Yeah, right,” I mutter. In a normal voice I say, “Fine, what do you want to talk about?” I glance at my watch. “I have exactly seven minutes before the carnival starts.”
“That’s plenty time,” she says, pulling me aside. “So,” she says, her voice dropping to a lower tone that only I can hear.
“So?” I say.
“I assume you know the whole story by now,” she says with a dramatic wave of her hand. “About me and Kas. We dated for a while, broke up, blah blah blah. The usual high school drama.”
“Of course,” I say, although I only found out about half an hour ago.
“I know you’re with him now,” she says. “And I respect that. I just want to tell you why we broke up. I know you like him right now, but he’s really not a good person. I wouldn’t want him to break up with you like he did with me.”
“What happened?” I ask skeptically.
She sighs. “I was happy with him for a while. He promised me that we’d be together forever . . . he promised me the future. And then one day he just ditched me. No explanation. We’ve barely spoken since then.”
I narrow my eyes. “You don’t know why he did that?”
“No idea,” she says. “He doesn’t really care about you. He’ll get tired of you, you’ll see. And then he’ll just drop you. Right when you think he does love you. That’s all I wanted to say.”
“Thanks, but I think we’re okay,” I say.
“Alright. Have it your way,” she says, and walks away to join her friends.
I couldn’t care less what Rosie has to say about Kas. She just wants to get us to break up so that she’ll have a chance with him again. I don’t intend on letting that happening.
I walk through the crowd for the next few minutes before the carnival is supposed to start. Everything is ready. Unfortunately. I’ve placed all the dynamite and lit the match. Now it’s only a matter of the time until the explosion. Until someone wins a prize.
Ms. Hedge is now standing on a chair holding a microphone, which she fiddles with for a second before yelling into it at the top of her voice. I cover my ears. She turns the volume down, much to our gratitude, before starting her announcement to the hundred or so students gathered here.
“Greetings, students!” she shouts. “We’re very excited for the start of the twenty-second annual athletics carnival at this school! We thank Rosie Chen for organizing this event!”
Wait, what?
It suddenly occurs to me that Ms. Hedge doesn’t want to lecture me and Kas about the prizes—at least she doesn’t want to talk about them yet, since she hasn’t seen them. She’s found out that Rosie was helping us with the proposal. Rosie tipped her off. My heart drops. Of course Rosie would do that, to win herself attention and recognition, while making me look as bad as possible. It was the perfect opportunity for her.
Everyone claps. Rosie beams.
I hate that girl.
“The rules are simple,” Ms. Hedge shouts. “There will be ten separate relay races, both with two teams—six races with teams of two people, three with teams of three people, and one with teams of four people! Each person who is signed up will run twice! If you have an extra on your team, they will take over one of those times! When you signed up, you were asked which distance you wanted to race, and with how many people, as applicable!”
Oh, no. I stuck people into random spots on the sign-up sheet without paying attention to the details, just writing down names in the first available box I saw. They won’t be happy about this.
Ms. Hedge continues to explain the relays as I try to melt into the earth. At least no one knows that I organized this stupid event. But half of them will remember me as the person who signed them up and didn’t even read the sheet before writing their names in.
I edge towards the sign-up sheet, lying nearby on a table. I put my own name down, by tradition. Unfortunately, I’ve signed up to run the hardest distance. I’ll be on a team of two people running four kilometers—we have no extras. Which means two kilometers for me. I can run much further than that, but why couldn’t I have put myself down for a shorter distance?
I don’t have time to see who I’ll be running with before I’m being pulled away by Arcadia. Ms. Hedge is yelling something about how relay races are team-building.
“I swear, team-building is that woman’s favorite phrase,” Arcadia says out of the corner of her mouth as we go to the starting line. “So, which position am I running in?”
“No clue,” I say. “I’m set to run two kilometers.”
She winces. “Tough.”
“I know. I wasn’t really thinking.”
“Who are you racing against?”
“No idea.”
“Do you at least know who you’re racing with?”
“No.” I grin sheepishly. “I know, I didn’t really think this through.”
Arcadia smiles back. “Yeah. Neither did Hedge, apparently. She literally gave all the credit to Rosie, who did nothing except be popular. I know you did the work, though.”
I just laugh along with her, deciding that it would be a too complicated to explain the situation.
Ms. Hedge announces the names of the first runners and screams, “Let the first relay begin!”

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

About forty-five minutes later, it’s my turn to race.
I need to win this. I will not allow whoever is on the other team beat me, no matter how fit they are.
People have won prizes, but they haven’t talked about them—at least not loudly enough for Hedge to hear. One girl cries when she sees her poster. People talk in whispers. But no one talks because they don’t want to get on Rosie’s bad side and they all think Rosie is running this clown show.
My voice is hoarse from cheering, but my body is calm. I look back at the bleachers and see Kas sitting there. He waves at me. I wave back.
“On the first team,” Ms. Hedge announces, “is Lauren Roberts and Aaron Cook!”
I don’t know either of those people. Lauren looks like she might be able to beat me—she has a runner’s build—but I could definitely crush Aaron, a chunky guy with glasses.
“On the second team is Azalea Mae Park and Arcadia Galanis!”
Oh. Arcadia is the last person I’d want to run with. I hate myself for thinking this. But the truth is that if she’s on my team—and we each have to run two kilometers—we don’t stand a chance.
But I’m glad I signed her up. And I’m glad she’s running with me. She deserves to try. She deserves to live like a normal girl.
“You’re up!” Rosie nudges me in the ribs.
“Don’t do that!” I snap back before I can stop myself.
Her eyebrows go up. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says in a sarcastic voice. “I’m just trying to encourage you before you lose spectacularly.”
Some girls giggle, but I hold my head high. “I will not lose. I refuse to.”
Rosie laughs. “Okay, whatever.”
I descend the bleachers, my legs shaking slightly. All four of us make our way to the . “Wanna go first?” I whisper to Arcadia.
“Yeah!” She looks more excited about this than anyone here.
I give her the baton. Ms. Hedge blows her whistle. Lauren takes off. Arcadia . . . sort of takes off. But I can tell she’s trying.
Lauren finishes the first lap in a minute forty. She’s so fast—I don’t think I’ll be able to match that pace. Arcadia takes twice as long, over three minutes.
“Come on, you got this!” I yell as she crosses it. She smiles at me, but her face is already flushed and sweaty.
Lauren finishes the first kilometer in three minutes and forty-five seconds. Arcadia is on the second lap. Aaron grabs the baton and he’s running now. I bounce nervously on my toes. There’s no way we will win this.
I jog the last half-lap with Arcadia. She hands me the baton and sits down on the grass, gasping for breath.
“Are you okay?” I ask. I can’t run until I know she’s fine.
“I’m really sorry,” she puffs. “I can’t run the second kilometer.”
I give her a thumbs-up and start running. That took her eight minutes. There’s no hope for us. Aaron is on his second lap. As I run, I try to calculate it. Lauren can run a kilometer in three minutes forty-five—Aaron, probably a bit more than five minutes. Together, nine minutes. And I have to run three kilometers.
First lap, done. I keep running. My fastest time at this distance is fourteen minutes. Aaron is a bit slower now? Is he? I can’t overtake him. I can’t overtake him. I focus on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Second lap. I see Arcadia standing up, clapping, cheering. Good. She’s alright. First kilometer done.
I pretend everyone is cheering for me and not Lauren. She’s just too fast. She keeps putting distance between us. No. I’m closing that distance now. I’m closing it. My feet slap against the track. It’s the only sound in the world. The sky is darkening now. How far have I run? Another two laps for this kilometer. Really? That little? I’m not even halfway through. Around the curving part of the track. I look at the bleachers, trying to find Kas. My lungs are burning. I can’t see him. I try to breathe deeply enough. It’s too hard. The sun sets in purple, grey, blue. Where is Kas? Halfway through. I don’t even know anymore. I just know to keep running. Keep closing that distance. The distance is still so big. Aaron is running now. I can close that distance. I can hear my breathing coming in ragged pants but I can’t feel myself breathing. Everything just hurts too much. Second kilometer done.
Aaron is running and I can see his small shape way out there. There’s no way I can do this. He’s a lap and a half ahead of me. He’s much slower than he was the first kilometer. He’s limping. I focus on this. I nearly trip over my feet and force my shoulders back. Breathe. Breathe. I can’t get enough breath. I’m going to suffocate. My hands are tingling, shaking. My arms are shaking. They work like knives, cutting downwards through the air and then coming up again down and up again down and up again and I see Aaron ahead of me he’s definitely limping I think he’s twisted his ankle—where is Kas—I can’t see him—I can’t see anything—everything is black—my lungs scream for breath and my brain screams at me not to quit—
“Aza! Run! RUN!”
That’s Arcadia right? Where is she? The darkness clears. The world is grey and fuzzy. I need to stop and catch my breath. At the end of the track I can stop and catch my breath. I can’t stop here. My chest feels like it’s being filled with liquid lava. This is the end of the track. No the other end. There are lions chasing me. I can hear them. I can hear their panting breath. I can’t let them catch me.
“RUN! AZA! GO!”
I see the entire world in front of me. I see a baby laughing in the sand. I can see a golden bird flying ahead of me. Don’t breathe. Don’t breathe. If I take a breath the pain will become too much. I know this. If nothing else, I know this. Last four hundred meters.
“AZALEA MAE PARK! RUN!”
Okay yes that’s definitely Kas no one else uses my full name like that yes he’s there I can see him standing there at the end of this lap just this three hundred meters left his face is going in and out of focus and the golden bird has exploded into golden haze wait that’s not him that’s an angel two hundred meters he’s going to take me to heaven now I’m dead I’m dead I can breathe again now no heaven shouldn’t hurt like this it’s Kas there one hundred meters the angel is gone the bird is gone everything is gone Aaron Kas Arcadia Mom Dad Daniel sky earth tree wind fifty meters we’ve won twenty-five twenty fifteen I’m passing Aaron now five and I feel calm, I’m calm, everything is fine now, it doesn’t hurt anymore.
I cough, tasting metal, and say, “Cake.”
“Cake—I’ll get that right away for you,” a girl says.
I know Kas is the only person who understands because now I understand the saying he told me earlier today—without work, there is no cake. No pain, no gain. I don’t want to eat cake now, though. I just want to sleep.
“Stay awake,” someone says, tapping my face lightly.
“I’m awake,” I say. My voice sounds horrible, like I’ve swallowed gravel. I clear my throat but it doesn’t help. “Did we win?”
“What?”
“Win,” I say. I spell it with my fingers in the air in front of me. There have to be people around because I can hear their voices, but I can’t see them. I can just see my fingers.
“Aza?”
“Kas?” I ask. “Where are you?”
“I’m right here.”
“I can’t see.”
“That’s fine,” he says from somewhere close to my ear. “I’m just going to try to get the blood back to your head.” I can feel him lifting my legs. “You ran three kilometers in twelve minutes and eighteen seconds,” he says. “That has to be some kind of world record.”
“I think the world record is nine minutes,” I say. “I really can’t see you.”
“I know,” he says.
“But my eyes are open, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” I say, blinking to clear my vision, which is turning black again.
“You could have had a stroke,” he says. “I mean, you weren’t getting much oxygen at all.”
“That’s . . . not good.” I close my eyes, and when I open them, I can make out a faint outline that has to be him. “But we won, right?”
“Aza!” Arcadia’s face swims into my field of vision. “That was incredible!”
“Thanks,” I say.
“I mean, I was sure you weren’t going to make it!” she says. “But you did! And we won! You are so fast. Like how?!”
“Did I faint?” I ask, looking at Kas, whose face is now coming into focus for me.
“No, but you’ve been lying here for almost five minutes,” he says.
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s normal. Honestly, I’m glad you don’t remember. It wasn’t fun. Everyone thought you were bleeding from your lungs. Hedge almost called 911.”
I wince. “I’m fine.”
“I really hope so, because you are not allowed to die at your own carnival,” Arcadia interjects.
“I’m considering dying,” I reply.
Rosie Chen comes over with her signature smirk. “I didn’t think you had that in you,” she says.
“Wow, thanks for the support.” I glare at her from where I’m lying on the track. After a moment, she walks away without another word. Good.
“I think it’s ironic that both of us were lying here on the same day,” Kas says.
“No, I definitely planned this,” I say. “Do I get a medal or something?”
“Just the prizes,” he says.
“Oh my god. I don’t want any of those.”
“I already picked one out for you!” Arcadia is back here again, holding a poster. “I picked it while you were still running. Believe me, it cost me more of my sanity than you know.”
“Do I want to see this?” I ask her.
“Definitely.” She unrolls the poster to reveal my favorite K-pop singer. “For your room or something.”
“How did that get mixed up with the prizes?” I look towards Rosie. She’s staring at the poster in disbelief. Oh. She put it in for herself, assuming she’d win, and also assuming that no one would find it first. “Hah,” I say aloud.
Arcadia isn’t listening to me as she shoves the poster into my waiting hands. Instead, she’s relating the state of my facial expression as I was running the last lap to some eager spectators who have gathered around me to witness the drama. A girl I’ve never met before returns with a slice of chocolate cake for me in a plastic take-out box, but I don’t feel like eating yet, so I let her leave it next to me.
“Everyone get out!” Coach Tucker yells. “We have more relays to run!”
I pick myself up and two girls help me back to the bleachers, where I sit down, feeling like my body is made of jelly. As I watch the next relay and eat my chocolate cake with my poster tucked safely under my arm, Kas sitting on my right side and Arcadia on my left, for the first time in a long time, I feel content.
That evening, Kas stops me before I get on the bus to go home.
“I was wondering if you wanted to go out together sometime?”
“What? You mean just the two of us?”
“Yeah.”
I fidget nervously. “I’d really like to, but I have to talk to my parents first.”
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll, um, text you if they say yes. Bye.”
“Bye, Aza.”
As I mount the steps to get on the school bus, his hand catches mine for a moment. This time it feels different from all the other times he’s done this.
Before I can think about what I’m doing, I’m back on the sidewalk again. I kiss him on both cheeks like my mother does to people. Our faces barely touch. But this is a little bit different than une bise. This is not saying hello—this is saying “when I see you again”.

Comments for this chapter

• it's so good i need to stop reading now but how is this not published already

  Comment by poibleps on May 22, 2025

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• ohhh thank you!!!

  Comment by rose on May 28, 2025

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

After a very long talk with my parents, they agree to let me go out with Kas. My main feeling afterward is relief. They insist that I don’t use my phone that night, since it’s nearly one in the morning and I need to sleep. Tomorrow is Saturday and I have nothing planned, but I know better than to argue with them over my sleep schedule—they’ll just end up making it stricter.
I go upstairs. I debate waiting for my parents to sleep first, and then I’ll get my phone and text him just so he knows, but my body is so exhausted from the day’s events that I fall asleep almost immediately. I don’t wake up until the next morning at noon. Mom came in and pulled the curtains across to let me sleep longer, but I wish she hadn’t. Maybe Kas thinks I don’t want to go out with him anymore.
I run downstairs. The first thing I do before even saying good morning to my parents is text him.
They said yes.
His reply is immediate.
Is tonight good?
I write back:
Yes. Where?
A few minutes pass with no reply. I tap my fingers anxiously against the table. Then, I say a quick good morning to my parents so they won’t feel like they’ve been replaced by my phone or whatever.
I sit in the kitchen, still in my pajamas and my hair a mess, before he replies.
I made a reservation for us at Ambrosia. Seven tonight.
I look up “Ambrosia” on my phone. It’s very fancy. Crystal chandeliers and red carpet kind of fancy. I don’t have anything to wear for a place like this.
I report this problem to Mom.
“He’s taking you to Ambrosia?” Her eyes widen in surprise. “Are you sure? Your dad and I haven’t even been there.”
“Sure,” I reply.
“Alright, I’ll give you one of my dresses,” she says. “But right now, we have to go to the salon and do something about your hair.”
Six and a half hours later, I’m ready. My hair is perfectly styled, and Mom took me to the mall to buy a new pair of extremely fashionable high heels which are silver to match my dress. The dress itself could make the ugliest girl look like a supermodel. It’s gorgeous, made entirely of silver thread and thousands of tiny jewels which sparkle infinitely, flashing every time I move. It fits my body perfectly, accentuating my figure, but it goes all the way up to my neck and then down to my ankles, leaving only my arms and sunburned shoulders exposed.
Mom finishes my makeup, and I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t even recognize myself. I’ve never looked this pretty in my life.
“Remember what I told you about boundaries,” she warns.
“I know,” I say. I’m afraid to move—I want this moment to stay forever.
The doorbell rings. Mom smiles and runs downstairs as Dad answers. I hear Kas’s voice from downstairs, making my parents laugh at something. I move towards my bedroom door and peek out.
“Take care of Aza,” Dad says.
“I will, sir.”
I take this moment to come downstairs, trying not to walk too fast, trying not to trip on the steps. Kas is wearing a full suit, and he looks so handsome my breath catches in my throat for a moment.
I say bye to my parents, and they leave us alone. I close the door and smile nervously at him.
“You look beautiful,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“Pretend I’m offering you my arm right here,” he says as we walk down the path to a waiting car.
I smile. “Pretending happening.”
We reach the car and he opens the back door for me. “Pretend I’m helping you inside.”
I get in and glance at the chauffeur. “Lex?” I ask in disbelief.
He holds a finger to his lips. “Shh. I’m undercover.” He’s wearing black sunglasses and a dark suit with the collar flipped up, so most of his face is hidden, but he has the same messy hair as usual.
I try not to smile. “Okay.”
Lex clears his throat. “Miss Azalea, welcome to the Lex Limousine Experience. We are the finest taxi company on this planet, according to acclaimed magazines such as Shonen Jump. Complimentary water bottles can be found in the side compartments. Enjoy your ride.”
Kas rolls his eyes. “Shut up, Lex. First of all, this isn’t a limousine, and second—”
Lex responds by stomping on the accelerator and tearing around the corner. The quiet street is filled with the screech of tires for a moment before he slows down to a regular speed. I breathe again. I swear he’ll kill himself with his crazy driving one day.
I lean closer to Kas, where I can smell his cologne and feel the warmth of his arm. He doesn’t move away from me. I rest my head on the sleek leather seat, my hair almost touching his shoulder.
“Hate to spoil the moment, but I need to tell you about Ambrosia,” Lex says.
I sit up properly in my seat. “Oh?”
“I went there once,” he says.
“With who?” Kas says immediately.
“Doesn’t matter. Tip number one: they have a million forks. Don’t use the normal-looking ones; people will think you’re weird. Tip number two: the waiters will recommend a million different things, but more than half of them are likely to be some form of boiled snails.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Ew.”
“Lex, seriously, stop trying to mess this up in every possible way,” Kas says with an edge to his voice, adjusting his cufflinks. His hands are trembling slightly. “We’ll be fine.”
“I’m just making sure,” Lex replies innocently.
I want to link my arm with Kas’s like we sometimes do, especially when one of us is feeling nervous (or in this case, both of us), but now that we’re officially on our first date, it doesn’t seem appropriate.
Ten minutes later, Lex stops. “Remember to leave a five-star review,” he says.
“You’re impossible,” I say, hiding a laugh behind my French nails, which Mom took me to do earlier today.
Lex pulls away from the curb, the tires squeaking. Kas and I are left standing on the sidewalk together.
“Let’s walk the rest of the way,” he says. “The restaurant isn’t far, and our reservation doesn’t start for fifteen more minutes anyway.”
So we walk. The sound my high heels make changes as we step onto the wooden bridge which crosses the river. The water shows a blurry yellow reflection of the buildings on either side, and in it too I can see the pale shape of the rising moon. I catch a glimpse of Kas’s face as we pass beneath a streetlight, the angles sharpened by its glare. He doesn’t look real. I can’t reconcile him with the snapshot of him crawling up the stairs yesterday. Yesterday feels like it was years ago now. The only reminder I have of it is the way my lungs burn when I laugh too much.
We stop at the highest point on the bridge and look over the water together. Some people are rowing slowly below us, the oars making a gentle splashing noise that only we seem to hear above the night city sounds.
“Doesn’t this remind you of all the canals in Amsterdam?” I ask.
“I’ve never been there.”
“Neither have I. We put it on our list, though. The one we buried in the time capsule. Go boating in Amsterdam.” I turn to him, looking him in the eyes. “Do you think we will be able to do that one day?”
“I hope so,” he says. “But you’ll have to row for both of us.”
I smile, leaning against the railing. The night air is cold, biting at any exposed skin. I want to put my hands up against my cheeks to warm them, but I know that’ll smudge the perfect makeup Mom did for me.
“Come on,” Kas says softly.
I tear myself away from the railing and follow him. Another couple approaches from the opposite direction. I’m about to move over to give them more space before remembering that I’m now part of a couple too and therefore get to act entitled by taking up half the bridge.
Everything is so pretty. The black buildings rise into the grey cloudy sky, the thousands of windows each glowing with golden light. In the distance, someone is laughing.
We reach Ambrosia, which is much more impressive than it looked in the pictures. The building rises two full stories up with tall arched windows and ivy snaking down the outer walls. Outside is a huge rose garden. I want to stop and cut some flowers to make a bouquet, but before I can dwell on this thought, a valet is showing us inside, where a hostess smiles and asks for the name on our reservation. It takes her forever to spell Kas’s last name properly, but finally she shows us to our table. It’s a small booth for two by a window away from most of the people. The tables are mahogany wood and the floor is so shiny-smooth I don’t want to walk on it.
I take Kas’s crutches from under his arms, leaning them against the wall separating us from the next table over. His arm rests against mine as he sits down, holding my hand tightly to keep himself balanced. We do this all the time, but now I’m conscious of every time we touch each other, every movement.
A waiter glides over and sets menus in front of us. There are five different menus for each person (drinks, more drinks, appetizers, main courses, and desserts) which he explains to us in detail. I open the one for appetizers and see that half of it is in Italian and the other half is in French. Well, of course, this is supposed to be Italian-French fusion or whatever, but they could have written it in English. Lucky for me, I’m fluent in both those languages, because my dad is Italian and my mom is French, so I have no trouble reading it. There are just so many choices. I have zero clue what most of the options are, which means I’ll probably end up ordering some kind of exotic plant as my appetizer.
The waiter says, “I’ll let you have a look at the drinks menu first.”
I’m underage and learned when I was ten that drinking alcohol kills your liver cells, so I wouldn’t order one even if I was older enough. But I open the first drink menu just to be polite and pretend to study it. Of course, it’s even more confusing than the appetizer menu, because it doesn’t seem to be in any language—at least not one that I speak. “Woody flavor with hints of caramel.” What in the world? I open the other drink menu, but it’s hopeless. What’s bourbon? Is that the flavor or the drink itself? I know bon means “good”. Embarrassed, I close the menus. Kas is still looking at them . . . like he actually understands them.
“Are you getting anything?” he asks.
I lean a bit closer and explain, in detail, exactly how a sip of an alcoholic drink ends up destroying your liver cells. Kas quickly touches my hand to make me stop when the waiter arrives again.
“Have you decided, or may I recommend something from our drink menu?”
“Can I please just have water?” I ask, feeling overwhelmed.
“I’ll get that right away. For you, sir?”
“Champagne,” he says.
I stare at him without understanding.
“Are you 21 or over?” the waiter asks dubiously, now actually looking at him for the first time. Kas looks older than his age, so I can see why at first glance the waiter would have put a drink menu in front of him.
He adjusts his crutches. The waiter smiles. “I’ll get you some right away,” he says and glides away again.
“Did you not hear anything I just told you about getting cirrhosis?” I scream in a whisper.
Kas smiles faintly. “I’ll only have a sip. Plus, I get perks cause I can’t use my legs. People tend to feel bad for me.”
The waiter returns with some champagne in a thin glass. Kas hesitates, then takes a small sip. I watch his face carefully, but his expression doesn’t change.
“It tastes a bit like sparkling lemons,” he says after a second.
“Sparkling lemons?” I shake his shoulder. “Seriously, you can’t be drunk already.”
“I’m not,” he insists. He looks at the main course menu for a while, oblivious to the fact that I’m staring holes in him.
Eventually, I cave. “Can I have a sip?” I ask, pointing to his drink.
“Only a small one,” he says.
I barely touch my lips to it. He’s right. It does taste like sparkling lemons, but also like wood, and like stars. I push it away because I really can’t resist another taste, leaving a lipstick kiss on the rim of the glass.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

The waiter returns about ten minutes later for our appetizer and main dish orders. I still don’t know what to pick, so I point to a random place on the menu. He nods and writes it down. Kas orders with ease. I pretend not to notice, but the fact that he looks so relaxed in a place like Ambrosia makes it even harder to tear my eyes away from him.
“May I open the window?” the waiter asks.
Kas looks at me, expecting me to make the decision. I look at the window. It’s the biggest window I’ve ever seen in my life, easily fifteen feet tall, like a window in a church, and I have no idea how someone would open it.
“Yes please,” I say.
The waiter nods and glides off. Waiters are very good at gliding. I bet half of them are secretly professional ice skaters.
I see him a few minutes later outside, on the other side of the window, with a key. He puts the key into a hidden lock in the window I didn’t even realize was there and a glass door swings open out of it. The rush of cold air from outside hits my entire body. The door is easily big enough to walk through. The thick wooden bars which run the length of the window create the borders of the door.
I keep my mouth closed tightly, because if I opened it, it would stay that way in a most unladylike fashion.
“Can we walk in the garden?” Kas says.
“Of course, sir.”
I reach for his crutches but he shakes his head. “No, just us,” he says, pushing himself up on the table and holding onto it as he descends the single step onto the path leading into the giant rose garden I was admiring earlier. I hold out my arm for him, and he takes it, gripping it a little bit too tightly. I want to ask if he’s sure he doesn’t want his crutches, but I already know the answer. Instead, I let him hold onto me.
Everything is so dark that it’s hard to see in front of us. The path is lit up in shades of brown and gold by lights that are so close to the ground they seem invisible. They cast gentle rays across our feet, making my silver high heels sparkle. I squint, trying to see all the roses. They come in almost every color—red, pink, yellow, white, even orange. It’s all dyed a strange grey hue by the cold night air. White streaks of faint, distant light cut lines across the garden, their edges hazy. Where the light touches, I can see dust swirling.
After a couple of minutes of walking along the winding path, we stop. Kas bends over and picks one of the red roses. “For you,” he says.
I have a feeling this just broke about a million fancy restaurant laws, but I take the rose from him and tuck it behind my ear. “Thank you,” I say.
We can see the river here, too, from this edge of the garden. A big tourist boat passes underneath us on the water. Someone waves a handkerchief and shouts at us in another language.
“What did you say?” Kas calls out.
Someone else yells a translation: “The couple is beautiful.”
We go back inside the restaurant after our walk. A few minutes later, our food is served. I have some kind of meat with onions and potatoes in a rich red sauce which smells amazing. But Kas is laughing so hard he can’t speak.
“What’s so funny?” I ask as I take a bite. It’s good—the meat is tender and slightly sweet with an almost earthy flavor. The onions are soft and the potatoes are cooked to perfection.
He covers his face with the napkin to muffle his laughter. I give him a look and keep eating. He ordered an entire roast fish with too many toppings to count and about seven different kinds of bread, but hasn’t touched it yet, laughing too hard to even breathe.
“Watroba wieprzowa,” he says.
“What?”
“What you ordered.”
I give him another look and take a bite of the sauce using one of the three spoons I’ve been given.
Eventually, Kas gets a hold of himself and says, “What you ordered is pork liver.”
I almost choke. It takes all my manners to chew and swallow like a normal person. “Are you serious?” I look around for a glass of water but only find several jugs at a small counter behind our booth. I snatch one before anyone can see and drink from it until the taste of the liver is gone from my mouth. I put the jug down on our table and dab at my lips with a napkin. “That’s disgusting,” I say.
“You looked like you were actually enjoying it before I told you,” he says. “We can switch. I like the taste.”
“Yes, please,” I say, pushing my plate as far away as possible and taking his. “Next time, I’m going to actually look at the menu. I thought this was an Italian-French restaurant?”
“They have dishes from everywhere,” he says. “A lot of people eat liver—it’s supposed to be good for you.”
“Can we talk about something else?” I ask.
“Okay,” he says, reaching across the table to tuck a loose curl behind my ear. My body immediately tenses when his fingers brush my skin.
“Tell me about your day,” I say.
“It was okay.” He hesitates, then adds, “They, um, obviously did the custody proceedings and all that yesterday. Lex is legally an adult, even if he doesn’t really act like one, but I’m in my mother’s custody for the next two years. And the baby, too, when it’s born.” He smiles faintly. “Mama says it’s going to be another boy.”
“That’s nice,” I say, my voice soft. I put my hand on the table, just in case he wants to take it.
He nods, then turns his attention to his plate. We eat in silence for a while. Most of the bubbles are gone from the champagne, which neither of us dare to have another sip of.
I think about yesterday, when he told me that he’d been with Rosie Chen, and how I’d left him there without even knowing he was okay. And how Arcadia comforted me and then told me I was beautiful. Mom and Dad said the same thing today, and so did Kas this evening. I don’t feel beautiful—I feel ugly inside because I don’t know how to be his friend, and I don’t know what we expect from each other, playing like we’re grown up by going out together tonight, when Mom said I can’t let him touch me or kiss me, and when he knows this without my words.
Eventually he looks up at me again. His expression is dead serious. “Are you happy?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“You don’t have to pretend,” he says. “I know you’re upset with me about Rosie.”
“That’s not really it,” I reply quietly. “Everything’s just so complicated right now. Your parents and my parents and school, and everyone and everything else. I wish it didn’t have to be. But yes. I am happy.”
“Good,” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
We’ve finished eating by now. The waiter comes by again and clears away our plates. He asks if we want dessert, and Kas gives me a look that says no, so I tell this to the waiter. I’m stuffed anyway. Kas pays for the meal with his phone—I hope he’s not using his mom’s credit card. I keep my hand there on the table, French nails tapping slowly against the mahogany wood. Kas’s phone rings. He winces and silences it.
“You can answer,” I say.
“No, it’s just my mom.”
“It might be important.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “She probably forgot I’m here. I’ll answer if she calls me back.”
She doesn’t. I’m secretly glad that he didn’t answer—I want it to be just us right now.
“Are you cold?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” I reply, but the wind coming through the door-in-the-window, which is still open, is brutal.
Kas sighs at my stubbornness and comes over to my side of the table, taking off his suit jacket and very carefully putting it around my shoulders. I pull it closer to me. It smells so much like him, like pine needles and rain.
“Sit here,” I say, patting the spot on the leather right next to me. I move closer to the window to give him space. He hesitates for a fraction of a second before sitting.
We look at the garden together for a while. He slips his arm around my waist, and I let it stay there, resting my head against his shoulder, looking up at the stars.
His lips are close to my ear, his breath hot and sweet against my neck. He whispers, “You look very, very pretty.” I smile but don’t say anything back. “I love you,” he whispers, and this time I say, “I love you too” and we don’t move for a long time, just existing, feeling the wind on our faces and the warmth of each other and breathing deeply to catch the scent of a thousand roses.
“Tell me something,” he says.
I take a deep breath. “So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens,” I say.
“William Carlos Williams?” he asks.
“We read a lot of him in school,” I admit.
“He’s good,” Kas replies. “Tell me something else. Something about you that I don’t know.”
I have to think about this for a moment. I always assume that he knows everything about me, but although he does know more than anyone (except my parents), I keep a lot of things to myself, things that I wouldn’t even tell Mom.
So I tell him, “I don’t always tell everyone the truth about their countdown.”
“Oh,” he says. “Did you lie to Daniel?”
“No. That was real. And Arcadia—that was real too. And my parents, and your parents, and Lex,” I say. “Even Rosie—if she asked, I’d tell her the truth.” I look up at him. “You believe me, right?” I ask.
“Of course I do,” he replies. “We saw someone, you know, die, remember?”
I do remember. It feels like forever ago, but I think of it often, perhaps more often than I should.
“You never told me how Daniel died,” he says. “You don’t have to talk about it right now. Maybe write me a note later?”
“I will,” I say. I think of what Mom said about boundaries, and after some consideration I let myself relax in his arms, turning away from the window. “Tell me something about yourself. Something that you didn’t tell anyone before.”
He thinks for a minute. “After the accident,” he says, “when I woke up, I saw you sitting there. You were asleep in your mom’s lap. I was actually a good enough person to wish that you wouldn’t be my friend anymore because I knew you’d have to take care of me like you do now.”
“I don’t mind,” I say. “Really. If I didn’t want to be your friend, believe me, I’d make that clear to you.”
He snorts a laugh. “Yeah. I know. Still.”
“I don’t really do much for you,” I continue. “I just help you walk sometimes. Or get you your crutches when you drop one. It’s not a big deal.”
“I appreciate you,” he says. “No one else does that for me except my parents and Lex. Which made you like my sister for a while.”
“Now it’s different?”
“A little bit. But I love you just as much. Love is the same. Always. It just feels different now.”
“Okay,” I say. “You’re very poetic.”
“Okay,” he says, smiling back.
We get up to leave. I straighten out my dress and give Kas his jacket and crutches. We go outside through the main entrance. The hostess thanks us for coming.
“Lex is coming to pick us up at eleven, so in an hour,” Kas says.
“Do you want to go sit by the river until then?” I ask.
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
We walk to the river, but instead of going on the bridge, we walk down a separate path, then sit on the lush wet grass at the edge of the river. The damp cold begins to soak into my dress, but I don’t complain.
“May I take your hand?” he asks.
I hold it out for him. His fingers wrap firmly around mine. I give his hand a small squeeze and he squeezes mine back.
“You can kiss me goodnight,” I say.
“Not yet,” he says. “It’s only our first date. Maybe next time.”
My heart flutters at the mention of next time. He says it so confidently like he’s sure it’s going to happen. “Okay,” I say again.
We sit there together for a long time in silence, watching the river move. People walk along the sidewalk that runs the length of the other bank, but no one else is on the grass. Kas doesn’t let go of my hand.
“When you said you didn’t always tell the truth about their countdowns,” he says, “you never told me how long I had left.”
“Kas,” I say.
“I just wanted to know.”
“Kas.”
“It’s not important. I’d prefer I didn’t know, actually. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life worried about all the things I’ll never get to do when I die. I’d prefer to just do as much as I can.”
That’s good. I can’t tell him the truth, so I’ll tell you instead. He has three months, six days, ten minutes, and twenty-six seconds.
“Give me a kiss,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I can’t.”
“It doesn’t have to be for real,” I insist. “Please.”
“I really can’t,” he says. “I can’t kiss you yet.”
Eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six.
“Look,” he says, pointing at the sky. “Pegasus.”
I squint at the stars. I can see a lopsided square with three lines coming out of it. Body, head, and legs. It takes imagination but it kind of looks like a big and endless horse jumping across a black and endless sky.
Nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds.
We stay there, holding hands and talking about everything but nothing at the same time. I ask him if he knows what it feels like to be falling. Falling from what, he says, I’ve fallen from a tree once but that’s it. No, I say, laughing a bit, I mean, do you know what it feels like to be falling in love? Does it feel the same?
We stay until his countdown says three months and six days exactly. I look at my watch. It’s ten fifteen at night. I hope the night it happens will be as pretty as the one today.
P.S. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth about this sooner.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Winter comes again unexpectedly. The ground freezes over, and in the evenings, frost paints strange shapes on the windows. When I was little I thought the patterns the frost made were signifying something, like a secret code the universe itself was trying to convey to me. I’d spend hours trying to crack it, but never achieved anything except a cold nose.
Real spring will come soon, but I’m done with the cold already. I wrap myself up in layers and go to school like normal and try not to think about Kas too much. He hasn’t been at school for a couple of days now. Maybe busy helping his mom, who’s expecting the baby in two months.
I try not to think of Arcadia too much either. She has six weeks left to live. She uses a wheelchair now to get around, but she has the same wide smile on her face all the time. We talk a lot—we’ve become really good friends, and she’s had me over at her house a couple of times, so Mom is inviting her entire family to dinner tomorrow night.
Arcadia asked me not to tell her parents, so I haven’t. They’re nice people—I mean, I judge people’s parents based on the quality of snacks they give out, and they gave me some M&M’s to eat while Arcadia and I watched a movie together.
I’ve calculated everything out, as much as I hate doing it, because I need to know what things would happen in which order between Arcadia, Kas, and the baby.
1) (One month, one week, five days) Arcadia’s death
2) (Two months, one day) Due date for Kas and Lex’s baby brother’s birth
3) (Two months, two weeks, three days) Kas’s death
I’d thought that writing all of that down would allow me to prepare myself, but I can’t imagine any of this happening. It doesn’t feel like it could happen in my own life. People aren’t supposed to die three months after their first date. They aren’t allowed to die.
I wonder why Kas hasn’t been at school.
I miss him.
I’ve texted him several times but all I got was some garbage about him being totally fine. No explanation. I have a feeling that something bad happened, but he doesn’t answer any of my calls so I can’t check. Part of my brain is constantly screaming for me to at least go over to his house and check on him, but maybe everything’s fine and he just needs space. A lot has happened since we went out together that night three weeks ago.
Hedge has given us exactly six thorough lectures about how we’d cheated while planning the event by asking Rosie to do it for us, and she’s going to assign us to another activity with “hopes that we make a real effort” next year (our senior year), which really sucks, but what’s worse is that we won’t be paired together this time.
Rosie is being as obnoxious as ever. She’s posted another picture of me online, this one of my face after running in the athletics carnival. I hid the picture from my parents, knowing it would just make them upset. I did send a screenshot to Lex, though, asking him to check with his law professors if what Rosie did is legal or not, and how much it would cost to sue her (and over which damages—I can’t really say “that picture hurt my feelings” and expect anyone to take me seriously—I’m not a kindergartener anymore).
GG called several times to ask when I’m bringing Kas over again for a visit. Mom says I should go again, but one time was quite enough for me. I secretly hate the fact that she doesn’t care if I come as long as I bring Kas over. But I love that he’s always so charming and gentlemanly that he can even impress someone like GG.
I hope he’s okay.
I google his mom, find her work number, and text her.
Hi, this is Aza. Can I bring you anything?
A few hours later, she writes back. The message is accompanied by an excess of heart emojis. Most of it is thanking me for asking about her (when all I did is send a text, but she’s nicer than people give her credit for). She says she doesn’t need anything, but there’s half a ham in the fridge which Mom made yesterday. I wrap it in brown paper and take it over to Kas’s house in a glass bowl with some cheese in case she wants to make sandwiches with it. I know my parents won’t mind.
Mrs. Kozlowska answers after the third time knocking, her hair in a high bun and her belly big with the baby. She hugs me tightly, but I’m used to my ribs nearly being crushed by her, and pulls me into the kitchen, thanking me over and over for bringing the ham. Again, I don’t really know what I did to deserve so much thanks. It’s not like I cooked this ham by myself. Although she doesn’t need to know that.
“Do you know where Kas has been?” I ask her as she serves me cookies and juice on the small table in the kitchen.
She frowns. “He didn’t call you?”
“No,” I say, now thoroughly confused.
She sighs, pulling a chair back and sitting across from me. “He fell. Badly. He was in the hospital for a day. He’s resting in his room now.”
My heart stops for a moment. “How? How did he fall?”
“He was being an idiot walking up the stairs without help and he fell,” she explains. “Fractured two ribs, poor rybko.”
I know rybko means little fishy but the rest of her words refuse to enter my brain. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. But he’s—how do you say it in English—his pride is hurt more than he is, I think,” she laughs. “Eat your cookies, kotku. You can see him afterwards if you want.”
I eat the cookies, even though they taste like ash. Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Lex sent me a stupid meme after I texted him about the picture Rosie sent, but didn’t even bother to mention this? Maybe they just assumed Kas had told me—but he didn’t, for reasons I don’t understand.
Mrs. Kozlowska smiles at me as I eat. “Is school good?” she asks.
I tell her about it as I finish my cookies and sip my juice. She seems actually interested. “My sons never tell me anything about it,” she says. “Every time they come home I ask them, and they just say that it was ‘good’. One word.”
I smile. “That’s what I say to my parents. How have you been?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “Obviously, a little bit stressed, but you’ll understand when you have children.”
“If you need anything, I can help you with it,” I say.
“You’re so sweet,” she says. “Thank you. I’ll ask you if I need something.” Which I know she won’t, but still.
We talk for a little longer, then I go to Kas’s room, which is downstairs. Mrs. Kozlowska leaves me at the doorway there. I knock, feeling apprehensive. Eventually I hear him call out from inside, “Come in,” and I push the door open hesitantly. He’s lying in bed, half-covered by the blanket. His face is paler than usual, and he doesn’t smile at me when I come in. His eyes barely lift to meet mine before he looks away, his lips pressing together like they do when he’s disappointed or embarrassed. One of his hands is resting on his chest, maybe where it hurts most. I can see that he’s in pain, even though he tries to hide it.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Fine,” he says.
I wish he would stop saying it. I know it’s not true, and he knows I know that. I sit down slowly on the edge of the bed, careful not to move him too much.
“Are you in pain?” I ask. “Do you want me to get you ice?”
“No, no, just stay,” he says.
“Why didn’t you tell me what happened?” I ask.
“I didn’t want you to be worried.”
“Congratulations, well, I was really worried about you, and I’m worried now,” I say.
“I’m fine—I’ll be back at school in a couple of days,” he says.
“I’m not worried about your stupid ribs,” I say, my voice rising in anger. “I’m worried about your nonexistent brain. What were you thinking? You didn’t even call me back!”
He grimaces. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“You can’t just ghost me like that!” My eyes fill with tears. “The whole time I’m thinking you just aren’t talking to me before. You did that before to me.”
“I’m really sorry,” he says, reaching over to take my hand. “I’ve just been messed up lately. I’m sorry. Don’t cry, Aza, please.”
“I am not crying,” I reply fiercely. “I have no intention of crying.” I take a shaking breath in. “It’s okay,” I say. His body tenses as I slip my arms around him and hug him as gently as I can, trying not to cause him more pain. “I missed you,” I say.
“So did I.”
I press my cheek against his. I can feel his heart racing and pull away. “I’m not really upset with you,” I say. “Just . . . other things.” Like his countdown.
He seems to understand. We sit there in silence for a while before he asks me how Arcadia is.
“She’s . . . fine,” I say. He knows about her countdown too, of course. “I called her last night. She sounded okay.”
“She’s not sad because . . .”
“I don’t think so. I think she’s just trying to, you know, live as much as possible. She convinced her parents to take her to Europe for a week, so she’s there now. I didn’t tell them, but I think they know.”
“That’s nice.”
I almost tell him about his countdown, but I take a deep breath and smile at him instead. “Yeah, it is. I know you always wanted to go there too.”
His eyes soften. “Come here,” he says, motioning to the spot next to him on the bed.
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
“We don’t have to do anything. But that chair is awful,” he says.
I think about it for a moment. I know he won’t do anything to me, especially since his ribs are fractured, and it seems harmless. But I know my parents would definitely not be okay with it. Then I think of his countdown and realize I might go through the rest of my life wishing for certain opportunities that I hadn’t taken when they came.
I lay down beside him, close enough to reach my hand out and touch him, but I don’t, and he doesn’t either.
“Do you want to die a virgin?” I ask.
He considers this. “Not really.”
“What do you mean, not really?” I say. “It’s kind of a yes or no question.”
“I don’t know yet,” he says. “I don’t see the point in being a virgin unless you want to enter a nunnery or something. Which would be kind of boring. One of my aunts is a nun and she has hair on her chin.” He shudders. “Please don’t become a nun, Aza.”
“You know that I want to study medicine,” I say. I’ve wanted to become a doctor since I was four.
“I know. We said I’d be an engineer and together we’d design actual leg braces that let me walk without crutches by controlling my brain.”
“I’m surprised you remember that.”
“You were wearing a yellow dress.” His words come slower now. I can tell he’s exhausted. “You looked nice but I didn’t want to tell you.” He closes his eyes.
“Now I know,” I say.
“Mmm.” His breathing deepens, and within a few minutes he’s asleep.
I stay there. His mom doesn’t come to get me, which I take as a good omen. I look through the skylight. It’s late in the afternoon, and I can see the place where the sky changes color from yellow to blue. The light makes strange shadows on the floor. Kas’s face is illuminated in shades of silver by a ray of sunlight coming through the curtains. The window is halfway open and a light breeze ruffles his hair. I resist the urge to smooth it back down.
I pull the blanket up to his shoulders and watch him breathe until my eyes close and I fall asleep.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When I wake up again, everything is dark. I have several missed texts from Mom. I text back, I’m over at Sylvia’s, and hope she doesn’t look at my phone’s location. Sylvia was my best friend until high school, when she moved to a different part of the city and a different school. After that, we stopped talking as much. But she’s the only person I know Mom would be okay with me having a spontaneous sleepover at, because she knows her parents well.
I look over at Kas, who hasn’t moved. Neither have I. I sit up slowly, trying not to wake him. He moans softly in his sleep, turning his head slightly towards me. I stop moving. His lips part slightly, but he just sighs, his fingers curling around the blanket. His hair is dark, damp with sweat.
It’s almost nine. I should probably go home. I look at him again, studying the lines on his face. I try to imagine what it will be like in two and a half months. It’s impossible not to think of all the ways he could die. Maybe his injury will cause complications and it will be slow and painful.
I whisper out loud to myself, “You’re not allowed to cry over things that haven’t happened yet.”
I swallow back the tears. I should at least tell Lex. Maybe not his mom, especially when she’s already dealing with so many things. Probably not his dad. I open my phone and click on Lex’s name in my contacts list, but as I try to text him, I realize I don’t know what to type. If he were here right now, I wouldn’t know what to say.
I never know how to say anything to anyone.
“Kas?” I whisper.
His eyelids flutter open and he blinks at me. “You’re still here?” he murmurs, his voice thick with sleep.
“Yeah,” I whisper back.
He closes his eyes again for a few seconds before forcing them back open. “There’s . . . there’s pain meds next to you,” he says.
I turn on the lights, then unscrew the cap and pour two pills into my hand. He swallows them with a sip of water, his hands trembling.
“Thank you,” he says. “You didn’t have to stay.”
“I fell asleep,” I admit. “I woke up because you kept pulling the blanket.”
He lets out a sharp breath. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“I’m being serious,” he says. “I’m not even supposed to talk loud.”
“I’m also being serious. I’m not trying to make you laugh.”
“Stop talking,” he says, trying not to smile. “Everything you say right now is funny and I don’t know why.”
I turn away from him to muffle my giggles into the pillow. I don’t know why this is funny either.
“Mockingbird,” he says.
“Where?”
He points at the biggest tree in the yard, then winces, even that simple motion causing him pain. “Second branch from the bottom.”
I squint. “I don’t see it.” But I do hear it singing before it flies away.
“You always say you don’t see things,” he says, pretending to be annoyed with me.
“That’s cause you point them out too late.”
His smile widens as he looks up at me, and he tries not to laugh again. “You have a blanket crease on your cheek,” he says.
I slap my hand to my face. “Oh my god. Why didn’t you tell me before?” I rub my cheek furiously with my knuckles. “You are literally the worst. And here I was, thinking you were actually grateful that I brought you ham.”
“You did?”
“Yes. And cheese. Three different types of it. I should get a medal for this.”
“You can have a cookie,” he says.
“I already ate all of your cookies,” I reply. “Your mom is way too nice.”
We tease each other for a while before the pain medication begins to take effect and his breathing evens out again. I put my hand on his arm. I can feel his heartrate getting slower, too, as the minutes pass.
“It’s so quiet right now,” I say.
“We can watch a movie if you want,” he says.
“No. Just us right now.”
He nods, then shifts uncomfortably. “Can you help me take off the braces?” he asks.
I pull the blanket back. He’s wearing ugly palm-tree patterned shorts which clash horribly with his shirt. I get the feeling that he couldn’t care less. I start to take his leg braces off. It’s harder than you would expect.
“Remember the end of year school field trip last summer?” I ask. “You were wearing pretty much the exact same outfit.”
He makes a pained noise, which means he does remember it. “That was the worst weekend of my life.”
It was not the best field trip we’ve ever taken. We went to a beach, the kind with freezing cold water no one wants to go in and hard grey sand. The place was deserted for a reason. There was no swimming, no surfing, no canoeing. We spent most of the time indoors, because it was too hot to do much outside unless you wanted to get heatstroke, and no one wanted to get in the water after rumors spread that there were poisonous jellyfish in the ocean.
“Second worst weekend,” I correct him. “The worst weekend was when we went on that trip together.”
Our parents had decided that it would be a cute, family-bonding oriented activity if Kas’s family and my family went on a three-day trip together. Our bags were lost in the airport. All four of our parents got the flu. The weather was too hot to walk for more than five minutes outside at a time.
I put his leg braces on the floor next to him. “I’m never letting your dad pick a vacation spot again.”
His smile falters. “Yeah. Me neither.”
“Have you talked to him at all lately?” I ask gently.
“No. He gets visitation rights, but . . . I don’t think he wants them,” he admits. “I don’t know who I hate more right now—him or Rosie’s dad. Or Rosie.”
“Pick Rosie,” I urge.
“Stop making me laugh so much,” he says, biting his knuckles.
He looks so handsome under the glow of the moon coming through the skylight. I can’t look away from him. He smiles faintly, that gentle smile I love so much.
“You look like Ben,” I say without thinking.
“Who?”
“Just . . . this boy from summer camp. He died a long time ago. He had pancreatic cancer,” I explain. “He was the first person who believed me about the countdowns.” I turn onto my side to face him. “I wish we could have been friends before that. He was really nice. But we only got to be best friends for a week during camp.”
It was the stupidest summer camp ever where we made pottery, as in, shriveled up under the sun while some guy yapped about how we were supposed to embrace the constant change of the clay and channel our inner Zen spirits into it, which had become a sticky mess all over our bodies by the time we decided it might help to pay attention to him. Ben and I snuck out halfway through the session on the first day and pretended we were jungle people.
“Did he really look like me?” Kas asks.
“He had the same color eyes. He would probably be taller than you by now, though.”
“What month was his birthday?”
I try to remember. “Oh, it was July. It was while we were at camp together.”
I think about how he told me that his parents sent him to camp over his birthday because they were travelling to Europe and wanted him out of the way. I felt really bad for him because he had the kind of mom and dad who didn’t even care to celebrate their son’s birthday—his last ever birthday. He explained they weren’t really his parents; they were his adoptive aunt and uncle, and anyway he had a babysitter at home to remind him to take his meds and drive him to chemo appointments and all that stuff, and he didn’t need his parents. He did tell me, though, that they were both still alive. His dad was in jail for assault and his mom did drugs.
I felt awful about it.
I still do.
Kas looks through the skylight for a while before pointing at something in the blackness above. “There. That’s his star,” he says. “Left of Orion. The brightest one just below his belt.”
“Who’s Orion?”
“A constellation, you idiot.”
“Oh.”
“Now you know where Ben’s star is, so you can look at it sometimes,” he says.
“What’s the point of that?”
“Don’t you know that when people die part of their soul becomes a star?”
“Um, no,” I say.
“I’m not joking. They do. And that piece of them will always watch over you. Like my grandma’s over there. Right above Ursa Major.”
“Do you think Daniel is up there?” I ask.
“Of course he is. Do you see Pegasus? He’s part of it. He’s the top-left corner of the square thing.”
I look at Ben’s star for a long time. It blinks back at me, almost like he’s watching me again from up there.
“Which star are you going to be?” I ask.
“I haven’t thought about it. And I don’t think I can really tell. I have a long time to think about it anyway, right?”
“Right,” I say.
“I kind of want to be part of Pegasus too,” he says.
We fall silent. I think about death. I think about how much I want him to kiss me right now. He takes a sip of water, and this time, his hands aren’t shaking. I’m worried we won’t have another opportunity to have our kiss, but I know I want to do it in the time we have left. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to love anyone again after he’s gone. Because I do love him. With all my soul. It’s not just pure physical attraction anymore, although that’s part of it. I love his smile and his jokes but more than that I love how kind he always is to everybody. I couldn’t ask for anyone more perfect.
He says, “You’re looking at me weird.”
I open my mouth to say something, but the words get stuck in my throat. Kas pulls me towards him, but before I can kiss him, he kisses me. Only for a moment. His lips barely touch mine before he pulls away from me. I don’t breathe, trembling and thrilling.
“Was that—”
“Shut up,” I say.
I grab him and kiss him properly, forcing him to kiss me back, pressing my lips hard against his, my fingers moving from his hair to his neck, his shoulders, his back, our bodies pressing together, although I’m careful not to hurt his ribs, and I don’t let go of him, and I don’t let him let go of me, until his arms are around me too.
Finally, we break apart. He looks up at me, his breath coming in short gasps. My heart is going so fast and my body is tingling, from my chest to my hands.
He reaches for me, slips off my crop top, unbuttons his shirt. Skirt, blanket moves, socks, things tossed aside, palm trees, hairclip. I pull the blanket up and turn out the light and a few minutes later we both feel strangely happy in a way neither of us have ever felt before. It feels like learning to fly and drinking too many stars.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I write Kas a note about how Daniel died and slip it into his locker (the combination is his birthday, but he has no idea that I guessed that, simply because he’s unaware that I’m actually a genius).
He comes back to school on Tuesday, looking marginally less dead than he did last time we saw each other.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” he says. “Also. I was the one who put that note in your locker.”
“Which one?”
“About Rosie,” he says. “Like, how I believed you didn’t do anything to Daniel? I thought it would make you feel better.”
“So . . . you’re saying no one else really believes me,” I said. “You wrote me an anonymous note thinking I’d believe some members of the school actually liked me. Which I did believe, by the way. Also, how do you even know my combination?”
“My birthday,” he says. “It’s easy.”
I sigh. “I thought you’d guess my birthday, so I put yours.”
“Great minds think alike,” he says. “I saw your note, by the way.” The bell rings. “Lunchtime,” he says.
“Is all you think about food?” I ask as we walk to the cafeteria together.
“Maybe. And also you.”
I blush. “You’re so—”
“Cute?” he offers.
“No. Annoying. But, like—well, in a cute way.” Someone bumps into us. I get the feeling it’s on purpose. I’m used to it now.
All the small tables are occupied, but Arcadia waves us over. “Hello!” she says enthusiastically. “Sit down. Please. I’m so lonely. And tired. I got back from Germany this morning.” She points to a chair, which I pull over to her table, but Kas remains standing. “Don’t you want to sit with us?” Arcadia asks him. Her countdown shows one month, one week, and twelve hours.
“I’m gonna sit with the guys,” he says, gesturing to the big table behind us.
“The same guys who cut your hand up after Daniel Byun died?” she asks, raising nonexistent eyebrows.
I stare at him. “What is she talking about?”
He sighs. “I got into a fight,” he admits. “A couple weeks after he died. Showed up at school. Some guys were saying you killed Daniel Byun. Wasn’t gonna let them talk trash about you like that. Anyway. I guess you can say it . . . well, we didn’t exactly hit each other, but . . .”
“But you hit each other,” I finish for him. This explains why his knuckles were split open the day he came to see me. And why he wanted to know how Daniel had really died. But it doesn’t . . .
“Not so loud,” he says. “Hedge has ears everywhere.” He gestures to an overly curious girl behind us with red hair in a bun and seventy-two years left to live.
“I like how you call her Hedge now,” Arcadia says.
“But that doesn’t explain why your hand was cut up the morning after Daniel died,” I say in a quieter voice. Kas looks away and doesn’t answer the obvious question hanging in the air.
Arcadia smiles. “Azalea, our new detective. Kas—gimme a birthday kiss.”
“It’s your birthday?” Kas asks.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“My seventeenth,” Arcadia replies. “I mean a birthday kiss. You know. My parents always give me a birthday kiss every year. My boyfriend used to. But we broke up when I got sick.” She shrugs. “Took me forty minutes to get over him, but I still want a kiss from someone.” She points at Kas.
“Why are you asking me?” he asks.
“I don’t really have anyone else to ask. I swear, I’ll get reported. People take everything the wrong way.”
“Fine.” Kas leans down and kisses her, very lightly. “Happy birthday.”
Arcadia blushes, smiles. “Thanks.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Just . . . don’t . . .”
“I know,” she says.
I kiss her on the cheek, leaving a tiny smudge of lip tone there. “Happy birthday.”
“Good!” she says, clapping. “Two birthday kisses from my two best friends in the world. A girl couldn’t ask for anything more.”
“A girl could ask for a birthday present,” I remind her, taking off my necklace. It’s made of solid gold. Mom gave it to me for my last birthday, but I think Arcadia needs it more than I do.
“Aza, stop,” she says.
I clip it around her neck. “You look pretty,” I say, stepping back.
“I cannot take this from you.”
Kas rolls his eyes. “Alright, I’m leaving.”
Arcadia ignores him. She’s too busy thanking me. I drop into the seat across from her. I ask her about her trip to Europe and let her talk about it until the end of lunch. I’m glad she was able to go there. But as we head to our next class together, I find myself wiping my eyes more than once. If I could, I’d give ten years of my life to her. No one deserves to die this young, especially somebody like Arcadia.
The weird thing is that I’ve accepted that she’s going to die in a month, while I don’t really think about Kas’s countdown, simply because it doesn’t seem real. I was able to see it the moment we met each other, of course, but back then five years felt like a long time. I never thought about the fact that we might still be friends in high school, that I might be at his funeral one day. I never acted extra nice to him or anything because he had so little time. Same with Arcadia. Now I wish I had, especially for her, since I can believe—really—that her countdown is real. I wish we could have been friends sooner. You might wonder why I’d want to become close friends with someone just to feel extra pain when they die. But I can’t really choose who I become friends with—I just happen to or not. Not the way I can choose who to become enemies with. And they can’t really choose either. Like Kas didn’t choose to drop his preserved shark on my foot in sixth grade science class. And I definitely didn’t mean to lock Arcadia in the bathroom with me that day.
Those things happened anyway.
Maybe, if god is being nice to me, I can die before either of them.
I’m not prepared to let them go.
“I didn’t ask, but are you and Kas officially together now?” Arcadia says, drawing me back to the present.
“Yeah, I guess,” I say, thinking back to that night a few days ago.
“Kiss?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, real?”
“Definitely.”
She smiles. “Good.”
“I have to tell you something else,” I say. “About him. Can we go outside for a bit?”
We head towards the track, where there’s nobody else. We’ll be late for class, but at this point, I’m honestly not sure why she comes to school anymore. Maybe her parents want her to, and she doesn’t have an excuse, since we’ve agreed not to tell them. Also, it would be really sad to spend the last month of your life alone.
There aren’t any wheelchair ramps, although Ms. Hedge promised she’d get them installed by the end of the year after seeing so many signatures on my petition to build them. I don’t know how to bring Arcadia down the steps to the track without them since she’s in her wheelchair, but I’ve spent years helping Kas get around with his crutches. I walk her down the few steps and lead her to a bench, leaving her wheelchair up there.
We sit down together. She sighs, leaning back against the bench, squinting against the sun. “This is nice.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“You look nice too,” she adds. “I like your shirt. Very cute.”
“Thanks.”
“What were you going to say about Kas?” she says. “And is it graphic?”
I wince. “No.”
“Did you two . . .”
It won’t hurt to tell her the truth. She’s not the kind of person who would use this against me in some way, or the kind of person who would be jealous, or the kind of person who would tell Rosie Chen.
“Yes,” I admit.
She hesitates. “Was it . . . how did it . . . I really don’t know how to talk about this,” she says, laughing and blushing at the same time. “I’ve never . . . I’ve been in a relationship before, obviously, but not like that.”
“We aren’t really like that either.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” I repeat.
“Now, please, tell me what you dragged me out here for,” she says, nudging me lightly in the side to let me know she’s just teasing. I know she actually enjoys it out here.
“I was just going to tell you about his countdown,” I say.
“What about it? Did it, like, change or something?”
“No. It’s the same as before. It’s just that . . .”
She purses her lips. “You didn’t tell anyone the truth about it.”
“I don’t want him to know,” I whisper. “Or anyone else. Just you.” She’s the only person I feel safe telling this information, and I need to talk about it with someone. I can’t tell my parents—I can’t survive another seven hour lecture, plus they’ll tell his parents, plus they’ll try to make me feel better in all the wrong ways, and I can’t deal with that right now. And I know I can’t tell his parents. Or Lex. Well, maybe Lex. But not now. Not yet. Only Arcadia.
“Oh, Aza,” she says. She hugs me, pulling me in so that my head rests against her chest, her arms tight around my body. I can smell her perfume, something floral.
“Barely two months,” I say. “That’s all he has left. And I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone.”
“I’m so sorry,” she murmurs into my hair.
“It’s okay.” I swallow, trying to be brave. Trying not to cry again. “You don’t have to be sorry. Please don’t be sorry.” I take a deep, shaking breath. “Do you think I should tell him?”
“Absolutely not,” she says.
“But I told you. You wanted that, right?”
“Yes, I did, but he wouldn’t.” She releases me. “Oh my god. This must be horrible for you.”
“And you too,” I say. “Now that you know.”
“The whole time, you knew?” she says.
“I couldn’t tell anyone. It would mess everything up.”
“You couldn’t mess anything up if you tried,” she says. “It’s a talent of yours. Not messing things up. Just . . . making mistakes that lead to better things. Like when you told me about my countdown, and I got mad at you—that led to us being best friends, right?”
“But I told Daniel about his and now everyone hates me.”
“All for the better,” she replies enthusiastically. “You can focus more on the people you actually care about.”
“Like you,” I say with a half-smile that barely reaches my eyes. “And my parents. And Kas. I care about all of you. A lot.”
“Then I want you and Kas to be together while you still can,” she says. “That’s going to be my birthday wish tonight. That you stay together until the end.”
“Shouldn’t your wish be for yourself?” I ask.
“What more do I need?” she says. “I’m not ready to die, but I can’t do anything about it. You know that more than maybe anyone. I can’t wish for anything for myself because there’s not really time for it to come true.”
“Arcadia,” I say.
“Azalea,” she says.
“Seriously, wish for something you want,” I say.
She fingers the necklace I gave her, considering this. “What I want is for you and Kas to be together,” she finally says.
“Okay,” I say.
“My parents asked me not to invite anyone over for my birthday, but I really want you to come,” she says. “Please?”
“I’ll be there,” I promise. “Why didn’t they want you to have a party?”
“Some stupidity about it ‘aggravating my symptoms’ or whatever. But when you’re there . . . can you just tell them from me that if anything happens—if I don’t get better—I want them to stay together, okay? I don’t want them to get a divorce or anything after I die.”
“Sure,” I say.
“Thanks.” She checks her watch. “God, we’re late. Thompson’s gonna kill us. Let’s go.”
I wheel her back to class and occupy the empty desk next to her instead of my usual one by the window. We pass notes and chat in whispers, not paying any attention to class at all. Even as we muffle laughter every few minutes, I come to realize how sick she really looks. She’s always been a big girl, but she’s wasting away.
In agonizingly slow motion.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

After class, Kas catches up with us. I don’t have a free period, but it’s more important to be with my friends right now than to sit through another boring science lecture. We go outside together again. This time, I have to get both of them down the steps and to the benches by the track, but instead, we sit in the grass. Rather, me and Kas sit in the grass, and Arcadia sits in her wheelchair on the grass, but same thing.
I lay on my back, looking up at the clouds. “Look, that one’s a baby,” I say, pointing up.
Kas and Arcadia both look.
“You’re right,” Arcadia says. “I think it’s a sign.”
“Of what?” Kas asks.
“That you and Aza are going to have a baby together,” Arcadia says with a mischievous smile.
Kas gives her a look that would send anyone capable of using their lower limbs running in the opposite direction. I let out a high-pitched giggle, and he gives me dagger eyes too.
“Sorry,” Arcadia says, watching Kas fake-punch me repeatedly as punishment for laughing. I roll away from him, but he grabs my arm, pulls me towards him along the grass and continues to fake-punch me. “You two are the best,” she says.
“I know,” Kas says. “Especially me.”
“You’re also literally the most conceited person I’ve ever met,” Arcadia teases him.
“Obviously you haven’t met a lot of people. Look over there.” He stops punching me to point at Rosie Chen, who’s flouncing back to the school building from the other side of the football field.
“Right. She definitely wins the most-conceited contest.”
We watch Rosie’s progress. When she gets close enough to see us clearly, Kas slips his arm around my body and pulls me close.
“She’s walking over to us,” I murmur, just loud enough for Arcadia to hear me too.
This is not a good sign. The last thing I need is for her to ruin this moment here. Why did she have to have a free period now? Another point of oddity: she’s not surrounded by her usual group of friends. Which means she has something to say to us.
She stops a couple of feet in front of us. “Well, if it isn’t the new couple,” she smirks, completely ignoring Arcadia, all her attention on me and Kas. “Are we happy together?” she asks Kas, her false smile widening, displaying two very long rows of very white teeth.
“Rosie, please go away,” I say, trying to keep my voice in check.
“Go away,” she mimics me in a baby voice before turning back to Kas, who’s reaching for his crutches. “So this is what you’ve settled for? That thing over there? Are you really that desperate?”
He stands up, gripping his crutches so tightly his hands turn white. His face is flushed with anger. “Shut your mouth. Right. Now.”
“Don’t you think she’s a little beneath you?” Rosie asks, her voice dangerously soft as she takes a step closer to us. “You don’t want to do anything to her. I hear her mom is tough.”
“Who told you that?” he snaps, breathing heavily. “Your dad? Did he mess with Aza’s mom too?”
“Let’s remember to remain kind and respectful,” Rosie says in the voice you’d use when talking to a kindergartener.
“You chink.” Then he spits in her face.
Rosie gasps and lunges for him. I try to push him out of the way, but before I can even move, she slams her fist into his chest.
Right where his fractured ribs are.
He staggers backwards. I grab his arm as he falls, but he pulls me down with him.
The world blurs.
“Kas?” I say in a small voice.
His eyes move, and his lips part, but no sound comes out. Rosie and Arcadia gasp from behind me.
I put my arm around Kas, forcing him to stay sitting up, because I’m worried that he’ll choke if I let him lie down. I can hear him trying to take a breath in, but he can’t.
“Oh my god,” Rosie whispers.
Kas looks at me, his eyes unfocused. Blood is trickling out of the corner of his mouth.
“Kas? Are you okay?” I ask.
“I can’t breathe,” he coughs.
My hands are shaking. “What do you mean you can’t breathe?” I ask, trying and failing to keep my voice steady. I learned how to do artificial respiration, but I don’t think I could use it on him.
Arcadia says, “What the heck happened?”
Rosie kneels down beside us. “Kas—” She reaches out but his entire body flinches away from her.
He coughs again. More blood.
“Come on, breathe,” I say. “Slowly. Breathe slowly. Like this.” I try to slow my breathing but I’m panting.
He takes the tiniest breath in. Rosie puts her hand on his chest like she’s trying to check for an already obvious injury. I snatch her arm, but it’s too late—she presses too hard.
Kas’s body jerks away from her and he screams. The sound is raw, wet, horrible.
Rosie screams too. “Oh my god!”
“Oh my god,” I repeat as he coughs up more blood. I wipe it away from his mouth with my hand. Wet.
Kas holds onto my hand tightly, trying to breathe again between the coughs, but it’s clear that breathing too deeply causes him too much pain. I have no idea what to do. Rosie is sobbing, which is not helping, and Arcadia isn’t in a position to do much.
So I whisper to him, “Shh, it’s okay,” even though it really isn’t. I need to call his mom. Maybe an ambulance. No. I can’t do that. It’ll only send everyone into a further state of panic. Plus my phone died half an hour ago. He can still breathe—kind of—which means he’ll be fine, right? He has to be fine. “You’re okay,” I whisper, trying to calm him.
“No,” he gasps. “Aza . . . it hurts . . . so much.” He’s crying a little bit. I brush the tears from his cheeks, smearing the blood on my hands across his face. The tears are hotter than I’d expect. Wet.
“Okay, we’ll go to the hospital,” I say. “Right now.” I look at Rosie. “Help me move him—”
He coughs again, his entire body shuddering, pulling away from me. “I can’t—Aza. Make it stop.”
“I’m trying,” I say. It takes all I have to keep from breaking down. I can’t bear to see him in so much pain. I try to lift him, but the motion makes him cry out again. “Kas, please, it’s okay, just breathe—”
“I can’t—”
“Rosie, help me—Arcadia—”
“I’m trying,” Arcadia pants. She’s pushed her wheelchair over to us on the wet grass. “Oh my god, he’s bleeding—”
“Aza, do something,” Rosie sobs.
“I’m trying!”
Kas’s body goes limp and his eyes flutter closed. Rosie shrieks and grabs him.
“Don’t touch him!” I scream at her. “You’ll make his ribs puncture his lungs!”
She doesn’t let go of him. “Oh my god, oh my god,” she keeps repeating, crying harder now.
“Rosie, LET GO!” I try to pull her away but my hands don’t feel like they’re attached to my body. Nothing feels real. He’s not even breathing anymore.
“My god, what should I do—” Arcadia is saying from above us, pulling out her phone.
“Arcadia. Call 911. CALL 911.”
I push Rosie off of him. Breathe. Now. Please. I dab the sweat on his forehead with my sleeve, knowing that it’s not helping him. “I love you,” I whisper to him, also knowing that’s not helping either. “I love you I love you I love you.” His lips are blue now. God, no. His eyelids flutter open again for a brief second. Arcadia is on the phone, calling for an ambulance, and Rosie is still crying, but my vision narrows to just him, just Kas, and he whispers, “Tell me something,” and I say, “Okay,” and the first poem that comes to mind is:
“Among the rain / and lights / I saw the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck / moving / tense / unheeded / to gong clangs / siren howls / and wheels rumbling / through the dark city.”
He smiles faintly. His face twists into a choking gasping sound. I hold him tight, as tightly as I can.
The minutes crawl by like wounded animals. The sirens are getting closer. Rosie clings to my arm and sobs. Arcadia is also crying. All of us are crying except for him, even me. I can taste the salt of my own tears and the salt of the cold sweat on my face. Wet.
“Put me down now,” Kas breathes.
“No,” I whisper fiercely. “I’m not going to put you down.”
Red lights flash, blue, white, as the ambulance stops in the parking lot. Paramedics rush towards us but not fast enough.
“Something else.”
“Among the sun / and sky / I saw a young man / in blue / on the green / grass / listening / calm / conscious / to a voice / saying things / and people running / through the football field.”
His eyes are closing again. I shake him awake. “No, no, don’t go to sleep,” I beg, but he doesn’t respond, just coughing again. I dab at the blood staining his lips with my sleeve, again, again.
The paramedics sprint towards us. There are three of them, two men and a woman. They all look so . . . calm. The two men pull Kas away from me and start working on him, giving him oxygen and lifting him onto a stretcher
The woman grips my shoulders as I sit there on the grass and hear words like “possible pneumothorax” and “critical condition” and “heart rate is dropping” and she says, “Your friend is going to be okay,” and I say, “I know. I know.”
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” Rosie gasps, crouching down beside me.
My mouth tastes like metal. I can’t think of anything to say to her simply because there is nothing to say.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Later that night, Kas’s mom calls me. I wasn’t allowed to see him in the hospital that evening—family only—but she has good news. Good news means he doesn’t have a collapsed lung. It means that he needed surgery to stop the internal bleeding caused by his ribs which got broken even more, but the pain medication is helping, and he’s able to talk, maybe go home tomorrow afternoon if things continue to go well.
I don’t consider what bad news could have meant.
He texts me at almost three in the morning but I don’t see it until I wake up.
MY LIFE SUCKS.
I write back to him as I get on the bus:
Key word: life. Are you okay?
About an hour later, while I’m in the first class of the day, he texts me back:
No
I’m about to start typing back when another message comes through:
Room 208 at St. Joseph’s
I write:
Now?
He writes:
Please
I don’t waste any more time—I tell the school nurse I’m sick and want to go home. She takes my temperature and announces in a stony voice that I don’t have a fever, therefore I’m not sick. But I complain so much about how badly my stomach hurts (it does, by the way, because I’m worried about Kas) that she gives me a glass of milk and lets me go home.
Ten minutes later, I push open the door to his hospital room. Kas is lying motionless in the bed with an IV in the back of his hand and other tubes and wires that I can’t track to their faintly beeping monitors, his eyes closed. No one else is there. His mom might have had to go back to work, and Lex is in school.
“Kas?” I call out softly, not wanting to wake him if he’s sleeping.
“Aza,” he coughs. His voice is wrecked. That’s all it takes for me to rush over to him. His face is nearly as white as the pillowcase under his head.
I sit on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath my weight. His hand is lying on top of the blankets. I take it, giving his fingers a squeeze. They’re freezing cold. I wrap both my hands around his, trying to warm him up.
“Hey,” he says, his voice hoarse, like he’s been screaming for hours and hasn’t slept in days. “Sorry I look like this.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like a mess,” he murmurs, his eyes fluttering closed for a second before he forces them open. “I do look awful, right?”
I snort with laughter. “Kas, you literally could have died, and you’re worried about how you look right now?”
“I have a reputation.”
“Fine. You sort of look like the ghost of a Victorian orphan,” I say. He smiles a little bit. His face is so pale, his lips grey, and his hair is tangled except for one loose curl which falls so ridiculously attractively over his forehead. I want to brush it away so badly but I don’t let myself. “A very handsome ghost,” I correct myself. His smile widens ever so slightly but that small victory feels so big in the huge empty silence of the hospital room. “And a very nice one,” I add. “I would have sued Rosie by now if I were you.”
“Kacper, the friendly ghost,” he murmurs.
“With terrible jokes,” I say.
“Fair point,” he says, coughing again, then wincing hard. “Ow. That really hurts.” I give him a sip of water from the plastic cup left on the table next to the bed. “Let’s think of all the ways my ghost spirit is going to haunt Rosie,” he murmurs.
“Okay,” I say.
“Right now—” He stops, his throat working as he swallows and catches his breath. “I’m considering placing an overhydrated chihuahua in her locker, but I don’t know the combination to open it.”
“Arcadia told me it already. It’s her crush’s birthday.”
“Which is?”
“Your birthday.”
He smirks faintly. “Noted.”
“She does like you,” I say. “Arcadia, I mean. A lot. Kind of as a friend, but also, kind of . . . well, she knows we’re together and she wants us to be together, but . . .”
“But I’m irresistibly hot.”
“No comment.”
His smile widens. I force myself to smile back. It’s just hard to smile when he looks like he’s been through a war. It breaks my heart to see him like this because it reminds me so much of the way he looked after the accident—hurting and scared because he’d never be able to walk on his own. I give his hand a reassuring squeeze, and his fingers tighten slightly in response.
He coughs again, gasping in pain when the motion jars his ribs. I offer him the cup again, but he pushes my hand away weakly.
“Do you want me to call the nurse?” I ask.
He gives the tiniest shake of his head. “Apparently, I’ve had so much pain medication in my life already that I can’t take much more of it.”
“Why?”
“It’ll, like, rip holes in my stomach or something equally horrible.”
I wince. “That’s . . . not great.”
Another cough. “I don’t need it,” he says. “I’m saving it for when I really do.”
He only has two months left. He won’t need it again. “Just take it now,” I urge.
“I’m okay,” he whispers.
“Okay,” I say.
He nods, swallows, looks away. “I think I need a new body. This one’s damaged beyond repair.”
My eyes fill with tears. He’s right—he’s so right, and I hate him for being right about this. He’s broken. “I really want to tell you don’t say that, but I can’t,” I admit. “But you know your ribs will get better. And . . . and eventually your legs.”
“I just want to be able to walk without my stupid crutches and braces before I die,” he whispers.
“I know,” I say.
“Can you . . . can you tell Arcadia I’m sorry?” he asks. “She invited me to her birthday yesterday.”
“I will.”
As soon as I open my phone, I see about sixty missed texts from her asking if Kas is okay. I explain the situation and send her his apology. Within ten seconds, she replies:
Ask him if he wants me to bring him some of last night’s birthday cake.
Kas says he’d like that. Then he closes his eyes again and falls back asleep. Or maybe he pretends to. I try to untangle my hands from his, but his fingers tighten around mine, and I can’t bring myself to pull away. He’s trying to be brave—he hates looking weak in front of people—but he looks so small and fragile right now. I stroke his arm gently, and eventually, some of the tension in his body eases, although he doesn’t really rest.
The door opens again. Even though it has one of those muffler things on the top his eyes snap back open. A nurse comes in to check his vitals. She’s young with her blonde hair gathered in a short ponytail.
“How are you feeling, hon?” she asks as she adjusts the IV in his arm.
“Not good,” he whispers.
“I’m so sorry to hear that.” She’s sort of patting his hand as she checks the heart rate monitor. “You know how I know you’re a fighter? When they brought you in yesterday and asked you about your pain level, you said a ten was a nine.”
He makes a soft sound.
She writes some stuff down on a clipboard. “What’s your pain level right now?”
“Maybe . . . four,” he says.
I give him a sharp look. “Kas.”
“Three and two thirds,” he says. “I can still do math, so it’s not bad.”
“You can do math because you’re a functional human being,” I say, looking at the nurse. “Eight. Maybe nine.”
“Eight and a half,” he mumbles.
She writes something down and adjusts some other things before she starts preparing a tray which includes gloves and a very long needle full of clear liquid. I try not to look at the needle. Kas is staring blankly at me.
“Are you his sister?” the nurse asks me as she pulls on her gloves. She swabs the inside of his elbow with alcohol and gets the needle.
“I’m mostly just here because I’m going to study medicine,” I say. “I’m, uh, getting some real-life experience in seeing people . . . suffer.” Kas gives me a look that might have been a glare if it wasn’t so weak. “Fine. I’m his friend.”
“Girlfriend,” he murmurs.
“Okay,” I say, trying and failing not to blush as the nurse raises her eyebrow at us. “Girlfriend.” It feels so weird to say that I’m somebody’s girlfriend. “But I do want to study medicine.”
“He has trypanophobia,” she says. “Can you keep talking to him?”
“What’s trypanophobia?” he asks me, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
“Try-pan-o-phobia,” I say, carefully correcting his pronunciation and trying to look anywhere but the needle the nurse his prepping. “It’s . . . a medical condition. It’s not dangerous. Usually. Well, sometimes it can be.” I hold his gaze as the nurse slides the needle into his arm—he’s already so out of it he doesn’t notice. “I mean—the condition itself isn’t life-threatening, but sometimes . . . people go a bit . . . wild. Well. What I’m trying to say is that it’s just a fear of something. Like some people have a fear of spiders and go crazy when they see one.”
“I know someone like that,” he says.
“Shut up,” I say, looking everywhere but the needle.
“You literally screamed the other day when you saw a spider,” he whispers. “It was, like, the size of your nail. I thought you were being stabbed.”
“Details,” I mutter. “I’m not scared of spiders.”
“Right . . . so you were scared of the wall.”
By now the nurse has finished giving him the injection. She puts a Band-Aid on his arm. “All done here,” she says.
Kas turns his head and flinches. “No no no don’t put that in me,” he says, his eyes widening as he looks at the needle, which appears much shorter now that it’s over.
“Kas . . . she kind of just did stick it in you,” I say as gently as possible. “While I was distracting you.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
He gives me dagger eyes. “You let her torture me?”
“With great pleasure.”
The nurse smiles and tells him to get some rest before she leaves, the door closing slowly behind her with a soft click.
“What do you want me to tell Rosie when I see her?” I whisper to Kas.
“Nothing,” he whispers back. “Don’t worry about it. Can I have some more water?” I hold the cup carefully to his lips and he takes another tiny sip. “Do you know where my mom is?” he asks. His voice is very small.
“No. Maybe she went back to work.”
He seems to be struggling to remember something. “No . . . she went to get something to eat.”
“Do you want me to stay here with you?” I ask.
“Go back to school,” he says. “I’m okay here.”
Right on cue, his mom comes into the room. There are dark shadows under her eyes like she hasn’t slept in days, which unfortunately might be possible. She’s carrying a plastic bag, probably full of food. I hope she’s not going to try to force Kas to eat something, because I know he’ll hate that. In my (very informed) opinion he just needs to sleep and let the pain medication work.
She gushes over me about how I’m so sweet to come take care of him and I should be in school and doesn’t my hair look nice today and do I want something to eat. I smile politely and say thank you. Lex comes in about a minute later, his hands stuffed into his pockets and an old comic tucked under his arm. His normally steely eyes soften when he sees Kas.
I turn to leave, knowing I should give them space, but he catches my hand. I give him a very quick kiss goodbye, right in front of his mom, and almost run out of the room before anyone can see me blushing.
I wonder how I’m going to tell Kas about his countdown.
I wonder if I’m even going to be able to tell him at all.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Time is weird.
Sometimes it takes forever and other times it takes only a moment.
The next three weeks fly by without me even seeing them. Kas gets better and goes to school again. I stay close to him all the time, terrified that Rosie Chen will try something on him again. She doesn’t approach Kas, probably knowing she might be permanently damaged if she gets within six feet of him while I’m around, but I get a million apologies from her.
I know she didn’t mean to hit him that hard. She didn’t know about his ribs. That doesn’t mean it was okay for her to hit him, but it was equally bad of Kas to call her what he did, and to spit on her. Not saying she didn’t deserve that. I mean, of course guys, let’s remain kind and respectful to everyone.
I can’t get mad at Kas, though, because number one, he’s my best friend, and number two, I’m not going to waste our time being angry with him for losing his temper. I have plenty of time to be nice to Rosie . . . later. If I want to.
And then, it’s Arcadia’s turn to need me.
I think that when someone is sick you don’t really know when their last good day is going to be until after that day. Arcadia’s last good day is nine days before her inevitable death. It’s also the last day that she comes to school.
Three days later, while in the last class of the day, I get a text from her mom. At first, I can’t breathe properly—she’s not supposed to die yet, she can’t be. The text is a blurry mess to my eyes but I pick out the words emergency last night and hospital. That’s when I know that yesterday was her last good day.
My heart sinks. I’m not prepared for this.
I don’t know how to go about preparing myself for this.
Kas and I walk to the sandwich shop together after school. I watch his legs move. After the accident, he couldn’t walk at all for almost a year, but after what I estimate to be four hundred physical therapy sessions, and a lot of pain (and cursing, I will admit, but from pain), he was able to start walking a little bit, then more, and now, we can go all the way to the sandwich shop together.
It’s the same girl behind the counter as before. I tell her I want a cap-reese. Some things never change including my terrible Italian pronunciation. But she doesn’t laugh at me this time. Kas orders a ham and turkey sandwich. I’m glad that he’s eating. A few months ago, he weighed so little I used to wonder if he’d be able to fly on the wind if he didn’t have his crutches and leg braces with him all the time. Now, he’s actually eating like a normal person.
The girl behind the counter bags our sandwiches for us. We sit inside, since it’s hot out, and eat them together. She’s watching us out of the corner of her eye. Like everybody else, she doesn’t know that this is probably the last time she’s going to see Kas.
“Did you hear about Arcadia?” I ask him softly.
“Yeah.” He isn’t looking at me. He takes a bite, chews slowly, swallows, fingers wrapping tighter around his sandwich, paper crinkling. I watch every movement. “Nine days,” he says quietly. “That’s . . . not enough time.”
“It isn’t.”
“I wish I’d gotten to know her better.”
“Kas, you can’t treat her like she’s already dead,” I snap, my voice rising. “You still can get to know her better. There’s time. I know it’s not much, but there is.”
“I wish I didn’t know,” he says.
“Me too,” I say. “Nothing good came out of this countdown thing except . . . well, money. Remember when I used to charge people ten dollars for me to literally look at the space above their heads and give them death prophecies?”
“You were kind of stupid then.”
“I still am. I’m worse now. I don’t know how to tell people things which is worse.”
“You know how to tell me things.”
I open my mouth, then close it, then open it again. The truth is that I don’t. That’s why I haven’t told him about his countdown yet. I’m trying to make myself feel better by convincing myself that he wouldn’t want to know, but a nagging voice in the back of my head tells me that he would.
Instead, I say, “If you only got one more wish before you died, what would you wish for?”
He stops, his sandwich halfway to his mouth to take another bite. At first he looks like he doesn’t know what to say. “You already know,” he says. “I’d wish to be able to walk like a normal person.”
“But . . . what if that couldn’t be true?” I ask. “What if you only had, say, one month for this wish to come true? What would you wish for then?”
“An infinite supply of cheese fries.”
“Kas!”
“I’m being serious! Think of all the things you can do with cheese fries!”
I hate that he’s making jokes at a time like this when I’m trying to ask a serious question. I hate that he doesn’t know this is a serious question.
Most of all I hate that I can’t tell him. Now, or ever.
“Kas,” I say again, covering my mouth with my hand and trying not to cry. “Please. Just tell me.”
“Don’t cry, Aza, please,” he says. He comes around the table, pulls me into his arms. I press the side of my face against his chest. His body is warm, his arms gentle around me. I almost believe that he’ll stay here with me forever.
I close my eyes and I do have that forever for a moment, forever of him holding me in an endless warm blackness in a place where I’m safe, where nothing happens, nothing matters. In that forever place Kas never lets go of me. When I open my eyes again, only a couple of seconds have passed and he walks back to his seat. I wipe my eyes and he sits down and we look at each other for a minute.
“What if you couldn’t have cheese fries,” I try again.
“I don’t know. What would you wish for?”
“I know this is very specific, but . . . I wish that we could go to the park with the bench under the tree together and have a picnic with cheese and tomato sandwiches,” I say. He smiles, so I continue. “And I’d bring To Kill a Mockingbird and you can bring your own book and we wouldn’t have to worry about anything.”
“That would be nice,” he says softly. He holds out his finger, bending it like he’s beckoning, and I hook mine with it. “Three, two, one—”
I make my wish, and he makes his, which I really hope is not about cheese fries. Then we wait for a sign. Usually, people see an eagle or a golden butterfly or something equally majestic and beautiful. Our sign comes in the form of a bird which flies into the window and breaks its neck.
“Not gonna come true?” I say as we throw away the wrapping paper around our sandwiches and go outside to look at the bird. I crouch down beside it on the grass. It must have died instantly. I scoop up some dirt with my hands and give it a burial while Kas watches. “Oh, great bird, much missed—”
“Stop,” he says. “You have absolutely no idea how to eulogize a bird.”
“I don’t know how to eulogize anything.”
“Let’s just leave,” he says. “People are looking at us.”
“You gotta say a few words for the bird first,” I say. “Otherwise it can’t go to heaven.”
He clears his throat. “Okay. This bird was very special to us because it was a sign that our wishes were going to come true. We hope. It could have also been a sign that we will both die gory and unnecessarily drawn-out deaths. May it rest in peace under this topsoil outside this sandwich shop in a random town in the United States. Lord grant eternal rest. Amen.”
“Amen,” I say. I can’t believe we literally just held a funeral for a bird. People are definitely looking at us now.
With a sudden burst of inspiration, I grab Kas’s arm as we walk away from the shop. “Give me your crutches.”
“What?”
“I’m serious,” I say. “If you want to walk without them, you gotta start now.”
“Aza, you remember what happened when we went to visit your grandma, we don’t need to do this in public—”
I snatch his crutches away from him. He tries to stop me, but since I can walk without them, I win. I hold them just out of his reach. He grabs at them, but I move further away from him.
“Aza, stop!” he snaps.
“No!” I snap back. “I need you to learn to walk without them!”
“What are you, my nurse?”
“By this point, I literally am!”
“Fine! But you’re not my mom!”
“I’m a sub right now for her!”
“Just give me crutches.”
“Absolutely not.”
He tries to take a step towards me without anything to hold on to and immediately falls, hitting the sidewalk hard. I drop his crutches and rush to help him up, but he slaps my hand away.
“Don’t touch me,” he mutters, his voice harsher than I can ever remember it being.
My eyes sting with tears. He didn’t really hit me hard but my hand burns too.
He struggles to get up. First to his knees, then one knee up, and finally, his hands pressing against his leg braces to steady himself, he drags himself to his feet. I hand him his crutches back without thinking. His arms are scraped up and bleeding.
“Kas, I’m really sorry,” I whisper.
“It’s fine,” he says, gritting his teeth as he stands up properly and puts the crutches under his shoulders, his head still hanging down. I know it isn’t fine.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I say again. I wipe some blood off his elbow. “I didn’t mean for you to fall.”
“I know,” he says quietly. “Just . . . let’s go home.”
In this case, “home” means straight to the hospital to visit Arcadia, who we’re both worried about, although she’s already texted me that she’s “completely fine”.
“Visiting hours are over,” the receptionist says.
I sigh, staring at the wall as Kas argues with her. Her countdown says twenty-seven years left. Could she not give some of those years to Arcadia and Kas? No. I can’t wish for things like that. It’s not fair.
Eventually, the receptionist caves. We’re allowed into Arcadia’s room for ten minutes.
She’s asleep, maybe unconscious. She doesn’t wake up when we come in. If I thought Kas looked bad while he was in the hospital, she looks even worse. I can almost see through her ashen skin. I can almost see the bones showing through on her face. And the cancer cells that are killing her.
Her parents are both there with her. Her mom looks up and smiles at us when we come in, but her dad’s head remains bowed like he’s already accepted this.
“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Galanis,” Kas says as we pause by the door. “Can we come in?”
His mom moves aside. “Please. I think she needs you both with her right now.” She takes a slow breath in. “She’s been really tired, but she asked for you two.”
I stand a few feet away from the bed and just look at her. Kas stands there with me. Arcadia’s parents watch us watch her. Eventually, her mom leaves, promising to be back in five minutes. Her dad still hasn’t said anything. I get the feeling that he’s crying.
I expect Arcadia to smile and greet us cheerfully. But she doesn’t. She looks small, fragile, wasted, over.
“Hi,” I say. “How are you feeling?”
“Honest opinion or TV personality opinion?”
“We want to hear your honest opinion, of course—”
“Like I’m ready to die,” she says.
I stare at her. “Don’t say that. You don’t get to say that.”
“You asked for my honest opinion,” she says. “Kas, are you okay? You look like you ate too much or something.”
“I’m fine,” he says. “We’re talking about you right now, Arcadia.”
“I know we are,” she sighs, waving her hand dismissively. “I guess you want to know what happened to me, but it’s honestly not very interesting. They drained a bunch of fluid from my lungs, and they’re keeping me here for ‘observation’ or whatever. I don’t know why people with cancer always have to feel like specimens. I am not a specimen. It’s so undignified.” She sighs again.
I wish I could tell you that she remained positive until the end or whatever, but she definitely doesn’t seem positive right now. She just seems . . . done.
I pull a chocolate bar out of my backpack, one I always keep in there for emergencies. “Here. You deserve this.”
She peels off a tiny corner of the gold foil wrapping and taking the tiniest bite. “Mm. Thanks. You’re amazing.” Then she puts it on the table next to her bed, careful of the IV line in her arm. Maybe she just can’t eat much of it.
“Do you want us to leave you alone now?” Kas says bluntly.
“No, no. You can stay. I’m just tired. Sorry.”
“I get it,” he says. “We’ll visit tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” she says. “Bye. Love you both.”
Turns out that tomorrow never happens for me because when I wake up, every joint in my body is aching. I turn over, rubbing my eyes. My arm feels like it weighs half a ton and my head is spinning in dizzying circles. When I take my temperature, it’s definitely too high.
I want to give Arcadia a call at least but I’m too tired to even answer my texts. I think about at least calling my mom, but she’s at work. She doesn’t need to worry about me. I don’t want to get my dad either even though he’s at home right now because he’ll panic and make it a big thing. That’s the last thing I want. I can take care of myself anyway. I pull the blanket over my messy hair and fall asleep again.
There’s no question of me being allowed to visit Arcadia now, even a day later when I feel nearly back to normal. I could spread this disease to her.
Doesn’t matter. She’s dying anyway.
Not like my germs could change any of that.
So that day was the Last Day I saw her.
The Last Thing She Said To Me was: Love you both.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A bit more than a week later, Kas and I are in the middle of watching a movie together at his house when someone calls him. He glances at it and his face crumples. I pause the movie. I didn’t calculate the exact time, but I know what happened as soon as I see Arcadia’s mom as the caller ID.
He answers, and they have a short conversation. All he says is the word “Okay”, even though nothing is okay.
He hangs up and explains to my barely functional ears, in a voice that is impossibly gentle, that Arcadia died about an hour ago. She was unconscious, he says. She didn’t feel pain. Her heart just eventually stopped.
At first, I say, “What, no, no, this can’t be happening.”
Then I say, “I’m not going to cry.”
Lex comes into the room and flops into a chair, grabbing the remote and playing the movie again, completely oblivious. Kas doesn’t even look at me. He looks at his hand, which is tracing shapes on the couch.
I hug my legs tighter against me. My chest feels heavy. In fact, my entire body feels heavy, like it’s slowly turning into lead. I look at the TV, but I don’t see what’s happening on the screen. I look anywhere but Kas. I can’t look at him.
Lex gets up and leaves after a while, obviously bored of the movie, leaving just the two of us here in this quiet-not-quiet room. I watch him go. My throat feels tight, making it hard to swallow. I try not to cry. I really, really try. I take small, shaky breaths through my nose and clench my hands into fists and press my head so hard against my knees that red marks bloom against my temples.
Eventually, I have to look over at Kas. His lips are pressed together. He’s trying not to cry too. There’s infinite sadness in his eyes—sadness that’s so deep it never ends.
“Kas?” My voice cracks at the end of his name. I close my mouth tightly, swallowing hard past the lump in my throat.
“Do you know why I said level ten pain was actually a nine?” he says. “I was saving my ten—” He breathes deeply, shakily. “This is—definitely a ten . . .”
He starts crying then. I can’t cry too because my stomach feels like someone tied a knot in it and it’s making it hard to breathe. I just stay. That’s all I can do. Just stay. He holds onto me, his body shaking as he sobs into my shirt. I put my arms around his neck and let him cry. His tears are warm and wet, soaking into my clothes. I hold him as tightly as I can. I will never, never let him go. His fingers dig into my back as he grips my dress. It’s really, really hard to see someone you care about this much cry. Kas isn’t supposed to be like this. Kas is the boy who’s calm, who’s confident, the one who gets called out in class for a perfect grade, the one who girls make sure he notices when they pass. This broken person holding onto me like nothing else matters is not a version I can reconcile with Kas.
“Shh, it’s okay,” I whisper to him. “I’ve got you.”
His sobs become quieter before they turn into shallow breaths. Then, silence. He leans back against the couch. His eyes are closed, tears still slipping out from beneath his wet lashes. His face is blotchy but I don’t think he cares. After a minute, he opens his eyes again, but doesn’t look at me. Instead, he looks at the movie, where some people are shooting some other people.
“She never got to finish the book,” he says, his voice cracked and hoarse from crying.
“Which one?”
“I gave her my copy of The Secret Garden. She kept trying to get me to spoil the ending.” He presses his fist against his mouth, and I brace myself for a fresh wave of tears, but he chokes them away. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be crying—”
“Kas, don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “You’re supposed to be crying.” I brush the tangles out of his hair with my fingers. His breath is coming in broken gasps now. “We can still spoil the ending for her,” I say. “We both know how to talk to ghosts.” He starts to cry again. “Shh,” I whisper.
He nods and wipes his face with the back of his hand. A few minutes of silence, broken only by the gunshots and explosions going on in the movie, passes between us. He sniffles occasionally, but otherwise he’s quiet. I keep stroking his hair, trying to comfort him in the only way I know how.
Lex comes back in, holding three sodas. He drops one on each of our laps and flops back in his chair again. He doesn’t look at us. The soda fizzes as he opens it. He drops the metal tab inside by accident and curses under his breath in Polish before turning the volume up.
Kas whispers to me, “Do you think she’s okay?”
“Definitely,” I whisper back. “I bet she’s laughing at us up there for being so sad right now about her.”
He nods again. “It’s just . . . I can’t really imagine what it will . . . like, I’m just waiting for her to text me.”
“Me too.” I curl up against his side.
Lex turns around to face us, his mouth open like he’s going to say something, maybe about the movie, but then his expression instantly changes when he sees our faces. “Aza?” he says. “Kas?”
“I’m fine,” Kas says quickly, his eyes still fixed on the TV screen.
“He’s just . . . very moved by the movie,” I add quickly.
“It’s messed up,” Lex replies forcefully. “I mean, the part where—are you guys actually okay?”
“We’re fine,” Kas says again, averting his gaze.
Lex eventually looks away from us.
Kas rests his head on my lap and we keep watching the movie although I’ve forgotten what it's about. There’s a guy called Six (I feel bad for whoever his parents were, coming up with such a horrible name) and a girl called Claire with a super high-tech pacemaker. Right now we’re watching Claire stumble around grey pillars in a big kitchen, or maybe it’s not a kitchen, everything feels so blurry like I’ve just been spinning around and around that it’s too hard to focus.
“Let’s go for a drive,” he says.
“Kas . . .”
“Please. Just us. Right now. I’ll bring sandwiches or something. I just don’t want to stay here anymore. Let’s go to the park.”
“Okay.”
So we put his leg braces back on and he goes into the kitchen to do some stuff while I hunt through dusty piles of old clothes and chairs in the garage before finding a wrinkled picnic blanket. I doubt Lex even notices we left because when I peek into the living room his eyes are still glued to the screen.
Kas has finished putting some food in a cooler, which I carry along with the picnic blanket out to the car, but as I put everything in the trunk he tells me to wait and goes back inside for a moment. When he comes back, he has To Kill a Mockingbird under his arm.
“I have an extra copy,” he explains.
Despite everything, I smile.
“Ready?” I ask as I help him into the passenger seat.
He nods and hands me the keys. I get in and adjust the seat for a minute before I start the car. The engine rumbles smoothly to life. It’s the same car that Lex picked us up in for our date.
About ten minutes later, we stop at the park we sometimes go to during lunch break or after school. Kas unfolds the picnic blanket on the grass while I bring the cooler over. There are cheese and tomato sandwiches, four different types of salad (pasta, fruit, plain lettuce, and tomato), and juice.
“Did you really make all this in ten minutes?” I ask. “I didn’t know you could cook.”
“Salad and sandwiches don’t really count as cooking.”
“True. But thank you anyway.”
We lay on our backs on the picnic blanket for a while. I shade my eyes to look up at the sky, wishing I’d remembered my sunglasses from home. After we’ve eaten literally everything he packed (which was meant for more like six people, not two, but whatever), he opens To Kill a Mockingbird to the bookmarked page and starts reading out loud from somewhere in the middle of it.
“The Colored balcony ran along three walls of the courtroom like a second-story veranda, and from it we could see everything . . .”
He reads and reads. I just listen. Usually I’d comment about something, laugh at the right times, or make disappointed sounds especially since we’re in one of the climaxes of the book. But I’m quiet now.
Kas pauses in the middle of Mayella’s questioning. “Do you think she’s watching us right now?”
“Yeah.”
“Think she’s happy we’re here? Doing . . . this?”
I turn my head towards him. “She said her birthday wish was that she wanted us to be together,” I say carefully. I don’t mention that she said she wanted me and Kas to be together in the time that we had left.
“So do I,” he says.
“Don’t make that your birthday wish too,” I say. His birthday is in a week, on May fifteenth. “Because I promise we’ll be together. Always.”
“You don’t know that,” he says.
“I do,” I say. “Like I know about the countdowns? I know this.”
“Okay. I won’t wish for that,” he says. “What should I wish for?”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
He nods, turns back to the book, and continues reading aloud for us. I’m busy thinking about what he should wish for on his birthday, though. He’ll only have three weeks after it. Maybe he should wish for a dream trip—no, with the coming baby, that won’t be possible. Maybe a new car—but he can’t drive. Thinking of all this makes me think of Arcadia again and all the things she deserved to have wished for, if she’s just had more time to live.
I tell myself, over and over again, that she had a good life. I have to keep reminding myself to think of her in the past tense. She might have been sick, but her parents were together, and she’d never lost someone. She doesn’t know what this feels like. I know she wouldn’t want us to waste our time being sad about her, which is why I’m trying so hard to keep a straight face about it.
With her parents on my mind, I wonder if I should text him, but I really don’t know what I’d say to them, so I don’t. Instead, I wait for Kas to finish the chapter, then ask if I can call them. He puts the book down. I call and put the phone on speaker.
Mrs. Galanis picks up on the first ring.
“Hi,” I say. “First of all. I’m really sorry about what happened. Second of all. I wanted to ask you something.”
“Go ahead,” she says. She sounds like she’s been crying for hours now.
“I just wanted to ask if you and Mr. Galanis are going to stay together,” I say.
“We’re not getting a divorce or anything,” she says after a pause, sounding confused.
“Okay,” I say. “I wanted to make sure.”
“Oh, honey, don’t worry,” she says. “We’re going to stay together.”
“Okay. Good. Thank you,” I say, and she hangs up before I even get the chance to say goodbye. At Kas’s questioning look, I explain, “Arcadia asked me to make sure her parents were going to stay together.”
He pushes himself up on one elbow. “If I just . . . disappear, do you think my parents will get back together?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, my heart pounding. Does he know? Who told him? Was it Arcadia?
“I mean, if I ran away or something,” he says. My heart slows in relief, but only for a second.
I think about it for a moment. “They might.”
The truth is that I don’t really know what his parents would do—I don’t know what they will do after he dies. I secretly hope that they will actually get back together, just like Kas does, but I know life doesn’t work that way.
I half-expect that Kas will be able to walk again in the next few weeks, just like he wished, and he’ll have this beautiful little victory, but miracles don’t exist. Knowing that he has a month left is the reason I wish for all these things. If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t really be thinking about them as much.
“Maybe I should run away for a little bit,” he says as he picks up the book again. “Like Dill in the story. Remember when I did that once?”
I nod. “Yeah, you came to my house and we ate gummy bears.”
“Like a sleepover except without sleep.”
“Were your parents mad?”
“I mean . . . my mom was about to call the police when she thought about calling your parents first, so, yeah, she was pretty upset,” he says. “It was fun, though.”
“She needs you now,” I say. “You can’t just leave again.”
“I know,” he sighs. “Do you want me to keep reading?”
“Not really,” I say. “We’re done with the chapter anyway.”
He nods, setting the book aside, and stretches out next to me on the picnic blanket. He keeps fidgeting, though, adjusting himself like he’s uncomfortable, and looking around as if he’s expecting someone.
I give him a look. “What are you doing?”
“Relaxing. Kind of.”
“You’re definitely not relaxing,” I say.
“I don’t really know how to relax,” he admits.
I give him another look, but he’s not smiling, which means he’s serious about this. “You just have to exist,” I say. “Stop thinking about everything else.”
“Existing is overrated.”
“Just close your eyes or something, Kas. Like, be Zen or whatever.”
After a few minutes of blissful silence in which I pick out six different animals in the clouds (rabbit, bear, chipmunk, deformed chipmunk, squirrel, dog), he says, “This is really boring.”
“That’s the point of relaxing.”
“This is also painful,” he says, sitting up again to take off his leg braces. They’ve left deep red marks on his skin, which already has dozens of white scars left by the accident. I remember being in sixth grade, seeing his legs work as he did lap after lap around the track, watching them drive him forward with endless strength and energy. Now, they can’t even hold him up.
He sighs in relief once they’re off, laying back again.
“Better?” I ask.
He makes a sound that’s probably agreement.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

When I look over at him again, he’s asleep. I can tell that he is by the way his breathing is deep and steady. At first, I consider leaving him to rest. He looks exhausted. But the sky is getting dark, and as the sun fades, it’s beginning to get cold enough that I want to go home.
I shake him. “Kas.”
“Mmm,” he says.
“Wake up.”
He doesn’t move. I sigh and pack everything up, then carry the cooler to the car. When I return, he has his arm thrown across his eyes.
“Come on, let’s go,” I say. “Sit up, I’ll help you with your braces.”
We try to put them on, but when he tightens the left one around his leg something snaps. I flinch. Kas stares in disbelief at the piece of plastic in his hands which has come off from the leg brace.
“Okay, no, that isn’t good,” I say.
He stares incredulously at the plastic, which is snapped clean through. “I don’t even know how I broke that.”
“Neither do I.”
The adjustable piece is no longer functional, which means that the section of the brace which is supposed to support his shin is useless. I don’t know if he can walk without it. Even with his crutches, he relies on both leg braces to move more than half an inch at a time. The car isn’t far, but half an inch at a time means that we’ll be stuck here the entire night and then some.
Kas takes off the rest of his brace. “This day just keeps getting better and better.”
“Don’t jinx it,” I say. “And it could be a lot worse, Kas. The car battery could be dead. It could rain on us.” I help him take off his other leg brace. Both of us know he won’t need it anymore until we can find him a replacement for the left one. “Do you have a spare in the car or something?”
He shakes his head, amused. “Do I look like a guy who keeps leg braces under the back seat in case of emergency?”
“It might be a good idea,” I reply defensively. “Do you at least have one at home?”
“No. We have to special order them from Germany or somewhere. Which means I basically can’t walk for the next two and a half weeks.”
This is pretty bad, worse than either of us want to admit. It’s even darker and colder now. A nearby tree rustles ominously, startling us both.
“Should we call someone?” I ask in a small voice.
“Absolutely not. If my mom hears my leg brace broke, she’ll start crying and get me airlifted or something. And I don’t want Lex to see me like this.”
“I can carry you,” I offer.
“No.”
“Kas,” I say firmly.
“I’m not gonna let you carry me.”
“We don’t have another option right now.”
“Aza. It’s not going to work. You’re, like, half my size.”
“Am not,” I counter. “I’m five six and you’re only six one. So like seven inches taller than me. And you weigh literally nothing.”
“I’m a hundred and sixty pounds last time I checked.”
“With leg braces?”
“Yeah.”
“So more like one-fifty. I’m one-thirty-five. And I work out. I can do it.”
He just shakes his head.
“No one’s watching,” I say. “We both know you can’t walk, so just let me carry you.”
“We can just stay here,” he says quietly.
I sigh heavily. “Kas, don’t be stubborn.”
“Really,” he says. “We can just . . . not go home.”
“No. You have to go home, remember? Your mom needs you. And Lex needs you. He doesn’t say it, but he does.”
A wolf howls somewhere in the mountains, followed by another wolf. I instinctively grab him, my heartrate doubling in an instant.
"Okay, okay, come on, let’s move,” he says, sounding panicky now as a second wolf joins in the howl. They’re far away, barely audible, but that might just because my heart is pumping so hard in my ears I can barely hear anything else. Everything is so dark now I can barely see the car parked twenty or thirty feet away from us.
“I’ll get your braces and crutches first,” I say, but he’s holding onto my wrist tightly with both hands, his eyes wide with fear. The wolves have stopped howling for now but every hair on the back of my neck is standing up. I decide it would be better to get him to the car and then come back for the rest of the stuff.
Another howl. Closer? I can’t tell.
“Come on,” I insist.
Kas doesn’t move. His pride is still at war with his survival instincts. I always knew he had a big ego like every nearly-seventeen-year-old teenage boy who grows up in America but this is kind of pushing it for me.
He hesitates a moment longer, then reluctantly wraps his arms around my neck. I put one of my arms around his back and the other under his legs, then left him, biting my tongue to keep from making a sound. I almost drop him at first and his entire body tenses, but eventually, I manage to lift him all the way.
I take a few painful steps towards the car, then a few more, until we’re halfway there. My legs are burning.
“This is so humiliating,” he says.
“You could have crawled. That would have been worse.” I stop for a second, trying to catch my breath, which is burning in my lungs.
“Lex is never gonna let me live this down.”
“He isn’t here right now.”
“Yeah, but you’re terrible at keeping secrets. You sold me out about my cookie stash, remember?”
“Your mom offered to pay me twenty bucks.” I gasp out, still trying to get my breath back. “I couldn’t refuse.”
Something snaps nearby. This time I really do almost drop him.
“Kas, what was that?” I whisper.
Kas stares back at me, his face pale and his eyes impossibly big in the faint traces of moonlight across the grass. He looks terrified. I can feel his breath coming hard and fast against the side of my neck.
“Tell me that’s just the wind,” he whispers.
“That is not just the wind.”
Another snap. His nails go into the back of my neck hard enough to make it almost bleed, which means he’s really scared.
“Run, run, run,” he gasps.
I start running as fast as I can towards the car, not caring how much my legs hurt anymore. All that matters is getting Kas to safety.
I almost run right into the car. “Keys, where, quickly,” I blurt out.
“I gave them to you!”
I drop him unceremoniously on the curb and fumble in my pocket. Several infinitely long seconds later, I yank them out and unlock the car. The trees rustle behind us. Kas grabs my arm and drags himself into the car. I try to help him, but my hands are shaking so badly that I can’t do much of anything.
I slam his door closed and run around the car to get into the driver’s seat. I hold onto the steering wheel as tightly as I can.
We try to steady our breathing, listening as hard as we can, but nothing else comes from outside, not even the sound of the wolves. For a few minutes, we just sit there in silence. The world beyond ours barely even breathes either.
“That,” I say eventually, “was the most scared I’ve ever felt in my life.”
“Me, too.” Kas is shaking like a leaf in the wind. “But, Aza . . . you still need to get my stuff.”
I stare at him. “Oh my god. If you think I’m going back out there—”
“I’m just kidding.” He laughs, but it’s breathless. His smile fades quickly. “Thanks for not leaving me.”
I glance at him quickly. “Kas, I wouldn’t—”
“I know,” he replies. “I just—I feel like I’m always slowing you down.”
Tears burn the back of my eyes. I look away from him and start the car.
“Don’t cry,” he says gently. He reaches over and puts his hand on my arm.
“I was just thinking about Arcadia.” I sniffle and wipe my nose. “She’s probably laughing at us right now for being so scared over nothing.”
I rest my head against the window, looking out. Still nothing there. Eventually, I sit up straight in my seat, and we drive away. I feel guilty about leaving Kas’s things behind, along with the picnic blanket, although there’s no way I’m going back out there tonight. Maybe I can get it tomorrow morning. He needs to order his spare one anyway.
We arrive at his house a few minutes later. The short path leading to it is pitch-black and there’s only light in a single kitchen window downstairs as well as the light coming from the TV in the living room, which is still playing.
“I’ll go get Lex,” I say.
“Okay. Just . . . don’t make it sound like a big deal.”
“I won’t.”
I find Lex on the couch watching a new movie now. He barely looks up when I come in, mumbling something about “Where did you go” but actually starts paying attention to me when I pause the movie.
I explain the situation. He sighs dramatically like I’m asking him to carry an entire bus inside the house, takes an extra long time to button up his jacket, and finally we go outside together.
“Do we really have to do this?” he grumbles, his face scrunched up in annoyance.
“Lex, he can’t walk.”
“You could have carried him.”
“Already did.”
“How, exactly, did his brace snap?”
“I don’t know—he was just adjusting it,” I say. By this point, we’ve reached the car. Kas is still slumped in the passenger seat. He looks smaller somehow without his leg braces.
“Seriously, what happened to you guys?” Lex says.
“Nothing,” Kas murmurs.
“We’ll tell you tomorrow,” I say.
Lex lifts him into his arms. “God, you’re heavy,” he complains, but it looks like Kas weighs nothing in his strong arms as he carries him into the house. I close the car door, open the front door, close it, open Kas’s bedroom door downstairs.
“Are you staying over to finish the movie?” Lex asks me.
“I have to go home.”
“Want me to walk with you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Be careful,” he says.
“I will.”
If Kas is my boyfriend, then that makes Lex my older brother. I sometimes wished I had siblings until I had them. The nice thing about them is that we can be just as close as siblings, but we aren’t around each other most of the day so we don’t fight as much. All of my friends are constantly bickering with their siblings, which is number one, very annoying and number two, extremely annoying when I’m trying to relax.
Lex is saying, “I’ll leave you two alone for a second.”
Once he’s gone, closing the door behind us, Kas just sighs and sinks further into the pillows. “What does he expect us to do right now? Be disgusting and romantic?”
“Maybe.” I pull the blanket over him, then fidget awkwardly, trying to think of something else to say. I come up with: “Are you sure it takes two and a half weeks for a new brace to come?”
“More, if my mom doesn’t want to pay for express shipping. It’s fine, though. I can just duct tape the old one or something. I’ll figure it out.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I’m sorry for crying earlier,” he says. “I’m not supposed to be . . . like that.”
“Don’t apologize. You don’t have anything to apologize for anything.”
He closes his eyes. “Can you . . . I mean . . . I don’t want to cry again in front of you.”
“I’ll leave,” I say.
“I don’t mean—”
“I know.” I tuck the blanket around him. “Goodnight, Kas.”
“Goodnight, Aza.”

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

At school a week later, I don’t talk to anyone.
Kas didn’t come. He says his mom is trying to get him to attend classes in the wheelchair she rented, but of course he said no. The baby is going to be born in two weeks, so he would probably have been at home anyway, helping his mom out as much as he can.
It’s Kas’s birthday tomorrow.
I wonder if he’s going to get to have an actual celebration for it. His last birthday.
He keeps texting me things like “Wanna move to Germany”, so that his braces wouldn’t have to be shipped overseas, or “Should have done gymnastics”, so that he can walk on his hands and not use his legs at all, as well of screenshots of Lex’s messages, which are all somewhere along the lines of “Sucks to suck”. In return, I barely say anything. I can tell we’re both still hurting. I’m just quieter over text when I’m sad.
Rosie doesn’t even look at me. I see her crying a couple of times. I don’t ask why. I don’t think she knows about Arcadia. I hope she doesn’t. I hope no one even notices. No one seems to except for me.
The halls are so empty without her.
So are the classrooms. The seat next to me has no one in it. I barely pay attention to what’s going on. There’s no announcement for her, no whispers. Maybe her parents haven’t told anyone else yet, anyone but me and Kas.
Did Arcadia ask them to tell us?
I realize that last night I didn’t ask Kas to find her star so that I could look at it. I didn’t really sleep last night. Things chased me in my nightmares, and when I was awake, I was thinking about her again. I kept waiting for her to text me, but she didn’t. I was about to text her at several points before realizing that she would never answer.
Now I look at her empty desk and the empty chair behind it. I wait for her to rush into class, for Mr. Brady to say hello to her and go back to teaching like nothing happened. But something did happen. Arcadia isn’t coming through this door. Ever. Again.
I find another note when I open my locker to get my science book in between classes. The book weighs seven pounds (I actually did weigh it) and it’s too heavy to carry around all day, so I usually just leave it in the locker until I need it.
I know this note can’t be from Kas since he hasn’t been here since the last time I opened my locker. I unfold it very slowly, my fingers trembling a little bit. The paper is crisp, folded so neatly, like it’s just been written.
The handwriting is unmistakable. It’s Arcadia’s handwriting. The slant and loops are familiar, and as I hold the paper to my nose for a moment to sniff deeply, it even smells like her—like fleece. The note is written with the same purple pen she always uses, her favorite pen, the one that never seems to run out of ink.
This is some kind of sick joke.
This has to be.
I look around, but the hall is empty. Who put this in my locker? Who could have replicated her handwriting so neatly? Most importantly, who took her pen? I’ve never seen a purple in the shade her pen is in.
It’s definitely her.
I blink back the tears and start reading.
Hey beautiful.
Sorry I didn’t say a proper goodbye to you. I know how much you hate goodbyes.
You’re probably wondering how I’m doing. I’m okay. I’m not hurting anymore. I miss you so, so much. Can’t wait to see you again up here. I hope you’re okay too.
I know you don’t believe in heaven. I didn’t believe in heaven either a couple of months ago. But I definitely do now. Heaven = Being With People You Love. I don’t think I ever told you how much I love you. I didn’t want to make it awkward.
Anyway, I can tell you now: I love you so, so, so much. When I was little, every birthday wish I made was that I’d have a sister. One who is smart, kind, funny, and looks out for me. You are every bit of that to me. I hope I was even a fraction of the friend you deserve.
Some other things I want to tell you:
1) Take care of Kas. He needs you.
2) Don’t cry too much about me. Things are good here.
3) At my funeral, make sure they have good snacks. Not like that eggplant casserole thing my aunt makes.
4) There are a lot of infinities. Some are big and some are small.
5) Numbers are a small infinity. I know there are an infinite number of numbers between 1 and 2, but you can just say “1, 2” and all those numbers go away.
6) Whenever you get sad that I’m not around just say “1, 2” and it can go away. Sadness is a small infinity.
7) There are two examples of big infinities that you can’t skip over with “1, 2”. One is love and the other is regret.
8) Don’t regret your choices after you make them. Trust me, if you’re making the wrong choice, I’ll get a message to you.
9) Please, please, please promise that you won’t tell Kas about his countdown. He doesn’t want to know. I know he doesn’t want to know. You know I know he doesn’t want to know. He loves you. Let him love you until the end. And after that, always.
See you up here sometime, girl.
Arcadia
I press my fist to my mouth to stop the tears. Reading this note makes it real to me that she’s gone. Before, I could pretend—almost—that she’d just show up at lunch, or catch up with me at the bus.
Now I can’t pretend.
I can’t pretend anything anymore.
I can’t pretend that I will be able to tell Kas about his countdown.
I can’t even pretend that he’s okay, because he isn’t. He isn’t okay at all. He hasn’t been okay for a long time.
I stand there for a while, and when I turn around, I bump into Rosie. She catches my arm before I can run away and hope she didn’t see my face, blotchy from crying.
“Hey,” she says. “I—I’m really sorry.”
“For what?” I say. She doesn’t know about Arcadia yet, does she?
“For punching him. Kas. I didn’t . . . I didn’t apologize to you properly.”
“You don’t need to apologize to me,” I reply stiffly.
“I do,” she says quickly. “I really do. I’ve been horrible to you. Like, even before I was dating Kas.”
“He was always interested in you,” I say, my voice bitter. “Since ninth grade. I knew. I could see the way he looked at you.”
“That isn’t anything,” she says. “He just looked at me because he’s a boy and I’m an arguably cute girl his age. People flirt with me all the time, he wasn’t the first. It was me who really wanted him. And for a while—” She stops, and I can hear a sob forming along the ragged edge of her voice. “For a while, I thought he wanted me back.”
“Okay,” I say, not following.
“He just always chose you in the end.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “And I thought, like, if I could really make him hurt . . . he wouldn’t choose you anymore. Like, not punching him or anything—messing with him, I mean, trying to make him guilty for dumping me. But he did choose you. Every time. He does.”
“Okay,” I say again, quieter this time.
“Anyway.” She takes a deep breath. “I just wanted to say that. That’s all.”
I nod, swallow, resist the urge to repeat my last two sentences. “Thanks.”
Later that day, during math class, sixth period, my phone rings loudly. Startled, I nearly jump out of my seat before putting it on silent as fast as I can. Everyone stares at me. Including the teacher, Mr. Johnson.
“Sorry,” I mumble, ducking my head. I’m pretty sure my face looks like a stoplight right now.
My phone rings three more times over the next five minutes. On the fifth time it rings, I raise my hand for a bathroom pass and step out into the hall. By the time I’m ready to answer, my phone has stopped ringing again.
When I open it, I see that all the missed calls are from Kas. My heart sinks. He knows I’m in school, and he’d only call me five times if there was a real emergency.
I call him again as he calls me, so I try to hang up on my own call as he hangs up on his. After some effort, I answer his next call.
“Kas?”
“Aza?” He sounds panicked. “Listen, I need your help.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“It’s—it’s my mom—I think—I think the baby—I don’t know what to do.” His voice is shaking.
My free hand clenches into a fist then unclenches slowly. The baby isn’t supposed to be coming now. Is something wrong?
“Kas, is your mom okay?” I demand.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Please, you’re a girl. You know about medical stuff. You gotta help me here. She keeps—she’s in a lot of pain. I don’t know if that’s normal or what. She says she’s fine but she’s not herself. Please.”
“Okay, call 911,” I say.
“Okay,” he says and hangs up.
I don’t go back to class—I sprint down the hall and rush outside into the muggy air. I drove to school today since I woke up late and missed the bus. I get in my car (actually my mom’s second car that she lets me borrow sometimes, same difference) and speed towards the hospital.
I find Lex and Kas in the hospital waiting room. Kas is still in the wheelchair, since he doesn’t have his leg braces. They look up when they see me coming. Lex walks over to me.
“Is she okay?” I ask.
“Not sure,” he says. “I hope so. Apparently, Kas kinda freaked out and called 911, and there was this whole scene with the paramedics and an ambulance and a fire truck and I thought they would bring an entire SWAT team for—”
“I told him to do that.”
“Oh. Well, I trust your authority.”
We go over to Kas, who barely smiles when I sit down in the place next to him. He’s much quieter than usual. I’d have expected him to be moaning about the utter humiliation of being in a wheelchair, but he doesn’t.
He seems about to say something, but sighs instead, looking at the wheelchair, tracing its outside with his fingertips. “Do I look like her? Like . . . right before she died?”
My heart squeezes in my chest. “No, Kas, you don’t,” I say. “You’re fine. You’re strong, and you’ll walk without your crutches, I promise.”
“You don’t know that,” he says.
I want to tell him that I do know this, but that would be another lie. And you’re not supposed to lie, according to the ninth commandment. I feel like I’m drowning in an endless sea of lies by this point. I told him he has time and I told his parents he has time and he doesn’t.
Instead I say, “Your birthday’s tomorrow, remember?”
“I know,” he says. Then hesitates like he wants to tell me something but decides not to. “On my eighteenth birthday—next year—do you think we’ll still be together?”
“I have no idea,” I say. “My mom says that every teenage relationship always ends. She yelled at me a lot when she found out we were together. Like, actually together. But . . . I don’t think she’s right.”
“So . . . it’s forever? Until one of us dies?”
“Yes,” I say.
He takes my hand. I tighten my fingers around his. “Your hand is warm,” he says softly.
I roll my eyes. “Of course it’s warm.”
“I mean your hands are a normal temperature, mine are just cold,” he clarifies.
I pull his other hand over to me. Lex is watching us, but I don’t care. I don’t want to waste time being embarrassed for loving somebody when we have so little time left.
Kas notices his brother’s eyes on us and gives him a sharp look. Lex pretends to be very interested in something behind us.
“It’s not even like we’re being weird right now,” I whisper to Kas. “I mean, we can if you want—”
“No. Definitely not. I don’t do romance. It clashes with the whole ‘burdened by my mysterious and tragic backstory’ vibe.”
I snort. “You do have a tragic backstory.”
“Yeah.” He winces, like he’s in physical pain. “Do you know what my grandma asked me the other day?”
“What?”
“My mom told her that me and you were together, and she took it in a completely wrong way. Since I’m almost completely paralyzed below my waist, she wanted to know if I could even get an—”
“No,” I say. “Stop right now.”
“I’m being serious,” he says. “Most awkward phone call of my life. It could have been worse—she could have known about Arcadia—but my mom doesn’t know.”
“The school is going to email everyone an announcement about it at some point, right? They did that for Daniel Byun.”
“I think so. I’m sure most people have already guessed. It was expected.” He turns to me, his eyes glistening with tears which he quickly blinks back. “Do you want to die an expected or unexpected death?”
“Expected,” I say. “Definitely expected.” I pull my hands away from his. “Do you still want infinite cheese fries? Like, for your birthday wish?”
“Maybe,” he says. “But not for my birthday wish. Did you ever think about what I should wish for?”
“Not really,” I admit. “But I know now.”
“Yeah?”
“You should wish that your mom is okay,” I say. “I mean, really okay. That she isn’t sad or stressed or anything, so your brother can grow up strong.”
He nods. Double doors swing open and a nurse steps out. All three of us look up expectantly, but she talks to a woman in a green sweater who’s knitting. “Do you . . . is your dad coming?”
“Definitely not,” Kas replies immediately, his voice firm and cold.
Lex looks up from his phone. “We don’t know if he’s coming or not.”
A sharp, sardonic smile crosses Kas’s face. “I mean, he’d better not.”
“What do you have against him?” Lex snaps. “It’s not like he cheated on Mama.”
Kas’s face flushes bright red and I hope he’s not going to hit someone. Lex’s normally warm grey eyes now have the color and force of steel. I put my hands over my ears.
“Please, don’t argue,” I say.
“You were the one who brought this up!” Kas snaps back.
“Sorry!” I lift my hands to shoulder height. “Can we just talk about something nicer? Maybe I could tell you a story?”
Both boys look away from me, their faces still tight with anger.
Eventually Lex grumbles, “Fine, tell us a story.”
But I think he actually wants me to.

Comments for this chapter

• Stop when I read the letter Arcadia gave to Aza I actually cried.. this is such a touching story so far and I love it so much!

  Comment by seriq on May 28, 2025

  Liked by 1

• thank you so much :D

  Comment by rose on May 28, 2025

  Liked by 0

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I think about it for a moment. “Do you want to hear about the time I went to my first—and last—sleepaway summer camp?”
“No,” Lex says immediately.
“Tell me about it,” Kas urges.
Lex listens anyway as I relate my adventures with Ben. I tell them everything. I don’t embellish it. I even tell them about the embarrassing parts. The ugly parts.
I tell them about our transformation into jungle people during the first day, where we stripped down to our underclothes, coated ourselves in thick black mud, and spent the day among the thick trees, swinging from imaginary vines and whooping like in the Disney rendition of Tarzan (to the best of our abilities).
I tell them about how we snuck outside that night, still covered in mud since no one had bothered to tell us to wash off, and raided the kitchen.
I tell them about how we bought ourselves tickets online to a movie theater thirty minutes away, left in the middle of one of the pottery sessions, took a cab to the city, watched Super Mario together, then came back to camp to find that no one had missed us.
I tell them about how the dorm beds were so hot and uncomfortable that every night Ben would stand under the window and whistle to me with his fingers so that I’d come down and we’d spend hours and hours looking up at the black sky, counting the infinite silver stars.
I tell them about drawing Ben’s face while he drew mine and how I memorized every line, every detail, how his skin was yellow and the whites of his eyes were yellow.
How I made him take his vitamins and meds and supplements even when he didn’t want to.
Holding his hair back when the cancer made him sick.
How I told him about his countdown one night by the docks.
How he looked at me after I told him.
He looked so much like Kas, but his cancer self and Arcadia’s cancer self could have been siblings.
Arcadia was beautiful too, even if she didn’t know it.
Even if I never found the words to tell her.
She had the kindest eyes.
And the kindest smile.
Lex: “You can cry if you want.”
Me: “No. I’m not going to cry because that’s going to make you sad and when you see the baby it’ll grow up with that sadness.”
Kas: “Your superstitions are worse than my mom’s.”
Lex: “Shut up.”
Me: “One of you tell me a story.”
There’s a hesitation from both of them. Eventually, Lex volunteers with something equally cheerful to the story I’ve just told them about Ben.
“Do you want to hear about the time I literally almost died after eating this weird fish at some sketchy seafood restaurant where there were stray dogs running around the kitchen?”
Kas scoffs. “You did not ‘literally almost die’, Lex. You were fine after six hours.”
“I was not fine,” Lex says stubbornly. “I was never the same after that.”
“I don’t actually want to hear that story,” I say, smiling. “Something happier?”
“Did I tell you about how I found out Kas is terrified of heights?”
“I’m not!” Kas protests.
“You are,” Lex says.
As they continue to bicker, a nurse in pale blue scrubs approaches us. I jab both of them in the side, and they immediately straighten, looking up at her.
“Family of Veronika Kozlowska?” she asks.
“Our mom,” Lex replies, instantly assuming authority, which makes sense, since he’s three years older than we are and in law school.
“Well, I’m pleased to say that the baby was delivered without any complications about an hour ago. Your mother is resting, but she’s asking for you.” Her gaze rests on each of us in turn. “All three of you.”
I don’t know if I want to see their mom, but I know I should go, especially if she’s been asking for me. I have no idea why she asked for me—she’s pretty nice, but I haven’t done much for her at all, just little things like bring leftover ham and cheese, or sometimes I make her a small gift box. Nothing big. Nothing that really makes me go out of my way. But knowing that she wants me there—that she thinks of me almost as a daughter—makes a warm feeling spread through my chest, the kind of feeling I have after drinking something hot and sweet when it’s cold outside. A bit too much at first but then comforting.
I push Kas through the hall on the first floor, following Lex and the nurse in scrubs (most nurses are in scrubs so I guess we can refer to her as the nurse with fifty-five years left). Fortunately, the hospital floors are made for wheelchairs, so it’s pretty easy. I don’t want to have to drag him up a staircase again, or, worse, carry him with wolves howling in the distance—that was not fun.
The nurse knocks first before she lets us into the room. The lights are dim; everything is quiet. As soon as I come inside, I’m reminded why I hate hospitals so much. It’s all so white, blinding, sterile.
Mrs. Kozlowska is propped up by half a dozen pillows in the hospital bed. Her hair is fanned out, dark with streaks of false blonde in it. There are traces of tears on her cheeks. The baby is next to her, barely visible, a soft bundle of blankets that come in varying shades of blue.
Kas says something in their language, his voice quiet. His mother nods. Lex approaches cautiously. There’s a short conversation which I don’t understand. I push Kas as close as I think he wants right now and then stand awkwardly to the side. I have the feeling that I shouldn’t be here.
Lex takes the baby after a few minutes and holds it. It looks like any other newborn, not pretty, its skin red and its head too big for its body, but seeing this fragile life in front of me fills me with an overwhelming sense of protection.
I feel invisible. At least, I’m invisible until I blurt out, “Can I hold it?”
Mrs. Kozlowska looks up in surprise, then nods. Lex gives me the baby. I hold it against me, its tiny body surprisingly heavy in my arms. I picture the baby growing up into a little boy, then becoming like Kas when he was younger, then Kas now, then Lex, and after that, I stop imagining. Instead, I try to determine what it will look like when it’s older. Its tiny hands are curled around the blanket, eyes still shut tight. I realize it has none of Rosie or Rosie’s dad or Kas’s dad in it—it looks like Mrs. Kozlowska, who’s just as beautiful even when she looks this exhausted.
It looks like Kas, who is now asking me if he can hold the baby. I give it to him as gently and carefully as possible.
His expression doesn’t change as he looks down at his little brother. Eventually he says, so quietly that I can barely hear it:
“I don’t want him to grow up having to take care of me.”
“He won’t,” I say before I can stop myself.
He doesn’t say anything. The baby whimpers a little bit, but he holds it closer against his chest. There is no space for words right now.
Eventually, Kas gives the baby back to their mother, where it immediately begins to feed. I look away respectfully. So do the boys.
“What’s his name going to be?” Lex asks.
Mrs. Kozlowska hesitates only a fraction of a second. “Maciej.”
“It means gift from God,” Lex explains to me.
I agree that it’s a fitting name. If there is a god, the baby is definitely a gift from them. With so much sadness, it seems almost like a miracle that it was delivered safe and healthy.
I watch Mrs. Kozlowska cradle little Mac in her arms, then look back at Kas, who’s staring out the window blankly. When he meets my eyes, I nod and leave the room, letting the family have their own space.
Kas’s birthday is the next day, but there’s no celebration—I don’t know who he would have invited anyway, except for me. I send him a text, but he doesn’t reply for several hours. He’s obviously busy.
Over the next few weeks, we barely talk to each other at all. His leg braces come and he goes back to school. Finals are so close—most of my time is occupied doing last-minute preparations for them, and Kas is doing the same thing. I pour my energy into studying instead of imagining the future without him.
On Monday, which is the first exam day, I catch up with him right before our first test, which is in math.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say. “A bit nervous.”
The truth is that I’m barely thinking about finals at all. He has only six days left.
Which means that unless I say something, five of those days will be spent over exams which will have absolutely no effect on his future.
Maybe I could fake sick and ask him to take me to the nurse’s office. No. I’m bad at pretending. He’d just tell me not to stress.
As I sit down for the first exam, the world around me narrows to the six sheets of paper in front of me. I read the first question, my lips moving silently as I spell through the words.
Evaluate the integral of ln(x). Show your work.
I take a deep breath, glancing at Kas, seated across the room. He’s already scribbling furiously on the paper.
I can’t let this—his countdown—ruin my life. I can’t let it consume me. And I definitely can’t fail my finals exams because of it.
He has time.
We have time.
With this singular thought resting heavily on my soul, I pick up my pencil and begin to write.

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CHAPTER THIRTY

Our Last Night is not how I pictured it. Not even close. And it’s not how I wanted it to be either.
For the months leading up until he died, I’d daydream about how it would look. Maybe a celebration now that finals are over. Maybe a quiet Friday night date at a small restaurant where our world becomes just the two of us. Maybe a walk through the city. Maybe holding hands, maybe kissing.
But instead, we’re at my house, watching a movie together. The movie is a stupid action flick with fast cars and cute girls. It’s made for teenagers who have nothing better to do. Kas is the only one actually watching it, because although my eyes are focused on the screen with him, I’m stuck thinking about how badly I’m ruining my only chance to say everything I need to tell him.
I don’t even know what I need to tell him. Or if there is anything to tell him. I know that he loves me, and he knows that I love him—maybe that’s enough, but it doesn’t feel that way.
My mom comes in every few minutes to ask if we want more snacks or a soda. I wish she’d go upstairs. I want it to be just me and Kas right now. I wait for him to say something, anything, to break the silence that has settled between us. Even a random compliment like “You look like the red-haired girl in the movie”, who is impossibly beautiful. Even one of his offhand comments about how stupid one of the characters is. It used to annoy me so much because he kept talking during movies but now I wish he would just say something—let me believe everything is normal.
The credits roll. Kas shakes off the soft blanket draped over us both and stretches his arms over his head. “I should go home.”
“Stay,” I say immediately.
“I have to—my mom—”
“Stay,” I insist as he stands up, gripping the arm of the couch for support. I grab his arm and force him to sit down. “Stay,” I repeat.
He hesitates. “Okay,” he eventually says.
We stay there in silence for a while. My mom doesn’t come back in. I look at Kas for a long time, and he looks back at me, smiling softly. The countdown says one day, one hour, eleven minutes, and fifty-six seconds.
I wonder, what is the world going to look like when he’s gone? Will there be things I regret not saying right now? I try to speak, but the words are lodged in my throat like stones, and I can’t get them out.
I wait for him to say something like, “You’re beautiful.” Or, “Let’s go for a walk.” Something to make me feel better.
He doesn’t say anything.
I say, “Do you want a snack? We have some more in the pantry.”
“I’m okay,” he says. “Thank you.”
“Okay.”
I wait for him to pull me closer, kiss me, something. He doesn’t move. He just looks at me, matching the intensity with which I’m looking at him.
I’m the first to break the stare. I crawl onto his lap. His arms go around me naturally, our bodies fitting together. I rest my head against his chest, and he strokes my hair.
“When I said I was dating Rosie Chen—”
“No, stop,” I whisper. “You don’t have to explain.”
“I just—”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I know it wasn’t for real.”
He’s quiet for a second. “I still feel bad for making you cry.”
I shake my head. “I cry all the time. More than you’d think. I cried earlier this morning because I got a B on my physics final and I couldn’t find my pink top to wear for you.”
“That’s different,” he says.
“Please don’t be guilty about it,” I say. “I know you’re sorry, and it’s fine now.”
His arms tighten around me. I put my arm around his neck. He kisses me, his lips warm and soft. I close my eyes and let myself kiss him back.
“Kas?” I say as we break apart.
“Yeah?”
“If you knew how long you had left . . . I mean, if you had, say, twenty-four hours or something,” I start. I’m trying to be cautious, trying not to give it away, but it’s so hard. The only thing that’s stopping me from telling him about his countdown is Arcadia’s last wish, the one she put in her note to me. Asking me please not to tell him. “If you only had twenty-four hours left to talk to me,” I continue. “Would you say anything?”
“I’d—” He stops. “Aza—what are you talking about? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Are you—are you sick or something?”
“No, no, no, I’m good,” I say. “I’m just wondering.”
“I know when you’re lying,” he says. “You’re not okay.”
I hate that he knows that I’m lying but mostly I hate that he’s wrong about what I’m lying to him about. Yes, he’s right that I’m not okay—but I’m healthy. Surely he can see that. It’s him who doesn’t have time.
“Would you say anything?” I repeat.
“Aza—”
“Please.”
He hesitates like he wants to ask me more questions. I give him a pleading look. I need him to say everything he’d want to tell me. I don’t want to go through the rest of my life not knowing.
“Maybe . . . maybe I could . . . I—I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“Okay. That’s fine,” I say. “Do you . . . should we go out or something?”
“Like, on a date?”
“I meant outside,” I say quickly, feeling myself blushing for suggesting that. My mom would kill me if I went out with anybody at ten o’clock at night. That’s about the latest she would ever let me come back home.
“Okay, let’s go.”
We go to my backyard where there’s a very old and very sad swing set and some dead yellow weeds. Not much to look at.
“Remember when you broke your toe jumping off the swing?” Kas says.
“Don’t remind me. That was really embarrassing.”
“You need a lesson on what true embarrassment is if you think faceplanting from three feet is bad,” he says. “That doesn’t even qualify as embarrassing. Now—faceplanting while standing still is—”
I roll my eyes. “For the last time, walking with crutches is not embarrassing. It doesn’t make you abnormal.”
“But when my brace broke and you carried me to the car,” he insists. “Serious humiliation.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “I dropped an entire bucket of red paint in art class once when we were in eighth grade.” I wince, just thinking about it. “You remember that, right?”
“No.”
“Good,” I say. “I spilt it on your shoes. It wasn’t nice. I mean, your shoes were ugly so I kind of did you a favor. They were neon green and had dinosaurs on them.”
“My shoes did not have dinosaurs!”
“They did,” I confirm, smiling. “You went through that phase, I promise. You also had Polaroid sunglasses. Like, the sunglasses pro bikers use? And . . . oh, you had a rubber chicken you kept squeaking in my ear just to annoy me.”
We’ve reached the swing set, which I barely even realized we were walking to. We sit down on the swings there. I push myself gently back in forth, trailing my feet in the dirt. The swing set creaks in protest. Bugs fly in front of my face in the hot evening air, and I bat them away impatiently.
“I don’t remember any of that,” Kas says. “Was I nice?”
I hesitate, then decide to be honest. “Not really.”
“Oh.”
“You were nicer than pretty much any other boy at school,” I say. “You were always kind, but . . . only when people needed you. Like you’d carry people’s books for them, but only if they asked you first.”
“Am I different now?”
“Very different,” I say. “You changed a lot after the accident. For the better, I think. You were always nice to me, though. That part never changed.”
He nods, looking at the ground. “Which one do you prefer? Me before or me now?”
“You’re still the same person,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “I just . . . can’t really remember what I was like. I remember running, though. All the time.”
“You were so fast,” I say. “Do you remember in middle school when we were on the track team together? I’d give you dagger eyes every time you lapped me.”
“Oh. I always thought you were just admiring my technique.”
“Admiring your technique? Admiring your technique? What kind of person does that? I was cursing your name because you were the only person who could outpace me without even trying!”
“That’s nice,” he says. “I’m really glad to know that my girlfriend used to curse my name.”
My heart freezes for half a second when he says girlfriend. He rarely uses that word when describing me. Usually, “a girl” or “my friend” or “my best friend” or, on rarer occasions when it’s a family only event, “my sister”.
He smiles at me, catching me looking at him again. That winning smile that can make anyone’s heart melt in a moment.
“Say it again,” I say.
He keeps smiling. “My girlfriend.”
I smile back. Then the moment is shattered when a bird squawks loudly overhead. We both jump slightly, then laugh it off, pretending that we weren’t scared, before silence takes over again.
“Did you really care that much because I was faster than you?” he teases after a while.
“Definitely not.” The swing set continues to make strange noises as I lean forward, gripping the chains, to watch my foot’s progress in digging a small trench in the dirt under me.
“Right,” he says, still smiling.
Mom is calling our name from somewhere inside the house. I sigh, knowing that it’s time now to go back in, but I really wanted to stay out there forever with him. I help Kas off the swing and give him his crutches.
“Did you wish like I told you to on your birthday?” I ask him.
“Mm,” he says. “No comment.”
That probably means he didn’t. I find myself wondering what he did wish for but I know better than to ask him right now.
“Can you write me a note about what you wished for?” I ask. “In case, you know, we’re not friends anymore when it comes true? It’s only if you say it out loud that the wish doesn’t work anymore.”
He raises his eyebrows. “I thought you said we’d be friends forever, Aza.”
“We will, we will,” I say hastily.
He frowns at me as I push open the sliding door and we go inside the house, greeted by the freezing cold AC. “Sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Then why do you keep talking like—like one if us is not going to be here anymore?” he asks softly.
“I’m just thinking,” I say. A lie comes to my lips so quickly that I can’t stop it before it slips out: “Since Arcadia, I’ve been thinking a lot more about death and stuff. It’s just always there, since I can obviously see countdowns, so . . .” I stop. He takes a deep, shaking breath in. I breathe deeply too. “Let’s just talk about something else,” I say. “Something that makes us happy.”
“Okay. I could . . . tell you how Mac is doing.”
We sit on the couch again but this time we don’t watch another movie. Instead, Kas tells me about his little brother, who has obviously grown up a lot in these past few weeks since I saw him. Mom doesn’t make Kas leave yet, which I don’t question, even though it’s ten-thirty at night. He shows me some pictures of the baby on his phone.
When he closes the photos app, I notice that the home screen picture is of me and him. I forgot we even took that picture—it’s of us together outside the park we like to go to. We’re sitting on one of the benches, looking at each other and smiling beneath a flowering white tree.
I put my lips close to his ear and whisper, “I’m very, very glad you dropped a preserved shark on my foot, Kacper.”
“And I,” he whispers back, “am very glad that you sobbed about your ruined shoes for forty-five minutes. Even though I hate seeing you cry.”
Mom comes back in, and Kas dutifully gets up to leave, but not before he kisses me again (she’s watching, he doesn’t care) and says quietly, “I love you, Azalea Mae.”

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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I really, really try not to think about the countdown the next morning.
I sit up in bed, rubbing my eyes. It took me hours to fall asleep, and I kept waking up in the middle of the night, checking my phone which I’d snuck into my room. I was terrified that I was wrong, that I’d miscalculated, Kas’s mom was calling me to tell me that he was dead.
I drag myself to the bathroom, wash my face, braid my hair, get dressed, toothbrush, lip tone, perfume. I feel physically sick just thinking about what is going to happen around eleven-thirty this evening. I’m not prepared. I take my hair out of its braid and then re-braid it and then re-braid it again, my hands too nervous to sit still for long.
“Aza?” Mom calls from downstairs.
Oh, no. It’s already ten o’clock. Of course I slept in, even though I rarely sleep this late, especially on the weekends. I’m wasting the Last Day. I need to call Kas. Mom yells for me again. “Coming,” I scream back, scrambling over my bed and knocking my phone over. It falls behind the nightstand. I grimace, poking around with my fingertips in the dark, dusty space before I touch it and pull my phone up by my fingernails.
I call Kas, and he answers immediately.
“Hey,” he says. “Are you coming to the party tonight?”
“Which party?”
“The one Jack’s having at his house. You know, an end of the school year celebration.”
“I don’t have anything to celebrate since I got a B and two A minuses and only four A’s,” I say. “But I’ll come. What time is it at?”
“Five.”
“Can you come over before that?”
“I’d like to, but my mom needs me to help her today.”
I try to keep the disappointment from my voice. “Can I help at all?”
“No, it’s okay,” he says. “Don’t worry about your grades, okay? It’s fine. People get a lot worse than a B.”
“That’s still not a good grade at all.”
“Yeah, well, you go to one of the top high schools in the country.”
“So do you,” I remind him stubbornly. “And you’re a perfect A kid. Probably an A plus kid if they gave A pluses at our school.”
“My parents are from Poland. They expect solid 100’s.”
“My mom’s French.”
“Poland is better.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“You’re biased.”
“No more than you are.”
“You’ve never been to France.”
“You haven’t been to France or Poland. I think I can make a more informed decision.”
“Fine,” I groan.
“Hah. You admit my superiority.”
“I’ll see you tonight,” I say. “France for the win,” I add, and hang up.
Mom is coming up the stairs, probably to yell at me some more for not being down by now. I quickly stuff my phone under my pillow and pretend to be very busy braiding my hair (for the fifth time).
When she comes in, she places her hands on her hips. I immediately start making my bed and straightening everything out.
“Come down for breakfast,” she says.
“I will soon.”
“Right now,” she says.
“Mom, I—”
“No arguments.”
I suppress an audible sigh and follow her downstairs. She seems like she’s in a bad mood as she slams a plate of watery scrambled eggs and unappetizingly burnt toast in front of me.
“Eat.”
I nibble at the toast. It’s rock hard, inedible. The eggs look undercooked. Very undercooked. I don't want to risk getting sick from them on the Last Day so I don’t eat them. I take the tiniest bite possible of the toast, just to please Mom, who’s watching me with hawk eyes.
“And then he just decides to go off on another trip without telling me!” she explodes.
“Who?” I ask, scraping my food into the sink when she’s not looking.
“Your father, of course!” she snaps. “Who am I to him? A maid? He didn’t even bother telling me he was going to Ohio again!” She pushes me aside and furiously begins drying the dishes stacked up by the sink. “All I do is housework all day while he goes off and—”
“Mom, you’re an executive at—”
“Don’t—interrupt!” she snaps.
I close my mouth.
She sighs deeply and puts the dishes away with a clatter. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do here anymore.”
“Mom,” I say in a small voice.
“What?”
“Are you and Dad . . . are you going to get a divorce?”
She spins around to stare at me. “What?”
I lick my lips, which are suddenly very dry. I’m trying to tell her that I don’t want her and Dad to end up like Kas’s parents.
“Oh, Aza,” she says, and pulls me into her arms, letting me inhale her warm, sweet scent that’s purely her. “Don’t worry about that. Don’t ever worry about that.”
“Okay,” I say, squirming uncomfortably until she lets me go. “I was just wondering.”
“Is there something else going on?” she asks.
I hesitate. We rarely talk about the countdowns. I’m not sure if she believes me—I hope that she does—but I don’t think she believes that I’m lying either. She’s just . . . skeptical. At least she doesn’t think I killed Daniel, or Arcadia, or anybody else.
“Just school stuff,” I say.
“This Rosie girl again?” she asks.
I shake my head, trying not to smile. Mom remembers everything. Rosie hasn’t actually talked to me at all for a while—she’s barely talked to anyone—obviously, she still feels guilty for hurting Kas, but it’s not like that will matter anymore. “No, she’s not,” I say. “Everything’s fine.”
“Then why do you still have that look on your face?” she asks as she puts the last of the dishes away.
“I, um, the eggs were a little . . . undercooked.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll make some more toast.”
“Alright.”
I toast a slice of white bread for myself and another one for her. She’s busy texting somebody when I set it down in front of her, the faintest frown on her face. Probably yelling at Dad over the phone.
I braid my hair again, which means that I’m definitely stressed, then take my toast to my room. Even though I can’t see Kas right now, I’m not going to waste our Last Day. I sit down and write him a list. I use my sparkly purple gel pen I thought was lost forever since I bought it in seventh grade, but discovered yesterday trapped behind my desk.
I write the title in all capitals across the top of the paper:
THINGS FOR KAS TO REMEMBER
Then, I switch to my best cursive handwriting. The pen bleeds through the paper and the ends of the words are dark purple spots where I pause too long. But it’s legible. That’s the important part.
1. The shark thing. Obviously. Especially my face when I showed you the state of my shoes (which were perfectly fine after being hosed down, by the way). How you looked, trying not to laugh at me.
2. The way you always pretend to hate rom coms, but you cried in To All the Boys. I saw you.
3. That one night we stargazed during the summer of 7th grade and you swore you saw a UFO. It was a plane.
4. Ice skating on the frozen lake.
5. When you let me borrow your hoodie and never asked for it back. I still have it.
6. I never hated you even when you could beat me every time during track practice. You were the first person I really, really wanted to beat, which made you also the first person worth beating.
7. Your laugh when you’re actually happy. It’s very soft and quiet. You always cover your mouth with your hand. You have really good teeth. I don’t know why you do that when you laugh, but not when you smile.
8. Your expression when we watch movies like Rush Hour. You lean forward with a look of intense concentration. I’ve never seen you concentrate that hard, even during an exam.
9. Sitting on the bench in the park under the tree eating our sandwiches.
10. Sitting at school under that other tree talking about To Kill a Mockingbird.
11. My face after seeing the athletics carnival prizes. Pretty sure you really did pick them, not Rosie.
12. Hiding in your attic eating Oreos and Capri-Suns for the entirety of seven hours until Lex found us.
13. How you always wait for me to tie my shoes even if you’re running late.
14. The picture of us under the white tree. I don’t know how we both looked so happy in that picture since you always look very serious in the other pictures that we have but I hope that happiness is what you remember.
15. Love is a big infinity.
There are only fifteen items. That’s okay. Fifteen is a good number. I could write more, but I want him to remember—really remember—each of the ones I already have.
I put the cap back on the pen and fold the note into a tiny square. Then I slip it into my jacket pocket and spend the rest of the morning on my purple beanbag cushion people-watching until Mom calls me down for lunch.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The party is louder than I thought it would be. Music blares from Jack’s basement. I can feel the pulse in my chest. I hope it’s not messing with my heartbeat. I also hope no one is going to call the police for a “disturbance”. Jack’s parties are always like this, though. People tend to get drunk, although he says he’s never had alcohol in his house before. They tend to break up with their boyfriends or girlfriends and make out with kids they’ve never met in the corners and the downstairs bathroom.
Kids are crammed wall-to-wall inside with red plastic cups full of soda and god knows what else. The air is thick and humid with sweat and cheap cologne, girl’s perfume so sweet it makes me feel sick. I push through the sticky mess of people and fill myself a cup of water from the sink. It’s too warm and tastes like salt.
I feel wrong here, like I don’t fit in. Everyone else feels so dirty—like in ways I can’t see on the outside—and I don’t think I’m dirty. I’ve kissed exactly one boy exactly seven times and would never dream of breaking up with him. Especially not right now.
I find Kas near the back, seated on the arm of the couch like he always does when his crutches are too much to deal with. Jack is saying something. Some girls are giggling. Kas is quiet, looking out the window.
“Kas?” I say, coming up behind him.
He startles, but then his face lights up when he sees me. “You came.”
“Of course I did,” I say, sitting down next to him. He puts his arm around me and I press my forehead against his cheek. “Do you want to go outside for a little bit? It’s really loud in here.”
“God, yes.”
I wonder if this is the last time I’ll help him stand up as I pull him to his feet and hand him his crutches. I try to think about everything as a Last Time because I want to remember. His smile, his last laugh. I know the last time he kissed me. I know the last time he held my hand.
People make way for us as we go outside. I push open the sliding door, which is heavier than expected. Jack’s backyard is full of dead yellow grass and prickly hedges lining a broken fence. Nobody has played in it for a long time. His brother, Dax, is in jail. His half-sister, Ellie, is older, probably twenty-five, married next month.
Kas and I stand there on the back porch, leaning against the railing. I can still hear the music from inside, and there are people here, but not as many. It’s less overwhelming for both of us. A group of girls pass us, trampling the dilapidated mass of soil and stems resembling the remains of somebody’s garden. I hear them whisper, “That’s the girl. Kas’s girlfriend, I think?”
I turn on the porch lights above us. There’s nobody else up here. Most people are seated on fold-up plastic chairs nearer to the fence.
Kas smiles at me. “Missed you today.”
“Missed you too,” I say. “How’s your mom? How’s Mac?”
“They’re fine.” His lips part like he’s about to say more, but instead he winces, pressing a hand to his temple. “It was so loud in there.”
“Yeah.” I shift closer to him. We look at anything except each other—the string lights and the porch railing that was once cherry but is now grey.
“I’m so glad school is over,” he says.
“Even with your perfect grades?” I say. “You don’t want to impress anyone else?”
“Perfection’s exhausting,” he says, then adds: “Don’t worry, I’m very humble about it.”
I nudge him gently in the side. “I’m glad you came tonight.”
“Me too,” he says quietly.
There’s a pause. I can tell he’s tired, though he’s doing his best to hide it. I feel dizzy looking at him. Something about this being our Last Day. I try not to think about his countdown even as it ticks past four hours. Three hours and fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds, fifty-eight, fifty-seven, fifty-six.
I slip the note I wrote for him into his jacket pocket. He glances down at my hand for a moment, then smiles at me again—a very small smile. The blue of his shirt exactly matches the color of his eyes.
For a long time there is only the sound of cicadas and our breathing and other people talking. We stand together, close but not touching.
“Kas?” I ask, my voice soft.
“Yeah?”
“Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m okay,” he says.
“You don’t look okay,” I say. Worry is creeping in now. “You look—”
“I’m okay,” he repeats, but then he presses his palm against his forehead again. “Just a headache. Probably the noise. Or the heat. Or the fact that I haven’t eaten today. One of those.”
“Or all of them,” I say.
“Yeah. Probably that.”
“I’ll get you something to eat.”
“I’m okay, just stay here,” he says. “The second you leave, I swear, those girls over there are gonna try to chat me up.” He gestures to a group of three girls. They are all so pretty, wearing so much makeup, their skirts too short and their legs too long. I didn’t even notice them because Kas isn’t looking at them, which makes me happy in a strange way.
Still. I’m worried. It’s our Last Day. And I’m not convinced that he’s okay. His words are a bit slower than usual and his eyes flicker too much.
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, no, not yet,” he says quickly.
More people are coming outside. Someone is lighting sparklers. Jack is yelling about making s’mores. I hope he isn’t planning on setting the neighborhood on fire in the process. I keep glancing at Kas. He looks exhausted.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” I ask, thinking that it might help clear whatever’s bothering him.
“Sure,” he says.
For us, a “walk” means Kas limping very slowly up a hill that forces him to pause for breath every few moments while I walk next to him, matching his pace. I don’t mind. I like being with him. I’d rather be here than anywhere else.
We stop under a streetlight. From up here, we are overlooking the city. I can see countless bluish-grey skyscrapers rising into the black sky. It’s about eight o’clock at night. I don’t really know what to say, and the first thing that comes to my lips is: “Tell me a secret.”
“About me?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” he says. “Well, I failed geography this year.”
“What? I thought you were an A plus kid!”
“I did okay on the other tests,” he says, looking at the ground and blushing deeply. “But yeah, I failed geography. Pretty badly.”
We are silent for what feels like a long time before he asks, “Can you tell me a secret about you?"
“I don’t know if I have one,” I admit. I have a secret about him, but that’s different. “I guess . . . well, I’m scared of the dark.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely terrified,” I say. “I sleep with a plushie at night. I know I pretend to hate plushies, but I have a Squish-Mellow at home. It’s pink.”
“Oh.”
“Pretty embarrassing,” I say. “I’d rather fail geography three times in a row than be that scared of the dark. It’s just, like, my parents sleep in the room next to mine, and there’s always weird creaking noises coming from their room. The bedroom on the other side of mine is empty and it makes extra weird noises at night.”
“I didn’t know your house had three bedrooms,” he says.
“We usually give it to guests,” I say. “My parents wanted to have another baby after me, but my mom couldn’t. It was okay, though. Being an only child is okay.”
I link my arm with his as he leans against the streetlight. He stands so casually that you’d barely notice his crutches if you looked at him. The wind ruffles his hair in that way I always find so attractive. He looks at the faraway city, not saying anything. He has that concentrated look on his face, the one that draws his lips together.
“Read the note I gave you,” I say.
“When I get home.”
“No. Now.”
“Okay.” He pulls it out of his jacket pocket and unfolds it.
I stand behind him, resting my chin on his shoulder to read too, even though I already have it memorized.
When he finishes, he smiles and tucks it back into his pocket. “Did you really think I was going to forget any of that?”
“No. I just wanted you to re-remember.”
For a while we don’t say anything else to each other. We just are. We exist together and that’s enough right now. We stand close but not touching. I don’t look at Kas anymore. I don’t want to see his countdown.
I tell him: “Among the night / and dark / I saw the brightest star / in silver / in the black / sky / shining / steady / beautiful / to footsteps running / music playing / and people laughing / through the summer air.”
He says: “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
I kiss his cheek, tasting the salt of his sweat and smelling the same cologne he wore for our first date. He leans forward and kisses me back.
“Pegasus,” he says, pointing at the sky. “Orion. Big Dipper. Little Dipper. Ursa Major. Ursa Minor. Andromeda. Perseus. Leo. Canis Major. Canis Minor. Corona Borealis. Corona Australis. Cepheus. Libra. Lyra. Cygnus. Scorpius. Gemini—”
“Can you really see all of them right now?” I interrupt.
“No, only a few,” he says. “It’s too early, and they don’t all show up at once. That’s most of what I know.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he says.
His countdown shows three hours and four minutes and twenty-one seconds. I don’t focus on it, and I don’t cry either as his breathing begins to slow. I’ve already accepted this. I accepted it the first day I saw him. I always knew he was going to die. I’ve calculated this a hundred times, triple-checked it. I knew since sixth grade that he would die the day after finishing his junior year of high school. I never told anyone but Arcadia. No one needed to know.
Kas: “You’re kind of everything.”
Me: “You’re kind of everything too.”
He smiles again. We start walking. Three hours two minutes eight seconds. Then I have the idea to race. I know there’s no way this will be a competition but still. I want a reason to run as fast as I possibly can, feel the wind on my face, be as alive as I can be with him in these last few hours. What’s the harm in it anyway? He won’t care when he loses. He says okay, let’s race. The starting point is at the crosswalk and the finish is down the hill next to a big tree.
I count off the numbers on my fingers and yell go. He starts walking, and I start running as fast as I can. I reach the other side of the street in what must be record time but before I can turn the corner to sprint down the hill I hear tires and brakes and crunching and somebody screaming.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Kas is trapped under a car, his body crushed beneath the tire.
I run over to him. Did I—but no—he still has time—
My hands flutter over him, trembling, desperate, like anxious birds. The driver, a woman, rushes to his side, screaming garbled panic nonsense that fails to enter my brain. I try to push the car off him. It doesn’t budge. My feet scrape uselessly against the asphalt. The woman is on the phone crying and calling 911. I push harder. The car isn’t moving. I have to get it off of him. I grit my teeth, move it about half an inch. The woman screams for help. No one can help him. Sweat is on my forehead. Tears are on my cheeks.
I look down at the boy I love so much who is lying so still. His face is untouched. He looks like he’s sleeping, but his body is spread out at awkward angles. I can’t move the car any more. I kneel beside him, touch his cheek, his hand. I know there is nothing anyone can do for him. Blood pours from his mouth and a hole in the back of his head. Blood covers his legs and chest. Blood spreads across the street below us in a pool of maroon. Blood soaks my jeans. Blood tastes like metal. Blood is wet. Blood is warm. Blood is warm and warm and warm.
I lay down beside him on the street. I want to be close to him right now. I put one of my arms across his bleeding, broken body. I can feel the tiny rise and fall of his chest beneath my hand. The worst part of all of this is that he’s still breathing. It couldn’t just be instant. Which is what we both would have wanted for him. Had he known. He didn’t. He won’t. He will never.
Kacper. Kacper.
He’s kind of everything.
“Do you see Pegasus?” I whisper. “What about the Medium Dipper? I never told you about that one. The four stars right above the trees? You see Arcadia’s star, right? Just over there. The brightest one.” He doesn’t answer, so I keep talking. “Do you remember when we made that list? The one where we wrote down things we were going to do together? You promised we would—Kas, you promised me—” I cry harder into his side, my nails digging into his lacerated flesh, which is warm and sticky. “You promised me,” I say again, choking away the sobs. Sirens wail in the distance. “You promised me we would.”
Only when I try to take a deep breath do I realize that I’ve forgotten how to breathe. “You promised you would write me a note about your birthday wish. And about what happened to your hand. You told me that, Kas. You’re not allowed to die without keeping your promises. You won’t be able to get to heaven. You know you’re not supposed to tell lies. Right? You know that.” I turn his head, forcing it towards me, like he’ll open his eyes again and look at me. “You told me that when you woke up you didn’t want to be my friend anymore. I didn’t want to be your friend anymore either, Kas. Well, I did. But not just that.”
Everything. Everything. A sob chokes in my throat. You realized. You realized from the first moment I told you about him. How he was everything. I just didn’t know.
I brush his hair back, my fingers soaked with his sweat and the blood pooling around him. “I think I knew that I love you was also the first time you cried. That was when I knew that I could love all the bits of you, not just the confident part or the kind part or the part that makes me laugh. Even the ugly bits. Kas—listen. I love you,” I whisper. “I don’t even know how to say it. How much I love you.”
The sirens are closer now. Red and blue lights flash in a way that makes the sky look like it’s bleeding. I don’t let him go. Before they take him away from me I need to tell him something else.
“About the list,” I whisper in his ear, although I know he can’t hear me, “I remember everything we wrote. We wrote ten things on it.”
LIST OF THINGS WE WANT TO DO TOGETHER WHEN WE GROW UP!!!
(By AZALEA and Supreme Lord KACPER Ruler of Everything)
1. Find Lex’s comic stash
2. Go to the observatory
3. Take a train to the beach
4. See Paris
5. Go boating in Amsterdam
6. Get our moms to try bubble tea
7. Sneak into a concert
8. Run a hundred miles
9. Graduate
10. Stay alive
P.S. Azalea rules NO SHE DOES NOT
“You promised, Kas.” My body is shaking so badly I can barely see straight. “You told me we would do all of that and we didn’t do any of it.”
His hand twitches slightly. I grab his hand, the one that is still intact. He coughs. It’s wet and horrible and there’s blood but it’s a sound.
I don’t move another inch. I don’t want him to wake up. I know that if he wakes up he’ll be in pain. I refuse to let him die in pain. I refuse to let him die knowing that he might not live. I don’t care if I can’t say everything that I want to him.
The woman is still pacing and crying. “I didn’t see him—I didn’t see him—I didn’t see him—I didn’t—” She sounds like a broken record. Record of what, I wonder. But broken. Definitely broken.
The ambulance stops with a final shriek of sirens. Paramedics jump out, yelling, “Back up, give us space!” I don’t move. A fire truck arrives thirty seconds later, followed by two police cars. And then I learn how to become the sky. There are people, an entire universe of people, and on the ground in a small town a boy and a girl and lights which flash red blue white red blue white angels or maybe even God.
One of the paramedics crouches down beside me. It’s a young man, twenty-something, with a freckled face, kind eyes, fifty-two years, voice low, tense. “Miss, you need to move.”
I don’t. If I let go of him he will die for sure but if I hold him we can just stay here forever. Instead I stay there across his body and watching him breathe and bleed.
“Miss—miss, you need to move, now,” the paramedic says. The firefighters who are not actually fighting any fire have a jack and some metal tools I don’t know the names of and now they are lifting the car off of Kas. The paramedic tries to pull me away. I don’t let go of Kas. I don’t care what he does to me—I’m not moving.
The woman who hit him is still crying. “I swear, I didn’t see him, he was just walking, why was he walking—” A police officer is leading her away to sit on the curb. I watch their progress out of my peripheral vision. This is her fault, but I hear the words my kids from her mouth and I can’t blame her for this.
Other people are moving around me now. Someone pushes my arm out of the way and tears open Kas’s shirt. His body is marbled with wounds so horrible that I can’t look at them so instead I close my eyes and cling to his arm, the one that isn’t mutilated from being crushed beneath the car.
“Move back,” someone commands.
“No,” I say. My voice is low and firm. How can it sound so steady when inside everything is shattered into a million terrified pieces?
“We need you to move back, now.”
“Not leaving.”
Someone puts a needle into my arm. I flinch. Clear liquid goes into my body. I let out my breath in a small sigh. I can feel my heartrate slowing down, the adrenaline stopping, everything stopping, everything going limp inside of me.
There will be no goodbye.
I never knew how to do goodbyes anyway.
I stay there for a long time. Or maybe it’s a second. Time is meaningless. My eyelids are very heavy and I can’t feel my hands. My body refuses to cooperate with me fast enough. The ground smells like metal and death. I’m not sure why. I lick my lips and taste the metal. Someone kneels in front of me with their hand on my shoulder, speaking in a low, soft voice. Maybe I fall asleep for a bit but eventually I become more aware of my surroundings and mostly aware that Kas is in a hospital without me or his mom. I look at my watch; two hours two minutes.
I realize there’s a second ambulance here. For who? Was someone else hurt? Was it me?
The driver of the car is gone, replaced by ten policemen including the one kneeling in front of me (I count) and some other official-looking people who are taking pictures and notes.
“Are you okay?” the policewoman in front of me asks after a couple more minutes.
I try to say something but the words get stuck halfway. I want to cry again but then I decide not to. Crying takes too much energy. Instead I say: “Define ‘okay.’”
“Was that your boyfriend?” I don’t answer. She tries again. “Was it your boyfriend who was involved in the accident?”
Was is in the past tense. “He’s still alive,” I say and then drag my arm out in front of me to look at my watch. “He’s still alive for one hour and fifty-four minutes.” I press my cheek against the rough asphalt smelling his blood all that’s left of him and ask, “Where is he?”
“He’s at the hospital, sweetie,” she says. “Do you want to get up?”
I don’t know if I want to get up or not so I just shake my head.
“Can you tell us what happened?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t remember.”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to remember right now. We had someone check you over, and it doesn’t look like you’re injured, which is good. Are you hurting anywhere?”
I put my hand over my chest because yes, I am hurting, right where my heart is. But I shake my head and say no.
Someone puts me into the ambulance and wraps a blanket around my shoulders. I sit there for a moment, numb and in shock.
I see Jack walking towards me. The world snaps back to reality. A sob wrenches from my chest, and my entire body curls forward, folding nearly in half.
“Oh god.” Jack is beside me, his arms strong around my body. “Aza, what the hell? Did he really—Jesus. This is really bad.”
I push him away, my shoulders shaking as I clutch the blanket. “I want Kas,” I sob.
“He’s at the hospital—”
“I don’t care. I want him.”
“You can’t,” he says. He’s also crying, big ugly tears rolling down his cheeks, his nose scrunched up. “I can’t get him for you.”
“NO!” I scream. “I want him. NOW.”
He reaches out for me, but I slap his hand away. The policewoman comes over to calm me, offers me something—maybe to eat, I don’t know—but I don’t take it.
“Already called your parents,” Jack says. “They’re coming soon.”
“I don’t want them. I want Kas,” I choke out. “Please. I don’t want anybody else.”
The policewoman takes both my hands in hers. “Honey, he’s in the hospital,” she says patiently. “I’ll make sure you see him as soon as you can.”
“I WANT HIM NOW!” I scream at her.
She flinches violently. “You need to relax. I’ll—”
“I WANT KAS!”
I don’t see Mom coming through the darkness. Maybe because I’m not looking. She grabs me and holds me so tight that for a second, I believe that she’ll never let me go. I breathe again. “Shh, baby, shh,” she whispers.
“Where’s Dad?” I whimper as she gives the police her contact information.
“He’s still on his trip, baby.” She’s carrying me towards the car now, my legs too weak to hold me upright, puts me in the back seat and closes the door. I rest my head against the cold window, wrapping my arms protectively around my chest like a shield against the world.
The car starts up and we drive away. Mom is crying too. I can see it in her reflection in the rearview mirror. I don’t know why she’s crying. She barely knew Kas at all. Then I realize she isn’t crying for him. She’s crying for his dad, who never made things up with him. She’s crying for his mom because she’s a mom too. For Lex, who lost so much and is only nineteen. For Mac, who’ll grow up with only his shadow and memory.
But me, I cry for myself. I cry because I lost my kind of everything and nothing will replace anything of it.
We drive straight to the hospital. I don’t remember going inside. We sit on hard plastic chairs, me on Mom’s lap. She holds me as hard as she can. She holds and holds and holds me. I put my arms around her neck, press my face to her chest. I realize my clothes—my face, my hands—it’s all covered in blood, now dried.
I watch the clock on the wall until it turns past eleven twenty-six. That’s when I know that his countdown is over.
I know. I’ve accepted this. I knew he was dead as soon as the car hit him. He didn’t have a chance.
The clock keeps moving, the world keeps turning, people keep walking by, the receptionist clicks on her monitor screen, Mom holds me. Maybe he’s dead but life goes on without knowing what was just lost. The clock moves its minutes hand a step forward. He’s dead.
He’s dead.
It changes nothing.
I rest my head against Mom’s shoulder and close my eyes because I don’t want to see a world without him. I wait for his voice to be close to my ear whispering I love you I love you into my soul, his breath hot and sweet and his forehead inches from mine. I never realized how powerful the three words in the sentence I love you are until he said them to me. They mean nothing until he’ll never say them to me again.
The Last I Love You was . . . I can’t even remember.
About thirty minutes later, a nurse comes out to speak to us. I focus on her boots, covered in ugly teal blue scrubs.
“Are you . . .” She glances at her clipboard before addressing Mom. “Azalea Mae Park?”
“That’s my daughter,” Mom says.
She glances at her clipboard. Her face is very serious which is not a good sign. Usually nurses have impassive faces. “I’m very sorry,” she says. “Kacper passed away around half an hour ago. We did everything we could. I’m very, very sorry.”
I’m quiet.
Mom pulls me close and whispers, “It’s okay to feel everything you’re feeling right now.”
Let me be honest with you. I don’t know how death feels like. I know Kas is dead, but I don’t know how to describe it, not really. I feel like my lungs are being flash-seared, then crushed to dust. I feel like my arms and legs are not attached to my body. I feel like someone tore my soul from my body. That’s not what death is supposed to feel like. That’s not how this should feel. I should be crying right now. But I’m so tired. My body feels like it weighs a ton. Tears would be too much effort.
I can’t even think of a good quote. I just say: “You know, when Scout learns how Tom Robinson died trying to get away—that’s how it feels right now.”

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I hate myself.
If I’d never told us to race—never let him cross without looking—never left him while I ran—none of this would have happened. I blame myself, too, for not having done something sooner. I could have fixed him. Someone could have fixed him.
I learn the extent of his injuries later while looking at his waxy figure which they haven’t yet covered. Mrs. Kozlowska is lying across his chest, her body shaking. Mom bottle-feeds Mac in a corner, sitting cross-legged on the floor and crying silently.
I look up the probabilities of survival for each injury and then make another list.
1) Fractured femurs, 90% survival rate
2) Crushed chest, 60% survival rate
3) Crushed pelvis, 65% survival rate
4) Internal organs crushed, 30% survival rate
5) Crushed lung, 85% survival rate
6) Traumatic head injury, 40% survival rate
7) 3.6% survival rate if the injuries were sustained separately
8) Which means next to nothing since they were sustained all at once and with existing conditions
I know it’s gory and horrible to make a list like this, but I needed to do it. I don’t feel better when I look at it, though. I don’t want to look at Kas either, so instead I look at the ground.
Mrs. Kozlowska won’t let them do an autopsy. She refuses to sign the papers. I also see no need for an autopsy when it’s clear how he died, and we know the full extent of his injuries already but I say nothing. Maybe it’s just a standard operating procedure.
It feels like my lungs are slowly being crushed. I wonder when they will collapse altogether.
I sit against the bed with my legs stretched out in front of me, then hold out my arms. Mom hesitates, but understands and lets me have Mac. He holds his bottle with me. I look down at him as I continue to feed him. I hope that when he grows up there will be people to tell him what kind of person his brother was—how he was smart and brave and good and kind and so loved.
Mac looks up at me. His eyes are dark and infinitely deep. He stares at me like babies do when they’re reading your soul without you even knowing. His eyelashes are impossibly long, and although he’s still so tiny, I can tell that he looks more like his dad than his mom. At first, I thought that I’d wish for him to look like Kas, but there can only be one Kas in the world, so now I’m glad that Lex and Mac don’t look like him. Even so I pretend that he’s Kas for a second. I pretend that I’m an angel holding Kas when he was small. Then I realize that Kas is never going to say “Pretend . . .” to me again and I will never say “Pretending happening” to him again and the illusion shatters.
Mac finishes the last of the bottle, and I pull it out of his mouth, wiping his chin with my sleeve. I want to explain to him right now. But he’s too small. Instead, I whisper, “He would’ve loved you so much.”
He doesn’t make a sound. He’s so quiet for a baby. Usually they are crying all the time. Maybe he can sense the heavy sadness in the room. He falls asleep in my arms after what feels like forever, his tiny breaths warm against my collarbone. My entire body hurts, but I don’t move.
I become aware of Lex sitting beside me, his arms wrapped around his body in a way that makes him look small. I want to say “I’m sorry” or something like that, but I can’t articulate the words.
Lex takes a deep breath in and addresses the floor. “You were always his favorite.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. Mac stirs in my arms and lets out a soft sigh. His little fingers twitch and curl around my pinky. Lex watches as I press a kiss to his forehead and rock him gently until he settles.
“He always talked about you,” Lex continues. “He never shut up about you, actually.” His finger scratches absentminded shapes onto the floor. He seems to want to continue, but his voice breaks on the next word and he stops. After a few more minutes, he adds, “You were his best friend. You were always first and everything else was second.”
I nod. I don’t look at him—I’ve never seen him cry before and I want it to stay that way—because I know he’s crying; I can hear it in his voice. It’s hoarse, cracked, barely there. He doesn’t look at me either.
We don’t say anything after that. The nurse comes in and says that they’ll need to take Kas away now. Mrs. Kozlowska just cries harder. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to block it all out.
The nurse says, “You can say goodbye to him. I’ll give you some time.”
I don’t know how to say goodbye. I don’t know how to let him go. I now understand why Kas said his ten was a nine. His ten was reserved. My ten was also reserved until now. Everything inside me is coiled up like a spring, wound too tightly and waiting to snap. It feels like I’m burning—being flash-seared—hot, sticky, endless. Outside birds are blue and chirping like nothing’s wrong except everything is, and in my head that blue turns to the hot yellow white, the color that iron glows, or the color of the sun.
Mom comes over to take Mac from my arms. I take this as a cue to say something to Kas. There’s no point because he can’t hear me, but I think it’s the appropriate thing to do. I stand up and look at him. They put him in strange sterile clothes and slicked his hair back in a way he would have hated. He would have probably commented on how ridiculous he must look and how embarrassing this is to be in a hospital gown with his hair styled like a 19th-century aristocrat in front of everyone. I don’t think he looks ridiculous. He doesn’t look like anything. He doesn’t look like Kas. All the color is drained from his body; his face is ashen, and his lips are a strange greyish blue. His hand is the kind of yellow that happens without blood as it rests limply on top of the bed. I touch it. It’s cold. Not like someone who needs a jacket. Like someone who’s dead.
Mrs. Kozlowska doesn’t stop crying, but she pulls her body away to let me stand closer.
“Kacper,” I whisper.
I expect him to wake up just like that, smile, ask me how my day was, tell me I look nice, say something stupid like about cheese fries. I hold my breath and pray for a miracle.
Nothing happens. His hand stays cold. I pull my fingers away from him.
Mom puts her arm around me. I stand there next to Kas for a long time, then lean over him—I know it’s morbid—and whisper in his ear, “If there’s a heaven, get a message to me.”
Then, very carefully, I hook my pinky around his and make that wish.
I wait for a sign.
I wait for one of the iron birds outside to fly into the window.
A few minutes later, the nurse comes in again, followed by three more people in white coats and scrubs but without nametags. They have a stretcher with them. I tear my gaze away from Kas, or what’s left with him. I didn’t really think about his leg braces and crutches—they sort of became a part of him after a while—but the body in front of me isn’t really him, it’s just a place that held him. I know he’s somewhere else now—somewhere I can’t reach—but I hope there is a heaven, or something, that death isn’t the end of everything.
They put Kas on the stretcher and take him away. The people without nametags don’t speak but the nurse (whose name, according to her nametag, is Nicole) pats me on the shoulder when she passes and says “I’m so sorry” like that sorry can make anything better. She didn’t know Kas—how is she sorry?
I sneak a glance at Mrs. Kozlowska, whose face is buried in her arms, red and puffy from so many tears. Lex is sitting next to her, looking at the floor. He hasn’t spoken a word in nearly an hour. He didn’t even say goodbye to Kas—maybe he doesn’t know how—or maybe he did and I wasn’t paying attention.
I wonder if anyone told Kas’s dad about this. If they did, he’d probably be here by now. I find his work number online and copy it. I don’t know what to say. Eventually I just write:
This is Aza.
And then I write:
Something bad happened and I don’t want to be the one to tell you. Please call St. Joseph’s hospital.
And then:
I don’t actually believe in saints. But I hope Joseph, whoever that was, is doing okay.
I hit send before I can think too much. He won’t see it right now. It’s five in the morning. Now that Kas is gone—I mean taken away, he’s been dead for hours now—I realize that I’m exhausted.
Mom says to the room at large, “Let’s go home.”
Mrs. Kozlowska, Lex, Mac, Mom, and me all go outside to my car (which is not really my car but I like to pretend it is). Most of the hospital parking lot is empty. The car next to us, which is red with two windows down, is idling. In the passenger seat, a woman is knitting something green. I draw the sign of the cross in the space in front of her because I heard somewhere that making that sign will grant you god’s protection but I might be wrong. No one sees me.
Our moms get in the front. Lex and me sit in the back together. I just want him to say something stupid or make a joke to let me know that things might eventually go back to normal but he’s just quiet. Finally I lean over and give him a hug. I can feel him breathing deeply. He gives my hand the tiniest squeeze and we let each other go much too quickly.
We drive to his house. Our moms go to the kitchen with the baby. Mom is making tea and toast like it’s her own house, though I know no one is going to eat it.
I don’t want to talk to anyone, but Lex pulls me aside. “I want to ask you something,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“I—I’m wondering—if you go—into his room.” His voice stops suddenly.
“I won’t take anything,” I say softly. I put my hand on his elbow and guide him upstairs. “I promise, I won’t.”
“Okay,” he whispers.
“Okay,” I whisper back.
We stop outside of his room. He nods, swallows hard, and disappears inside without another word.
I linger there for a few moments longer and hear him begin to cry faintly behind the closed door.
Kas would know what to do right now—he always knows what to do—but I don’t. So I just go back downstairs. I hate myself from running away from everything. I just don’t know how to stay.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I go to Kas’s room which is just down the hall and push the door open. The air inside is muggy like summer. It looks so . . . empty. But full at the same time. His bed is unmade, a sweater left on the floor, a cabinet stacked up with last year’s textbooks hanging open.
I crawl into his bed and curl up with my knees drawn up to my chin and my arms wrapped around my legs. Then I pull the blanket over me and take slow breaths, inhaling the scent that was purely him—lemon and wood and lavender. Grass. Soil after the rain. Sweat from our locker rooms. New clothes. Something faintly resemblant of antiseptic.
So much like him.
I close my eyes and then open them, expecting him to be asleep beside me. The other side of the bed is empty. I stay as still as possible.
No breath, no movement.
Still, I turn onto my other side. He’s not there either. He’s not in his chair watching me. He’s not standing by the window looking out at the street.
He’s dead.
I let myself sleep. When I wake up again several hours later, all the stars are gone.
I feel like a waffle. Like a very hot, very sticky, very squishy waffle that has been doused thoroughly in water and syrup and left out in the sun to dry. Not saying I’ve ever done that to a waffle. Maybe I was just a waffle in a past life.
The blanket is tangled around my legs—I’m too hot to use it anyway now, since the window is open like someone just forgot about it when they left, and the air outside must be ninety degrees right now. There’s an envelope on the pillow beneath me next to my hand. I have a feeling that Lex came in at one point and put it there.
I wonder what’s inside, but I don’t want to open it, not just yet. Instead, I get up and cross the room to Kas’s desk. His computer is open, but the screen is dark. There are papers and four different kinds of pens—I count. The papers are not very interesting—scraps, torn-up pieces (he was chronically obsessed with shredding paper using his fingers), math equations, half-finished sentences that trail off into nothing. He left his water bottle there too—he always refused to drink a healthy amount of water, maybe instead preferring to suffer through the effects of dehydration, and anyway the bottle an unappealing shade of purple. There’s his copy of To Kill a Mockingbird at the corner of the desk. I open to the bookmarked page. We never finished reading it together.
“Spoiler alert: Radley exists,” I say in case he’s listening.
I wait for a sign. About five minutes later, a fly buzzes in front of my face. I frown. If Kas came back as an animal like they believe in some religions, I really hope he’s not this fly.
I look around the rest of the room. Next to the window, his spare leg brace is lying on the floor like someone just dropped it there and left a moment ago. He never learned to walk without his braces and crutches like I promised him.
The poster on his wall about some band called THE OCTOPUS PROJECT has lost a pin and is hanging at an awkward angle. The pin is on the floor. I put it back into the wall.
I find a notebook, too, tucked between his mattress and his bed. At first I don’t want to look at it—maybe it’s private—maybe it’s some kind of secret journal—but he isn’t here anymore, he won’t mind. I open it, but the pages are all blank except the first one, which has his full name (first, middle, last) in big letters across the top, and below that are the words:
April 8th: Pygmy hippo day is today.
April 9th: I hereby declare that the meaning of the name “Kacper” is “chunk of granite”. Hah.
May 14th: My life goals now include: get my mom to read Harry Potter, get Jack to quit his yapping, and tell whoever is reading this to get out. Unless it’s me. In which case: aloha, you’re so FIRE. Also, Mac was born earlier today.
May 19th:
Lex
Kas
Aza
Mac
Always
And
Forever
I look at it for a long time, trying to piece it all together. I’d expected some kind of riddle, maybe some of his deepest secrets, but its not—its not even like a puzzle with half the pieces missing, more just like stuff. I really was hoping for something better than Kas’s random thoughts spread out over a couple of months. I wanted it to mean something to me, but it doesn’t.
I take one of the pens from his desk which says HILTON HOTEL (come on, Kas, we all know you’re not supposed to steal) and circle the word Forever in his notebook. There. Much better. I put the notebook back like it was never touched.
I look back at the envelope, then breathe out a heavy sigh and open it. There are two folded-up papers inside. I open the first one.
For Aza:
Note of explanation for why my hand was cut on the day after Daniel Byun died.
I saw him die. I asked you to write me a note about it not because I didn’t know, because I wanted to know how you’d heard it from Jack.
Daniel didn’t die throwing himself off a bridge. I pushed him. Me and him and Jack were walking with some other guys, when he started saying things “I’m just gonna end it all”. We told him to shut up and laughed it off, but he kept saying it.
I know you didn’t mess him up, Aza. I think he was on something. They did an autopsy but his mom never told me what they found in his system. He would never talk like that unless he was on something.
When we came to the bridge, he was talking about you. I told him to stop. We weren’t together then, but I knew I loved you. I didn’t want anyone hitting on you.
We got upset with each other. Daniel punched me. I hit him back. Broke two of his teeth with my fist. It’s why my hand was cut up. He started running. He got up on the bridge railing saying he was going to end me and daring me to hit him again.
I didn’t mean to push him, I swear. I was angry, I wasn’t looking where I was going, and I tripped over my crutch. He got knocked off the railing. He fell into the water. Died instantly. His head was smashed open on the rocks.
Me and the other guys made a promise not to tell anyone about this. Not the police. Not our parents. Not even you. But I want to anyway. When you’re ready and it can’t hurt me (which is when you’ll be reading this note).
Another thing. I don’t think you know why Jack’s brother, Dax, is in jail. Everyone was told it was because he was drunk driving. He was drunk driving. He was also the person who hit me.
I just thought you should know.
I look at the paper for a while before I wipe my face. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me all this. Maybe he was just waiting for the right moment. Or maybe he didn’t want me to know. Like I didn’t want him to know about his countdown. That’s okay. Right? I kept secrets from him too. About him. It was only fair that he could have kept secrets from me. It was expected. At least I should have expected it.
But he pushed Daniel. Maybe not on purpose, but he pushed him. And now Daniel is dead. And it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault at all.
Everyone hated the wrong person for the wrong reason.
I close the window. No one can know about this note now that I’ve read it. I tear it up into small pieces and toss them into the trash bin. I try to remember everything about him. I remember all of the Last Things. Last Smile. Last Thing He Said To Me. Everything that was the Last. I remember everything I put on the list which I wrote for him. That was the Last List that he read.
But then I remember other things too. I remember things I forgot to put on the list—like building a treehouse that was literally three boards nailed to a branch, when we had a school assignment in sixth grade to run a lemonade stand and instead just sold water because it was easier, hours spent picking out dream colleges (his were all Ivy League) and then both of us applying to the same two or three. I remember the night we had together—how it felt—how his body felt—how it felt to touch him. I’d asked him if he wanted to die a virgin, and he didn’t, and now I won’t either.
If I could see my countdown, maybe things would be better. Maybe. They could also be worse. I might waste my time on this earth in fear of the inevitable, reminded of how fragile and short life is every time I look in a mirror.
I think: I wish.
I don’t know what I wish for, I just do.
On the dresser is a picture that I didn’t notice before. I pick it up, turn it over in my hands, study it. It’s of me and him together. Neither of us are looking at the camera. Instead, we’re looking at something in the distance. We’re both wearing tracksuits—his is grey and white, and mine is pink velour. His hair is permanently windswept in the picture and I’m permanently smiling up at him.
I think we look nice in that picture. We aren’t posing. We’re just . . . us. Always.
I lay down on his bed again. The scent of him is already fading like the world is forgetting he was here. I won’t ever let his memory fade. I lean over the side and pick up his sweater from the floor, put it on and zip it up. My jeans are still covered in his dried blood, but none of his stuff will fit me. I go into his closet anyway, pushing his clothes aside and looking for something that might. The clothes are in neatly folded stacks—most of them. Some of them are just thrown on the floor like he didn’t have time to put them away properly.
In the back of a closet, I find a wrapped package. I squish it a little bit. It’s soft like fabric. I shrug—he won’t need it anymore, whatever it is—and tear it open, the paper rustling.
It’s a Christian Dior dress. My heart freezes. Who could . . .
There’s something scribbled on the tag, still attached to it. It says Aza, 18th birthday, if you’re still together. Otherwise, Mom. –Lex
I unfold the dress with shaking hands. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. The entire dress is red silk which starts with crimson at the top and fades into black. It’s almost like two pieces—the top part is in the shape of a heart, and the bottom is a full-length, flowing skirt.
Lex asked me not to take anything, so I fold the dress up and wrap the paper back around it. He’ll give it to me when we’re ready.
“Aleksander Kozlowski,” I whisper. “Thank you.”
I reach into the envelope again and open the second note, unfolding it very carefully. I hold it up to the glow of the sun. The handwriting is immaculate.
My birthday wish: That she knows how much I love her.
I do, Kas.
I really do.
My eyes burn as I tuck it back into his envelope and slip it under his pillow. I don’t leave his room as the sky changes, strange colors sliding through the window. Grey to yellow to white to blue to grey to white to pink to blue to pink to purple to grey to black.
Afterwards, after everything, I lay there in the dark and count the stars.
If your star is the handle part of the Medium Dipper, then his is so bright it fills the entire sky.

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