Rooms(43)

He wanted to see her again, but he was afraid, too.

“Hello,” he whispered.

He thought he heard a snicker, or an echo of a snicker. The voices were still there—sporadic, often indecipherable, like footsteps that stop as soon as you pause to listen.

Was it her?

The memorial for his father was in just six days and Trenton had not anticipated being alive to see it. But the ghost had changed things. He could not—he would not—kill himself until he knew the truth about her.

He lay there, listening to a fly buzz somewhere, watching bits of cottonseed float in through the half-open window on long fingers of sun. He was tired and hungover. He’d drunk too much at Katie’s stupid party.

He should never have gone. Trenton had thought it would be a high school thing, and everyone would know one another, and he would feel out of place. Instead it was just a bunch of random people floating between the kitchen and the basement. He wondered where Katie picked her friends: they looked like refugees, or people who might work in a shitty dollar-for-a-pound thrift store, if they worked at all. Trenton was positive he recognized one of the boys from the butcher counter at Mick’s Deli. Even Katie hadn’t seemed to know anyone very well. Several times, she had confused a girl’s name, calling her Megan instead of Melissa. And when Trenton had asked how she knew everybody, she had responded vaguely that she liked having people around, which of course wasn’t an answer to his question at all.

Katie took him out to the back porch and sat so close to him their thighs touched all the way from hip to knee. She was impressed that he could name a few constellations—thanks to an astronomy elective at Andover he’d taken for the easy A—and together they’d counted the fireflies floating through the dark.

“I used to pretend that fireflies were fairies,” Katie had said, her voice a little thick. “I’d imagine I was a fairy cursed to live in human form, and someday I’d transform back.” She turned to him. Her breath smelled sweet, like raspberry vodka. “Do you ever wish you were someone else?”

And he had answered truthfully, “All the time.”

But then Marcus had showed up with more alcohol. Marcus. What a sleazeball name. He looked like a sleazeball, too, with a goatee thin as a rat’s tail and dirty jeans and a tattoo on the back of his hand of a girl in a bikini using his pointer finger as a stripper pole. He must have been at least twenty-five.

Trenton had been so close to kissing Katie.

He was just starting to doze off when he felt it—a change in the atmosphere. His lungs tightened in his chest and he was temporarily paralyzed, as he had been the moment he’d first woken in the hospital, encased in plaster, unable to move or even cry out, because of the tubes in his throat.

He kept his eyes closed, afraid that if he opened them, it would prove to be just his imagination. Or she would get scared. He squeezed them together so he wouldn’t cheat, feeling his heart beat deep in his chest, and found himself praying that this was real. That she was real. That he wasn’t crazy.

Trenton felt her sit down on the bed. The mattress didn’t sink, the headboard didn’t groan, but he felt it nonetheless: a change next to him, as though a sudden wind had sprung up. Now he didn’t know whether to open his eyes or not.

Don’t go away, he thought. Don’t go away. But he was terrified. He could no longer feel his fingers or toes.

The thought occurred to him: maybe she was coming for him, to take him over to the other side. And he remembered the moments after the accident, and the feeling of soft shadowed hands all over.

“Are you asleep?” Her voice, too, was like wind across the sheets.

“No,” Trenton said, and he forced himself to open his eyes.

He tried not to scream. Or maybe he tried to scream and couldn’t. The desire was there, a hard pressure in his chest and throat and terror deep in his guts; but he kept breathing, in-out in-out, and made no sound.

Once, in seventh grade, Trenton had come down with a bad migraine just before basketball tryouts. Standing on the court, he’d seen holes in the boys charging at him, holes in the floor, great swirling pits of darkness in the air and ceiling. He’d spectacularly missed a free throw before puking right in the middle of the gym. But nothing was worse than the holes.

That’s what this was like: parts of her were there, and parts of her weren’t, but he couldn’t exactly tell which was which because the holes, the dark spaces, seemed always to be moving, eating up first her jaw or the left part of her cheek, then her shoulder and elbow or half her chest or a leg. The more he looked, the worse it became—dizzying, immobilizing, like entering a house after staring directly at the sun and fumbling blindly for familiar shapes.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I’m Trenton,” he said. “I live here.” It was far better when Trenton didn’t look at her directly. He scooted up on his elbows, leaning back against the headboard, and stared instead at the wall, where he could see the faint outlines of posters he’d had tacked there when he was a boy—places where the sun had bleached more or less, and small nicks in the wall from the thumbtacks. In his peripheral vision, she seemed far more solid. “Who’re you?” he said, although he thought he knew.

“I’m nobody anymore, am I?” she whispered. Then: “The others told me I was dead. They told me to get used to it.”