Where the Staircase Ends(45)

I stood up to look around, or as around as you can look when you aren’t able to move your head or body backwards.

Nothing looked any different beyond the hint of the pink trail left behind by the dragonfly. The sky was still clear, the air was still quiet and motionless. A few tiny flakes of snow drifted down from invisible clouds, but otherwise there was no movement beyond the rising and falling of my own chest. Where was everyone? Did they all poof and disappear?

“Hello?” I called, my voice sticking to the sides of my throat from lack of use. “Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Hello!”

My voice came back to me in an echo, reverberating off the stone steps like I was standing inside an empty canyon. For a moment I stood there, remembering earlier when the snow started to fall after I yelled at the sky. Someone listened to me then, so where were they now? Why wasn’t anyone helping me?

Even stranger than where everybody went was how they managed to get to that point on the stairs. How was it that this part of the stairs was worn down, but the part I started on was perfectly smooth and flat? It would make more sense for the beginning part of the steps to be worn down because that’s the place where everyone had to start. Right?

But the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t be sure that I started at the bottom of the staircase. I couldn’t turn around to look behind me, so there was no way for me to know whether or not I started at the beginning. I just assumed it was the beginning, because, well, that’s how stairs usually work. But what if I appeared somewhere in the middle of the staircase? Given everything that had happened, it wasn’t farfetched to think I might have poofed into the center of the stairs when the car hit me, which was disconcerting. How big was this thing?

I crouched down on the step again, rocking on my heels while I tried to work it out in my head. My fingers worked around my temples the way they sometimes did when I tried to squeeze an answer out of my brain in class. What if when we died we all started at a different place on the stairs? What if there was no beginning, or the beginning was different for all of us? It wasn’t logical, but then again nothing about the stairs seemed logical.

If you assumed there was only one set of stairs for everyone and we all started at different points, then that meant I’d hit the place on the staircase that everyone else eventually reached. And if that was the place we all eventually reached, wouldn’t that mean I was close to the top?

My heart hammered in my chest, clanging against my skin like it wanted to escape. I still couldn’t see the top of the stairs, so there was no guarantee I was right. But it gave me hope. Hope that there was something waiting for me up there. Hope that I wasn’t alone after all.

I was on my feet before I knew what I was doing, running as if my life depended on it.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


WORDS THAT SWIM


The sun screamed through the cheetah-printed curtains when I woke up the morning after the party. I tried hiding my head under the pillow, but the sun leaked through the sides until I finally gave up and went to Sunny’s room to see if she was awake.

Her door was cracked, so I pushed it open wider and tiptoed inside. Sunny was buried under her white duvet, a soundless lump under a mass of blankets. I took a running leap onto the bed and started jumping up and down to wake her.

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood!” I sang. “A beautiful day in the neighborhood! Won’t you please, won’t you please, please won’t you be my … neighbor!” I hopped on top of her when I sang the last line, grabbing at the blankets to yank them away from her body. She was curled up into a ball, her face buried inside her hands so I couldn’t see her.

“Sunny, wake up. Yoo-hoo!” I reached out to tickle her, the way she used to do when we were kids and she woke up before me at one of our ritual sleepovers. She pulled her hands away from her face long enough to slap me away, and that’s when I saw she was crying.

“Sunny?” I stopped bouncing, the grin slipping from my face as I sat down on the bed next to her. “Sunny, what’s wrong? What happened?”

She sniffled loudly and hid her face underneath one of her pillows.

“Please go away, Taylor. Please.”

Her voice was small and muffled. The bed shook with the rhythm of her crying, and I didn’t know what to do. Sunny never cried. Not when Mark Schroen dumped her, not when she lost homecoming princess to Lizzie Masters, not even when someone stole her Coach handbag from her gym locker. There was only that one time, many years ago, when her mom left.

“Sunny,” I whispered, reaching out to smooth the hair that poked out from underneath the pillow. “Sunny, what’s wrong? What happened?”

She started sobbing louder, and that made me even more nervous. My first thought was maybe someone had told her about me and Justin, but that didn’t make sense. I expected her to be mad, pissed even, but she wouldn’t cry about it. Not like this. Then I remembered someone was in the room with her when I went to bed. They were laughing, but maybe something went down after I’d gone to sleep?

“Sunny, did something happen last night? With the guy who was in the room with you?”

I waited, listening to the sound of her ragged breath under the downy pillow. When she didn’t say anything, I lay down on the bed and wrapped my arms around her. She felt small, like a frail bird shaking underneath the weight of my arms. I never realized how tiny she was; she always seemed bigger than life.