Wallace nodded. “You’ll know, won’t you? How long we can go. How far.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“I need this,” Wallace said plainly. “And I want it to be with you.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Hugo’s expression shuttered. “Changed your mind? Last night, you seemed pretty certain you didn’t want to hear how I feel.”
“I’m scared,” Wallace admitted. “And I don’t know how not to be. But if this is it, if this is what I have left, then I want to do this. With you.”
Hugo sighed. “It’s really what you want?”
“Yes.”
“I need to ask Mei if she’ll—”
“Already done,” Mei said, peeking her head through the kitchen doors. Wallace snorted when he saw Nelson peering under her arms. Of course they’d been listening. “I got it, boss. Give the man what he wants. It’ll do you both some good. Fresh air and blah, blah, blah. We’ll hold down the fort.”
“We don’t even know if he can ride it,” Hugo said.
Wallace puffed out his chest. “I can do anything.”
* * *
He couldn’t do anything.
“What the hell?” he growled as he fell through the scooter to the ground for the fifth time.
“People are staring,” Hugo muttered out the side of his mouth.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Wallace pushed himself up off the ground. “And it’s not like they can see me. For all they know, you’re talking to your scooter like a weirdo.”
Hugo crossed his arms and glared at his feet.
Wallace frowned at the scooter. It should be easy. It was just like the chairs. “Unexpect it,” he mumbled to himself. “Unexpect it. Unexpect it.”
He lifted his leg once more, throwing it over the back of the scooter. He knew he looked ridiculous as he lowered himself slowly, but he was beyond caring. He was going to do this if it was the last thing he did.
He crowed in triumph when he felt the back seat of the scooter pressed against his rear and thighs. “Hell yeah! I’m the best ghost ever!”
He looked over at Hugo, who fought a smile. “You’re going to fall off and—”
“Kill myself? I have a feeling I don’t need to worry about that. Get on. Come on, come on, come on.” He patted the seat in front of him.
It was awkward, more so than Wallace thought it would be. The scooter was small and Hugo and Wallace were not. Swallowing thickly, Wallace studiously avoided looking at Hugo’s rear as he threw his leg over one side and settled on the seat. The scooter creaked as Hugo propped it up, raising the kickstand with the heel of his shoe. They were close, so close that Wallace’s legs disappeared into Hugo. The cable stretched between them tightly. It was oddly intimate, and Wallace wondered what it would be like to wrap his arms around Hugo’s waist, holding on as tightly as he could.
Instead, he reached back and gripped the metal bars at his sides, settling his feet on the footrests.
Hugo turned his head. “We’re not going far.”
“I know.”
“And you’ll tell me when it starts getting bad.”
“I will.”
“I mean it, Wallace.”
“I promise,” he said, and he’d never meant it more. The whispers he’d heard in the house were louder now, and he could no longer ignore them. He didn’t know what they were calling him toward, but it wasn’t the door. They were calling him away from the tea shop.
Hugo turned the key. The scooter’s engine whined, the seat vibrating underneath Wallace pleasantly. His laugh turned into a yelp when they started rolling forward slowly, picking up speed as dust kicked up behind them.
Wallace felt the pull the moment they hit the road. He gritted his teeth against it. He hadn’t known what it’d been before. He did now. He looked down at his arms, expecting to see his skin beginning to flake off. Not yet, but soon.
Wallace thought Hugo would turn toward town, perhaps driving down the main drag and back to the shop.
He didn’t.
He went the opposite direction, leaving everything behind. The forest grew thicker on either side of the road, the trees swaying in a cool breeze, limbs clacking together like bones. The sun sank lower in front of them, the sky pink and orange and shades of blue that Wallace couldn’t believe existed, deep, dark, like the farthest depths of the ocean.
No one followed them; no cars on the road passed them by. It was as if they were the only two people in the entire world on a lonely stretch of road that led to nowhere and everywhere all at once.
“Faster,” he said in Hugo’s ear. “Please go faster.”
Hugo did, the engine of the scooter whining pathetically. It wasn’t built for speed but it didn’t matter. It was enough. The wind whipped through their hair as they leaned into every curve, the road a blur beneath them, flashes of white and yellow lines shooting across Wallace’s vision.
It was only a few minutes later that Wallace’s skin began to rise and flake away, trailing behind them. Hugo saw it out of the corner of his eye, but before he could speak, Wallace said, “I’m all right. I swear. Go. Go. Go.”
Hugo went.
Wallace wondered what would happen if they never stopped. Perhaps if they went far enough, Wallace would drift away into nothing, leaving all the pieces of him behind. Not a Husk. Not a ghost. Just motes of dust along a stretch of mountain road, ashes spread as if he’d mattered.
And maybe he had. Not to the world at large, not to very many people in the grand scheme of things, but here, in this place? With Hugo and Mei and Apollo and Nelson? Yes, he thought maybe he mattered after all, a lesson in the unexpected. Wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t that the great answer to the mystery of life? To make the most of what you have while you have it, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.
In death, Wallace had never felt more alive.
He squeezed his thighs against the sides of the scooter, holding himself in place. He raised his arms out like wings, pieces of his arms flaking off behind them. He tilted his head back toward the sun and closed his eyes. There, there, there it was, the warmth, the light covering him completely. Never wanting it to end, he shouted his wild joy toward the sky.
Hugo seemed to have a destination in mind. He turned down a road that Wallace would have missed had he been on his own. It wound its way through the forest on an incline. The pull of his shedding skin was negligible. A dark curl flickered at the back of his mind, but he had it under control. The whispers were fading.
On the side of the road ahead was a little pullout, nothing more than a gravel patch. Hugo steered the scooter toward it. Wallace gasped when he saw what lay on the other side of the guardrail.
The pullout was set on a cliff. The drop-off was steep, though the tops of the trees below rose in front of them. The sun set in the west, and as the scooter came to a stop, Wallace jumped off, rush ing toward the guardrail. In his haste, he almost ran through it, but managed to skid to a stop just before.
“That would’ve been bad,” he said, looking down, the thrill of vertigo washing dizzily over him.
He heard Hugo turn the scooter off and prop it up on the kickstand before climbing off himself. “We can’t stay long. It’s getting worse.”