“Sylvie could see he was dead when she came to.”
I try to focus on the golden light. I try to watch the dust motes and think about how, as a kid, I theorized that they were tiny planets and cosmos swirling in and out of existence. I figured our Milky Way was dust motes in some giant’s world, our existence from the big bang onward as brief to those who observed us as the dust motes’ dance seemed to me.
“What do you mean, Lex?”
“I probably shouldn’t explain.”
The girl who let me in upstairs crosses the room, and the dust motes swirl again like tiny, synchronized swimmers of air.
It’s still the day of Finn’s death.
“The electrical burns went all the way up his arm. That’s what killed him, they said. From his hand through his arm to his heart, and that side of his face was—”
If Alexis said that Finn was pronounced dead right after midnight, did he die before midnight? I think again about the paramedics arriving, packaging him up, and delivering him to the hospital without urgency.
“Sylvie told me that when she saw his face, she wished she had died too.”
I scan the room for Sylvie. Alexis said Sylvie, by some miracle, only had a concussion and was allowed to go home. She isn’t here though. I think about finding Alexis and asking her if hosting this party is a better idea than being with her best friend after she almost died, but I know it’s pointless, like everything with Alexis.
I won’t be able to tell Finn he was right. But if he was alive, I’d probably still hook up with Alexis until I leave for college and over Christmas break, if she was up for it.
It seems so obvious now; it matters which people you spend time with, and it matters how you spend your time, because you don’t know how much you have.
I gaze around the room again. People are laughing or crying or talking, and they’re all going to die. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But they will die. Everyone they love will die too, and no one can stop it.
There was a book Finn and I read in class the year we met about a boy who sees an apple change, but he doesn’t understand how it changed, only that it changed somehow, and later you find out that he’s seen in black and white his whole life and was perceiving the red of the apple for the first time.
I’m looking around at all these people in the basement, and it’s like I’m that boy in that book, except I’m seeing everyone as a future corpse.
All these people drinking and milling around, they are simply meat packed around skeletons. The tiniest amount of electricity—just the right amount!—runs through each of us, but it will stop someday. We will rot or be burned, but we will be disposed of in some manner.
We are all dead bodies that haven’t died yet.
The apple was always red; the boy just couldn’t see it.
I take a deep breath and look down at my own chest. I imagine my pink lungs under my white ribs, taking in the air, pushing it out, taking it in, pushing it out. I feel my fleshy heart beating, beating, working to deliver the oxygen from my lungs to my blood. I even feel my arteries pulsing, pushing, working.
I am alive.
I’ve always been alive.
But today I feel it.
I take another breath and hold it until my body begs for more, and then I let it out so that I can take another.
After a while, someone puts a song on repeat from the one depressing album Finn liked. I think about finding out who so that I can either punch them or hug them. He has that now, no alarms or surprises, like the song says.
Sudden pain strikes my toes, and I look up.
“Oh, sorry.”
It’s the crying girl from upstairs. She steps off my shoe and closer to her friends, who’ve congregated near the beanbag chair. She isn’t crying anymore, but I still don’t recognize her.
“I’ll live,” I say to no one in particular and flinch.
She doesn’t notice my choice of words and turns back to her friends. Jacoby, Melissa, and Seth—I know them. Seth was on the team at least.
“Anyway,” the girl I can’t remember says, “I know that it’s such a small thing, him having that pencil. But it was so nice of him, and it really was a terrific pencil.”
“No, I get it,” Seth says. “Everyone knew Finn was the nicest guy.” They all murmur agreement.
Jacoby adds, “Yeah, he really was.”
I want to ask him how they can talk about Finn being dead so easily, as if he’s been gone forever.
“I should’ve saved that pencil to remind me to be nicer to people,” the girl says somberly.