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Chapter 17

Tyler Emery

The stars outside Charlotte's window were like little pin pricks, like a smattering of paint across the sky to lighten up and beautify the cold and crushing darkness. What if that's what God actually did when he created the universe? What if he thought his perfect little children would need something to make the night sky less scary, something to base great legends and futures off of, so he just took paint and threw it out on to the sky, like it was a huge, midnight black canvas. Wouldn't the astronomers hate to hear that, that the thing they spend their whole lives studying and looking up into is actually completely random and has no great purpose?

I pressed my hand against the glass, remembering how Drew and I used to breathe on the school bus windows, causing them to fog up, then drew out elaborate battle scenes with our fingers. Knights cut off the heads of ogres, giants, and witches. Troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, trying to take the world back from the Germans. My tracings were always hurried and full of gore and guts, trying to impress Ashley Usher who was sitting a couple rows away. Drew, of course, spent the whole bus ride perfecting his tiny army men and snarling horses. We used to create worlds with our fingertips. Now I couldn't even breathe on the window to fog it up. 

Charlotte made a snuffling noise behind me, and I spun around, my eyes searching her sleeping form. She had run to her room as soon as we got home after her dad picked us up from school, refusing to talk to him at all. She hadn't moved much all afternoon, just curled up in a tight fetal position with her earbuds in. She ignored the knocks on her door at every hour, and rejected the food that was left outside her door. Sometimes she cried quietly, stuffing the pillow into her mouth to stiffen the sobs. Other times her blind eyes just stared upwards, dry of tears and empty of emotion. Somehow, that was worse than her tears and body-wracking sobs. Like she had accepted that her life was falling apart around her and had no desire to stop it. I wondered if that's what Drew saw in me in the last couple of days.

She finally gave up on staying awake and drifted off at around eleven. Downstairs, her parents stayed up in the kitchen, talking with low voices and hushed tones about the blind school that Charlie might be attending in the near future. I put my ear to the floor, hoping to catch as much of what they were saying as possible, but only hearing the dull roar of the dishwasher and some ridiculous children's TV show. Of course it occurred to me to try and open her door and slip down the stairs, to materialize my fingers long enough to tap the door handle and be on my merry way, just like when I slapped the papers out of the troll's hands and slipped my hand into Charlie's as she was leaving the cafeteria, but the whole idea seemed too tenuous and risky. I still had no idea how to control or make it happen when I wanted it to; I had spent the whole lunch period with my index finger planted solidly willing it to exist, to feel the cool and smooth surface of the plastic tabletop to no avail. I couldn't push over hoodie boy's milk cartoon or tap the Princess of Darkness's spiky lunchbox. It was only when Charlotte stood, looking frenzied and anxious all over again, and I felt a rush of overwhelming sympathy and sadness, did I reach out instinctively and put my hand in hers, just long enough to give her a squeeze to convey confidence and strength, and honestly to relish in the feel of something real, something substantial. Her hand was dry and slightly rough, like she worked with them often, and her fingers were long and slender, reminiscent of thin twigs.

Now I strolled to her bedside, my feet dragging and my arms hanging limply at my sides, feeling exhausted and like an old, worn out toy. I first noticed it at lunch, when my eyes went slightly out of focus, like when you didn't get enough sleep and in the morning your mind was all fuzzy. I had to shake my head to clear it and focus, but it only took ten or twenty minutes until it happened again. My body wanted rest, the time it needed to recuperate after putting it through so much turmoil throughout the day, but I was ninety-nine percent sure that ghosts couldn't just take naps. I couldn't lay down on Charlie's floor and sleep, my body didn't crave sleep the way it had when I was alive, but I also couldn't keep going on without some kind of rest and reprieve. I knew that I had used too much energy today, that I had spread myself too thin, but I had no idea how to counteract that.