terrible things - ashton irwin

epilogue

In Bucolic Klamath Falls, early fall is bright and dry. The leaves are already turning brown, letting themselves be blown from their branches into sad little piles on unmown lawns.

My mum is down in the courtyard, searching for the watch she dropped on her way home from the bar last night.

She's been looking for half an hour already. (If you ask me, I think Critter found it and took it straight to Jack's Pawn.) Mum keeps looking up at me, sitting here on the apartment's tiny balcony, like she thinks that any minute I might vanish into thin air.

I'm not going anywhere. My first community service session isn't until tomorrow afternoon. See, when I got back home, the first thing I did was walk to the police station and turn myself in.

Yup. Once a GG, always a GG.

I think I knew from the moment we stole the Harley that I was going to have to make amends for our journey. It was the right thing to do. And even though Ashton's eyes are likely rolling out of his head right now, I think he might have been smiling down on me, too, when the judge handed me my sentence. Grand theft auto is a felony and usually lands people in jail, but miraculously I was only charged with a misdemeanor and was banned from getting a driver's license until I turn twenty-one, and I'm basically going to do community service until my arms fall off.

It's completely worth it to me. After all, the people who "lent" us their cars gave Ashton and me an incredible gift, and I'll gladly pick up trash for the rest of my life if I have to. In fact, I'm thinking about volunteering for the police department, too.

"Lav," my mum calls up, "shouldn't you be heading to school soon?"

"I'll be down in a minute," I reply. Ugh. I'd forgotten about my mandatory physics tutoring session, which starts in an hour. Turns out you can't pass a class when you ditch the last three weeks of it and stop being able to understand the supposedly important laws of physics.

Those laws don't explain why Ashton had to die. They don't explain how I'll keep going without him. So I'm pretty sure I don't care that much about understanding how "the entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases."

But then, like a contrarian voice from the heavens, something from class pops right into my mind: a body in motion tends to stay in motion; a body at rest tends to stay at rest. That's the definition of inertia, a word that would have made Ashton roll his eyes.

I am in motion. I will stay in motion. Maybe one of those magical forces of the physical universe will kick in and keep me going, no matter how much pain I feel.

Or not.

I wrap my arms around myself, inhaling the scent of Ashton that lingers on his flannel shirt, which I'm wearing. And my tears well up and start to spill out all over again. I'm just really, really tired.

"Hey, Lav, check this out!" my mum calls. I lean over the balcony and she points to a part of the withering rosebush in the yard—one solitary flower still miraculously in bloom. I smile weakly. I was hoping she'd finally found her watch.

"You okay?" he asks.

I shrug. I mean, how am I supposed to answer that question? I saw Dr. Suzuki last week, and my cancer is still in remission. My five-year survival rate? Almost 93 percent.

So technically, yes, I'm okay. Technically.

But as I sit here letting the sun warm my face, I know that there's a part of me that's missing. It's as if the doctors had sliced something essential out. A vital part that I was sure I needed to keep me breathing. Not just existing. Even now, sometimes I think I hear Ashton's laughter, and for a moment my heart lifts. But when I turn my head to look, it's never him. It's the wind, or the call of a bird, or a hallucination of my own mad dream.