Alive.
We don’t look at each other.
We’re both definitely crying.
I can feel him next to me, his arm against mine, his knee in his jeans, right there next to my knee. I can smell the lemon peel he scrubs his hands with to get rid of most of whatever toxicities he’s been touching, the charcoal in the soap he uses to get rid of the rest, the smell of pencil shavings and graphite. All I’ve got is ( ).
Jason’s fingers are running up and down my hand, and his other hand is petting my wrist and, and, and.
&,&,&.
!!!!
I can’t look at him.
Finally, in the silence of the giant squid footage, as it swims away, back to its own world, I manage to say, “Don’t you want to know what I wished for?”
Like he doesn’t know. I think he wishes the same wish I do. Both of us are very good at pretending we aren’t superstitious about these things, but we so are.
“I don’t need to know,” he says, looks at me, and grins a crooked grin that is in danger of not being a grin at all.
“Aza,” says Jason, and leans in. I want to lean into him, too, I want to, and I start to, and I can’t breathe, and I’m me and he’s him and we’re best friends and what is this? Kiss the sick girl?
No, no, this is Jason, an inch from me. He’s still crying, and so am I. I’m leaning in and he’s leaning in, and
Lightning.
White, sizzling, hair standing up all over our bodies, ozone. OMG, it’s striking in my backyard. Outside the basement windows. Right outside them. Ten feet away.
We jump, instinctively, away from each other.
AZA screams a whistling voice. AZA COME NOW.
Rain starts to pour down the window, and then hailstones the size of Ping-Pong balls. Wind banging hard.
Jason grabs me, and keeps me from falling off the couch.
“Did you hear that?”
“What? The thunder?” he says. “Yeah, that was close.”
“No, THAT,” I say. “Like a million birds. Like a million birds screaming at me personally.”
Jason has his arms around me. I am as stormed by that as anything.
There’s another sonicboomjetenginethundercrash of a noise, and that noise screams, in a lot of different voices:
AZA.
I hear more than that. Individual voices, flickering across the wind, humming wire voices. Everyone—who?—is shouting, singing, shrieking my name.
AZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZA
I grab Jason’s shirt, and stare at him. He listens for a second, then shakes his head.
“Crazy,” he says.
“Crazy what?”
“Weather.”
I pull back from him, adjust my shirt, fold up the paper he gave me, and put it in my pocket.
“Maybe,” I say. I pretend my fingers aren’t shaking.
Shit, shit, shit. I’m losing it. This is a whole new level of wrong.
Jason’s staring at me. I try not to think about how one day I walked into my room and looked at the flea circus and all the fleas were just dead in their spangles.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Not so much,” I say.
“Because of everything,” he says slowly, “or because I just screwed up?”
I shake my head. That’s all I can do. “Give me a second,” I say at last.
He looks hard at me, and then nods, folds up his laptop and its miracle squid, and goes upstairs. I sit on the couch in the dark, trying to hold myself together. I want to cry and laugh at once.
We almost—
But no.
And—
After a few minutes, my heart goes back to being a heart, and I head upstairs.
“You okay?” He’s at the sink, doing the dishes. We are made of awkward.
“Better,” I say.
He clears his throat. “Back to Magonia?” he says, not looking at me. “More proto-UFO theory?”
I stare at his back. Shoulders = too high.
“Maybe,” I say. And then I’m insanely brave because I keep talking. If this is it for me, if this is the last day I’m going to be alive? Why not be brave?
“I want to go back to what we were doing before,” I say. “It was me who screwed that up.”
I’m forced to blurt out the rest as fast as I can.
“All-right-do-you-want-to-start-over-even-though-I’m-a-disaster?”
Jason’s shoulders relax. His face softens. “You think you hold horrors for me . . . ,” he says, which is what he always says when I utter anything in this category.
“But you hold no horrors,” I say, which is the correct response.
Jason leans over the table, and I get myself ready to change our status, because OMG, I think I would desperately like to change our status, but Eli chooses that moment to bang her way into the kitchen, looking disgusted.
It’s okay.
I didn’t need to kiss him.
I hadn’t been imagining kissing Jason under the surface of my brain for years, or anything.
I feel a flash of rage at Eli, whose fault it isn’t.
“Weather out there sucks it,” she says, and then looks at us, assessing, coolly. “Weather in here kind of sucks it too. I got rained on. Did you see the lightning?”
She flicks a drop of rain off her shoulder. Only one. Possibly she just walked between raindrops. Me, I get drenched anytime there’s even fog.
“Eli?” I say. “Do you think you could—”
She must be reading my mind, because she’s instantly defensive.