Don’t die, she says. Dying won’t help.
Sometimes Eve is exactly the right mom. There’s no “pass away” or “lose” in that.
She sends another text. This time, a guilty one.
And if you *really* don’t want to fall asleep, I wouldn’t drink the milk. Carol made it.
Carol loves me, is worried about me, and is a doctor with access to sleeping pills. I move the milk off the desk. I’m not done thinking, but I turn off the overhead light for a minute.
Aza must have done what she did to my ceiling a week or so before she died. It doesn’t show during the day. Pretty sure the moms don’t know about it. I didn’t either until I turned out the lights for the first time, two nights after she died. Glow paint.
AZA RAY WAS HERE.
Except that the last E got smudged due to Aza apparently falling off my headboard or something. So, it actually reads AZA RAY WAS HER.
I look at that for a minute, trying to get myself together. I’m a fucking mess of rattling pi and things I never said.
I spent the last ten years talking. Why I couldn’t say any of the right words, I don’t know.
I want to install a better version of all the things that happened right before she died. All the crazy stuff, beginning with the skyship, right through the feather in Aza’s lung. The storm when we were in the basement—the whole town should have been rain, and lightning, and it was only Aza’s block.
Yes. I know people die. I know that when people die, the people they leave behind always think something insane happened, because death, by its nature, feels insane. It’s part of how humans have always dealt with dying, as though it’s somehow special, as though every person who dies is a hero. We want to die spectacularly, not just “perish.”
I keep trying to make it make sense.
In the ambulance, the medic cut into her like she wasn’t even a person. Aza made a choking noise. Her back arched. Her heart stopped again. The medic used the crash pads to start it. Twice.
And I heard a sound from her chest, this song. A bird, whistling, shrieking.
I’m not crazy.
There wasn’t even really a feather in her lungs. The coroner didn’t find anything in the autopsy.
There was an autopsy, yeah. I haven’t seen any results yet. But I’ll get them. I need to see them, and make sure—okay, I know Aza died. It felt like she took off running without me. Her fingers clenched on mine. Then they relaxed, like she’d lost all her bones.
When the driver called for the life flight, I was already sure she was dead. Which makes it even worse what happened to the helicopter.
The thing about Aza and me is that we’ve spent every day since the day we met knowing she was going to die, and pushing that knowledge over to one side. No one knew what was wrong with her, not really, so a few years ago I decided I’d be the hero who figured it out.
Aza didn’t know. I went through a ton of medical journals. It’s amazing what you can learn to make decent sense of with the right motivation. I’ve got articles going back to the 1600s. If you want me to diagram a lung, I could do that for you. I could maybe even do it blindfolded.
But whatever I was doing, I didn’t do it fast enough. I’m not a miracle worker. I’m not even a scientist. Some days I’m just sixteen, and sixteen isn’t what I want to be.
Aza’s mom had the same idea as me, a lot earlier than I did. She’s been trying to figure this out for almost fifteen years, since Aza started having trouble breathing, but the meds she’s been trying to get testing cycles for keep getting rejected.
I know things Aza didn’t know about what her mom’s been doing for her. A few months ago, I ran across some really promising data that had come out of the lab Aza’s mom works in, and so I asked her about it. Her mom was on an asthma project at the time, on mouse trials. When Aza came down with this, by whatever freakish coincidence, the mouse stuff was almost to human testing, and then it got turned back, because it didn’t actually work on asthma without major side effects. It wasn’t useful for anything. Except, apparently, for Aza.
“I had a little bit of serum in the house, for severe asthma. I don’t know why it works even a little bit, but she was dying, so I gave it to her,” Greta told me.
Whatever Aza’s mom used was the X factor. Aza kept getting sicker, but it slowed down. According to all medical opinions, lungs that could barely send oxygen into her bloodstream should have killed her, but whatever Greta did probably saved her. It’s been part of her daily meds ever since. Despite the fact that it is completely illegal.
This is pretty much the only big secret I’ve ever kept from Aza. Her mom begged me not to tell her. She wanted to keep working on it, she said, and if people knew, she’d get yanked. It felt all wrong to know something Aza didn’t know.
She died anyway.
I look at the ceiling and try to imagine what happens to someone when they die. Perished = Being Separated. All the things that were you and all the things that were her, flying apart, an explosion. Dispersed into everyone else.
Morning. Funeral. Sunglasses. Suit.
Carol supervised, and it makes me feel like I’m a scarecrow. The sleeves are strangely loose, which I guess means it fits. I’m used to my grandfather’s jacket, which I wear over everything. It came from my dad’s side and even though I didn’t know my dad, don’t even know who he was, my moms gave it to me. It has about a thousand random pockets. Every pocket has a tiny embroidered label to say what it should contain. There are pockets labeled “opals,” “pitch pipe,” and “bullets.” My grandfather was either James Bond or a traveling salesman.