Page 15

Someone is knocking at my window. It doesn’t quite wake me—because whatever it is that I do at night now doesn’t seem to be sleeping—but it rouses me. I glance at the clock. It’s 11:37.

I’m still hoping it’s Calvin. He’s had time to get over the shock, to believe that I’m really back, and will take me in his arms and I’ll be able to feel it, feel him.

It’s not Calvin. I can tell as soon as I open the window, even though it’s too dark to make out more than an outline of a person. Which means a stranger is at my window. I start to close it but someone’s hand is already lodged there. “Hey,”

it cries as I slam the jamb down.

I recognize the voice, fluty and mellifluous, capable of doing the best animal impressions: duck, cow, horse, pig.

I open the window and there is Dina Weston, examining her smashed hand.

“Oh my God, Dina! Are you okay?”

Dina shakes out her hand. “I appear to be just fine.”

I open the window all the way. For a minute, we just stare at each other. When we were little, we invented this game we called UC Farm where we would spend hours on end pretending to be animals, never uttering a word, but somehow communicating just fine. We have not played that in years but it seems like we have not forgotten how to communicate in silence.

“It’s good to see you, ,”

she says at last. “Really good.”

“It’s good to see you, too.”

And it is. Even though Dina and I drifted apart years before I died.

“I guess my mom spilled everything to your mom,”

I say, trying to hide my annoyance. Such a hypocrite! After Mom and Dad finished fighting earlier, Dad sat me down for a talk. He told me I wasn’t to see anyone. I wasn’t to go anywhere. I wasn’t to communicate with anyone. “Until we get this sorted. It’s too confusing to explain to people,” he said, and I could tell it was Mom’s words he was parroting. Mom who told Peg Weston, who clearly told Dina. Still, I’m so happy to see Dina, I let it slide.

“Your mom and mine talk a lot these days,”

Dina says.

“But they used to hate each other.”

“No. Your mom hated my mom,”

Dina corrected. I wait for her to add something along the lines of, like you hated me. But she doesn’t. Because that is all water under the bridge now. And anyhow, I never actually hated Dina. “I think they’re really good friends now.”

“When did that happen?” I ask.

“Maybe a few years ago.”

“Weird.”

“Weirder than this?”

Dina zigs a hand back and forth between us.

“Fair point,” I say.

The wind rattles in the window. “Come in, it’s cold out.”

Only the weird thing is, it’s not cold, or I don’t feel it. For the first time, I’m not freezing. I gesture for Dina to come inside. She plunks down on my bed and pulls down the hood from the sweatshirt she’s wearing, emblazoned with the name of the college she must have gone to. Except for her hair, which she always wore in long braids but now has down in soft curls, she looks pretty much the same as she did when I last saw her.

“What have you been up to? Did you finish college? Study zoology? Did you go out West?”

I say, remembering how when she was little, Dina spoke endlessly of moving closer to her dad, who lived on the West Coast with his new wife and their kids—Dina’s half siblings who she’d seen only on a handful of Christmases.

“Not yet.”

She seems bummed about it, which makes sense given how her dad basically dumped her for a new family, so I don’t probe further. “What have you been up to?”

“Not much. I’m under house arrest. My parents are freaked out.”

Dina plays with her bracelets, a bunch of those rubber bangles she always wore to hide the MedicAlert band, which she hated. “That’s understandable. It’s a lot to take in.”

“They’ve gone all prison warden on me because I left the house.”

I pause, deciding to trust Dina. “I went to see Calvin.”

“He saw you?”

“Totally. Though I barely recognized him. I mean, he looked terrible, so withered and skinny, but now that I’m back, I’ve been thinking that I can help him get better.”

As I say it, I begin to wonder if this was why I couldn’t feel him kissing me. Because he couldn’t feel it, wouldn’t allow himself to feel it. Same as Mom. Maybe that’s why I’m cold around them. They haven’t let me back in. Maybe when they do, I’ll be hungry again. I’ll sleep again. I’ll be warm again. I’ll be fully alive again.

Suddenly, the need to see Calvin is even more urgent. I need to save him. To save me. To save us.

“Do you know where he lives? If he’s with anyone? My sister didn’t think so but she wasn’t sure.”

Dina shrugs. “How would I know any of that?”

Dina and Calvin didn’t exactly run in the same crowd. I don’t know if they even knew each other. Still, maybe they became friends after I died. If Mom and Peggy Weston did, anything’s possible.

“I actually thought you were Calvin just now, that he’d gotten over the shock of it.”

Dina’s face falls so I hastily add, “But I’m so glad it’s you.”

She fiddles with her bracelets. “Thanks.”

“It might take him more time to accept it,”

I say. “To accept me.”

“Yeah,”

Dina agrees. “Some things take time.”

“I know. But on the other hand, we’ve already lost seven years. And I’m still in love with him. Do you think he could be in love with me? We were supposed to be forever.”

“I don’t know,”

she admits.

“Sorry, I’m only talking about me. I’ve barely asked about you. What’s new?”

She shrugs. “Not much to tell. I’m the same . . .”

She drifts off.

“As you ever were,”

I finish. “Because people stay their essential selves. Like I’m still me and Calvin is still him.” I pause. “Right?”

Dina gets this look on her face, her eyes turned up, her chin quivering. “What? Do you know something?”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Dina! I know you know! You could never keep a secret. Remember that time you got to take home the class rabbit even though you weren’t supposed to have animals? You were going to hide it in your room to keep it from your mom. You lasted like ten minutes.”

“Because I started sneezing.”

She pauses. “But this isn’t a secret. Everyone knows.”

“Knows what?”

“About your dad.”

“What about him?”

“He’s convinced Calvin was responsible.”

“Responsible for what?”

Dina looks up and stares me right in the face. “For your death, .”

“What are you talking about?”

“The police never found out who the driver was. No cameras, no witnesses. My mom worked the case for months. But all the leads dried up. Your dad, though, he got it stuck in his head that it was Calvin. He hired an investigator and everything. It got pretty ugly for a while. Really divided the town.”

“Calvin! He would never hurt me. He loved me. Why would my father think that?”

Dina shrugs. “My mom says grief makes people crazy.”

“Poor Calvin. No wonder he got so lost.”

I pause, knowing I have no right to ask this of Dina, but she’s the only one I can ask. “Will you go see him for me?”

“Me?”

“I’m under house arrest and clearly seeing me is too much for him. But you. You won’t freak him out. He knew we were good friends once. Best friends.”

“He did?”

Dina sounds so hopeful that I don’t tell her that he only found that out when we were looking at old photos of me and he came across a photo of the Halloween when Dina and I went as a cheetah and an elephant.

“Yes. You can convince him. Tell him it’s really me. I’m here. And I know he would never do anything to hurt me.”

Dina hesitates as she runs her finger up and back along her MedicAlert bracelet. “I’m not sure he’ll hear that from me.”

“He will! You’ve known me longer than anyone. And you believe I’m back. You could vouch for me. We used to be best friends once. That has to count for something.”

She meets my gaze straight on. Her eyes are a greenish gold—like a lion’s, she used to say. When we were younger, she really wanted to be an animal. So did I, but I grew out of it, grew out of her, basically dumped her to hang out with Casey and Alexa. So I know I don’t have any right to ask her this. But she’s here. She came to see me. That has to mean something.

She stares at me a moment longer and then she puts up the hood. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you! Thank you!”

I hug Dina. She was always slight but now she’s practically nothing, a wisp of a person.

“When you see him, tell him,”

I exhort her as she climbs through the window.

“Tell him what?”

“That I forever love him.”