Page 37 of Everything All at Once

“You didn’t have to buy this! Thank you.”

“I’m sad you won’t tell me what happens.”

“I know. But you’ll read it for yourself soon enough.”

He seemed resolved to his fate and only pouted a little while we waited on the platform for the 10:04 train to Penn Station. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been on a train; when I’d gone to the city with Aunt Helen, we always drove. I was wide awake with excitement and the coffee I’d drunk in the car. I was almost shaking with the anticipation of delivering the manuscript. And I’d brought Aunt Helen’s next letter, because I had a hunch it would have something to do with New York.

The train arrived a few minutes early, and we found seats in the back, across from each other, our knees almost touching.

I thought of the flash drive in my purse and how Aunt Helen hadn’t told anyone she’d written another book, hadn’t even told us she was working on something. Then I thought about what my dad had said, about how it felt like Aunt Helen was always hiding something.

I knew what he meant.

Sometimes I caught her staring at a window, and I knew she was watching something that wasn’t happening in front of her, but on another plane or another planet or another world.

Sometimes I’d ask her questions, easy questions, like, “Do you ever wish you’d done something other than write?” and instead of answering like normal, she’d getvery serious and quiet and say something weird like, “There are always things we wish we’d done differently.”

Sometimes I would look at her and see a shadow over her face, a shadow caused by nothing, something she had that I could never find on anyone else.

Except Sam.

Sam had the same kind of shadow. It moved when he moved. It disappeared in bright light. It followed him everywhere.

“You’re seeing auras,” Em said once, when I tried to explain it to her. “You’re like a psychic. But not a predict-the-future psychic. More like a gut-feeling-woman’s-intuition psychic.”

I didn’t think it was like that at all.

In front of me, Sam shifted in his seat, and his knee brushed against mine. The train jerked a little, and my brain immediately flew to track fires, derailments.

Getting hit by a train would be a great way to go. Messy, of course, but quick and painless.

Being in a train crash, on the other hand... I needed to do more research about that. I didn’t know any of the statistics. But it was probably like a car crash, a toss-up of whether you lived or died or got seriously hurt. It could be painful.

“It’s all right. It’s supposed to do that,” Sam said.

“Oh, I know. I was just thinking.”

It was three hours to Penn Station, and the first thing we did was buy pretzels from a street vendor. Sam dippedhis into mustard and made me try it and then let me finish all of his when I kept looking at it. The day was perfect—breezy and warm and exactly like how a good New York day should feel.

“Let’s walk,” I said.

“What’s the address again?”

“Broadway. By Fulton Street.”

“Right, that’s about fifty streets away from here.”

“I don’t want to ride the subway. Look how beautiful it is!”

“We can walk until we get tired,” he compromised. “And then we’ll get a cab.”

But we walked the entire way. Fifty blocks, talking about everything from our favorite books (Sam had read every single book I mentioned and then some. He said he was a fast reader; I said I didn’t know how he had done it without decades of free time on his hands) to our favorite bands to our favorite subjects in school to what we wanted to do when we graduated. I felt a strangeness at that, an almost undetectable hesitation on his part. He said he didn’t like to think too far in the future.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I’m going to the University of Connecticut. For elementary school education.”

“A teacher, huh? Like your aunt.”