we’ve sat together like this.
It’s what I wanted, but it’s all wrong. He’s cold and white as a bone, too hard, and when I lay my cheek against his chest, the silence is awful. I used to lie with him on the sofa in Becker’s basement, or upstairs in my bed when Mom wasn’t home, and count his heartbeats, a sturdy thump-thump I could feel beneath my palm, even through his T-shirt.
“What’s wrong?” he says. “You’re shaking.”
There’s no way to answer him. Not honestly, anyway. You’re wrong, I want to say. This is wrong. I was so, so wrong to think I could do this. Or hide it.
Instead, I simply whisper, “Cold.”
He holds me tighter, strokes my back. It doesn’t make me any warmer, but I sit there anyway until it’s dark, because he likes me there. He always seems more centered as soon as I come up to the loft. Whenever I manage to get up the stairs without him hearing me coming, he’s sprawled so loosely on the bed that he looks a little bit like a marionette whose puppeteer has tossed him aside.
I can’t run from this. I can’t hide from him. Not in the library, not anywhere.
What’s just as scary is that I guess I can’t hide from Gabriel, either.
CHAPTER FIVE
PEOPLE ALWAYS SAY THEY FEEL NUMB AND empty when they lose someone.
I feel that way now sometimes, when Danny and I are curled together on his bed in the loft. But in the days right after he died? At his funeral? I felt like I’d been stuck under a glass, so that everything inside me—rage, grief, terror—resonated louder, harder, clanging together until I could feel it in my bones.
As we stood there beside his grave, the only sound other than the minister talking about eternal peace was Danny’s mother, sobbing. Danny’s dad had his arm around her, holding her up, but his jaw was clenched so tightly, I was pretty sure he was going to lose it any minute.
We all just stood there, our heads bowed and hands folded, listening, waiting for it to be over. Nothing was right—instead of gray and rainy, the way it was supposed to be, the way it always is in movies, it was a bright, hot July day. The sun poured through the leaves of the giant maple beside the plot.
But at Danny’s grave that day I thought the crowd of football players and the stoners from his art class were probably glad they had a legitimate reason for their sunglasses, even though everyone knew they would have worn them anyway. It was hard not to choke up when you heard Danny’s mom and little sister, Molly, sobbing, when you saw his older brother, Adam, choking back tears as their dad patted his back. None of us were supposed to die. Life was supposed to be what we were waiting for, not something already over.
When someone’s cell went off a few feet behind us, my head went up so fast, I nearly lost my balance. My mother put a hand on my shoulder. I wanted to shrug it off, but I couldn’t—any minute that glass around me was going to shatter, and all that furious energy was going to explode out of me. I had to shut my eyes for a second, trying not to imagine the carefully manicured lawn around the pit of Danny’s grave going up in flames, or a sudden wind ripping through the cemetery, hurling the mourners against the headstones.
I couldn’t let that happen, not to Danny’s parents, and Ryan, and Danny’s other real friends. Not even to Danny, although I knew that the boy I loved wasn’t really in that casket. Not the part that mattered, anyway.
At home later, I went down to the basement. I figured I could do the least damage there—or maybe the most, without consequences anyway. Getting through the reception at Danny’s house had taken more self-control than I thought it would, even though I hadn’t managed to do much more than stand against the wall in the living room with a paper cup of punch in one hand, nodding at the people who came over to hug me.
I didn’t even change my clothes before I ran down the basement steps, and