“Wait, is that yes, you’re fine, or no, you’re not?”
I nod, and when I see Zach’s wide eyes, I dissolve into a fit of giggles again, which makes the coughing resume. And then Zach is dragging his chair around to my side of the table, like all the way around, so our chairs are touching, and then he puts his hand on my arm and says, “I need you to nod if you’re okay, Addie, and shake if you’re not.”
Get a grip, Addison,I chide myself.
The hysterics cease for a bit, and though my eyes are still watering, I nod.
“O-kay,” I wheeze out, except it sounds likeoke.Maybeoh.There’s not even really a hardKsound.
Zach shakes his head at me, fingers still on my arm, still sending jolts of current through my bare flesh. “Shh,” he says, to discourage me from more attempts at speaking. “And good,” he says. Then, more quietly, his eyes dancing as a smile slides across his face, “You’re, like, my favorite person right now.”
There’s a second of nonsensical neuron firings in my brain, and I’m glad I don’t have permission to speak, because my heart is tingling and blood is coursing through my body so quickly I think it would sound like an ocean if I tried to speak. Just a roar of currents and waves and things I can’t control, threatening to come up or apart. Have I always had this much inside me?
It’s not that I don’t feel like myself, either; I do. I just feel like a different version of myself at exactly this moment.
So instead of speaking, I just lift three fingers up at Zach.
He frowns, trying to comprehend. “Three…top three?”
I point at him, then raise three fingers again.
“Me,” he says. “Top three?”
I shrug, and he bursts out laughing.
His full, uncontrollable laugh that feels as warm as the temperature of the sun on my skin. “God, you’re really pissed about this restaurant, aren’t you?”
AFTER
January
“So I get that I’m remembering you, but why like this?Areyou a ghost?” I ask him, cranking up the heat in my car when we’re back in it.
I guess the pieces started falling together while I was playing in my room earlier. Hundreds of questions and guesses moving in slow motion until they collided with one another just now, until the single most messed-up day of my life finally started to make a crumbling kind of sense.
“Therealyou,” I clarify when he still hasn’t responded.
I obviously don’t remember Bus Boy. The “real-life” Bus Boy.
But I know I am asking the right questions. It’s the only version of things that makes sense and that doesn’t make me a complete lunatic.
If I’m right, though—if he is a memory—I have a million of them, and none of them are like this. Life-sized, real enough to talk with, to touch. Could he be a ghost?
I shoot a quick glance at him, his long legs cramped in my small car, and wonder exactly what he was to me. WhatIwas tohim.Blood rushes to my face and I feel angry with myself. Of course, I’m crushing on an invisible boy. The fact that I know I didn’tcompletelymake him up offers some relief, but it is mild at best.
“Well?” I prompt, impatient for his response.
“Well.” Bus Boy pauses thoughtfully. He sticks his arm out and flexes his hand so his fingers press against the cool window. “I can’t go through objects. But maybe that means nothing. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on ghosts.”
Or anything,I think bitterly. I mean, if we were to tally up the number of things he does know, particularly on the subject of himself, we’d be firmly at zero.
I cross my arms over my chest. “So, then, youmightbe dead?”
“I suppose.”
“In which case, you’d be a ghost.”
“I…could see that,” Bus Boy says carefully, and I roll my eyes, but my heart is starting to feel like a rock in my chest.
