Page 59 of 72 Hours of You

“Gee, thanks.”

“—you’re like, the average amount of light of a normal person. Like … less gray. Oh, I got it!” She snaps her fingers. “Less completely dead in the face.”

“Sometimes I actually hate you,” I say, getting up and putting my cereal bowl in the sink.

“Listen,” she says, shoving a handful of dry cereal in her mouth. “You don’t have to tell me if Peter Beckett is attending your one-person clam bake, I just think—”

“Jules, seriously—”

“For real,” she says, coming over to me and putting her hands on my shoulders, “I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy.”

“No, I mean like normal-people happy.” Suddenly her face is all serious and full of sisterly love and it kind of makes me want to stab myself in the leg with a steak knife. “I think he’s good for you—for that little black soul of yours. Keep ditching, or whatever. And I’ll make sure Dad doesn’t find out. I got you.” She pulls me into a hug.

“Thank you,” I mumble into her strawberry-scented hair, a tiny nugget of emotion threatening to rise up in my chest.

Jules pulls back and smiles. “And in return, you will tell me in great detail what his mouth tastes like when you do finally bag and tag him.”

Thirty-One

25:34:19

We’ve been looking all morning for a Clocker, and we finally found one. Lucky for us, not so lucky for them.

“Aw man, her?” Peter says, looking across the street at an older woman sitting on the edge of a little retaining wall, reading a book.

“Yeah, so?”

“I don’t know. She looks nice.”

“Oh my god, Peter, you say that about literally everyone. She could be an actual axe murderer. That book could be Mein Kampf.”

Peter frowns at me. “It’s not Mein Kampf.”

“You don’t know.” The woman is wearing a baggy shirt with a cat on it and cargo shorts, and she’s got super-short gray hair that probably makes her look ten years older than she is. It’s not exactly the uniform of a neo-Nazi, but you never know these days.

She leans back and lets a sliver of sun slide onto her face. And then she closes her eyes and just sits there, her hands in her lap, her book against her chest, not smiling but also not not smiling.

“Oh shit,” I say. “She knows.”

“Knows what?”

“She’s going to die.”

“Really?” Peter says, glancing back at the woman. “How can you tell?”

“I just can. I mean, look at her. She’s like, forcing herself to appreciate the sun and shit. She knows.”

“Damn,” Peter says. He looks at her for another minute before he asks the inevitable Would You Rather question. “Is it better or worse to know?”

“I have no idea,” I say. And I really don’t. “I think sometimes it can make it better—like you get a chance to tell your mom you love them one last time or whatever, all that Lifetime movie shit. But sometimes—a lot of the time—it would just make it worse. Like Liam. He had a fucking good time at that party. Who knows what he would’ve been doing if he’d known he was going to die? He’d probably have been at home paralyzed by the impending agony of nonexistence. Or maybe he would’ve done something cool, like cliff jumping or something.”

“From what I heard at the funeral, that sounds like Liam.”

“Yeah, but you never know. How people live doesn’t always give you a clue as to how they’ll deal with dying. People get fucking weird.”

“Maybe it would’ve changed things,” Peter says. “If he knew. Maybe if he hadn’t been at that party—”