Page 17 of Seasonal Fears

“Harry…” she begins.

He punches the steering wheel, and Mel jerks away, eyes widening in surprise. “Sorry,” he manages. “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t … No. You can’t, Mel. You can’t. Not tonight. I know you’re going to sooner or later, but it’s almost Valentine’s Day, and you’re supposed to be my Valentine. We’re going to the Valentine’s Day dance, together, and if you’re going to break up with me, you can do it tomorrow like a normal person, not in my car after you’ve already taken the corsage I brought for you. I’m sorry, but you can’t. I won’t accept it.”

“I can break up with you?” asks Mel wonderingly, like those are words she’s never envisioned in that order, like Harry has just provided her with groundbreaking new information.

“I have to drive,” says Harry, gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles stand out white and angry. It almost hurts, he’s holding on so tight. He’s never really learned how to let go.

“I don’t think so,” says Mel, tone still a little distant, like she’s considering an entirely new concept. “I mean, I think about dying on you. I think about dying on you a lot, and what that’s going to look like, and I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to you giving my eulogy in my imagination so many times that I could recite it in my sleep—”

“Could we not? Do you think it might be possible for us to have one normal date where you don’t talk about making me bury you? Especially when I’ve just watched you collapse on the football field? I was afraid you’d died, Melanie. I thought you were dead.”

“Well, yeah,” she says. “You’re pretty smart. But about this ‘breaking up with you’ idea, what even is that?”

Harry hits the brakes and twists around to face her, frowning. “What do you mean, ‘I’m pretty smart’? What’s that about?”

“I asked my question first. I’m not breaking up with you, Harald. I told you in second grade that I was going to marry you, and as far as I’m concerned, that still stands, or would, if I hadn’t spent the last couple of years waiting to die. I’m never breaking up with you.”

“No, just leaving me.”

“Only if I don’t have any other choice.”

Harry doesn’t understand any of this. He returns his attention to the road, scowling, the temperature in the car beginning to creep upward again. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“You said you thought I’d died,” says Melanie. “What did you see?”

“You were waving, and then you went pale—even for you—and all the light went out of your eyes. They rolled back in your head, and I woke up on the ground, with you leaning over me,” says Harry. “Trevor said you fell. That you weren’t moving and they couldn’t … they couldn’t…” He can’t even say it. He punches the steering wheel again.

He’s never been the sort of guy who hits things that can’t hit back, but right now, it feels like his confusion is too big for his body, and anything he can do to shake it loose, just a little, just enough for him to breathe, is a good idea.

“They couldn’t find my heartbeat,” says Melanie. It doesn’t sound like a guess.

“Yeah.”

“I want you to stay calm and keep driving,” says Melanie.

“What are you—”

“If you can’t, you need to stop the car and let me get out right now.”

“Melanie, we’re still more than a mile from the school. It’s dark and cold out there.”

“And when have you ever known me to care about the cold, huh?” Melanie looks at him challengingly. She’s so pale that her face stands out even against the shadows. She might as well be a ghost.

He hates the thought. He shoves it aside.

For her part, Melanie doesn’t point out that she ran the full distance between her house and the school today, ran it like she was still thirteen and strong and immortal, still a full year away from the horrifying comprehension that she was a limited-time offer, that she was going to end. One day the world would wake up and Melanie Cosgrove wouldn’t wake up with it, the same way it had woken up without her mother and her twin sister. All of them are here to go.

Maybe that’s why she was willing to listen to the child who broke into her room while she was sleeping, even if she doesn’t believe a single word they said. But she still can’t feel her heartbeat, and the temperature in the car is smothering. She wants out. She wants out and she wants to run, not lock herself immediately away in the high school gym, away from the cold winter moon above them.

It’s almost spring, and part of her knows that when the spring comes, her strength will go. She doesn’t understand the knowledge yet. She will. She just needs time.

“Okay,” says Harry. “I’m driving. You see? I’m driving.”

“And you’re going to keep driving, right? Not turn the wheel too hard and run us into a tree because you don’t like what I have to say?”

“Melanie,” says Harry, offended. She can hear it in every syllable of her name, which only gets pronounced beyond the first three letters when he’s unhappy with her, or her father is in the room. “When have I ever run us into a tree? Honestly, you’d think you’d have more faith in my driving by this point.”

“They couldn’t find my heartbeat because I didn’t have one,” says Melanie. “I still don’t.”