Page 7 of Seasonal Fears

One of the boys on the field barks a command she’s too far away to hear, and they scatter, dressed in practice gear rather than their uniforms—even among the cheerleaders, whose uniforms are less cumbersome, more playful, she’s the only person on this field in full uniform—but beautiful all the same, so beautiful it takes her breath away for a moment, because they will never be this young or this beautiful ever again.

Tonight, she’s going to put on a dress the color of wine spilled on white linen, and let him tie the matching corsage around her wrist. Maybe it’s another cliché, wearing red to a Valentine’s Day dance, but some clichés are worth it. Some things become iconic for a reason. He’s going to pick her up wearing a tuxedo he rented from the shop downtown, and they’re going to dance until the gym closes, and he’s going to kiss her in front of the balloon arch, and it’s going to be perfect.

They don’t have many perfect nights left. No force on Earth is going to take this one away from her.

So when she woke up this morning, she got out of bed, checked the group chat to confirm the girls were still planning to hit the field for their own impromptu practice, took her pills, and put on her uniform. She brushed her hair until it shone, falling down her back in a flawless black waterfall, a stroke of ink slashed across the lines of her uniform. She put on just enough makeup to look like she was among the living and not one of the walking dead, and she walked to the school to meet him on the field.

It’s already going to be a perfect night. She’s going to make sure it’s a perfect day as well, the kind of day he’ll always remember, the kind of day he can hold close as they’re lowering her into the ground. (She’d prefer to be cremated. Her father hasn’t been willing to budge. Her mother and her sister were both buried, and the family is going to be together when they’re gone. If it kills him, they’re going to be together.)

The boys have finished running their play. They’re coming back together on the field, smug and sweaty, laughing as they clap each other on the back and settle into their positions. Some of them will be here next year, juniors looking forward to their moment of gridiron dominion, when they’re at the top of the high school food chain and the world is theirs for the taking. Others will be gone, off to college and the hope of greener pastures, every one of them believing their glory days are not yet behind them.

Some of them will be wrong. Some of them have already peaked, such as it is, and will see nothing from here but the slow erosion of their dreams and the slow loss of their childhood loves. She doesn’t want that for Harry. She wants him to have a clean break, to walk away and not look back. That’s why, if her name doesn’t come up soon, she doesn’t intend to see the end of the summer.

Suicide is easy when you’re a dead girl kept walking by pharmacists and prayer. All you have to do is forget a few pills and let nature do the rest. She won’t be the reason he never gets away.

One of the boys on the field has seen her. Not Harry, but she’s a distinctive figure, she knows: she’s always been pale, but a year spent almost entirely in hospitals and in her bedroom, where natural light is rare and fleeting, has pulled almost all the color from her skin. She’s a Snow White girl, and she owns it, because what choice does she have? Her lips are painted red as blood, her fingernails buffed and polished to match, and she wears her uniform like nothing else has ever been appropriate.

The boy elbows the boy next to him, who says something, not quite a shout, not loud enough for her to hear, but loud enough for Harry. He looks up, sunlight glinting golden off his hair, and he’s young and strong and perfect in his practice gear, no one has ever been more beautiful, and his heart is strong, not like hers at all. He’ll survive this.

Somewhere two thousand miles and more away, William Monroe is grabbing the controls of his private plane, ignoring the pilot he pays to see him safely from place to place, and maybe he could have avoided the collision if he hadn’t done that; maybe he could have stood idly by while the pilot steered the plane to a stop without hitting the woman on the runway. Maybe he could have survived. But he doesn’t do any of those things, and time is a road that runs only one way for most people: they cannot negotiate with the past the way some others can, the way a girl with numbers where her heartbeat ought to echo once did. It is later than it has ever been before in the life of the universe. The clock has started running again, and the future is here.

Harry raises his hand and waves, beaming, and that smile is all for Melanie, that smile is hers, that smile belongs to her in a way very little ever has. It is the smile of a boy in love who will be a man all too soon, and that thought fills her heart with light and love until it seems like it must burst.

And two thousand miles away, a plane slams into a woman standing on the runway, and her death is swift and terrible and several hundred years too late. She dies with a smile on her face, despite the pain, despite the horrific damage to her body. She’s been ready to go for a long, long time.

Melanie Cosgrove isn’t ready.

She’s seventeen years old and still fresh as the summer sun. She may have come to terms with the idea that she doesn’t have forever, but that doesn’t mean she’s consented to it, ever once agreed to it. Her plans to die before September comes have been less about resignation and more about needing to feel like she controlled something about her life, like she did something on her own. She didn’t choose her heart condition or her dead mother or her stillborn twin, didn’t choose her veil of tragedy, didn’t even choose the boy she loved. She could choose the moment that she died.

This isn’t the moment she chose.

But when William Monroe collapses in the cockpit of his private plane, her traitorous heart seizes in her chest. The pain is immense. The pain is like a wave, crashing down so hard and so fast that there’s no time to evacuate the people standing on the shore. And like any wave that comes that quickly, when it pulls back, it pulls everything in its path out to sea. She is snuffed out like a candle. One moment she is, bright and beautiful and raising a hand to return her boyfriend’s wave, and the next moment she isn’t, just a sack of bones and tissue crumpling where she stands, collapsing to the cold, dew-damp grass.

She never hears the other cheerleaders shout, never sees them throw their own pom-poms and their water bottles aside as they run for her. (One of them, Christine, keeps her phone in her hand, and it’s her footage that will be on the evening news tonight, her breathless narration that will define a semi-viral moment for people around the state and world.) She doesn’t see Harry bolting for her, running faster than he’s ever run before; doesn’t see him clutch his own chest and collapse. She doesn’t see anything.

Her eyes are still open, but she doesn’t see anything, because she’s not here anymore.

Melanie Cosgrove is gone.

BOOK IIIThe Lost Lenore

But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”

—Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven”

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

—Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

“You’re in a bucket,” said Zib, with careful delicacy.

“Yes, I had noticed,” said Niamh. “I got into it on purpose. You can come into it, too, if you would like.”

“I don’t think it’s big enough,” said Zib.

“This is a wishing well,” said Niamh, patiently. “The bucket is exactly as large as we need for it to be.”