Page 9 of Seasonal Fears

“Don’t you dare,” she hisses, between teeth bared like a beast’s, lips drawn back in the rictus of a snarl. “Don’t you dare, Harald March, this isn’t what we agreed to. This isn’t what you signed up for.”

She’s supposed to go first. That was the deal. And yes, she knows, in a distant, abstract way that she technically did; knows she was dead when she hit the ground before, knows there’s something wrong with the echoing silence where her heart is supposed to pound. But none of that matters now. What matters is Harry, silent and broken in front of her, and what matters is that this isn’t what he promised her. She’s never supposed to see his funeral. Never ever ever. And maybe that’s selfish and maybe it’s not, but it’s one of the only things she’s ever been promised in her life, and she wants it, wants it like a flower wants the sun.

“You can’t go without me,” she says, and slams her lips down on his. A few of the other cheerleaders gasp and mutter to each other about how she’s kissing a dead kid, Melanie Cosgrove is kissing a corpse, and it doesn’t matter that it’s her boyfriend, or that he’s still warm, or that Trevor says he has a heartbeat: this is too deliciously disgusting to ignore.

This is where Christine’s video ends, in a flash of dazzlingly bright light, so white it hurts to look at, sudden and sourceless, overwhelming the camera and burning out the lens. One moment Melanie is kneeling over Harry’s motionless form, and the next, everything is brilliant white, and everything is gone.

(When the news runs Christine’s tape, they’ll claim the battery died, cutting off the video before the paramedics could arrive. No one will contradict them. There’s nothing they could say that would be believed.)

On the field, in the moment, under the bitter February sky, this is what they see:

Melanie kneels over Harry, fingers digging into the grass to either side of his head, kissing him like she thinks someone is going to take him away. The two of them making out is not an unusual sight around the school, hasn’t been since ninth grade, but the sight of her kissing him without his arms around her is strange enough to be worth staring at. Maybe that’s why he lifts his arms and wraps them around her torso even before he begins kissing her in kind, the two of them locked together in an embrace that will not end.

When he pulls away, it’s only to stare at her, eyes wide and wounded, and say, “You fell down.”

“So did you.”

“I thought you were dead.” What he doesn’t say—what he doesn’t need to say—is that he’s had as long as she has to get used to the idea that he’s going to outlive her, that barring a miracle or a cliché from one of the teen romances he likes so much more than she does, the ones she carries in her purse for him to read when they’re alone and he won’t be laughed at for it, he’s going to see her dead and buried and be expected to keep going, alone in a world that no longer has a Melanie in it.

(She knows all that. What she doesn’t know is that he had his tissue typing done years ago to see if they were a match, if he could be the donor she tries so hard not to hope for and won’t admit she needs. He isn’t a match. He can’t save her. If he could save her, he would have done it already, would have found some means of suicide that let him give her his heart and keep her in the world where she belongs, even if they can never stay in the world together.)

Melanie looks at him with grief and resignation, and the air between them is heavy with the things they both know but never say. He knows she’s planning to die this summer if the miracle doesn’t come; that she doesn’t intend for him to go off to college shackled to the dying girl back home. He knows she thinks she has to break his heart to keep her heart from destroying them both. He knows she’s wrong, and he knows she doesn’t know that, and so he doesn’t say anything, because he can’t stop her.

He’d give anything to stop her.

“You can’t go,” he says, and this time when he pulls her close, he sits up at the same time, crushing her against him, holding on so tight he can feel her ribs shift under his grasp. He’ll hurt her if he keeps holding on this tight, and yet he can’t stop himself. “You can’t,” he repeats, voice muffled by the side of her neck, by her hair, by the smell of her skin and the minty bodywash she uses.

“I’m right here,” she says, and pats his back.

The blare of sirens tells them all the authorities are on their way: that Trevor managed to get someone to break out of their fugue long enough to dial 911 and summon the paramedics. Melanie’s head snaps up, hearing the entire future in that sound, and she pushes away from Harry and up to her feet in the same gesture, so fast that for a moment he’s left embracing the air.

“I can’t be here anymore,” she says hurriedly, not seeming to catch the irony of saying this right on the heels of her previous statement.

“The paramedics will make sure you’re all right,” says Harry, pushing himself more slowly to his own feet.

Melanie isn’t all right. She knows she isn’t all right, because she still can’t feel her heart beating, can’t feel the pains that have attended her every waking moment for years. And somehow, none of that matters as much as … “My father said I couldn’t come to practice. If they call him—and they will call him, even after they check me out clean—he’ll make me stay home. I’ll miss the dance. I can’t be here.”

In the moment, despite everything, a high school dance is all she can think of, all the future she can see. No one stops her, not even Harry, as she whirls and runs away across the field—runs, really runs, the way she used to run when they were children, when “congenital heart defects” were just words adults liked to say and not real things that would ever have any impact on their lives. Harry hasn’t seen her run that way in years.

He stares after her but he doesn’t call her back, because he wants to go to the dance with her as badly as she wants to go to the dance with him, and they’re both seventeen and not entirely clear on the concept of long-term consequences. They’ve been living their lives from heartbeat to heartbeat for as long as either of them can remember, and if they didn’t know how to live in the moment, they wouldn’t be living at all.

Then the paramedics are reaching them, and the other football players are pushing Harry forward, demanding he be examined, and he doesn’t have time to watch his girlfriend go. He just has to hope her father doesn’t find out.

(Her father will find out, of course, will be informed of what happened, by the evening news if nothing else. But that won’t happen until it’s too late for him to interfere with what has to happen next. His part in things comes later, when they understand more of what’s going on. For all that he did a lot before the story started, he doesn’t have the biggest part to play now that it’s happening.)

Melanie runs under the gray February sky, the clouds concealing the fading rays of the worm moon, although she doesn’t know its name, has not yet had cause to learn all the different words for the ways time can be marked and mapped, the different ways the seasons turn. The ground beneath her feet is softer than February ground is meant to be, already thawing, already preparing for the coming spring, and her heels dig down to mud again and again, squelching and sucking and almost getting stuck. But her legs have always been strong, even when her heart hasn’t been; even when she’s been reduced to sitting at her desk and doing physical therapy to keep her muscle tone from wasting away. She pulls herself free again and again, and she runs.

And at some point, it turns from running for the sake of getting away into running for the sake of running, for the feel of her legs obeying her commands and the wind blowing in her face, the ground beneath her feet and the sky overhead. Nothing hurts. Nothing hurts at all. She can’t feel her heartbeat, but after a lifetime of pain, she doesn’t miss it. She doesn’t want it. She just wants to run.

So she runs.

She runs, and the school drops away behind her; she runs, and the paramedics are checking Harry over, declaring him a little warm, but that makes sense for a football player who’s been exerting himself, nothing to be concerned about, not hot enough to qualify as a fever, no, no, nothing wrong here; she runs, and no one mentions that she was there, no one points out the extra pair of pom-poms or the spot where her falling body crushed the grass, no one gives her away; Christine has already posted the footage, will find the query from the local news the next time she checks her messages, but that’s not telling, no, no, that’s not being a snitch, that’s just seeing the chance to go a little viral and grabbing it with both hands, like any sensible child of the social media age. Melanie won’t mind. Melanie never minds anything, as long as it doesn’t upset Harry. She runs, and there’s her street, and there’s her house, and there’s her father’s car in the driveway, and that’s when she finally slows down.

It’s not that Roland Cosgrove is a bad man, or a cruel man, or even a particularly strict father. It’s that he’s a man who lost the love of his life to a difficult pregnancy that ended with one of his daughters dead and the other living under a death sentence as her heart winds down like a piece of glass clockwork, unable to sustain life without the aid of an entire team of medical professionals. His life, for the past seventeen years, has been almost entirely bent to the task of keeping Melanie alive; it’s clear he has no idea what he’s going to do without her. Melanie regrets that she won’t be able to see Harry grow into the man she knows he’s destined to become. She rejoices that she won’t have to see her father fall apart. Death will spare her from witnessing both of them.

Everything she’s ever done with her life has been against her father’s wishes, from kissing Harry to joining the cheer team—a sad list of accomplishments, but she is, after all, only seventeen; her peers aren’t that far ahead of her, no matter how she feels when she looks at their Instagram feeds, packed with selfies and vacation shots and adventures she can only dream of. He just wants to protect her. He just wants to keep her safe, for as long as he can, because she doesn’t have much time.

She’s never had much time. When they placed her in his arms at the hospital, almost six weeks old and finally stable enough for him to hold, he had already been to speak with the doctor, two specialists, and the hospital counselor; he knew she wasn’t expected to reach her first birthday, much less her fifth. Much less her seventeenth. But he’s taken care of her, watched over her, kept her safe, kept her here. His little girl is a miracle of medical science working hand in hand with alchemy, and if she can’t appreciate that, he’ll just have to appreciate it enough for both of them, until the day she understands what he’s done for her. What he’s sacrificed, what he’s paid for the sake of her peaceful, protected life.