– and she yanks away, but then some red-headed teen brushes up against her –

The kid's not a kid but a thirty-year-old man and he tastes the gun oil on his tongue as the pistol's sights scrape the roof of his mouth and then comes a hot, hollow flash and the bullet plows through his brain pan

– and she brings her hands tight to her chest, the way Mighty T-Rex might walk, and she barrels into the bathroom, leaving someone behind her asking, "Just what the heck is wrong with that girl?"

It's a question she can't help but echo.

INTERLUDE

The Interview

"Fate's an immovable object," Miriam says, tracing her finger up the neck of the bottle. A warm haze saturates the edges; the scotch is doing its glorious, God-given duty. "The course is charted. Fate's already got everything mapped out. This conversation we're having? It's already on the books. It's already been written. We feel like we have control over it, but we don't. Free will is bunk, bupkiss, bull-puckey. You think that you go buy a coffee, you kiss your girlfriend, you drive a school bus full of nuns into a fireworks factory, that's your choice. You did that. You made that decision and acted upon it, right? Bzzt. Wrongo. All of our lives are just a series of events carefully orchestrated to culminate in whatever death fate has planned for us. Every moment. Every act. Every loving whisper and hateful gesture – all just another tiny cog in the clockwork ready to ring the alarm for our ultimate hour."

Paul says nothing. He just stares, wide-eyed. He tries to say something, then didn't.

"What?" she asks.

"That's… dark."

"No kidding."

He shifts uncomfortably. "So you've tried to change things."

"Yup. For the first couple years, I tried a lot. Let's just say it never worked out."

"And then one day you just stopped trying?"

"No. One day I met a little boy with a red balloon."

TWELVE

The Proposal

The bathroom is unisex, and the place only has one. Someone's rattling the doorknob. She mumbles for them to piss off, but she doesn't have the heart to say it loud enough for anybody to hear; a rare moment.

It's like a closet in here. Tight. Bright. Blue. Everything is blue. Robin's egg blue. Sky blue. Picasso's blue period. The blue of someone choking on a meatball and dying blue.

She hears the distant clang of a red snow shovel. She feels its heavy weight on her back.

In the mirror, she sees a glimpse of ghosts from future and past: Del Amico, his throat almost comically swollen with his own tongue; Ben Hodges, the back of his head blown out like a juiced pomegranate; the old man, Craig Benson, stroking his bent erection with hands curled into arthritic claws; Louis, an electrical tape X over each eye, mouthing her name again and again. A shiny balloon floats up, and for a moment, it seems to blot out the light above her head, even though she knows it's not real…