And I’m glad it’s dark because my eyes start doing that thing that eyes are sometimes prone to do . . . you know, that go-blurry-because-whatever thing.

But honestly I don’t even care, because, Q—

Q.

You’re . . . alive, man.

YOU’RE ALIVE.

“Are you okay?” I ask him. “You’re feeling, like, not weird, or whatever?”

“Other than the fact that you’re staring at me like you’re deciding whether to have my babies or to stab me in my throat, yeah, I feel great.”

And this normally would’ve been funny.

But it’s too much.

Everything is too much.

All of this, especially this, is a mistake.

And so I do what I do best.

The thing I’m arguably most proficient at.

I stand up.

I smile.

And then I run as fast as I can.

I nearly crash into Ms. B as I fling open Q’s bedroom door, and she calls after me as I race down the stairs and out the glass front door and down the block, down, down, down. And I may never slow because I’m not only a proficient sprinter, I have stamina for days. I run fast and I run hard and I never stop.

I can’t stop.

59

I’m sitting in an empty parking lot when she rolls to a stop, lowers the window.

“I didn’t think you’d come.”

She shrugs. “I wasn’t going to. Still not sure I should’ve.”

After we hung up, I wondered how it would be to see her. This would be the first time since the beach.

Normally, she would’ve bounded from the car when she saw me, and we’d race to meet in the middle of this street like it was some grassy knoll.

Normally, her sandpaper eyes would tractor-beam me into her body and her wide-open arms would finish me off.

But nothing’s normal anymore. Only an hour ago, I fled Q’s reanimation.

“So, you getting in, or you wanna walk beside the car?”

I fasten my seat belt. “Autumn, I’m . . .”

But she shakes her head and it’s a silent twenty-minute drive to the lake.

She gets out first, and I watch her walk toward the water so resolutely I half expect her to walk right in. But she stops at the edge.

Stands there like she’s waiting for me to join her.

Or waiting for me to disappear.

And then she’s stooping low, gathering stones from the grass-pocked sand, using the bottom of her shirt like a basket. I climb out, dig until I find a cat’s-eye. I hold it out to her, but she walks past me back toward her car, her collection of stones like rain on tin as they tumble onto the car hood. I watch her scoot herself up; she loses one of her sandals to the ground.