There are rules here, she thought. Rules, just like the physical world. She would just have to learn them. After all, the rules of the living world must have seemed strange when she was very little. Heavy airplanes flew; the sky turned red at sunset; clouds could hold an ocean full of water, then rain it down on the ground below. Absurd! The living world was no less bizarre than this afterworld. She tried to take some comfort in that, but instead found herself bursting into tears.

Lief saw her tears and backed away. He had little experience with girls crying—or if he did, his experience was, at best, a hundred years old. He found it highly unexpected and disturbing: “What are you crying for?” he asked her. “It’s not like you got hurt when you fell from the tree! That’s why I pushed you—to show you it wouldn’t hurt.”

“I want my parents,” Allie said. Lief could see that Nick was fighting his own tears, too. This was not at all how Lief had imagined their first waking day would be, but maybe he should have. Maybe he should have realized that leaving one’s life behind is not an easy thing to do. Lief supposed he would have missed his parents, too, if he could still remember them. He did remember that he used to miss them, though. It wasn’t a good feeling. He watched Nick and Allie, waiting for their tears to subside, and that’s when the unthinkable occurred to him.

“You’re not going to stay here, are you?”

Nick and Allie didn’t answer right away, but that silence was enough of an answer.

“You’re just like the others!” he shouted out, before he even realized what he was going to say.

Allie took a step closer to him. “The others?”

Lief silently cursed himself for having said it. He hadn’t meant to tell them. He wanted them to think it was just the three of them. That way maybe they would have stayed. Now all his plans were ruined.

“What do you mean others?” Allie said again.

“Fine, leave!” Lief shouted. “I don’t care anyway. Go out there and sink to the center of the Earth for all I care. That’s what happens, you know. If you’re not careful, you sink and sink and sink all the way to the center of the Earth!”

Nick wiped away the last of his tears. “How would you know? All you know is how to swing from trees. You haven’t been anywhere. You don’t know anything.”

Lief bolted away from them. He climbed his tree to the highest perch, up in the slimmest branches.

They won’t leave, he told himself. They won’t leave because they need me. They need me to teach them to climb, and to swing. They need me to show them how to live without being alive.