“Now close your eyes,” she whispers.

We listen.

We wait.

The sun lies over us like a blanket. Her breath is slow and even. The hole inside me gets a little smaller.

We are eight years old again, waiting for Santa. Listening for sleigh bells. Believing in magic. Together.

I press my ear against the stone. I hear Ben say, We’re living on a mystery.

I crack open an eye just for a second. Nah’s are squeezed shut, her brow furrowed in concentration. She is listening hard. I close mine again, try to catch the sound of Earth’s center. I don’t hear whatever sound its heat is making, but maybe that’s not the point. Maybe it’s the listening that counts.

“I can’t hear anything,” Nah says.

“That’s probably because Earth’s core is thousands of miles below us.”

I don’t know how far. I wish I could ask Ben. I wonder if he has ever pressed his ear to the ground and tried to hear the fire burning in the center of the globe.

I wish we were still together and I could kiss that ear. But it’s also very distracting—that ear. Him, all of him. I think I made the right choice. I hope I did.

“I can hear the blood pumping in my veins,” Nah says. “It sounds like lava. Like in this video they showed in chem.” She laughs a little. “The one day I showed up this semester.”

Nah is transferring to a special school in the new year, a sober high school full of people like her, all trying to get better.

I listen to the blood pumping in my veins. “The center of Earth is mostly iron,” I say. “And seventy percent of the iron in the human body is found in our red blood cells—our muscles, too.”

“You’re getting all Bill Nye the Science Guy on me,” she warns.

I smile. Thorny rose.

“Which means,” I continue, opening my eyes, “that the fire in the center of the globe probably sounds like us, like our blood. Liquid iron.”

I raise my head, and she raises hers.

“Yoko,” she breathes.

“I don’t speak ‘weird.’”

Nah pushes up to her elbows. “She’s trying to get us to see that it’s in us. The earth. The center. Dude. The fire in the center of the globe is burning inside us.”

Oh, Ben would love that.

But …

“Or is it just a metal in the first transition series, atomic number twenty-six, symbol Fe for ferrum—”

“I don’t speak ‘weird.’” She leans closer, presses her forehead against mine. “I’m pushing my weird thought into you so you can understand it.”

I laugh, a giggle. I don’t think that sound has come out of me since August twenty-eighth.

“Okay.” I lean into her. “I’m pushing my weird thought into you so you can understand it.”