On the street around them, there were mostly students trudging to class or in and out of the coffee shops and corner stores. The tree closest to Matthias was dotted with little pink spots. She guessed maybe it was a whole flock of sparrows who had suddenly died and did not want to be apart. Two blocks over was a street she always avoided because one of the most tangible spirits Ayanna had ever seen lay in the alley between the road and the parking structure. They had jumped and remained in front of the graffiti that read Krave and was embellished with three messy hearts. All it ever said was “I did this,” and Ayanna could not tell if the spirit was referring to the graffiti or death. That was the world she lived in. No one full and intact returned and lived again.

When she was thirteen, Ayanna had read about how different cultures designated some places as sacred because they were so beautiful that spirits—the kind people said were impossible, like dryads and naiads and demons—revered them. A waterfall in Europe, woods in Japan, a swamp in South America. Misty blue grottoes scattered across the Mediterranean that grandmothers worried about not just because of the tides but because of the somethings that loved it. It made her want to go to all these places; now, everywhere was potentially those places.

“You don’t have to be alone,” he said. “Let’s spend the day together. If you just listen, I’m sure God will give you peace.”

Matthias had the look on his face of someone who was used to getting let off the hook for his bad behavior. One smile and one moderately nice thing probably did feel like an apology to most people. Here he was putting in an effort. Ayanna turned. She jogged and crossed the street before he could react.

18

After typing up the interview notes and sending them to Professor Collins, after spraying and wiping her room again because when she returned, the rotting-meat smell was so bad as to feel almost viscous and capable of attaching to her for forever, after going to her mailbox and finding another batch of note cards that had only the sentence please kill yourself so we can be together written on them in all caps, after ignoring texts from everyone because she could not handle interacting with anyone, after eating a cup of chicken tortilla soup, because it was the most appealing option on the dorm menu, and staring into the void, after reading some of another book that seemed only to be saying in different ways, Wow, books are made of words and every reality created by books is false because man is fallible and anything can be misconstrued, Ayanna longed for sleep. She turned over the day in her head, and looked again at Stephen’s notes. Instead of Marlie Nelson, she decided to search the name “Marlie Evans.”