“I’ll send you my personal Naruto and Shippuden mixes,” he said. “Perfect winter viewing when the weather sucks.”

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever,” he continued.

She didn’t know what to say to that. It was true. “I kept trying to find you, but it’s packed.”

“You didn’t answer my emails or texts,” he said. “Sorry. That sounded needy.”

Ayanna finished her drink in a glug, held on to the cup. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

Felix nodded, guided her beyond the party’s remnants out into the cold, blue night. The streetlamps were orange on this side of town, and a few people had decorated for the holiday with string lights wrapped around porches, and one house with a seven-foot-tall ghost wailing and watching all comings and goings with glittering red eyes.

“Why are you working with Professor Collins?”

He cleared his throat. Ayanna offered him her arm, and he looped his own through it. The breeze played with Felix’s costume, making him seem bigger as he started talking.

“Seven years ago—on May seventeenth—I died.”

21

Felix Wilson was fifteen, well-liked and well-hated because he was the type of kid who was good at everything. Easygoing, on the track team where he ran the two-hundred- and four-hundred-meter hurdles, vice president of the Film Club where he earned his one and only week of detention for screening Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and then John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood after already being warned that all film choices had to be approved by the club’s academic adviser. He wanted to be a filmmaker. Weekends spent watching movies and writing in a black notebook, sometimes making embarrassing movies with his friends, and wanting to cultivate an appreciation of light. To be great, you couldn’t just care about movement, about finding the right script, about the right actors, you had to know about color and what it made people feel.

Other things he wanted Ayanna to know: at that time, he had braces, he went to the fancy art school on scholarship, it was pretty white, but it was the place where he got to take the AP classes his parents cared so much about, and he got to write his scripts, have his nerdy little discussions about how Michael Mann uses sound, and think deeply about the ways the length of scenes isn’t just about disseminating information, but about establishing time, emotion, and tone.

“I was insufferable,” he said.

“I think you have to be when you’re younger, if you want anything big,” Ayanna said. She winced thinking of herself reading books about cartography, the way she sometimes drew imagined worlds instead of taking notes in high school. “There’s something about cultivating obsessions, maybe?”

“Maybe,” Felix said. He took a breath and puffed out into the night as if exhaling from a cigarette.