The memories are harder to grasp after that. The lights became blurry, dancing across my vision in a melting, warping effect. The people around me seemed to move in stop-motion. By my side. Then over there, ahead of me. Then gone altogether. I moved, too—sometimes of my own accord, sometimes when someone dragged me by the arm. Eleanor. Alfie. Harriet. I drank things as they were handed to me, and threw my arms around anyone close enough to reach, and I floated by the ceiling and I sank below the ground.

Molly fiddles with the cuff of her sock. “I noticed he didn’t come back, but I figured he was talking to you, or Alfie, or somebody. But eventually I got worried and I went to look for him.”

When Molly appeared and told me she couldn’t find Oscar, I had managed to focus. Even through the mist, I knew the tone of her voice was unusually urgent. I couldn’t quite steer myself, but with Molly leading me by the hand, I accompanied her on her search as the rooms spun and spun and became one with one another.

The room we found him in was dark, and quiet. There were no lights to blur together in there. Just a bed, with a boy, and a wall for me to lean on. I think, looking back, Molly was asking me for help for far too long before I remembered what the word meant. That was the first moment of clarity—the first moment I took Oscar in. Even in that state, I knew I was looking at something very, awfully wrong. His head was thrown back, exposing his neck, and his mouth and eyes were open as he took in a single rasping breath, but he wasn’t looking at Molly. Everything stopped, and I stared and stared, because I knew that the wrongness meant I had to do something, but I simply couldn’t remember what.

In my memories, I stared at him like that for perhaps an hour. Realistically, it couldn’t have been more than a second. I remember whispering, “Wait…” but I can’t be sure if Molly ever heard me. It wasn’t an instruction, anyway. More of a plea to the universe to undo whatever had been set in motion. Then Molly was grabbing at him, and shouting, and the room wasn’t empty anymore. My bodyguard, Elizabeth, rushed to the bed to examine Oscar. I found Eleanor by my side, speaking into her phone. That was when I remembered that one should call emergency services when one finds their friend in an empty, dark room looking like a corpse.