“What is that branch?” I ask.

“Widowmaker,” Rush whispers.

I walk the rest of the way over to Sebastian, slowly. I kneel next to him. I don’t look too closely at his chest. Instead, I focus on his eyes, as if they might snap open at any second. I lean over his lips, waiting for a breath to bring my hope back to life.

The Students of Tempest High School: Now

Nobody really knew the boy who got impaled, so nobody can get their hands around the fact that he’s dead. Instead, everyone spends Monday morning unsettled in their auditorium seats. The principal gives a short, dumb speech. “We are all devastated by the loss of a student who should have been with us today.” The sentences are empty boxes where details about the boy should go. It’s like burying a casket without a body in it, which the students of Tempest know something about.

“Sebastian DeAureli will be missed,” the principal promises. But most of the students never met Sebastian. He was like them, but he wasn’t one of them.

Both those facts are unnerving.

The bell rings, the recorded sound fuzzy. The students get up, most of them gathering armloads of books for their classes and going about their normal day as if that will save them from having to think about a dead classmate. Some skip classes to smoke smudgy-sweet pot and make out in the scruff of woods past the soccer field. For others, gossip is the only cure.

One girl leans toward another at their lockers in the concrete shade and says, “The weird girls found him.”

“Of course they did.” The second girl vines her body against her boyfriend’s side.

“Nobody could make a redwood tree lose a branch and hit that kid,” the boyfriend says, trying to sound reasonable.

The first girl closes her locker with a metallic snap. “Yeah. But.” They all know that something strange happened in the woods; they just don’t know how to talk about it. Silence spreads like blood, warm and sticky, until everyone turns away from the dying conversation.

Danny: Two Years Ago

It started in darkness, long nights with my eyes pressed closed. I whispered that I belonged here, alone in my narrow bed in our narrow town.

I told myself out loud, so I would believe it.

On the worst nights, I would get out of bed and walk the hallway to the kitchen, and sometimes open the back door and take a few steps outside. My feet told me all about the differences between worn carpet, chilled tile, living earth. I looked out into the darkness of the backyard, and it matched the darkness in my head. When I went back to bed, my legs twitched and my thoughts writhed and I had to sleep with ten blankets on top of my chest to hold me down.