I haven’t actually broken a rule, so she doesn’t puncture the silence with anything except small talk.

What do you want for lunch tomorrow?

Should we schedule a call with your father this weekend?

Are all the girls at your school that pretty?

I answer.

Anything.

Sure.

No.

There are plenty of technically pretty girls at school, even openly not-straight ones. But the Grays are special. After them, anyone else would pale in comparison. I realize, with a cold stone in my stomach, that I haven’t even considered kissing any other person at Tempest High.

If I told Mom that, she would probably give me a hug and extra lo mein and call it progress.

But what if it means that I need the Grays too much? What if it means that they have all the power and I have nothing?

I do my homework, and when it’s filled in enough that I won’t get in trouble tomorrow, I change into drawstring shorts and a T-shirt, climb into bed early.

I turn from one side of the bed to the other, mash my face into the feather-soft mattress like that will somehow cut off the oxygen to my fear. But the way it felt to take Neil’s final breaths sinks roots. It sends tendrils outward. Starts to grow.

Two boys killed in the redwoods.

One girl gone.

I look out the window, and the trees are waiting like a collection of needles, piercing the evening blue. It won’t be fully dark out for a while. Twilight has separation anxiety; it sticks to the trees.

I close my eyes, but I don’t fall asleep.

Danny: The Last Five Months

Iwould get out of bed in the middle of the night, and they’d find me three neighborhoods away. I dragged myself toward the fistful of lights at the center of town, down sidewalks and street margins so skinny my body barely fit. When I walked through the liquor store parking lot, I sliced my heel open on a broken bottle.

I called Dad that time.

He called Mom.

In the emergency room, she asked in a ragged voice, “Were you sleepwalking?”

I had done that. Torn up her hope that things were going to get better. And even worse: I couldn’t name what I was doing, or where I was going, or answer the most important question, the one that started gushing out of people like blood from an unexpected wound.

Why?

The school counselor asked it when she handed me a calendar of the month of May, with the days that I’d missed school blacked out. It looked like a building with half the lights off.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Nowhere. Anywhere.” I had mostly been in the fields outside of town, the abandoned barns with sunlight pushing through slits between the boards.

“Why did you feel that it was acceptable to leave?”

“I didn’t,” I said.