Alistair lazily lifted his gaze from the book.

“Congratulations,” he said drily.

I still had no idea what we were doing. My thoughts were moving very slowly. They both looked at me, and when I didn’t respond, Boo explained.

“What we just talked about,” Boo said. “Alistair is . . . like that.”

“Like . . .”

And then I realized why Alistair was looking at me like I was so stupid. The eighties look he was rocking—that was no look. That was his actual hairstyle from the actual eighties.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “You’re . . .”

“Yeah! He’s dead.”

Boo said it like she was telling me it was his birthday. Alistair looked . . . like a person. The spiked hair and the rolled jeans and the big trench coat . . . I reached up and touched my own hair—longish, straight, very dark—and was suddenly very glad that I hadn’t dyed it pink, like I’d been considering. Pink hair for a few weeks, fine. Pink hair for eternity, that I wasn’t so sure about.

Which was not a good or decent thought to be thinking. I should have been thinking about the nature of life, the idea of dying at eighteen at school, the idea that for some people, death wasn’t the end. But those were all big thoughts, too big for me right now. So I concentrated on his hair. His eternal hair. His eternal Doc Martens.

I started laughing hysterically. I laughed so hard, I thought I was pretty much going to throw up in the middle of the literature section. Someone came into the end of the aisle and stared at me in annoyance, but I couldn’t stop. When I finally got it under control a little, Alistair slipped down from his perch.

“Come on,” he said. “Might as well show you.”

He walked us down to the ground floor, to the research section, by the librarian’s desk. There was a shelf full of The Wexford Register, the school newspaper, bound in green leather.

“March 1989,” he said.

Boo pulled the 1989 volume down and set it on one of the nearby tables. She flipped through to March. The paper looked weirdly cheap and cheesy, roughly typed. We found a large photo of Alistair on the front of the issue from March 17. He was smiling in the photo, his hair particularly large and obviously bleached blond even in black-and-white. The headline read “Wexford Mourns Death of Student.” “‘Alistair Gilliam died in his sleep on Thursday evening,’” Boo read softly. “‘He was the editor of the school literary magazine and was well-known for his love of poetry and the band the Smiths’ . . . in your sleep?” “Asthma attack,” Alistair said.