“Yeah, sure. I mean, I wasn’t always in the basement, to be fair. I peeked through the windows from outside too. Might’ve ducked into your kitchen once when you were napping. I wanted to see how you were doing and eat one of the peanut-butter cookies your mom made. So good. But you’re missing the point, Art.”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“Look at you with your new-height attitude.”

“Shut up.”

“No, seriously, please, give me and give the world more of that. Anyway, the point is you need to stop walking around like you will break. It’s not just a now thing either. You walked like that before your surgery.”

I slapped the door with an open hand, which was dumber than dumb, and pain solar flared from my center.

“That’s the spirit.”

“Go away.”

“Art, listen. Yes, you feel terrible, and you look terrible now. Like a goddamn corpse. I told you I won’t ever lie. And I’m not being cruel or mean, but you need to hear it now, and not just from your mom. You need to hear it from a friend—”

“Oh, you’re a friend?”

That hurt then, and it hurts now reading it.

“You will feel and look a hell of a lot better eventually, and sooner than you think. But right now, Art, man. Not good. And you need to do something about it.”

“I need to do something about it? I need to do something about it?” I screamed the question into the closed door twice. The latch hook quivered in the expectorated frequency. “I’m like this now because of you!” I waited for her to be indignant, to protest, to laugh, to make fun of how ridiculous I was being. She didn’t say anything. I wanted to let everything out, talk about how at the first Pallbearers Club funeral I felt dizzy and weak and sapped of strength when I was carrying Kathleen Blanchet’s coffin, how every Sunday after being with Mercy I’d feel the same way, totally wiped out, and how my scoliosis had stabilized until I met her and how the curve impossibly worsened in the few months that we’d hung out together, and I wanted to talk about sleepover night and me waking with a weight on my chest and how it felt like I was going to die and I felt like I wanted to die, and I wanted to tell her what I saw and who I saw when I went downstairs and talk about my week and a half home since the hospital and how I’d kept getting thinner and weaker not wanting to live like this, and how I knew it was all because of her, because she was Mercy, the Mercy Brown.

The doorknob turned and the basement door leavened from between the doorjamb, straining against the latch. The skin around my incision itched and throbbed.