Little Alice was staring at his face. Why she idolizes him so, I can’t say. I don’t imagine she understands anything he’s talking about.

“Just stop, OK?” I said. “Can’t you see we’re slowly dying here?”

“People are slowly dying everywhere,” he said. “They are also continuously living. Every moment they draw breath, they can find the glory I put here on Earth, if they look for it.”

I turned toward the dark-blue ocean.

“To be honest,” I said, “this feels more like Hell.”

“I assure you it is not.”

“I guess you would know, huh?”

“Yes.”

I paused.

“Is there a Hell?”

“Not the way you imagine it.”

“Then what happens to bad people when they die?”

“Why, Benjamin?” he asked, leaning forward. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

I glared at him.

“Get away from me,” I said.

Six

Sea

It is time I wrote about Dobby. You need to know. The world needs to know. I will start by saying I am unaware of what happened to him—though I imagine he is dead along with the others. We did not speak that last night on the Galaxy, not after I told him “I won’t do it.” He was furious. He felt I betrayed him. Inasmuch as he thought I shared his rage, I understand that.

But it was his idea to blow up the Galaxy, Annabelle. Not mine. Had he not arrived on my doorstep last summer, shortly after you left me, I would have gone along my way, quietly bearing my resentments.

Dobby was more actuated. As a boy, he argued with our schoolteachers, fought the local bullies, led the rest of us kids down dirt paths on our bicycles, always speeding ahead, taking the turns first. He was a rebel in a boy’s medium T-shirt, loud, unruly, his dark hair mussed, his brow often furrowed and his lower lip hanging down, as if constantly being scolded by someone. He and his mother came to Boston two years after we did, after Dobby’s father, my uncle, passed away back in Ireland. I was nine. Dobby was eleven. I remember overhearing his mother telling mine, “That one runs with the devil in his shoes.”

But Dobby was smart. Incredibly smart. He read all the time, borrowed books from the library and read them as he ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He was the reason I took to reading, Annabelle, and writing. I wanted to be more like him. We had little competitions, like who could come up with the most shocking ghost story. He always won. He had a better imagination. He also burned for justice before I knew what the word meant.