I push myself up and hobble toward the Tahoe, with the cracked windshield and crinkled-up hood. Inside, I slam the door, causing crystals of broken glass to rain into my lap.

With trembling hands, I lift my phone from my pocket, blood from my finger spreading across the screen as I dial Benji.

He answers after one ring. “Jake, what the fuck? Where did you go?”

“Sending my location,” I choke out. “Please come.” I’m starting to sob. “Please hurry.”

My phone slips, and my head hits the wheel. Tears tremble in my throat and shake down my body as I pick up the phone and send my brother my location.

“Jake?” he calls. “Hello?”

Thunder bowls across the sky, and then the rain starts, hard, as if to wash it all away.

To give me a new start.

It’s over. It’s over.

“Please come.” I drop the phone in my lap and then rest my head against the wheel, quickly losing consciousness. “Please. . . .”

Jake

I wake up in a bed, in a room that’s not mine.

Or anybody’s. It’s a hospital bed. There’s tubing attached to my chest and head. There’s a TV on the wall and a pyramid of coffee cups stacked on the table by the window.

Benji is in a chair by the bed. “Thank God,” he says when I come to. “What happened to you?”

It’s just us in here, and that old cat-and-mouse cartoon on TV.

“Where’s Mom?” I ask.

“She went to the bathroom.”

“I killed him . . . I . . . I finally killed him.” The words fall out like a rockslide, and then I remember who I’m talking to. “You’d never believe it.”

The white blankets over my legs feel like they’re defeating me, even though I won. In some ways, I will always be ostracized from my family, and I just have to learn to accept it.

Benji says, “I believe you.”

I wonder at first if it’s a joke. No criticism? No mocking?

He’s serious. His expression is soft, his eyes open to listen.

“Why didn’t you believe me earlier?”

“I don’t know. Your life doesn’t make sense to me. But I guess it doesn’t have to make sense for it to be real. Like, what do I look like, going around telling people my brother sees dead people?”

“I know. You have to fit in.”

He cuts his eyes at me. “And so do you. Sometimes I do the most, but you don’t do enough. We both have our ways.”

It’s true. I’ve always shied away from challenging the white people at school when I don’t do what they want me to. But Benji rises to it. Maybe his influence brought me to where I could stand up to my bully.