The Heritage hellscape makes a daze of my Saturday morning. I make an egg sandwich, take one bite, and leave it in the fridge. I sweep dust off the extremely white quartz countertop. My weight feels ugly—heavy and hunched over, like my spine is trying to turn me into a wood bug. My stomach hates food.

Sawyer is getting all that energy from his school for his strikes. How long will I have to fight him? Ordinary ghosts exhaust their fear, panic, and grief by flickering lights, flipping chairs, rapping on windows. They’re starved for attention. Then they get it, and they’re done.

Sawyer . . . he’s never gonna be done until I’m dead, is he?

River passed on. Now she must be part of all this hissing dust eclipsing the sunlight between the window and kitchen. Something about confronting Sawyer, about beating him the second time, propelled her into the afterlife. But that doesn’t mean Sawyer is gone—it just means his memory in her life has no power to trap her anymore.

That was never my fight. Sawyer’s still waiting for me. I can feel it. Still standing in the shadow of some distressed teen who met his final hour under the barrel of his gun, sucking a piece of them into his final form.

School on Monday is a bleak blur—everything dull and less important than usual. The locker room at PE is a maelstrom of hooting and thrashing, the smell of half-naked white boy creating a stench.

I change in the bathroom, in a nook away from the main area. My knees are stinging, my fingers weak around the band of my sweatpants as I pull them up. There are gashes on my hands where it looks like a paring knife peeled back the skin. Bruises form valleys in my wrist. I should know when all this damage occurred, but I can’t even remember.

After dressing, I hug the wall, still feeling this extreme sense of post-astral jet lag. There are whispers in my mind and the image of Sawyer pointing a gun in my face. I’m half-afraid everything will start tipping and throw me on my head.

BANG! The door shakes. “We saw you go in there, Jake.”

Chad. A rumble of laughter spurs him on—he always has a bigger audience than he deserves.

I check the sliding bolt to make sure it’s really locked, because if it opens, I’m doomed. Chad must hate my whole family now that my brother hooked up with his girlfriend. But he hated me even before that, I think for a worse reason. I think it’s because I’m Black.

“What’s wrong, Jake? Scared to change with all the other boys? Afraid someone will see your micro-dick?”

The laughter is loud, and the sound makes me nauseous—it’s so ugly to make fun of other people, but somehow it brings them so much joy.