“No,” Trace says. “I didn’t—I didn’t—” He pulls her upright into his arms and she cries out and he moans like her pain is his. She buries her face in his chest. “Talk to me.” He shakes her a little. “Grace, talk to me. Please.”

This didn’t happen. This is not happening.

“I don’t want to die,” she says.

I step back. Rhys wraps his fingers around mine, stopping me.

I can’t feel it.

“Okay, don’t talk if you’re going to say things like that.” Trace squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m sorry—I am so, so sorry, Grace—”

“Don’t be mad,” she whispers. “Please don’t be mad at me.”

“I could never be mad at you,” he says, and she starts to cry because it’s all she can do, the last thing she’ll ever do. “Grace, come on.”

“Please don’t be mad.” Her voice is getting smaller and smaller. “I don’t want to do this to you…”

“Then don’t—come on, don’t do this to me—you don’t have to do this to me…”

But she does. Grace dies in the hall, in her brother’s arms, in our school in this stupid, unforgiving world where there are no phones or ambulances or hospitals or doctors. She closes her eyes and she tries so hard to stay, but in the end she lets us go.

Trace asks to be left alone with her body.

We wait for him in the auditorium. No one speaks. We try, but our voices sound funny when we do, our words awkward and stiff as they fall from our tongues, like we are just learning to talk. It is hard to hear anything over the ringing in my ears, the beating of my heart, the air entering and leaving my own lungs.

Harrison is curled up on his mat, crying.

I want to hurt him until he stops.

Seconds pass, minutes pass, hours pass. The sun rises. When Trace finally comes in, we are all so much older. His eyes are red and swollen and his face is drained of color. There is blood on him—Grace’s blood stains his shirt, his pants.

Even knowing this, I look for her. I look past him for her. She’s not there. Half of me understands this but half of me refuses to believe it and that half of me is waiting for her so we can talk about this. We can’t talk about her being dead without her being here.

Trace looks at us and no one says anything.

There is nothing any of us can say.

Seeing him makes Harrison cry harder. He covers his mouth and sobs. Grace kissed that mouth when she was alive. Cary’s mouth. It hits me again: Grace is dead. Just like that, there is no Grace. We live in a world without Grace.