She choked out air. I could hear her tears and I opened my eyes. Her voice had seemed so faraway, yet she was standing right next to me wearing a pair of navy sweatpants with her hair still in curlers. It was just a dream. I was still in our town house. In my bed. There was no way this was real. My mother wouldn’t be caught dead looking like that in public.

“It was just a dream, Mom.”

The clarity and force of my voice shocked her. Her head moved side to side as she pulled me into her. Her voice soft and gentle. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

“Just a dream,” I repeated.

“No,” she whispered. “Kori died. So did the two other boys, Curt and Brian. Parker is in ICU.”

My head shook in disbelief but my mother’s hold only got tighter.

“Kori died instantly,” she said as she stroked my hair off my face and tried to look into my eyes. One hand rubbed my back. She was desperate to soothe me. “She didn’t suffer,” she said over and over. But Mom didn’t know. Not really.

I didn’t go back to school. I went home, put Pearl Jam’s “Black” on repeat, and stayed in bed until the funeral.

Between cycles of deep sleep and restlessness, I thought about all the ways I could get to wherever Kori was. Most involved too much pain to think about for too long.

So instead, I thought about a story Mrs. Patterson had told me when I was younger. It was about a man and a woman who had been childhood sweethearts. They’d gotten married, had beautiful children, and were as in love with each other on their fiftieth anniversary as the day they’d married. On the way home from dinner one night, the woman had an aneurism and died. That very night, the man went to sleep and never woke up. Died of a broken heart, they said.

I closed my eyes and waited. But every time I woke up, reality stood over me. I was still here. Kori wasn’t.

I don’t know how many times I tried, how much time had passed, but it wasn’t enough. My heart wouldn’t give out, but it wouldn’t come back to life either.

Everything inside of my skin hurt, everything on its surface was numb.

And then came the sudden blinding sting of sun as my mom snapped the drapes open. Then the impatient jab of her finger as she rammed all the buttons on my iPod until she silenced the singular voice that had rolled over in my head for what I supposed had been somewhere between three and five days. I felt the loss of it instantly. I needed to crawl back into the darkness, wrap myself in Eddie Vedder’s cries of why.