Where are they sending you? For how long? I ask, but there’s no good answer. All I want is for James to tell me I misunderstood.

He takes a long drag on his cigarette. London, he says in a monotone. To my aunt Millie’s.

But the show and the apartment and… I let my words fade off, because really, I mean me. What happens to me without Gabriel and without James?

I’m not sure I could go onstage like this, anyhow, he says and looks away again. I don’t know if he means because he’s all bruised or because of something else.

But you’re the star, I say.

A show is never about a single person, he replies predictably, and they’ve been managing without me quite well apparently.

I wrack my brain for anything that might make James stay, but before I can put up a fight, he changes the subject and asks: Have you ever held someone’s hand while they’ve died?

I shake my head in the darkness, wondering where this conversation is going and why.

I have, James says. In the last months before I went to my parents, I held the hands of two dying acquaintances and one man I met in the hospital who simply had no one else. I couldn’t be there for Steven, so… I’m tired of it, Michael. It’s just begun, and I’m already so tired.

He rubs his eyes with his long fingers and says, I don’t want to spend all my time worrying about death. Lord, I’m only eighteen.

Aren’t people dying in London too? I want to ask. Can’t you stay here? But really, my heart is pounding, selfishly repeating, But what about me? over and over and over.

So instead of saying anything, I take James’s hand and squeeze, and we sit like that until the sun rises.

The first thing I do the next day is to look out on the fire escape for cigarette butts, the only sign I have that James was actually here. Instead, I find a note saying he’ll write to me, and a sealed letter for me to pass along to Becky.

I race to the kitchen and call the apartment, but when Rob answers, he tells me James has already left for the airport.

Filled with nervous energy, I clean my room, finally packing away the final pieces of my junior year before leaving to meet up with Connor. He’s spent the last few weeks with Maurice on Fire Island, so when he meets me in a Wham CHOOSE LIFE T-shirt and blue aviator sunglasses, he’s tanned and relaxed and looks like he’s walked off the set of a music video.

You’re still happy? I ask, even though the answer is obvious.

Life, he says, eyes shining, is a bowl of cherries.

Next to him, dressed in my black club clothes, I look like depression personified, but its Echo, and blending in with the scenery doesn’t sound half bad, even if I feel like I have to be here to reclaim part of my life.