Harken

5 Near-Death Experiences

My legs moved frantically, winding up a circular stairway in a thin tower-like space walled by gray stone. I saw everything as if it was through my eyes, but as cognitive as I was for being in a dream, I had no control over my muscles.

There was little light around me, only that which came from the old metal flashlight I clutched in my right hand. It was like the inside of a refrigerator. The steps rang like deep metal bells but I continued without stumbling once, hearing others chasing behind me.

My pursuers were only a step or two away but I never paused to look back, only continuing to run, the surrounding chill clouding my frantic breath into a mist. The end of the steps came suddenly when I arrived at a doorway, the passage already open and waiting for me. My body raced out and then turned to close the door, but to my surprise I waited for the other two to pass with me. I realized they were not chasing me after all, but were my companions.

I barely caught a glance of their features. One was a guy who appeared to be close to my age. He had long, black hair that went past his shoulders and hung over his ears but was free from his forehead, and green eyes with irises nearly unperceivable from his pupils in the low light. The other was a girl shorter than me, but I didn’t get to see her face before I turned, pressing something in the wall with my palm.

Immediately, a massive wall began to move across heavy railings, closing over the doorway and sealing flat, now making it appear like there was no opening at all.

“Hurry!” the girl said. Then I was running again. We had exited into a room with a low ceiling, only a few inches higher than my head—if I’d been claustrophobic I might have been petrified. We dashed up a set of stairs and around a corner that my subconscious didn’t even take the time to illustrate, and shot though another door into the cold night.

There was a vintage Oldsmobile waiting under the moonlight outside, and I leapt into the driver’s seat. I turned the key in the ignition without hesitation. It rumbled to life, the old radio bursting out music as it did, and we roared away without taking a second to turn the sound off.

My heart raced even though I still had no control over anything that was happening. My clothing felt odd: the design of my shirt was old, my jacket stitched tighter than I was accustomed to. On my right hand was a silver ring that glimmered in the lamps that hung outside of the buildings’ doors. We shot out of the alley and into a giant parking lot surrounded by buildings and a chain-link fence, racing toward an opening on the other side.

But suddenly from all directions, a multitude of other cars appeared, and my foot slammed on the brakes. Tires squealed as the cars blocked our escape. But my dream self wasn’t giving up, switching gears into reverse and pulling around the other way, only to find that we were trapped in a corner.

None of the cars moved, no doors popped open. I switched gears but saw that I was boxed in no matter which way I turned. There was nowhere to go.

I turned my head to look at the girl who was in the passenger seat, as she searched our surroundings for a way out. But there wasn’t any. So she turned to me, and for the first time I saw her face.

I had seen her before.

But where? It was like time had slowed to nothing. The dark hair, the blue eyes… Somehow I knew her eyes microscopically well, down to every fleck and line in her iris. I always remembered a pair of eyes.

Callista.

She didn’t say anything. She only stared deep into me as if she could read my thoughts.

I heard doors popping open from the cars outside our windows, men in suits emerging. The song continued to play. None of us moved.

A man appeared through the front window of the car, unhesitating steps as he moved to stand an inch from the center of the hood. He was thin and tall and wearing a long coat with no tie, arms nearly enveloped in his sleeves, his breath blowing mist. His chin was sharp and his gray eyes studied us through the window—no smile, just a dry and dutiful stare. His eyebrows were completely white in contrast to his deeply black hair. He held a pistol with a long barrel, which he lifted with no emotion and pointed straight at the side of my head. On one of the fingers he had wrapped around the gun’s handle, he wore a red metal ring.

All of this had faded into the background. I was unable to tear myself from my deep entrenchment in Callista’s merciless gaze.

A burst of noise.

A vicious crack.

A shattering of glass.

My bedroom ceiling fan whirred above my head like a cage of hornets was caught in its motor. I found myself staring at the fan blades going around and around before my eyes had fully focused on them, hypnotizing me as I lay motionless in wide-eyed terror, my bed drenched in sweat. The heavy click of the gun would not leave the recesses of my eardrums, even though it—and the stairs, the car, the girl—had never been real at all.

I was scratching my hand furiously so I forced myself to stop, trying to slow my breathing before I hyperventilated. The darkness of night still surrounded me. I managed to turn my head to look at the alarm clock. 5:31 AM. Far too many hours until morning.

Again, I had to stop myself from scratching my hand. The sweat was causing me to itch all over, and this only added to my growing misery as I forced myself to sit up.

This is your own fault, I told myself. It was because I’d spent so much time concentrating on her picture before falling asleep. There is nothing more to the dream than what was caught in my subconscious.

Yet I’d dreamed of running again, for a second time. Now I’d been running with the girl I’d never met—who was dead—and a boy I’d never seen before in my life. I couldn’t make the horrible images in my head disappear.

“Crazy dream,” I hissed to myself, standing up but refusing to turn on a light. I wiped my forehead with the back of my arm, hair damp. When I couldn’t take the ferocious itching any longer, I walked quietly down the hall to the bathroom, closing the door so I wouldn’t wake anyone as I switched on the dim shower light.

I went to the sink and tossed a rag into it, wiping my wearied face with the cool water. It was such a relief against the heat. I held the rag up against my neck.

I dropped it in fright.

In the reflection of the mirror, I saw that the black birthmark on my right hand was now surrounded by red. The line was still dark but now swelled to the size of my knuckle, and the skin surrounding it was vibrantly inflamed worse than any rash I’d ever seen.

Startled, I touched my birthmark, drawing my hand back at the sting. The skin was hard. I scrambled to turn the water on and ran my finger under the cold, but it didn’t help.

What is happening to me…? I thought, breathless. Poison ivy? Something that’d been in the work gloves I’d gotten from Spud’s truck? That was all I needed, something else to add on top of the gloom of this week. I rubbed the mark, struggling to numb it.

The burning!

I ground my teeth together, fighting back a sharp scream as it struggled to exit. A massive tremor of pain shook throughout me, heat seeming to radiate from the spot I had touched. The skin had come loose, sliding, peeling…

My eyes had closed in the grimace but I forced them open, breathing heavily, looking down. Between my own two fingers, stuck to their tips by my own blood, was a thin strip of my skin that had fallen off.

From my birthmark, a trickle of liquid started to run down my hand, staining the white porcelain of the sink with red.

I found gauze in the cabinet above the toilet, wrapping it so tightly around my finger that it forced the flow of blood to stop and hid the wretched sight. The spot of skin looked mangled like a burn victim’s, so I covered my entire hand in ointment to be safe, making me wince even more. My finger continued to throb. I scrubbed the sink until it was clean again, and hid the rag in the trash under a wad of tissues.

I didn’t sleep any more that night, mulling over the most horrible thoughts I could collect under the watchful eyes of the photographs on my walls. Maybe the briefcase had been booby-trapped with a chemical defense, and somehow I’d caught a skin-degenerating disease. Now there was nothing too supernatural, nothing too otherworldly that I could simply dismiss as impossible.

I tried to forget the girl and the dreams. I didn’t need the distraction. The only real lead I had was whatever Spud could find.

Now with a wrapped-up finger to add to my already wrapped-up knife wound on my arm, avoiding attention seemed impossible. I went downstairs and nonchalantly poured a bowl of cereal. Alli sat cross-legged on the couch with her own bowl, watching TV.

“Trying out as a mummy?” she asked, spotting the new gauze immediately. There was no getting past her. I tried to give her a sliver of a smile so she wouldn’t think anything was wrong. My acting skills were deteriorating though.

“You look like a mess,” she told me.

“Why thank you, Miss Positivity,” I replied, pouring the milk. “Anything else I need to know about myself?”

“You eat little kid cereal,” she said, stirring hers and taking a bite.

“I prefer my breakfast to have cinnamon, not just raisins and flakes,” I retorted and began to shovel food in. This proved to be a bit more difficult than usual with gauze wrapped around my finger, but I managed.

“Any more dreams?” Alli asked without warning, and at first I had trouble swallowing down the food in my mouth. I debated not telling her, but I knew she’d see right through that.

“Yeah, maybe,” I told her without commitment to elaborate.

“And you said I need a therapist,” she said, grinning. She shook her head.

“Same stuff as last time?” she asked. I did a small nod-and-shrug combination.

“Somewhat,” I said. “Running again, at least. But this time there was a girl.”

I knew that would set Alli off. I heard her legs scratching across the couch cushions as she pulled them under her, turning to face me, completely ignoring whatever was on the TV now. I grinned because I couldn’t help it.

“A real girl?” Alli said, sounding out a fake gasp. “She must have been coming to kill you.”

“Can’t I be around a girl and you not think she has ulterior motives?” I protested. Alli shook her head. She had a point. I bit into my food with a sense of vengeance.

“No,” I told Alli. “She was actually running with me. Are you a dream expert now?”

Alli gave me an unamused look. “Well everyone knows dreams reflect what you obsess over in real life.” She shrugged. “Creeper.”

I certainly wasn’t about to tell her that the girl who’d been in my dream had been dead for nearly a week. So I sniffed at her and washed my bowl out, and left.

I started on foot in the direction of Spud’s house. His was only a short distance from mine, a left on the corner of Hogan Lane then a few blocks of sidewalk, the streets still lonely due to the weekend’s late-sleepers. He lived in one of Arleta’s rare two-story places, painted dark blue with fake white shutters. In contrast to my mom’s small and progressively dying garden, his mother’s covered about half of their front yard, with nearly-bursting tomatoes and an assortment of vegetables. His parents were invested in being energy efficient: skylights and solar panels cut into a roof of temperature-reflective metal. Spud’s truck was parked across the street, a distance he’d probably been hoping would get him indoors undetected the night before. I envied him having parents who slept like rocks.

I knocked softly on the front door. He was there in seconds.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“I don’t know if I even slept last night,” he returned, but he didn’t look entirely defeated and that gave me hope. He led me upstairs through upholstered couches and traffic-flattened orange carpet, a finger to his lips as we passed the rooms shared by his seven siblings, then his parents’ door, then his grandmother’s door, and finally to his.

Spud’s bedroom was even more of a wreck than my own. Instead of camera equipment, though, his was packed to every wall with parts of computers and old video game consoles. If any collector were to creep about—if they could, seeing as there were very few places to step—they would have been greeted by countless old Ataris, Segas in color and monochrome Game Boys, and tons of other gaming systems and circuit boards I couldn’t identify. In the corner was an old arcade system with a busted screen, the sides advertising a fighting game whose image was defaced in marker and pen from years of abuse by teenagers. For a moment, I wasn’t watching where I was going and nearly tripped over a pizza box that had wires coming out of it.

“Careful!” Spud warned in a whisper. He produced a folding chair from against the wall and slid things aside with his foot until there was a space for it. I sat next to him in front of a computer monitor—it was one screen in a row of eight, the others dormant.

“So,” he began, “I don’t have the news I was hoping for. But I do have something good.”

He clicked on a window he’d lowered, bringing up a web browser with at least twenty tabs open. He shuffled through them until he found the site we’d discovered the night before. It appeared different when it wasn’t on the tiny screen of my phone, but still bore its scant decoration and barely-understandable pieces of text. He clicked a link and brought up the login screen that had denied us before.

“I couldn’t break through it after all,” he said. “They’ve got some federal-banking level encryption in there—the stuff governments use. Nothing I have can smash through it. I even tried—” he paused, seeing my blank expression, and sighed. “Never mind, you won’t understand it. But basically, we’re not getting in.”

“I thought you had good news,” I said.

He held up a finger to silence me. “I couldn’t get in, but you also asked me to find out who’s running the site,” he continued. “It’s this guy here.”

He pointed to a line that appeared in dark gray beneath the post titles. I hadn’t noticed it before because my screen had been so small. In tiny letters it said “POSTED BY: THE EXPOSITOR”.

“That’s not much help,” I said with a hint of dissatisfaction. Again, Spud waved his finger.

“Take a hint from this site,” he said gruffly. He pointed to the words at the top of the website. “Only. Those. Who. Listen. Shall. Hear. What. Is. True. It’s telling you to shut up.”

“You’re way too smug to have not cracked anything,” I said, lifting an eyebrow. He nodded. He enjoyed feeling like a genius.

“I couldn’t get through the passwords, and I couldn’t find out who owned the site—all the domain ownership information was private. But I found something while digging in the pages.”

He scrolled to the bottom, clicking a link to go back a page of posts. He did this again, three more times, until he reached blogs that had been posted two months before we’d visited. He stopped the scrollbar halfway down the page, showing the beginning of a post titled INERTIAL PROPULSION, and a photograph before the thin paragraph of text.

“Some of these posts,” Spud said, “have a picture uploaded and embedded into the top of the article. Since they show up before it cuts off and forces the login, I can actually see some of these pictures. Look really close.”

I leaned in toward the screen. The photograph was plain, simply a snapshot of a piece of paper with words typed on it, the stationary sitting unfolded on a desk against a blue wall. I couldn’t read the words because the picture was too small to see the miniature typeface.

“I don’t understand what it is,” I told Spud.

“It’s one of the letters,” Spud said excitedly. “Look, this guy—the Expositor—he keeps mentioning up and down this site that he’s getting letters from someone called Anon. That’s his informant. Someone who knows about all this secret government stuff and keeps mailing the blogger info about it.”

He tapped his computer monitor. “But obviously, the readers who follow this site don’t always believe him. So he posts photographs of some of the letters he gets. That’s what this is.”

“Does that help us?” I asked. It wasn’t like I could simply go searching the world for someone called Anon—short for Anonymous, I figured.

Spud shook his head quickly.

“This is why you’re lucky to have a friend like me,” he said. “And more importantly, why I’m lucky to have my granny.”

He was smiling with victory. “Because when I first saw this, I thought I saw something familiar in the picture. And it’s hardly even in the picture at all. It’s behind the letter.”

His finger moved from the letter to the blue wall that was at the back it. Only a sliver was visible before being cut off: an energetic hue decorated with an unusual pattern of swirls, tiny angels sitting in the curves like they were in a pillow of clouds. The angels had hair and skin hand-painted in a metallic yellow so it appeared they were gold, though it was obvious the wall behind them was merely cheap plaster.

“That wall,” Spud said, “reminds me of my granny. My granny reminds me of going to church. And going to church reminds me of my Uncle Richard’s funeral, where the walls were decorated with gold angels on a blue wall that my little sister wanted to draw moustaches on.”

“Wait…” I jumped in with shock. “You’re saying you—”

Spud nodded. “This wall is from Saint Lita’s church, just down the road from here.”

I jumped forward, grabbing the mouse from Spud. My fingers drummed across the keyboard, typing SAINT LITA’S CHURCH ARLETA into a search engine. A website for the church had service schedules, contact information, and photos in a line. One of the pictures showed two priests and a deacon posing in religious garb beside a row of old pews. Over the shoulder of the priest furthest to the left was a blue wall with golden angels.

Spud hit the desk triumphantly. I was aghast.

“You’re actually brilliant,” I told him, unable to form any other words. He nodded like he’d known this already.

“So,” he said, “chances are the person who’s getting these letters attends this church, maybe even one of the cleaning crew or someone in the office who spends a lot of time alone there.”

“What time is the next service?” I blurted out. Spud checked the site’s schedule.

“It’s Catholic,” he said. “So Saturday evening mass starts at 4:30. But then you have 7:30 AM tomorrow, and 9 AM, and 11, and…”

His voice trailed off. “What, are you going to go down to the church and see if you can just spot someone who looks like they enjoy conspiracy theories?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s all I have. Maybe if someone overhears me asking questions I’ll catch a Glimpse…”

My voice trailed off. The chances of that happening were very thin, and both of us knew it. Spud didn’t look too enthusiastic about the idea. But when he didn’t answer, I entered the church’s address into my phone, heart racing.

Spud’s family started moving around downstairs, and once his younger brothers and sisters discovered I was there, the whole place turned into a zoo of screaming voices. I was nearly knocked backward when they all ran into me at once, and it took half an hour before I managed to get outside and head home. Spud offered to come with me, but his mother forced him to stay because they’d already planned a family trip to the beach.

So I went alone through the slowly-awakening neighborhood again, now interspersed by cars and trucks heading out for the weekend. Some of the daze-like feeling still lingered over me. I guessed that was my mental defense: continue to believe there was some reasonable explanation to all this so that I wouldn’t lose my sanity.

I walked quickly—the church service didn’t start for hours but I was eager to be home. My birthmark itched furiously so I unwrapped the gauze with caution. It was even redder than before, though the outside air helped to relieve the pain.

Seeing that the redness hadn’t subsided since I’d awoken only made me more concerned. There was one person in the world who’d know how to fix it. So when I got home, I headed straight for the back of the house.

To call my mom’s workspace an “office” was far too conformist of a term, a word that implied organization and efficiency and maybe even a sturdy chair, none of which my mom had. The previous owners had converted an end of the back porch into a storage space. My mom, ever resourceful, had painted the place cream and redone the wooden flooring herself, tacking up thin, colorful cloths to make it cozier. She had a desk and a stool in the corner that she’d gotten from a secondhand shop, two couches for her and clients, and bookshelves stuffed with old records and bottles on the far wall.

It was the strongest smelling room in the house, on account of the herbal invasion spread upon her desk, but I knew for every awful scent there was some ailment she could cure. Alli and I were sick the least out of everyone in our schools, and we’d never gotten a single shot from a doctor in our lives.

“I only work by appointment!” my mom said loudly to me, not looking from the tall notebook she was scribbling in, glasses over her eyes. “Walk-ins not welcome!”

“You’re supposed to heal me, you Hippocratic hypocrite,” I said, falling onto one of her torn couches, from the same secondhand store as the rest of the room.

“I didn’t take any Hippocratic Oath,” she growled, turning a page in one of the thick books open on her desk. “I’m not your doctor.”

This was the game we played—she would be researching something for a patient and I’d come in, and she’d act like it bothered her when it really didn’t. Half the time I wondered how Alli and I hadn’t driven her to get a job away from the house, especially when summer came and we were ten times worse of a distraction. I rolled over onto my back, looking up the walls. She had a guitar hanging on one side, from back when she was part of a girl band called Fruity Joos. They’d never really gone anywhere, except for the time the trio had opened for Aerosmith—she’d told that story to me dozens of times, and I guess it made her cool enough.

Next to that, like a stop sign that signaled the end of her guitar age, was her framed college degree. She’d studied zoology at UCSB. When I was old enough to know what that was, I’d asked her why she wasn’t working with penguins and lions and elephants, and she’d just said she had enough wild animals living in her home to suffice.

“I have an appointment in half an hour,” she told me when I didn’t leave. She looked up, blinking at me expectantly through the glasses.

“I’m hurt,” I told her with a whimper. She scrunched her mouth together. I held my hand out where she could see it, and she nearly jumped.

“What in the world, Michael…” she said with a gasp. “What have you been doing to that?”

She took me by the wrist and I was forced to sit up as she pulled my mangled finger closer to the lamp. The heat from the bulb made my finger burn harshly so I tried to pull away.

“Did you hit it in the car wreck?” she asked, not letting me go.

“No, I think it’s a rash,” I said.

“The skin is peeling bad.” She examined it closer, touching lightly. I winced.

“It’s hard too, are you sure you didn’t break a bone?”

“I’d be in a lot more pain, right?” I said, though the burning had left me speaking through my teeth. She let my hand go and took her glasses off. My hand trembled.

“Take this first,” she said, producing a slim blue cylinder labeled Arnica from one of the desk drawers. She popped the lid and a pile of tiny white pebbles tumbled into my other hand. They tasted like sugar.

“What witchery is this?” I said.

“It’ll make the ache go away,” she replied, stretching up to rearrange glass bottles on her shelf, pulling two and setting them on her desk. Each was labeled but I couldn’t read the scribbled handwriting, glass droppers exposed when my mom unscrewed the caps.

“This will help heal it,” she said, filling the dropper then hovering it over my hand. “Hold still, it’ll burn a—”

I nearly screamed, jerking my hand back. The first drip, no larger than a raindrop, had fallen onto my finger.

“THAT. BURNS.” I exploded, flinging my hand back and forth to drive the pain away.

“That means it’s working!” my mom insisted. “Put your hand down NOW.”

I whined and whimpered, but in the end she had more power over me than any doctor, so I had to obey. She leaned her elbow lightly against my arm, but to me it was like a vice holding me down.

“While I’m doing this,” she said, “tell me about those dreams.”

I looked at her with a hint of alarm but she didn’t register my reaction as she dripped more solution onto my finger.

“Alli,” I hissed, whispering the name the second it came to me.

“Don’t hate her,” my mom said in warning. “She told me because she’s scared for you.”

“Alli, scared?” I said with disbelief, wincing at the medicine again. “She’s in there watching a movie about killers right now.”

“And her brother was nearly killed two nights ago,” my mom said. It cut me off. Was that her silent voicing of confidence in my story about Mr. Sharpe? Certainly not. If she thought that the murder had been real, she’d be out in front of the police station picketing right then for an investigation. Was she making fun of me? I wasn’t detecting that either.

The car crash, I remembered. Even with Mr. Sharpe out of the picture, I’d still nearly died in that wreck. She’d already crossed the possibility of Mr. Sharpe’s existence out.

Would she cross him out so easily now that I had proof of something different?

I could have told her then. I could have blurted out everything I’d found: the car, the briefcase, and the girl’s face on the newspaper. My life would have taken a dramatic turn in the space of a few seconds.

But my mouth remained shut. I didn’t need the police—not yet. I was on top of this, and felt I had the power to dig one last shovel into the dirt of this mystery, and perhaps find the treasure chest myself.

“They’re just dreams,” I told her.

“Do you normally dream of when you die?” she pressed. Stupid Alli. Were there no secrets in this house anymore?

“No,” I replied slowly, but one look from my mom caused the gates to break. That, or the fresh droplet of burning herbal concoction that sent pain racing through my nervous system.

“Alright, they’re dreams of me dying,” I admitted. “It’s happened twice. They feel real when I’m in them, but I know I’m dreaming, so it’s even weirder.”

Was that enough of the truth for her without giving too much? I was already uncomfortable and in pain, I didn’t need her to think that I was losing my mind on top of it. Or any more evidence to that fact, at least.

If she thought that, she surely didn’t show it through her face. She shrugged.

“You’re the kid who keeps getting into strange trouble,” she said. “It only makes sense it happens in your dreams too.”

That got a wry smile out of me, one that become more genuine when she let go of my arm and I knew the evil drops were over. She threw the gauze away before I could wrap my finger up again—she was a firm believer in the healing powers of outside air.

“You’ve been doing that all your life, you know,” my mom went on. “You remember when you were ten and I almost ran you over?”

“You’re supposed to look before backing up,” I said.

“If I remember correctly, you were playing hide-and-seek under the car,” she reminded me. “Before that you were eight and I found you under your Aunt Bama’s sink, the cap already off the bleach and a straw in your hands,” she said. “And you almost died before you were born too.”

I shifted on the couch. I’d heard these stories so many times, I’d usually disregarded them as unimportant family folklore that only got brought up at birthday parties. They felt a little bit different this time though, as if my most recent incident called for a reminder of all the times I’d flirted brazenly with Death.

“I got pregnant with you at twenty, and just a few months in I got really sick,” my mom said. “I went in and they told me there was some complication, and you were taking more of my body’s resources than you should have. Which sounds small, but at the rate you were going, you were actually killing me, they said.”

She’d told me this story many years before but I didn’t remember much of it. I listened enraptured, my mom’s gaze turning up to the wall behind me.

“They told me I should get rid of you, because otherwise I’d die for sure,” she said. “They were very convincing too. They made you sound like a leech. Five percent chance you’d make it, and even less that I would. But you think I was about to give you up?”

“Obviously not,” I said. She grinned.

“Yeah. I told the doctors to screw off,” she said, crinkling her nose with some degree of delight. “And I’ve been telling them that ever since,” she snorted. “Them and the whole bonkers medical system. And after I left them, I endured six more months of miserable torture hoping for some reward at the end,” she looked back down at me. “But unfortunately, all I got was you.”

She knocked me on the side of the head with the back of her hand.

“And that is why, Michael, you can never complain about chores, ever,” she said. Then her face softened up. She leaned her elbow against the edge of the couch, brushing the hair from my forehead.

“You really wanted to live,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to. I think even G wanted to listen to the doctors. Then Alli came along. Then G left for Megan McSluttus, and now we’re a happy family of the Asher Trio, which thanks to you, often seems close to becoming the Asher Duo.”

G was what we called my invisible father, George, because we’d come to a consensus that he wasn’t worth the time of pronouncing all six letters. I shook my head, making the hairs she’d pushed away fall back into place. I knew she was thinking about the car crash.

“You’re good at not dying, Michael. Keep that up,” she said. It was gently, lovingly…so unreserved that even without a moment of surprise, I could read the Glimpse behind her gaze, the gate opening without the walls being broken down. I’d hardly ever read my mother, probably because it felt weird to know what she was thinking. But seeing the warmth behind her, that real and genuine care for me was almost like an unspoken renewal of what I already knew. No matter what else the world would do, she actually cared.

I could have told her everything. I wanted to tell her. I should have told her. But I didn’t.

When the silence wore off, she drew back to her desk.

“What are your plans for this evening?” she asked me. I sat up straighter, stretching my arms. I debated what to say.

“Church,” I replied. She gave me an odd look but didn’t ask. So I stood up, left the room, and closed the door between us.