“I don’t like stains either,” Sen said quietly. “They’re like...”
“Like ghosts,” Lee said before he could help it.
“Yes,” Sen said, as if Lee made perfect sense. The moonlight gleamed in her dark eyes, twin moons in each pupil. “They’re reminders of the past.”
“But a past no one wants to remember,” Lee said.
“Yes,” Sen said breathlessly. “They’re scars that our mistakes leave behind.”
Lee nodded vigorously. He could no longer feel the cold breeze on his bare arms, could no longer feel that he had a body at all. He felt stripped down to his soul, fragile as a forgotten song carried by the wind. Only Sen could hear him.
“Your heartbeat is so loud,” she said—her words quiet, so as not to drown him.
“Mine?” Lee whispered. “All I can hear is yours.”
Sen shook her head. She drew closer, pulling her hair behind one ear. She brought her ear close to his chest, careful not to touch.
“It’s like a bird is trapped inside, trying to break free,” she said.
Lee swallowed, unable to move with her so close. Slowly, she reached a hand out. “Maybe this is where your mother is,” she said.
Before Lee could ask what she meant, her hand was moving toward the center of his chest. He held his breath, anticipating the coldness of her touch over his fluttering heart.
But her hand plunged into his chest like his rib cage was made of quicksand, her whole forearm disappearing as she leaned deeper and deeper into him, her lips a breath away.
“Sen,” he whispered as the world dissolved.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lee
“What are you doing this summer?” a voice said.
Lee blinked hard, his eyes adjusting to the light.
He was sitting on the scratchy couch in his apartment, his laptop balanced precariously on his knees. The gray sky had turned to off-white paint and the sterile sting of cheap lighting in student housing. The scent of charcoal and grilled burgers floated through the open balcony door.
James was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a slice of pizza in one hand.
James, who was whole and alive, his eyes safely in their sockets.
One moment, Lee had been sitting in his room with Sen, and now he was somehow back in his college apartment.
Lee Turner had forgotten this moment, but it rushed to him now in vivid colors. He remembered the way he’d propped open his astronomy book with his phone because it was old and stiff and wouldn’t stay open to page forty-five. He remembered the box of pepperoni pizza that James had brought back from a club meeting and offered to Lee, which he’d declined.
“Are you traveling?” James asked when Lee didn’t answer.
Lee looked down at his textbook, though he had forgottenhow to read, how to breathe, how to think. This moment was somewhere between a memory and a fantasy, for he could remember being here but now held all the knowledge of what came after. Could he change what happened next if he acted differently now?
Run, he wanted to say to James.Get out, now.
“I don’t know,” was what Lee actually said, because those were the only words he could find in the darkness of his mind.
James took a bite of pizza. He chewed as he watched Lee, as if waiting for more. Lee watched him swallow, James’s Adam’s apple bobbing. Lee snapped his gaze back to his textbook and pretended to read, holding his breath because he was sure James could hear his screaming thoughts. He would call the police on Lee for a murder that hadn’t happened yet. He would kill Lee right now to stop it from happening.
But what James actually did was much, much worse.
“I’m thinking of going to Asia,” James said after he finished the last bite of pizza, reaching for a napkin and wiping the grease from his fingers, one by one. “Have you ever been to Cambodia?”
