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TWENTY-ONEELLIE

After the guy in the suit leaves, we stay at our table. Noemi has been quiet, as if she can’t muster the energy to mention rescuing the old man. I keep thinking about what happened in the forest. Henry seeing zombies. Me seeing a shooter.

What we saw is wrong, unnatural—supernatural—yet here we sit, acting as if we’re just waiting for dawn and cell phone service, having let that man leave without telling him what happened out there.

But what option do we have?

If Henry and I tell the others, they’ll think we’re mad. Drunk, high, mentally unstable, suffering from traumatic hallucinations.

Nothing we said would have stopped that man from leaving. In fact, the more we said, the quicker he’d have gone to get away from us. All we could do was reframe the danger as something he might accept.

Feral dogs dragged off an elderly car-crash victim.

Is it possible there is an explanation? A natural one? Maybe something in the forest that made us hallucinate? We touched or inhaled something out there?

That would actually make sense, wouldn’t it? I hallucinated the thing I fear most—a man with a gun. Henry did the same, only in his case, it’s zombies.

And yet we aren’t in the Amazon or some unknown jungle. I grew up in this part of the world, and there is nothing in our forest that would cause those hallucinations without us actively imbibing it.

I stare down into my coffee cup. Then I glance at the bartender, writing in a logbook.

Did he drug us?

If that was the answer, though, we wouldn’t just experience things in the forest. We’ve been fine in here. Caleb and Noemi are also drinking the booze-laced coffee, and they’ve seen nothing.

My gut insists that we just sent a man to his death. But I don’t know how to say that and have anyone listen. Henry keeps shooting me glances, and maybe he’s afraid I’ll burst out with it or maybe he’s feeling what I am, the absolutely ridiculousness of sitting here drinking with strangers after what we experienced.

Noemi is the first to feel the weight of the silence. “So you’re a paramedic,” she says to Henry, and that launches some small talk, where she asks about his job and then about mine, before we bounce the ball back.

“Law school,” she says. “Which is … less fun than I would have expected.”

My brows shoot up. “You expected it to be fun?”

She smiles, relaxing. “I had hopes. My parents are both lawyers, and so I knew what I was getting into but since I’ve had two drinks, I’ll admit it’s as awful as I expected. It’s just not…” She shrugs. “Not me.”

Henry and I both hold back the obvious question, but she answers it anyway. “My parents expected me to follow in their footsteps, and I had this crazy idea that the law was in my blood and I’d discover a great passion for it. Maybe that’s still to come.”

“Or,” Caleb murmurs, “maybe a career shift is to come. Like teaching law.”

“I’m considering that,” she says to us. “I love teaching. I was that annoying kid who made all her friends play school, which is way less fun for them after they actually start school.”

I smile. “I can imagine.”

“I never lost interest, though. I just shifted to tutoring. Signing up to be a reading buddy in elementary school and then a peer tutor in high school and then a TA in college. I am a teaching geek.”

“Because you’re so good at it,” Caleb says. When she blushes, he says to us, “Really, she’s amazing. That’s how we met. I came from a small-town school, and I was overwhelmed my first month at college. Noemi and I were living in the same house off-campus, and she saw I was struggling. Without her, I’d have been home by Thanksgiving.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” she says.

His voice softens as he says, “Yeah, it was,” and he looks at her with the kind of love that makes envy bubble up inside me. Envy but also the quiet joy of seeing someone else have something I want, because it means it’s possible. It’s the same look my dad gives my mom after forty years of marriage.

“I’ll probably shift to teaching,” she says. “I just need to get through law school and a few years of practice, and then I can position it right for my parents. I didn’t fail. I just made a lateral shift.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Henry says.

“It’ll require more school,” she says. “I’d want my doctorate. My parents won’t cover tuition, but I should be able to afford it by then.”

“We’ll be able to afford it,” Caleb says.