just it. Strength seeps out of me, beading on my skin as sweat. I’m shaking and I can’t stop. My head isn’t in control of anything below my mouth.
“Help!” The word tears out of me. I squint up toward the dark blur in the upper corner of the room. “Help me! Please!”
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like this.
“Help me! Help—”
It hits me so fast, I barely have time to turn my head before the contents of my stomach come rocketing up and out of me. In between heaves, I can’t release a breath, let alone another word. I’m gasping and it doesn’t stop. Even when there’s nothing left, I’m heaving and cramping and crying because it hurts, it hurts—
The dark swallows me up and spits me back out; there’s no way to measure how long I drown before my body drags me up from the depths again. My hair clings to my face, my neck, my shoulders as the world goes fizzy and foggy around me. The dreams that emerge from the dark are disjointed and bold, colors like vivid sunsets.
My father’s voice trumpets through the night, Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall by any means hurt you. I see him standing at the altar, wings with purple and gold feathers expanding behind him, casting shadows over pews. My mother’s perfect, icy face melts off and falls into her lap. Lucas, older Lucas, is above me, climbing up and up and up through the branches of a tree. When he turns to look down, I see a crown of stars around his dark hair. The sparks drift down around me as I reach up for his hand.
I’m on the bus in the pouring rain. The kids around me are silently crying, turning their faces down so the men and women standing in the aisles can’t see. It plays in black and white, an old movie my brain has filed away. But in the row ahead on the opposite side, there’s a little girl with dark hair. I see her in color—green eyes that flash toward me, blue-and-yellow Batman pajamas. I remember this—the gunshot, the Orange. The blood on the bus windows that the rain resignedly washes away. That girl walks next to me the whole way to the big brick building until we’re dripping on the black-and-white checkered tile inside. I hold her hand. I remember holding her hand.
It’s Ruby. I know it is. Ruby, who slipped away, Ruby who disappeared. Is this what she felt like? All those nights I used to wonder, Where did she go? If there’s a Heaven, will they let any of us in? Where do we go? If there’s no place for us outside the fences, where do we go when we die?
The girl crumbles into a pile of ash. I try to scoop her up, mold her back into her shape, but she’s gone, it’s all gone—I hear scratching, a metallic whine, and turn toward the other end of the hallway where a pale blue light glows. The kids around me fade to shadows. A voice like a gunshot cracks through the silence.
“—gency—require—immediate—transportation to—”
The world rocks and rattles, shaking me out of the black and into the blue. I blink against the foggy light around me and try to turn my head to see what dark shape is moving near my feet, but my body is locked up tight. My tongue is swollen and it tastes like bile in my mouth. I can’t feel anything anymore. All that’s left of my heartbeat is a soft, tentative knocking in my chest. A Stay awake, a Fight harder, a You can’t go.
It’s too hard to keep my eyes open for long. When I come back, there’s a face I don’t recognize above me, saying things I can’t hear. One of his careful hands is on my throat, the other on my leg. Gone, back, gone—I’m moved, lifted up on something stiff and unbending. The cold air can’t touch me, but the smell, the smell of clean air, the last traces of rain, it makes me want to cry. I glide under a sky so blue, so purple, so golden I fight as hard as anything to keep my eyes open, because I want to remember it forever, however long that lasts.
Because I know it’ll be the last thing I ever see.