narrow bed with a brown wool blanket, the bulletin board crammed with drawings, the posters and magazine pages corner to corner as if Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone had been in the same recycle bin that then exploded all over the walls. I didn’t remember any of it, but I liked the craziness.
Maybe he thought I was disgusted, because he said, “It’s okay. We don’t have to stay.”
“It’s nice,” I said.
“Nice?”
“I mean, it’s you.”
“Hey now,” he said. “I don’t have to take that kind of abuse.”
“No, really,” I told him. “It’s the kind of room where you could just kick off your shoes and leave them in the middle of the floor instead of having to put them back in the shoe box and put the box on the shelf in your closet and close the closet and wipe your fingerprints off the closet door—”
“I believe you,” he interrupted. “Feel free to kick off your shoes.”
I pushed off my Keds, toe to heel. He sat on the desk chair and I sat on the bed, the one I didn’t remember lying in naked.
On the board over his desk, one of the pinned-up sketches started to flap in a draft. It was the only one that wasn’t a dragon or a monster. It was a beautiful line drawing of eyes. Maybe my eyes.
“I have something for you.” Billy reached under the mattress, making the bed rock under me. He pulled out a piece of cardboard, the back of a tablet with all the pages used and torn off. It must not have been what he wanted, because he dropped it on the bed and reached under again.
I picked up the cardboard—one side was blank and the other had a long list of dates and numbers, 7/03 19 years, 6/08 6 weeks, 5/05 10 years, etc. The list was titled: C/PVS.
“What’s C slash PVS?” I asked.
Billy had a piece of notebook paper in his hand now and said, “Coma slash persistent vegetative state.”
“Why?” I asked. “What are these dates?”
He took the cardboard from me and slid it back under the mattress. “Stories I found about people who wake up after doctors say they never will. It happens all the time.” Billy unfolded the piece of paper, ready to present it to me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that list. The idea of him tracking miracles gave me a chill. It looked like he’d made a note of the dates they woke up and how long each person had been unconscious. His mother had been in a hospital and hadn’t spoken a word in how many years?
“I think this was written for you.” Billy smiled. He sat beside me on the bed.
I glanced over the single page of notebook paper he’d given me. “Is this a homework assignment?” I asked. It was labeled with Billy’s name, September 16, English. I started to read it out loud. “The library smells like old books—a thousand leather doorways into other worlds.”
“It’s from when I was him,” said Billy.
I kept reading. “I hear silence like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me . . .”
I stopped and Billy whispered, “I guess I should say, he wrote it for her.”
My heart took a shuddering surge forward. “Wow.” Then I read, “Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I’ll say this is just a place where you can’t play music or eat. She’s gone. The library sucks.”
The soul who looked out of Billy’s eyes in the photograph of us together had written this for the soul who had been looking out of me.
“And get this.” Billy held the paper so we could look through it using the light from the window. “See?” He pointed out where the misspelled word sacrid had letters underneath that had been erased. “He misspelled a word on purpose.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Because he was pretending to be you?”
“Looks like it.”
“Smart boy,” I whispered. That the ghosts had to pretend to be us, the way I pretended to be what my parents wanted me to be, made me sorry for them. First you’re alive, then you’re dead, then you get a