I am sent to the Deborah to recover. A six-month stay imposed on me for my own good by Reginald Washington and his do-good council. Yes, Mother and Father, I have become a sadcon—a third-floor sadcon to be precise, the category of unstable patients forbidden from leaving the asylum grounds. Because I stay calm and collected in the days after I kill Johnny, people assume I am in shock. They tiptoe around me, literally (the ballerina-looking nurse who earlier brought me my breakfast of gruel and English muffin with jam walked as if she were afraid to make the floorboards squeak).

Albert Schmidt, the baby-faced asylum manager, often drops by my room (thankfully, not Willa Blake’s old one) to check on me.

“How are you getting on?” he always asks.

“Hunkily-dorily,” I reply, coining an adverb.

He does not believe me, of course. Nobody does. I do not even know if I believe myself. I lie on my bed and gaze at the creeping ceiling cracks and twirling ceiling fan, just as I used to do in my room in our apartment, and I miss you both dearly, Mother and Father, and I miss the models of the planets that hung from my ceiling, and I even miss the cobwebs that gathered there because, on my insistence, you gave the spiders the freedom to spin their webs.

Most of all, I miss Johnny.

At least once a day, I go down to the courtyard. I like the courtyard. The sad and confused seem less so here. Bushes blossom with red, yellow, and orange roses. A pergola has trellises overrun with thick vines like those you described in Jack and the Beanstalk, Mother. How I regret not having listened raptly when you read me fairy tales in my childhood. Remember how I used to scoff at The Little Engine That Could and ask for encyclopedia entries on train combustion? For my limited interest in fictional worlds, I am sorry.

Today when I enter the courtyard, some sadcons are sitting on benches and reading about fictional worlds in novels (Flowers in the Attic and We Have Always Lived in the Castle). Others are playing gentle games like four square, hopscotch, and jacks. As I stroll by, a few sadcons nod at me or tip their balloon hats. I have become rather famous here. Yet they are too shy to approach and so keep at a safe distance. They think me dodgy and erratic because, despite appearing docile, I did kill a boy.

I sit on my favorite bench. It is my favorite for two reasons. First, it has wise graffiti carved into it: ETERNAL HAPPINESS IS JUST PLAIN CRAZY. Second, it is beside a yellow rosebush whose thorns are sharp. I like to prick a finger and time, with Casper the Friendly Ghost’s help, how fast the tiny wound heals. Today my nick takes a mere twenty-two minutes to vanish (a record).

After the nick heals, I look up from my hand and see Esther Haglund coming into the courtyard for a visit. Luckily, she is a full-fledged do-gooder now (third-floor sadcons are allowed visits from do-gooders only). Esther comes weekly to update me on the world outside the Deborah. Today all the sadcons eye her because to match her purple armband, she has on a purple velvet gown—her most flamboyant outfit to date. Zig only knows how she managed to bicycle here. I should ask her to make me a purple velvet suit: if I am to be an oddball, I should look the part.

Esther sits down on my bench, and her feet do not touch the ground. On her feet are slippers with gold sparkles glued to them. She picks a yellow rose and tucks it into her fluffy hair. An artist might capture the beauty of this scene in paint.

“Johnny’s still redead, I presume,” I say.

Esther nods. Two weeks ago, she told me his body had been taken on a stretcher from the Marcy Lewis Gymnasium to the Sal Paradise Infirmary in Five.

“The nurses still think he’ll heal and wake up.”

“But his heart isn’t beating,” I point out.

“They think it’ll start up again.”

“It never will.”

“You don’t know that!” she snaps. She rubs her eyes. She looks dumbfounded and frustrated. “Well, if he’s redead for good,” she asks, “why’s this happening? Why’s Johnny sticking around?” Her bulbous brow knits. She wants me to solve the puzzle of the first redead townie who does not vanish in the blink of an eye.

“It is a true mystery,” I say. “One of my theories is that perhaps Zig believes I need Johnny around, so he left him, or at least part of him, here in Town.”

Esther taps my knee, and I wince because I have relapsed into my hands-off policy. “You don’t need Johnny anymore, Boo,” she says. “We all have to get on with our afterlives without him.”

“Oh dear, I can’t imagine that,” I say.

She stares at me a moment and then shakes her head. “You should start imagining it. Maybe then Zig will let Johnny go.”

“No,” I simply say, with a shake of my head.

It starts to rain, a light sprinkling at first that nonetheless chases the sadcons and the nurses out of the courtyard and back into the Deborah. Esther stays put even when the rain comes down in cats and dogs and soaks her puffy hair, velvet dress, and sparkly shoes.

We sit and watch the fat raindrops pound the roses. They lose several petals. Yet they are hardy boys (like Frank and Joe, ha-ha), so they will bounce back, I am sure. And so will we, I suppose. I want to share this thought with Esther, but when I turn to her, she looks so wilted that I have my doubts.

She slips off the bench. She pushes her wet hair out of her eyes and gives me a weary look.

“What is it, Esther Haglund?”

“I don’t think I’ll come back to see you,” she says.

I wait in the rain for her to go on, but she just stands there eyeing me as if she has guessed something vital about me that I have not yet figured out myself.

“I know it is not as easy as peach pie to be my friend,” I finally say.

She does not reply. She just sighs. Then she turns on her sparkly heels and walks in her bowlegged gait out of my afterlife.