I’M SITTING ON THE SWINGS in our backyard, rocking from heel to toe, heel to toe, while you pick slivers of wood off the frame.
“You can’t tell anyone,” you say. “Not your parents. Not your friends. Not Ben.”
“Why not?”
“People aren’t smart when it comes to the dead.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If you told someone that there was a place where their mother, or their brother, or their daughter, still existed—in some form—they’d tear the world apart to get there.”
You chew a toothpick.
“No matter what people say, they’d do anything.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’d do it. Trust me, you’d do it too.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Maybe not anymore, because you know what a History is. And you know I’d never forgive you if you tried to wake one up. But if you weren’t a Keeper…if you lost someone and you thought they were gone forever, and then you learned you could get them back, you’d be there with the rest of them, clawing at the walls to get through.”
My chest turns to stone when I see him, crushing my lungs and my heart.
Benjamin lies on the shelf, still as he was beneath the hospital sheet. But there’s no sheet now, and his skin isn’t bruised or blue. He’s got the slightest flush in his cheeks, as if he’s sleeping, and he’s wearing the same clothes he had on that day, before they got ruined. Grass-stained jeans and his favorite black-and-red-striped shirt, a gift from Da the summer he died, an emblematic X over the heart because Ben always used to say “cross my heart” so solemnly. I was with him when Da gave it to him. Ben wore it for days until it smelled foul and we had to drag it off of him to be washed. It doesn’t smell like anything now. His hands are at his sides, which looks wrong because he used to sleep on his side with both fists crammed under the pillow; but this way I can see the black pen doodle on the back of his left hand, the one I drew that morning, of me.
“Hi, Ben,” I whisper.
I want to reach out, to touch him, but my hand won’t move. I can’t will my fingers to leave my side. And then that same dangerous thought whispers into the recesses of my mind, at the weak points.
If Owen can wake without slipping, why not Ben?
What if some Histories don’t slip?
It’s fear and anger and restlessness that make them wake up. But Ben was never afraid or angry or restless. So would he even wake? Maybe Histories who wouldn’t wake wouldn’t slip if they did…But Owen woke, a voice warns. Unless a Librarian woke him and tried to alter his memories. Maybe that’s the trick. Maybe Owen isn’t slipping because he didn’t wake himself up.
I look down at Ben’s body and try to remember that this isn’t my brother.
It was easier to believe when I couldn’t see him.
My chest aches, but I don’t feel like crying. Ben’s dark lashes rest against his cheeks, his hair curling across his forehead. When I see that hair tracing its way across his skin, my body unfreezes, my hand drifting up to brush it from his face, the way I used to do.
That’s all I mean to do.
But when my fingers graze his skin, Ben’s eyes float open.