“I’ve been that way for a while now.” He sounded confused.

“This isn’t real.”

He sat down beside me and tried to put his arm over my shoulders, but I moved away. “It depends on your definition of real, I guess.”

“My definition includes, ‘not just a dream Scout’s brain conjured to keep her from slitting her wrists’. Yours?”

“This isn’t a dream.”

I laughed the laugh of the crazies. “No, I go to sleep at night and start having conversations and make-out sessions with my dead boyfriend. Not a dream.”

“Scout…” He grabbed my upper arm. I tried to jerk away, but he was too strong. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

More maniacal laughter. “Wrong? Everything is wrong. You’re dead, Alex. Really dead. The casket wasn’t empty because you’re still alive. It was empty because the Hagans decided to burn your body because, really, killing you wasn’t enough. And if losing you and Charlie and, in some ways Jase, wasn’t enough, now I’ve lost my mind, too.”

“You thought I was alive?” He brushed my cheek where tears should have been.

“Just… just stop, okay? I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“This!” I gestured at the crazy dream lake with wild arms. “I can’t keep seeing you, touching you, believing in you —” The last words were lost in an ugly sob. I buried my face in my hands and let go. Hallucination Alex had enough good sense to leave me alone during my stellar display of self-pity fueled waterworks. When I finally gave it up, I found him standing by the water’s edge, chucking stones into the lake with a brutal force.

“Have you ever noticed,” he asked, “how hard it is to do the right thing? It’s like, you look at all the options, decide which one is going to suck the most, and that is what you’re supposed to do.”

“If doing the right thing was easy everyone would do it,” I conceded, walking up to slide my arm into his and rest my head on his shoulder. If I was going to be crazy I might as well enjoy it. “So what sucky thing should you be doing?”

His head rested on mine. “What you asked me to do. Leave you alone, let you move on.”

I knew it was time for me to make the decision. I could either continue living this lie or cut him off completely.

“I can’t do this on my own.”

“You’re stronger than you think.”

“You know, people always say that, but everyone has a breaking point, Alex.”

His arm moved around my back and tugged me closer. “You can survive this. You have to.”

“Why?” Giving up would be so easy.

“Because fulfilling your destiny will be hard. That’s how you know it’s the right thing to do.”

Chapter 16

I continued going through the daily motions. Angel decided she needed to learn to sew her own clothes after catching a rerun of Project Runway, so we signed up for a mother-daughter class at the community center. She was happy to add another thing to her list of Things Scout Is Completely Incapable Of Doing Well. Normally it would have bugged me that my shirt had only one arm hole and two necks, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

The only thing to break through the fog was our training sessions. I pushed myself and the others even more. We were all covered in bruises, most nights limping our way up the stairs and to bed, but no one complained.

I was able to put on a good front most of the time. Eventually, Talley quit asking if I was okay on an hourly basis and even seemed to dial down the suicide watch. As long as there was someone to perform for, I could do it. It was when I was alone the world crumbled, taking my living girl facade with it. I would sometimes come crashing back to reality with the realization I had been staring at a wall for countless hours, nothing to indicate what transpired other than an overwhelming sense of grief and abandonment.

Fortunately, between my sister, who was going through a clingy stage, and my Pack, I was rarely left alone for very long. That is why I panicked when faced with an entire day to myself. Mom and Dad took Angel to St. Louis for the weekend to visit the zoo and some museums, and everyone else had long shifts at work. I tried to keep busy, even cleaned my bedroom. It was a task which should have taken me hours, if not days, but since Talley moved in, my room transformed from a haven for clutter and disorganization to a carefully arranged and labeled monument to the obsessively compulsed. I dusted every top and vacuumed every inch of carpet, even using the hand-vac to get under the bed. Of course, I learned that trick from watching Talley do the same thing two days prior, so it was basically an exercise in futility. Thirty minutes later, the room was beyond clean and I was facing at least eight more hours alone.

At the mere thought of it my chest got tight. I had to fight for breath, and the harder I fought, the worse it got. I collapsed against the wall, my entire body trembling.

Calm down, Scout. It’s just a panic attack. You have to relax to breathe.

It was one of those things your brain knew to be true but had trouble convincing your body. I worked on taking slow, deep breaths, and eventually I was able to get a grip, but I still felt strung out. On top of everything else, I was angry at myself for not being able to just get over it. I wasn’t the only person to ever face tragedy and loss, yet I seemed to be the only one who couldn’t move forward. How did other people deal with it?

I pulled myself off the wall and straightened the picture I knocked aside during my little episode. It was one Talley recently dug out of a pile of pictures Ashley Johnson brought over after Alex’s funeral. The pictures were Ashley’s attempt at turning P.I. She had laid her claim on Alex in the third grade I-saw-him-first fashion and hated me with the fiery passion she normally reserved for skin blemishes and clothes bought at Wal-Mart. While Alex and I conducted our secret affair, Ashley kept a photo record of our escapades. After Alex’s death, we sorta-kinda-not-really had a reconciliation, and she turned over the photos. I flipped through them only once, and then tossed them into a drawer. Talley found them and fell in love with one that showed the two of us standing chest-to-chest, staring deep into each other’s eyes with the goofiest of smiles plastered on our faces. She put it in a frame and hung it on the wall.

I wondered if she was torturing me on purpose.

Looking at the picture though, I got an idea. It was possibly the worst idea I ever had, but I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit around and feel sorry for myself all night long.