Chapter 11: The Edge of Vanishing

The days after the diner ran together in a way that didn’t feel like time passing so much as time refusing to.

Eli went to school because going to school was a thing he still knew how to do, the way you might keep walking after you’d stopped noticing the road. He sat in government class and heard Mr. Halvorsen explain the judicial branch without retaining a single word. He ate lunch across from Samir in the cafeteria and pushed food around his tray, never quite hungry enough to eat it. He went back to the apartment each night and lay on the air mattress with his composition notebook open, staring at blank pages he couldn’t bring himself to fill.

He wasn’t sleeping right. He knew that much. He’d fall into something that felt like sleep around one or two in the morning and wake at four with his heart racing for no reason he could name. After that, he’d just lie there until the light came up gray behind Samir’s blinds, thinking about nothing in particular, which was its own kind of exhausting.

He noticed, distantly, that he’d stopped being angry.

That should have felt like relief. It didn’t. The anger had been loud, and at least it had given him something to push against—Lydia’s calm voice at the farm, his sisters’ faces in the diner booth, his mother’s handwriting on the objection note. Without it, what was left underneath felt flat and gray and very quiet, like a room after everyone’s left it.

He kept thinking the same thought, turning it over without meaning to: They knew. All of them. The whole time. Not in an angry way anymore. Just as a fact, sitting there. A fact about the world, the way the stove is hot is a fact about the world.

He didn’t tell Samir any of this. He didn’t have language for it that felt worth handing to another person. When he tried to imagine saying it out loud, it felt like it would take up too much room, like it would be an imposition. He didn’t want to be one more thing Samir had to carry, on top of the air mattress and the groceries and the rides to school.

So he said things were fine. He said he was tired. He said he had a lot on his mind, which was true in the emptiest possible way.

On Thursday, three days after the diner, Eli stopped trying to reach his mother. He had been calling her himself, leaving messages she didn’t return. After the sisters met with him, Mara started calling him again—twice a day, sometimes three times. He didn’t answer those calls. He watched her name light up his phone screen and felt nothing about it, which frightened him a little when he noticed it, the nothing. He used to feel a jolt when her name came up. Hope, mostly, in the early weeks. Then anger. Now there was a gap where the feeling should have been, like a tooth that had been pulled and the tongue kept going back to check.

He put the phone face-down on Samir’s kitchen counter and left it there.

“You’re not going to call her back,” Samir said. It wasn’t really a question.

“No,” Eli said.

“Okay,” Samir said, and didn’t push it. Eli was grateful for that in a distant way—the same distant way he was grateful for most things now. A fact registered rather than felt.

Friday, he almost didn’t go to school.

He lay on the air mattress at six-forty with his alarm blaring and thought, with a dull clarity that surprised him even as he had it, what’s the point. Not dramatically. Not like a decision. More like a simple observation, the kind you’d make about weather. What’s the point of getting up. What’s the point of any of it. Nothing that happens today is going to fix anything that’s actually wrong.

He got up anyway, because Samir was already moving around in the kitchen and it felt easier to get up than to explain why he wasn’t.

He didn’t say anything about the thought. He filed it away with the other flat facts and went to school.

Dana Hart caught him in the hallway between third and fourth period.

He almost didn’t notice her at first—she was talking to another teacher near the trophy case and he was walking past with his eyes down. It was her saying his name that stopped him.

“Eli.” She’d stepped away from the other teacher, and there was something in her voice that was different from the last time, a couple weeks back, when she’d handed him her card and told him to take it without it meaning he’d admitted to anything. This time her voice had an edge of attention in it, focused, the way you’d look at something you were trying to read in bad light.

“Hey,” he said.

“You got a minute?”

He didn’t, technically. He had fourth period in ninety seconds. But something about the way she said it made technically feel like the wrong thing to be thinking about. He said, “Yeah, I guess,” and followed her to her office.

She shut the door most of the way, left it open a crack—the way he’d noticed she always did. Enough privacy for a conversation, not so much that it felt like a locked room. She sat down across from him instead of behind her desk, the way she had before.

“How are you doing,” she said. Not brightly. Not the hallway version of the question. A real one, sitting there waiting to be answered honestly or not.

He opened his mouth to say fine and found that the word wouldn’t come. It just sat there, refused, and in the gap where it should have been, he felt something crack a little—some thin surface he hadn’t known was under strain until it gave.

“I don’t know,” he said instead.

Dana didn’t say anything right away. She let the silence hold for a second, watching him without making it feel like scrutiny.

“You look tired,” she said. “More than tired.”

“I haven’t been sleeping great.”

“How long.”

“A few days. Maybe longer. I don’t know exactly.”

“Okay.” She nodded slowly, like she was filing that away, not reacting to it yet. “Can I ask you something direct? You can tell me if it’s too direct.”