Three hundred miles separated Laura from me—that was the distance between our schools, but every weekend that I could manage it, every weekend that she wasn’t seeing Tom, her high school sweetheart, I’d make the trip in my old car, setting off with the day’s first sunlight brushing the back of my shoulders, driving west with little in my head but thoughts of my love, my dear sweet honey—and only a few more hours, miles, minutes, until she was in my arms again. Maybe this time we’d actually make love.

It was early spring, and the Indiana meadows to the sides of the Interstate were just turning green. Traffic flowed smoothly, the tires of trucks hummed their strange long- distance song, and I relaxed as much as I could while trying to remember what kissing Laura was like. It was hard: kissing was most of what we’d do together, but remembered kisses are not as good as real kisses. Anticipated kisses are not as good as real kisses. Nothing is as good as real kisses.

The quiet stretch of early morning highway let me think back to our first kiss. We were sitting near the top of a seldom used side stairway outside the Performing Arts Building watching the pale blue twilight settle over the campus. A quiet, peaceful evening. “It’s nice here, isn’t it?” Laura said, and she took my hand. I wondered if Laura had shared this spot with Tom. A pair of fat red fire trucks ploughed rapidly along the main avenue and then the wail of their sirens ebbed into the distance. The world grew quiet again, and I leaned closer to Laura. She had a wistful look, at one with the soft blue evening. We sat side by side, and when it was almost but not quite dark, I dared touch my lips to hers. I didn’t know what to expect. The softness surprised me—the perfection of our fit, as if we were nothing but each other’s breath.

“You’re a good kisser,” Laura told me over the telephone some months later. She laughed her pleasant little laugh. “You must have had a lot of practice.”

“Only with you,” I said. “And not nearly enough practice. Oh, I wish...”

“Only with me?” Laura interrupted. “I’ll never believe that.”

“It’s true,” I protested. “You are the only one I’ve ever kissed. The only one I’ll ever kiss.”

There was silence on the phone. I could tell she was both a little puzzled and a little pleased. “Maybe you should kiss some others,” she suggested. “Just to see.”

“I don’t want to,” I replied. “I only want your kisses. I only want you.”

“Okay,” she said, “But it’s your funeral.”

“Why, are you a vampire or something?”

We both laughed.

“Can I see you this weekend?” I dared to ask.

There was a moment of silence. “Um, I don’t know,” she said at last. “I might be going down to visit Tom. Or he might be coming up. I don’t know.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, let me know when you know, okay?”

“Okay,” she promised.

I was thinking about how nice Laura’s laugh was, how sometimes she laughed as she kissed, how sometimes she was so serious, how sometimes she was so excited, so eager and aggressive, how sometimes she teased, taking quickly, giving grudgingly, playfully, pretending to be demure before yielding the full juicy heart of her kiss. It could be casual, innocent, a game; it could be unquenchable passion; it could be anything.

I was into Illinois. Laura less than an hour away. As a reward I let myself think of her clitoris. Such a pretty clit it was, so small and plump, bold and shy, supple and slippery—perfect under the press of my tongue. In the last few months she’d permitted me those kinds of kisses, too. It took hours of my wordless entreaties, questions asked only with eyes and fingertips and lips, but eventually she’d lie back on the threadbare rug of her little living room and shyly let me open her legs, let me feast upon her flower, feast first with my eyes, then with my fingers, last with my lips and tongue and nose and mouth; she’d let me kiss those snug little lips until they parted and curled and tiny droplets of gleaming honey welled up in the small tender cove. So sweet she was to suck. So shy of sex, it seemed. The quivering took a long time to come, but when finally she gave herself up, when she clamped her thighs around my face and pressed her head back and thrust the full softness of her middle hard against my mouth, her climax, the glorious wash of it, claimed me completely.

Afterwards I’d help her to her feet. Unsteady as a newborn calf she’d cling to me. I’d hold her and pet her and kiss her and at first she was shy of herself, of her taste, but when I insisted, when I forced my sex-flavored tongue to touch the tip of hers, she’d grow curious, then greedy, then she’d fuck her tongue into my mouth, and moan, and press her middle against me, and soon she’d start coming again, a series of sharp coursing spasms which made her whole body snap and jolt. Just as one orgasm ebbed the next would coast in behind it. Again and again she’d crest, seemingly endless waves of coming, until finally she couldn’t stand it, her knees would waver and weaken, and I couldn’t hold her up anymore—we’d puddle together to the floor. We’d lie there on our backs looking up at the off-white ceiling of her apartment, afternoon light drenching the air with golden dust, and it was as if we were floating there, floating in heaven. “I can’t move, can you?” she’d say some minutes later, and I’d feel the back of her hand resting against me, and I’d marvel at the miracle of her words, of her body, of her being. “I’m paralyzed forever,” she’d sigh. “For ever and ever.” I’d turn my head a fraction of an inch, just enough so that I could see her body stretched out next to mine, so that my eyes could graze the gentle curve her belly made, the drop and then the rise to the swell of her pubic mound, the shy nest of soft dark hair topping her there, and I’d think of the secret furrow just beyond my view, and I’d need to touch her again, to hold that impossible, ineffable sweetness, to taste it one last time. Gracefully she’d catch my hand away. “No, boy, that’s enough ... don’t you ever get enough?” “Never,” I’d answer, and she’d laugh, and I’d clamor over her, cover her with my body and try to kiss her laughter, try to capture it with my mouth, but her laughter was too nimble. “Oh, oh you’re so naughty,” she’d say as she evaded my kisses. “So very naughty, my naughty, naughty boy.” Then somehow she’d slip out from underneath me and roll on top, a fresh gleam of “now you’re going to get it” in her eyes, a perky sway to her hair, an impish fullness to her lips. She’d mime a kiss. A couple of kisses. Straddling me now, she’d slip her hand inside my trousers and feel how hard I was, how about to burst. “So naughty,” she’d repeat, circling her fingers, miming more impish kisses, beginning to work the circle of her fingers up and down, up and down with a frisky, steady rhythm, bringing me off in a jiffy, all the while looking into my eyes and grinning at my helpless pleasure.

The blare of an air-horn shook me. The whoosh of an 18-wheel semi-trailer truck shoved my car sideways. I had to hold the wheel hard to keep it steady, to keep from veering right off the highway, as the truck rushed past. Carefully I steered my car to the shoulder. Up ahead was the gray shadow of a bridge crossing the highway. I pulled my car up under the bridge, deep into the shadows. I shivered.

It’s strange how memories can get buried. Almost as if they’d been obliterated, as if the substance behind them never was.

In grade school Annie Richards was my best friend. We were friendly rivals in the classroom. Every Thursday right before the end of day, our third-grade class would have arithmetic races, and without half trying I’d always be able to work a few more problems than anyone else. Most of the time Annie came in second. Then on Fridays we’d have speed reading, and no matter how fast I’d force my eyes along the page, Annie would always read a few extra words, a few more sentences. More than a few—she was usually finished before Miss Parks called time, and Annie would smile her pretty smile at me as Miss Parks came around collecting the workbooks. It was a teasing smile, friendly but smug, not that I knew the word “smug” back then. “Everybody knows math is more important than reading,” I’d whisper earnestly in Annie’s ear after losing yet another reading contest. “So you say,” Annie allowed, her small bright voice musical in its glee, “But we both know how to work those silly multiplication problems, and I know how the story ends—you don’t. You won’t know ‘til next week, if then.”

After school we were pals. We always sat on the same seat on the school bus going home. We both lived up on the hill overlooking the university where our parents taught – the barracks apartments for faculty and married students – and often, instead of going straight home, we’d stroll over to the meadows on the other side of the hill.

On this day, this school bus ride home, Annie sat next to me as usual, but she didn’t say anything. She just looked out the window. I’d beat her in reading for the first time. “A new champion!” Miss Parks had proclaimed. I was pleased, also surprised. I hadn’t felt like I had been reading any faster. But the words just flowed into me. It was inexplicable—one of our vocabulary words for that week. What was even more inexplicable was that Annie hadn’t even finished second. When I’d looked over at her I thought I saw the beginnings of tears in her eyes. “Don’t say anything,” her eyes told me, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything all the way to our bus stop.

“Aren’t you getting out?” I asked her. “It’s our stop.”

Annie shrugged, and then she got up and followed me off the bright orange bus. The school year was almost over. We’d only watch that bus pull away two or three more times, and then we’d have a whole summer of freedom.

“Want to walk over to the meadow?” I asked Annie. “The grass is probably dry by now.”

Annie didn’t say anything, but she walked with me. One of our favorite things to do was lie on the ground, on the soft meadow grass, and stare up at the sky. The ground sloped in such a way that our heads were above our feet, and it was a pleasant angle to watch the sky, the deep endless blue of it, and the few puffy white clouds which moved with excruciating slowness.

“I’m sorry about the reading,” I told Annie.

“It doesn’t matter,” Annie said. “Reading doesn’t matter.”

“Sure it matters,” I said. “Reading is ... important.”

Annie didn’t say anything. I tried to think about the story we’d read in the speed reading contest; I tried to think about something important about it, but I couldn’t. “I have a new book,” I said. “My mom got it for me. It has a lot of information in it. Good information. There are 106 countries in the world,” I said, “and they all have flags. Every country has its own flag, and this book I have has a picture of every single flag.”

“Probably not every flag,” Annie said glumly.

“Yup,” I said. “All of them. Even countries that don’t exist anymore, where all the people got killed off in wars and stuff.”

“I don’t see how it could have all the flags,” Annie said.

“Well it does. It’s got every single one. Some of them are really neat. Some of them have snakes on them.”

Sometimes we’d teased each other about snakes in the meadow. Sometimes we’d played a tickling game called snakes and ants. It didn’t seem like Annie was interested in playing snakes and ants today.

An airplane crept out of one of the clouds. We could hear the drone of it as it inched across the sky, progressing slowly but steadily towards the next cloud.

“Have you ever been in an airplane?” Annie asked.

“Yes,” I lied. “One time. Everyone looked like tiny ants.”

“Were you afraid?”

“It wasn’t too bad,” I said. “Planes hardly ever crash. And anyway, they give you parachutes.”

“But what if it did?” Annie said. I understood her to be talking about the airplane directly above us. “What if the plane exploded into a big orange ball?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That would be something. But it would be horrible if you were in the plane.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Annie said.

The plane had almost reached the next cloud.

“You wouldn’t mind if you were falling through the air, burning?”

“At least then it would be over.”

“What would be over?”

“Everything. Everything would be over.”

“I don’t want everything to be over. I think I’ll probably live forever. The scientists are making advances all the time. Soon people will live forever.”

Annie didn’t say anything. We watched the plane until it disappeared.

“Why would you want to die?” I asked her. “To get to heaven?”

“Do you think there’s a heaven?” Annie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.”

“But if you’re going to live forever, what difference would it make?”

“Well, the people who are already dead ... I’d want them to be in heaven. Wouldn’t you want your dad and mom to be in heaven? In case they’re too old for the scientists to save them?”

“One thing for sure, my dad’s not going to heaven.”

“Why not?” I asked. “How do you know?”

“I just know,” Annie said. “I can’t really talk about it.”

“Why can’t you talk about it?”

“It’s too... “ She left off. I waited. I turned. She was looking at me.

“You can tell me,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“If I tell you, you better not tell anyone.”

“I won’t. Cross my heart.”

“You promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“You’d better not tell anyone. You’d better not tell anyone ever.”

“I won’t.”

“Sometimes he ... sometimes...”

There was a long pause. “Sometimes he what? Sometimes he spanks you?”

“I’d rather he spanked me,” Annie said.

“Then what is it?” I asked. “I get spanked all the time. And yelled at. Even when it isn’t my fault, sometimes I get yelled at.”

“Sometimes he touches me,” Annie whispered.

“He touches you?”

“You’d better not tell.”

“What’s so bad about him touching you?”

“It’s bad,” Annie said. “It’s really bad. I...” She started crying. Not loud crying, but her eyes were filled with tears.”

“I don’t see what could be so bad about touching. Where does he ... what does he... ?”

Before I could properly formulate my question, Annie was up, running across the meadow. “Wait,” I shouted, but she didn’t wait, she just kept running, and in a moment she’d disappeared over the crest of the hill. I didn’t try to follow her, didn’t try to catch her. Instead I lay back down on the soft meadow grass and looked up at the sky and tried to understand what it was she’d told me. But it didn’t make sense to me; how could being touched by your own father be bad? It was a mystery, a little like the mystery of the naughty song we’d had in music earlier that year, a song called Buffalo Girls. With a smile the music teacher, Mr. Wedman, warned us that this song might be a little naughty. Afterwards I couldn’t understand quite what was naughty about it. It must have been something about dancing in the light of the moon with holes in your stockings, but what was so naughty about that? On the walk home from the bus that afternoon I’d asked Annie if she thought the song was naughty.

“Very naughty,” she’d told me with a little laugh.

“But what was naughty about it?”

“Ha,” she exclaimed. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Then she ran on ahead. There was a happiness to the way she ran. She led me up over the hill and down into our little meadow where she let me catch her, and soon we’d wrestled each other to the soft spring earth and rolled over and over in the new green grass. In the end I had her pinned beneath me.

“Now are you going to tell me?” I demanded.

“Never,” she said. “Never, never, never.” So of course I tickled her mercilessly, and she laughed so hard she was gasping for breath, but she wouldn’t tell me.

“I don’t think you even know,” I said finally.

She smiled. “If you say so.”

Buffalo Girls must not have been the same – the difference was in the way Annie ran. Then there had been something nimble to her step, something light and airy; now it was with utter urgency, anger, despair. I did understand that something was deeply wrong, something tickling couldn’t cure, but I didn’t know what it was or what to do. I stayed in the meadow for a long time, doing nothing, just looking up at the sky. I thought maybe another airplane would come. None did.

The next day Annie was not in school.

The morning after that Miss Parks let us all get settled. Again Annie had not been on the morning bus.

“I have a very sad announcement,” Miss Parks said. “Annie Richards has been killed in an automobile accident. Tomorrow would have been our last day of school, our end of the year picnic party, but there is instead going to be a service for Annie. I am passing out a mimeographed sheet which has all the information. Bring this home to your parents. For the rest of today we are going to have quiet time. You may read or work on your artwork. Some of you may wish to say a little prayer for Annie. Some of you may wish to talk to me or to Principal Hopper about this. I know it is hard to understand how something so ... so horribly dreadful, so completely inexplicable can happen. Principal Hopper and I are available to help you, so please if at any time today, if you need, if any of you want to ... please raise your hand, or just come up, if you, if you...” At that point Miss Parks turned away from us. We saw the jerk of her shoulders, the quiver of her back, the sobs catching hold of her body. She left the room.

“Did you know?” the girl who sat next to me asked.

I did not give my parents the mimeographed sheet of paper with the details of Annie’s service, but of course they knew about it, everyone in the barracks apartments knew about it. My mother hugged me. “I know she was your special friend,” she said. “It’s so sad. We will all miss her so much. So very very much. I hope your suit still fits for the funeral.”

“It’s not a funeral,” I snapped. “It’s a service. They already cremated her.”

“I know, honey,” my mother said. “I meant to say ‘service.’”

I shook free of my mother. “Anyway, I’m not going,” I said.

“Of course you’re going,” she answered. “What do you mean you’re not going?”

“I’m not going.”

“I can understand that you are upset. Deeply deeply upset. But you have to go. It’s the right thing to do. To pay your final respects to Annie.”

“I’m not going.”

“Why not, honey? Why won’t you go? Even if you don’t want to go for yourself, would you go for me? Would you go for Annie, and for her parents? It would mean a lot to...”

“I’m not going, and that’s final.”

“We’ll talk about this more when your father gets home.”

I went to my room. I sat on my bed. I took down my new book, the one with all the flags, and I looked at the flags. I studied the one with the snake on it. “Don’t tread on me,” it said. It seemed silly. Stupid. I shut the book. I sat on my bed for a long time with the closed book in my hands.

I was still sitting on the bed when my father came home. “What’s this about your not wanting to go to Annie’s service?” he said. I could tell he was angry. I was probably going to get a spanking.

“I won’t go,” I said. “You can’t make me.”

“Annie was your friend,” my dad said. “It’s the least you can do, the very least. All your friends from school will be there.”

“They’re not my friends,” I answered. “Anyway, I don’t care.”

“Well, I care,” my dad said. “Mr. Richards is a friend of mine. A colleague and a friend, and we’ll not let him down this way. He...”

“He killed Annie,” I blurted out.

“What are you talking about?” my dad yelled.

“He killed her,” I said.

“He lost control of the car. It could happen to anybody. The roads may have been bad. He was hurrying with her to the hospital because she was sick, very sick, with a high fever, a dangerously high fever, and he lost control, hit the railroad bridge. And now he’s got a concussion, busted ribs, a punctured lung for Christ’s sake. And he lost his little girl. Nothing will ever bring her back. Nothing. Think how he must feel. Think!”

I started to cry. “He killed her,” I repeated. “He touched her and he killed her. He made her die.”

“What do you mean ‘he touched her and made her die’? What the hell are you talking about? You’re talking nonsense. Utter nonsense.” I could tell my father was on the verge of spanking me. I hadn’t meant to say anything. I really hadn’t. It just came out. It wasn’t because he was about to spank me.

“He touched her,” I whispered. “Bad touching.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my father said. “You don’t know.”

“I know,” I said. “I know because Annie never lied. She never never lied. And if you make me go I’ll tell everyone. I scream it out right in front of everybody, right in the middle of everything. I’ll scream and scream and scream. So don’t make me go. Please don’t make me go.”

My mother took my father aside. I could hear them talking in the next room. Hushed talking. I wasn’t really paying attention. Sometimes I couldn’t help hearing the words, the ones my father said too loudly. “Utter nonsense. Delirious.” Then my father shouted, “There is no way, no way in hell!” and I closed my eyes. If only Annie and I could be back in that meadow, laughing and rolling over each other in the soft grass. I will tell everyone, I said to myself. I will. I will. And then I remembered that I’d promised Annie I wouldn’t tell anyone. That I’d never never tell. I’d already broken my promise. I sobbed miserably. I decided that if my parents insisted I go to the service, I would go, and I wouldn’t say anything. I’d never say anything to anyone as long as I lived.

In the end I didn’t have to go. My mother came in to talk to me. “We know how much Annie meant to you,” she said. “We understand how truly distraught you are. We still think it would be best if you went to the service, but we won’t force you. It needs to be your decision.” She didn’t say anything about the touching. No one ever said anything about the touching.

I didn’t go to Annie’s service. My mother asked me one more time, the next morning, just as she and my father were about to set off, and I shook my head. “Very well,” my mother said. “If anybody asks why you’re not there, we will tell them that you are grief-stricken and that you are mourning Annie in your own private and personal way.” She smiled at me, a sad smile, and kissed me on the forehead, and then she left.

In a way I wanted to go, I wanted to see Annie’s father, I wanted to kill him with my eyes. I thought if I could concentrate my inner forces enough that might be possible. That he would catch fire right there before everybody. Or if not that, that at least he would know, he would know how much I hated him, he would know that I knew. But what did I know? I wasn’t really sure. I knew that somehow he had killed Annie.

I sat down at the little table in my bedroom and looked out the window. It was a bright sunny morning, and nothing was happening. On the windowsill was a worn green crayon. Lime green. It was Annie’s crayon, I remembered. We’d used it only a few weeks ago. It had been rainy that day. Much too wet to go to the meadow.

“We’ll color in your room,” Annie had said as we got off the school bus. “I even brought my new box of crayons. See how I think ahead?”

“What will we color?” I asked.

“Whatever we feel like.”

“I don’t know what I feel like,” I said.

Annie pinched my arm. “You feel like a boy,” she told me.

I pinched her back. “You feel like a boy, too,” I said. “Boys and girls feel the same.”

“Ha,” she said. “Shows what you know.”

I knew that boys had a penis and girls didn’t. I wasn’t sure what they had. I was wondering if there was a way to ask Annie about it without seeming too foolish, but she was already busy with her coloring. I listened to the rain rattling on my window. I listened to the thump and thrum of music coming up through the floorboards from the apartment below. The same song seemed to be playing over and over and it seemed to blend with the slow strong rain. “The purpose of a man is to love a woman, the purpose of a woman is to love a man, la la la love” the song went.

“Don’t use up all the green,” I told Annie. “I’m drawing a baseball field and I’ll need lots of green.”

“You always draw baseball fields,” Annie chided me.

“I love baseball.”

“Maybe you should try something else sometime.”

“Why?”

“Just for fun.”

“What could be more fun than baseball?”

Annie laughed, but she tossed me a green crayon. Then she settled down to work. After a while she borrowed the green back. I watched her draw. She worked quickly, using edges and points of the crayon I didn’t know existed, and she was finished with her first picture before I’d even colored in my outfield grass.

“What are you drawing now?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you when I’m done,” she said, “Work on your baseball field.”

“I’m going to draw something else,” I told her. “Something beautiful.”

“Okay,” Annie said, so caught up in her art she wasn’t paying any attention to me.

When she was finished, Annie showed me her pictures. The first one was of a pale green field. Way off in the distance was a red barn and a silo and what might have been purple bushes or trees and there was a single jagged streak of lightning coming out of the mild blue sky, striking the earth. “I wanted it to be the moment the rain starts,” Annie said. “Can you feel it, how still it is?”

“You’re a good artist,” I told Annie.

“Do you think the rain will be hot or cold?” Annie asked.

“Hot,” I guessed.

“How hot?” Annie asked.

I gave her a puzzled look.

“So hot you’d just have to take your clothes off?” Annie asked. “Just so you could feel the hot rain on your bare skin, and the barn way off in the distance, almost miles away?”

“You’re weird,” I said.

Annie’s other picture was of a smokestack, a tall smooth smokestack with smoke the color of purple clover flooding upward into a deep blue sky.

“The smoke looks pretty,” I told Annie.

“It’s poisonous,” Annie said. “That’s why the smokestack is so high. If you breathed even one breath of this smoke you would die. You wouldn’t even have time to cough.”

“I like the rain field better,” I said.

“Me too,” Annie agreed. “Now show me yours.”

I showed her.

“A baseball field! You said you were going to do something different.”

“I was,” I said. “I was going to draw the most beautiful thing, but I didn’t know how to make it beautiful enough, so I stuck with baseball.”

“What were you going to draw?” Annie asked. “A basketball court?”

“I was going to draw you,” I said.

“You think I’m beautiful?”

“Sure,” I said. “Very beautiful.”

“Okay,” Annie said. “Now tell me about the baseball field.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me about the game. Tell me about what you were thinking about while you were coloring the picture.”

“I was thinking about hitting homeruns,” I said. “Four homeruns, and one double.”

“A double?” Annie said. “How come not five homeruns?”

“The last one was almost a homerun. It hit the top of the wall. Just two feet more and it would have been over. But it bounced off the wall and I had to settle for a double.”

“Too bad,” Annie said.

“No, I wanted a double,” I said.

“Why?” she asked. “Would five homeruns have been too greedy?”

“No, I just wanted to stand out on second base,” I said. “Right out in the middle of the field.”

“Do you really think I’m beautiful?” Annie asked.

I nodded.

“Can I have your baseball field?” Annie asked.

“It’s not really very good.”

“I want it anyway.”

“How come?”

“Maybe I’ll draw you standing on second base. You’ll be wearing a bright white uniform and a bright blue baseball cap. And you’ll be looking down at the ground because all the people will be cheering. They’ll be cheering so loud, louder than they cheered for your homeruns, and you’ll be looking down out of pride and embarrassment. And I’ll draw me on second base, too, sharing it with you. And...”

“You can’t have two people on second base, not at the same time.”

“But I won’t really be on second base. I’ll be sort of ghost-like, so you can tell it’s just that you’re thinking about me, that I’m not really there. And all the people in the stands, all those people cheering and clapping, they’ll all be me, too. They’ll be clapping and cheering so loud—you won’t be able to hear anything.”

“You’re so weird.”

“So can I have your baseball drawing? You can have my field and my smokestack.”

We’d traded pictures. I don’t know if Annie ever drew me standing on second base. I’d put the pictures of the smokestack and the field with the lightning bolt on the top of my bookshelf where they’d be safe. On the morning of Annie’s service, still holding that worn-down lime-green crayon, I reached up to get the pictures. I brought them over to my table by the window and set them down. I looked at them. I noticed that in the front part of the field the grass was raggedy, and there were tiny white flowers which I hadn’t noticed before. I also noticed the way the sunlight held the smooth curve of the smokestack, but dripping down the shaded side was a tarry black stain. I stared into the puffs of purple fume and wondered what it would be like to breathe it in, what it would be like in the instant of dying. “Annie,” I whispered. It didn’t make any sense to me that she was no longer alive. That she was dead. That I would never see her again. I closed my eyes tight as I could. I tried not to breathe.