I would try to solve myself. Find out where it all went wrong. How I got here, from A to B, A being the Alexis Riggs who was so sure of herself, who was smart and solid and laughed a lot and cried occasionally and didn’t fail at the most important things.

To this.

But instead, the blank page yawns at me. The pen feels unnatural in my hand. It’s so much weightier than pencil. Permanent. There are no erasers, in life.

I would cross out everything and start again.

1.

MOM IS CRYING AGAIN THIS MORNING. She does this thing lately where it’s like a faucet gets turned on inside her at random times. We’ll be grocery shopping or driving or watching TV, and I’ll glance over and she’ll be silently weeping, like she’s not even aware she’s doing it—no sobbing or wailing or sniffling, just a river of tears flowing down her face.

So. This morning. Mom cooks breakfast, just like she’s done nearly every single morning of my life. She scrapes the scrambled eggs onto my plate, butters the toast, pours me a glass of orange juice, and sets it all on the kitchen table.

Crying the entire time.

When she does the waterworks thing, I try to act like nothing is out of the ordinary, like it’s perfectly normal for your mother to be weeping over your breakfast. Like it doesn’t get to me. So I say something chipper like, “This looks great, Mom. I’m starved,” and start pushing the burned food around my plate in a way that I hope will convince her I’m eating.

If this was before, if Ty were here, he’d make her laugh. He’d blow bubbles in his chocolate milk. He’d make a face out of his bacon and eggs, and pretend to talk with it, and scream like he was in the middle of a slasher film as he slowly ate one of the eyes.

Ty knew how to fix things. I don’t.

Mom sits down across from me, tears dripping off her chin, and folds her hands in her lap. I stop fake-eating and bow my head, because even though I quit believing in God awhile ago, I don’t want to complicate things by confessing my budding atheism to my mother. Not now. She has enough to deal with.

But instead of praying she wipes her wet face with her napkin and looks up at me with shining eyes, her eyelashes stuck damply together. She takes a deep breath, the kind of breath you take when you’re about to say something important. And she smiles.

I can’t remember the last time I saw her smile.

“Mom?” I say. “Are you okay?”

And that’s when she says it. The crazy thing. The thing I don’t know how to handle.

She says:

“I think your brother is still in the house.”

She goes on to explain that last night she woke from a dead sleep for no reason. She got up for a glass of wine and a Valium. To help her get back to sleep, she says. She was standing at the kitchen sink when, out of the blue, she smelled my brother’s cologne. All around her, she says.

Like he was standing next to her, she says.

It’s distinctive, that cologne. Ty purchased it for himself two Christmases ago in like a half-gallon bottle from Walmart, this giant radioactive-sludge-green container of Brut—“the essence of man,” the box had bragged. Whenever my brother wore that stuff, which was pretty often, that smell would fill the room. It was like a cloud floating six feet ahead of him as he walked down the hall at school. And it’s not that it smelled bad, exactly, but it forced you into this weird takeover of the senses. SMELL ME, it demanded. Don’t I smell manly? HERE I COME.

I swallow a bite of eggs and try to think of something helpful to say.

“I’m pretty sure that bottle gives off some kind of spontaneous emissions,” I tell her finally. “And the house is drafty.”

There you go, Mom. Perfectly logical explanation.

“No, Lexie,” she says, shaking her head, the remains of the strange smile still lingering at the corners of her mouth. “He’s here. I can feel it.”

The thing is, she doesn’t look crazy. She looks hopeful. Like the past seven weeks have all been a bad dream. Like she hasn’t lost him. Like he isn’t dead.

This is going to be a problem, I think.

2.

I RIDE THE BUS TO SCHOOL. I know it’s a bold statement to make as a senior, especially one who owns a car, but in the age-old paradox of choosing between time and money, I’ll choose money every time. I live in the sleepy little town of Raymond, Nebraska (population 179), but I attend school in the sprawling metropolis of Lincoln (population 258,379). The high school is 12.4 miles away from my house. That’s 24.8 miles round trip. My crappy old Kia Rio (which I not-so-affectionately refer to as “the Lemon”) gets approximately 29 miles to the gallon, and gas in this neck of Nebraska costs an average of $3.59 per gallon. So driving to school would cost me $3.07 a day. There are 179 days of school this year, which adds up to a whopping $549.53, all so I can have an extra 58 minutes of my day.

It’s a no-brainer. I have college to pay for next year. I have serious savings, a plan. Part of that plan involves taking the school bus.

I actually liked the bus. Before, I mean. When I used to be able to put in my earbuds and crank up the Bach and watch the sun come up over the white, empty cornfields and the clichéd sun-beaten farmhouses tucked back from the road. The windmills outside turning. Cows huddling together for warmth. Birds—gray-slated junco and chickadees and the occasional bright flashes of cardinals—slipping effortlessly through the winter air. It was quiet and cozy and nice.

But since Ty died, I feel like everybody on the bus is watching me, some people out of sympathy, sure, ready to rush over with a tissue at a moment’s notice, but others like I’ve become something dangerous. Like I have the bad gene in my blood, like my sad life is something that could be transmitted through casual contact. Like a disease.