The evening has pretty much been one gnarly corpse after another.

I’m trying to immunize myself to the sight of the dead. To think of us, of all the living creatures under the sun, as meat. Sour milk. Green goo. Whatever. Something that, inevitably, will rot. I don’t know why, but it helps me to see death as inescapable and unavoidable and certain.

Yeah, it’s messed up, I realize. But you do what you have to do.

And so it happens that at exactly 10:11, just as I am finishing up episode seventeen, I smell my brother’s cologne.

Strong.

SMELL ME, it says. HERE I COME.

I don’t have time to process this. If I could stop and process it, I would rationalize that the bottle of cologne is much closer to where I’m sitting (in the basement, only approximately fifteen feet from the basement bathroom) than it was to Mom when she smelled it upstairs last night. It would be easy to explain away.

But I don’t have time to process. Because right then I glance away from the television for a split second, to check the time on my phone, and when I look up . . .

There he is.

Standing by the door to his room in his favorite jeans and a white T-shirt.

Ty.

I don’t think.

I yelp and throw my phone at him.

He vanishes before it reaches him, like a bolt of lightning flashing across the sky, his image there and then gone. My phone strikes the wall hard with a sickening crunch.

“Lexie?” calls my mother from upstairs, her voice muffled by the layers of wood and carpet between us. “What was that?”

I can’t catch my breath.

Ty.

“Lex?” Mom calls again.

“I’m fine,” I call. “Everything’s fine. . . .” I make myself get up and go over and collect my phone. My hands are shaking as I try to assess the damage, and not just because I saw Ty. Because I’ve broken my phone.

Because there’s something on my phone I don’t ever want to lose. That I can’t lose. I can’t.

I push the power button and stare at the cracked black screen. My own fractured reflection stares back. I look completely freaked out.

The screen flashes.

It goes on. Reboots.

I close my eyes for a few seconds. Please, I think. Please.

Miraculously, aside from the cracked screen, the phone seems fine. I scroll through the messages, back and back, through the hundreds of concerned texts that have piled up over the past six weeks, the so sorry to hears and I’m praying for you and your familys and let us know ifs, to a text dated December 20.

The night Ty died.

It’s still there.

My vision blurs so I can’t see the words, but I don’t need to see them anymore. I don’t know why, really, the idea of losing this text put me in such a panic. I will never lose this text. It will be stamped in my brain for the rest of my life.

I let myself breathe. It takes me two or three good deep breaths before I can even attempt to get my head around what just happened.

Tyler.

Ty. The word is like a heartbeat.

I stare at the spot where he was standing. “Ty,” I whisper.

But the room is empty.

My brother’s not here.

9 February

This is pointless.

The last time I saw Ty

No.

It wasn’t real.

The last time I saw Ty happy

Okay, so Ty never seemed that unhappy, really, not the kind of unhappy you need to be to

He was getting better

He’d been okay. He’d been—

Sure he was sad sometimes. Aren’t we all sad sometimes?

He had his reasons for what he did:

Dad

Megan

that girl Ashley

his stupid shallow jock friends

Mom

me

the way it must have felt like nobody was ever there for him

the general suckiness of life

But then again, life bites for most of us. And we don’t all exit this world via a bullet to the chest.

I should get this over with.

The last time I saw Ty happy, really and truly happy, was the night of the homecoming dance. October 11th. He’d asked a girl and she’d said yes. He was picking her up at 8. The first part I remember with him being happy was probably around 7:15, when he appeared behind me in the bathroom mirror just as I was finishing up my makeup.

He said I looked nice.

I made a face at him, because I hate makeup. I hate wearing my contacts. I hate the whole high school dance scene, really, the drama of it all, the uncomfortable dresses and the cheesy pictures and the lame punch everybody stands around sipping so they don’t have to talk. I get claustrophobic around large groups of people—it’s something about how stuffy the air becomes with so many bodies pressing in around you. I have to have my own space. I need to breathe.

But Steven made the argument that dances are rites of passage, and even though they are kind of torture, they are a necessary evil.

“We go so we’ll have proof that we were once young,” he said.

Really I think he just wanted to see me in a dress.

Anyway, Ty said I looked nice.

“Uh-huh. What do you want?” I asked, suspicious.

“I need your help,” he said. “It’s important, Lex, and I can’t do it without you. Please.”

Our eyes met in the mirror. We had the same eyes (Dad’s), hazel with a circle of gold around the pupil. We had the same nose (Mom’s), with the same slight bump at the bridge. We had the same brown, curly hair that always looked good on Ty with the help of a lot of product, and wild on me, because I don’t care to mess with it. Whenever I looked at my brother, I was struck by how he was like a slightly improved copy of myself, in the looks department, anyway.