I tear the Post-it off the glass. The hole is an enormous chasm in my chest now, a swirling black hole, but I fight it. “I do not accept this shitty little note.”

I crumple the Post-it. I drop it. It falls from my fingers and bounces on the floor and out of sight.

My vision goes dim around the edges. I can’t breathe. Then I’m on my knees on the floor with my face pressed to the musty carpet fibers, and I see blue lights behind my eyes. Constellations of pain. But I don’t see Ty.

“Where are you?” I wheeze into the floor. “Where did you go?”

The hole passes. I don’t know how long it takes, but suddenly it’s simply gone. I turn my face to the side and cough and lie there in the fetal position until I feel enough strength return to my body to sit up.

The first thing I do is get on my hands and knees next to the bed and search for the Post-it.

To smooth it out. To put it back. Because I can’t stay angry at him.

Instead my fingers close on something hard and sharp. I jerk back, then reach underneath the bed carefully and pull the object out.

It’s a tooth. A shark-tooth necklace, to be more precise. The necklace part consists of a row of tiny black beads on a rough string, with a single white and jagged tooth gleaming in the center. I sit up on my knees to inspect it, frowning. I bring it into the beam of light from the lamp. You don’t encounter shark teeth every day in our part of Nebraska. Or any part of Nebraska. Landlocked state, if you recall. I don’t remember this necklace. Ty wasn’t the kind of guy who wore necklaces, period.

“What is this?” I ask to the empty air.

And then I remember where I’ve seen it before.

The picture of the three amigos: Ty, Patrick, and Damian making the peace sign.

I pull Ty’s collage out from behind the door and find the picture in question. It was taken at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. Nebraska may not have too much in the way of snazzy tourist destinations, but we do have one of the best zoos in the country. I have always liked the gorilla exhibit, but Ty’s favorite was the sharks. It’s a huge blue tunnel where hammerheads and blacktips and grays and about ten other species of shark sweep through the water around you like they are performing a slow aquatic ballet.

Ty would sometimes stand in there watching the sharks for hours. I used to tease him about it. “Who loves sharks?” I’d asked him. “If you got tossed in there, I doubt they’d love you back. Two words: feeding frenzy.”

“It’s peaceful” was all he said in his defense. “I like it.”

The three amigos photo was taken just outside the entrance to the shark tunnel. They must have been on a class field trip, because they are each wearing a fluorescent green badge. They are also each wearing a shark-tooth necklace from the gift shop. I stare at their hopeful faces. I close my hand around the shark tooth.

Ty.

Patrick.

Damian.

Three links in a chain.

15 March

The first time I thought there might be something wrong with Ty, the first time it occurred to me that he might be looking at the dying-young scenario a little too fondly, was when Samantha Sullivan, a girl from our church, died of pneumonia. Samantha was a sweet girl, the type who I always remembered smiling. She had braces, but they only seemed to accentuate her smile in a good way. When she got sick, nobody thought she would die. People we know don’t die of pneumonia, not in this day and age, not 14-year-old violin players. She was in the hospital for a few days and scheduled to be discharged on a Monday.

On Sunday morning she developed a blood clot in her lung. On Sunday afternoon part of the clot broke free and traveled to her brain.

And then she was dead.

Samantha hadn’t been super popular. She was quiet. She had a small group of close friends, like me. She didn’t like to call attention to herself. But it seemed like every teenager in the city of Lincoln came to her funeral.

One of her friends made a playlist of all her favorite songs: Taylor Swift, mostly, with some Carrie Underwood and the Pistol Annies thrown in. Samantha liked country. The playlist looped all through the viewing before the funeral. Samantha’s mom bought several of those collage frames and filled them with photos: Samantha as a baby, Samantha canning tomatoes with her grandmother, Samantha on the beach of Branched Oak Lake with a line of cousins, Samantha eating ice cream with her friends, smiling her sparkly smile.

At the funeral, the people who got up to speak kept referring to Samantha’s gentle spirit and how she was a light that had gone out too soon, but how she was home now. There was no sickness that could touch her. She was safe. She had run her race. They tried to make it sound like life completely blows, so thank goodness Samantha got out of it when she did, while she was ahead, so to speak.

No tears in heaven.

I remember thinking, why? If God’s so good, why take this girl before she’s even had a chance to live?

It didn’t make sense.

It still doesn’t.

Ty took Samantha’s death hard. He spent the rest of the summer playing Taylor Swift songs over and over. He had a picture of Samantha, taken at a church potluck when they were both about 12, sitting on a lawn chair with a paper plate balanced delicately across her knees, about to dig into some potato salad. He tacked the picture up on his wall next to his bed. It’s still there.

What was weird was that he and Samantha hadn’t been particularly close. Yes, they had known each other since they were kids, and that much was upsetting in itself; nothing can remind you of your own fragile place in the universe so powerfully as someone your own age dying suddenly, here one minute, gone the next. But the level of emotion Ty showed over Samantha’s death didn’t correlate with what he’d felt for her in real life. He hated country music. He wasn’t friends with any of her friends. So why did it settle into him so deeply?