He nodded and pulled away, going back to slicing up cabbage, careful to keep his attention on what he was doing so he wouldn’t cut himself.
After a moment, she murmured, “I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
He put the knife down and wrapped his arms around her. She leaned into him, and he was tall enough that her face pressed against his collarbone. He could feel her breath, warm against the fabric of his shirt as her fingers pressed hard into his back, as if she meant to hold him so tightly nothing could ever harm him again.
God, he loved her.
God, he wished he could get far, far away from her.
* * *
Midnight came and went, and Tobias finally set his books aside. Premed meant a difficult course load, and the expectations of his professors were high. Tobias was smart, but some of his foundational high school courses—those taken at Woodbury, anyway—had been lacking in content and challenge, so he constantly felt like he was playing catch-up. Summer courses were more intensive than regular ones, too, but if he wanted to graduate next spring, it was necessary.
He got into bed. His eyes felt heavy, but his thoughts began whirling again the second he had nothing else to concentrate on. He lay on his back, one hand pressed flat on his belly to remind it to calm down.
His desk was invisible with the light off, but he glanced in its direction anyway as if the letter tucked away in the top drawer might be somehow visible behind the wood. He should read it, shouldn’t he? Even if it was twenty-four years too late, he couldn’t simply ignore it. And what had been the point of digging it out of the trash where Manman had dumped it if he wasn’t going to read it? To do anything else was like admitting she’d been right to keep it from him.
Hell, maybe she had been. Here, in the nighttime dark, it was harder to hide from that old fear, that old certainty of his own weakness. Broken, he mouthed into the silence of his bedroom.
Is it like before, she’d asked.
No. He remembered that dull, cold flatness too well to mistake it for anything else. A near-constant sense of suffocation, his body leaden and slow, his thoughts as trudging as mud sliding down a drain, when they moved at all, all of him weighed down by the inevitability of his own future, of the expectations he couldn’t possibly meet. He’d been as aware as a scarecrow, and about as useful.
This was something else.
These past eight months since the whole thing had gone down with Church and Ghost and the favor, ever since that terrible day when he’d almost lost Church, when he’d been miles away from what was going on and unable to do anything but send a series of stupid texts—it was all sharper and meaner and brighter than before.
Tobias had never told Church about it, not wanting his friend to feel guilty, but he’d had a monster panic attack once everyone was safe. It’d taken his knees out from under him. He’d been on the floor of a dingy bathroom in the Tivoli Student Union, vision narrowing to a pinprick, the voices from the food court a distant buzz in his ears, and all he could think was I can’t do this again. I can’t be this powerless again. It’d started some process that’d only been amplified by finding the letter, amplified further by Ghost’s absence, a process that he couldn’t define or get a grip on, but which made it increasingly difficult to be polite, to accept only what was offered, to wait and endure and put up with what was left over.
Before had been the numbness at the bottom of a gray ocean.
Now was red and boiling and—at times—impossible to contain.
His breathing was too fast, and he concentrated on slowing it. He forced his hands to uncurl out of the fists they’d formed. This creeping electricity buzzed inside him all the time these days, an incessant itch beneath his skin, poised to burst through.
And a small part of him that he didn’t want to acknowledge liked how it felt.
* * *
Tobias was up at 6:00 the next morning, early enough to sneak into the bathroom before Guy, a necessity if he wanted to get to his 8:00 class on time, because Guy had recently entered a phase in which he had to stare at his zits for ten minutes a day as if he could will them away. Still better than the girls’ bathroom, though; between Ruby, Mirlande, and Marie, that one was a nightmare from dawn until dusk.
Manman shoved a bagel in his hand on the way out the door and Papa called after him that they would need to talk internships when Tobias got home. He made the long drive down to the Broadway light-rail station, where he parked and caught the train. He spent the time trying to concentrate on his biochemistry study guide while actually thinking of how to find Ghost.
His classes passed with their usual interminable dullness, the numbers and theories slipping sideways in his head despite his rigorous note-taking. His hours in the writing center went by more quickly; he liked tutoring other students, liked imagining all the fascinating subjects that other people got to study.
On his way back to his car, he got a text message from Church: still no word from ghost?
He paused halfway through the parking lot in the congestive August heat, sweat prickling between his shoulder blades, and considered how to respond. If he explained about Ghost’s phone and meeting Sullivan, Church would flip out. He’d tell Tobias to come over and explain everything so that Church would know how to handle it.
At twenty-three, Edgar-Allen Church was almost a year younger than Tobias, and they’d been best friends ever since he’d come to Woodbury on his eighteenth birthday, fresh from a year’s
