Excerpt: Forever and a Death

I invite myself in. He’s sitting on his bed. The switchblade is on the dresser, in front of him, and Carl is engaging it in a staring contest. He’s not even blinking. He looks like the dead, plus slight fidgets and intensely deep breathing.

“Carl,” I say.

“Slate.”

“Your dad let me in.”

He sighs. “I do need to talk to you.”

I cross in front of the knife to get him to look at something else, although with him sitting down and me straight-backed it’s probably my cleavage. “You didn’t answer my call.”

“I know.”

“Or the text.”

He nods. “I put my cell on silent. I can’t take Madeline or anyone else right now.”

“Where were you at the funeral?”

He sneers. “I was trying to kill a harmless old lady.”

I grit my teeth. “You had better be joking.”

Before I finish, he’s already launching into what happened. “She looked about a hundred, putting flowers on some person’s grave. I don’t want to grow old, if it means all your friends six feet under. They were pretty flowers—the ruffly ones that are so bright they hurt your eyes.”

“I don’t care about flowers.”

“I know,” he says. “I didn’t, either. I cared that she was…red.”

The crap does that mean?

He sees my face and laughs nervously. “She didn’t look red, but she…brought up red in me. It’s hard to explain. It’s just, certain people, in big crowds sometimes I can find them, and Lana was, at the accident, red. Feels red.”

“Are you serious?”

He rolls his eyes. “Would I joke about something like this? I didn’t know seeing people as red was weird until I was ten. I figured it was an overactive imagination. Slate, this barely happens. One in a million.”

“Am I ‘red’?”

He shakes his head, and I let out the breath I’ve been holding in.

“I looked at the lady, and she was red, she was dying. Not in front of me, but close. And I had the switchblade and when I saw her, I wanted to…I wanted to…” he’s shaking now. His hands are gripping his jeans. He swallows again and again. “I wanted to take it out.”

“The switchblade?”

“Yes. I wanted to plunge it into her. I wanted to kill her.” He buries his face in his hands. “I’ve never wanted to kill anyone, not ever, not before. I’m a pacifist, you know that, you make fun of me for it. And my hands were itching and I knew that it was time and I had to—”

I can’t stand it anymore. I spring forward and wrap my arms around him.

“Shut up. You’re a good person. Having someone die on you is hard, I’d know, but you can’t think that just because—I know you, you wouldn’t.”

“I didn’t,” he says. “I ran away to stop myself.”