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seeing his mother like that, which only made this harder.
“Do you think any of it matters to me?” his mother demanded. Kevin could see the tears pouring from her eyes now. “You’re my son, and you’re dying, and… I can’t… I can’t save you.”
“You don’t have to save me,” Kevin said, although he wished that someone would right then. He wished that someone would come along and just make all this stop.
It was starting to seep in what this might mean. What it would mean, in less time than the end of the school year. He would be dead. Gone. Anything he’d looked forward to would be cut short, anything he hoped for the future would be stopped by the fact that there would be no future.
Kevin wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Sad, yes, because it was the kind of news you were supposed to feel sad about, and because he didn’t want to die. Angry, because what he wanted didn’t appear to matter when it came to this. Confused, because he wasn’t sure why it should be him, when there were billions of other people in the world.
Compared to his mother, though, he was calm. She was shaking as she drove, and Kevin was so worried they might crash that he sighed with relief when they pulled onto the street where their house stood. It was one of the smallest houses on the block, old and patched with repairs.
“It will be all right,” his mother said. She didn’t sound as though she believed it. She took hold of Kevin’s arm as they made their way into the house, but it felt more like Kevin was supporting her.
“It will be,” Kevin replied, because he suspected that his mother needed to hear it even more than he did. It might have helped if it were true.
They went inside, and it felt almost wrong to do anything after that, as though doing normal things would have been a kind of betrayal, after the news Dr. Markham had given them. Kevin put a frozen pizza in the oven, while in the background, he could hear his mother sobbing on the sofa. He started to go to comfort her, but two things stopped him. The first was the thought that his mother probably wouldn’t want him to. She had always been the strong one, the one looking after him even after his father left when he was just a baby.
The second was the vision.
He saw a landscape beneath a sky that seemed more purple than blue, the trees beneath oddly shaped, with fronds that reminded Kevin of the palm trees on the beaches, but trunks that twisted in ways palm trees never did. The sky looked as though the sun was setting, but the sun looked wrong somehow. Kevin couldn’t work out how, because he hadn’t spent time looking at the sun, but he knew it wasn’t the same.
In one corner of his mind, numbers pulsed, over and over.
He was walking across a space covered with reddish sand now, and could feel his toes sinking into it. There were creatures there, small and lizard-like, that scuttled away when he came too close to them. He looked around…
…and the world dissolved into flames.
Kevin woke up on the kitchen floor, the oven’s timer beeping to tell him the pizza was ready, the smell of burning food dragging him off the floor and over to the oven before his mother had to do it. He didn’t want her to see him like this, didn’t want to give her even more reasons to worry.
He took the pizza out, cut it into slices, and took them into the living room. His mother was on the couch, and although she’d stopped crying, her eyes were red. Kevin put the pizza down on the coffee table, sitting beside her and switching on the TV so they could at least pretend that things were normal.
“You shouldn’t have to do this,” his mother said, and Kevin didn’t know if she meant the pizza or everything else. Right then, it didn’t matter.
Still the numbers hung in his head: 23h 06m 29.283s, −05° 02′ 28.59.
CHAPTER TWO
Kevin wasn’t sure he’d ever felt as tired as he did when he and his mother drove into the school’s parking lot. The plan was to try to keep going as normal, but he felt as if he might fall asleep at any moment. That was a long way from normal.
That was probably because of the treatments. There had been a lot of treatments in the last few days. His mother had found more doctors, and each one had a different plan for trying to at least slow things down. That was what they said, every time, the words making it clear that even that would be something special, and that actually stopping things was something they couldn’t hope for.
“Have a good day at school, honey,” his mother said. There was something false about the brightness of it, a brittle edge that said just how hard she was having to try in order to produce a smile. Kevin knew she was making an effort for him, and he did his best, too.
“I’ll try, Mom,” he assured her, and he could hear that his own voice didn’t sound natural either. It was as if both of them were playing roles because they were afraid of the truth underneath them. Kevin played his because he didn’t want his mother crying again.
How many times had she cried now? How many days had it been since they’d been to see Dr. Markham the first time? Kevin had lost track. There had been a day or two off school sick, before it had become obvious that neither of them wanted that. Then there had been this: school interspersed with tests and attempts at therapies. There had been injections and blood tests, supplements because his mom had read online that they might help, and health food that was a long way from pizza.
“I just want things to be as normal as possible,” his mother said. Neither of them mentioned that on a normal day, Kevin would have taken the bus to school, and they wouldn’t have had to worry about what was normal or not.
Or that on a normal day, he wouldn’t be hiding what was wrong with him, or feeling grateful that his closest friend went to a different school after the last time he and his mom had moved, so that she wouldn’t have to see any of this. He hadn’t called Luna in days now, and the messages were building up on his phone. Kevin ignored them, because he couldn’t think of how to answer them.
Kevin could feel the eyes on him from the moment he went inside the school. The rumors had been going around now, even if no one knew for sure what was wrong with him. He could see a teacher ahead, Mr. Williams, and on a normal day Kevin would have been able to walk past him without even attracting a moment of attention. He wasn’t one of the kids the teachers kept a close eye on because they were always doing something wrong. Now, the teacher stopped him, looking him up and down as if expecting signs that he might die at any moment.
“How are you feeling, Kevin?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Williams,” Kevin assured him. It was easier to be fine than to try to explain the truth: how he was worried about his mother, and he was tired all the time from the attempts at treatment, how he was scared about what was going to happen next.
How the numbers were still going around in his head.
23h 06m 29.283s, −05° 02′ 28.59. They were there at the back of his mind, squatting like a toad that wouldn’t move, impossible to forget, impossible to ignore, no matter how much Kevin tried to follow his mother’s instructions to forget them.
“Well, just let us know if you need anything,” the teacher said.
Kevin still wasn’t sure how to reply to that. It was one of those kind things that people said that was kind of useless at the same time. The one thing he needed was the thing they couldn’t give him: to undo all of this; for things to be normal again. Teachers knew a lot of things, but not that.
Still, he did his best to pretend to be normal all the way through his math class, and through most of history after that. Ms. Kapinski was telling them about some early European history, which Kevin wasn’t sure was actually on any kind of test, but which had apparently been what she majored in at college, and so seemed to show up more than it should.
“Did you know that most of the Roman remains found in Northern Europe aren’t actually Roman?” she said. Kevin generally liked Ms. Kapinski’s classes, because she wasn’t afraid to wander off the point and tell them about whatever fragments of the