“Delaney, come with me.”

I didn’t think at all about his lips, and how the last time they touched my mouth they were moving and warm. Now they were still and cold.

“Delaney, it’s over.”

But seizures don’t kill.

I breathed air into his lungs. I pumped his heart. I squeezed my eyes shut and lifted my face upward and prayed for a miracle. I begged for a miracle. “Please,” I cried. But nothing happened.

Sirens blared in the distance, growing closer.

“Let’s go. We have to go. I’m going.”

I kept pumping. I kept breathing. Troy’s car rumbled away. The real help arrived after I exhaled my breath into his lungs fifty-three times. They pulled me away. They pushed me back. They shouted questions as they lifted Carson’s empty body onto a stretcher and replaced my mouth with an inflatable yellow bag.

“What happened?” and “Who is he?” and “How long?” and “Next of kin?” but all I could say was, “Carson Levine.”

And all I could think was how cruel and impersonal that bag on his mouth was. How cold, sterile air was forced down into his lungs. How it had no connection to the living.

Someone asked me if I was okay to get myself home. I must’ve made some sound indicating I was, even though I wasn’t, because they drove off, leaving me alone on the side of the road with Mom’s car still running, two doors thrown wide open, front seat stained. I fell to my knees and stared at the hollow spot in the earth where Carson had been. Where his body had dug a hole for itself. I listened to the sirens fading into the distance. I pictured them saving him.

Because seizures don’t kill.

Only that’s not what he said.

He’d said seizures usually don’t kill. Like people usually don’t survive for eleven minutes underwater. Like I usually get all As. I doubled over in pain, but I couldn’t tell where I hurt. Just a widespread, all-encompassing, debilitating pain. I wondered what Carson felt. The last bit of life in his body had been from me. The last living thing his mouth touched had been my own.

I clutched at the snow in the empty space where he had been, packed from his weight. Then I flopped down beside it, on my back, like I was making a snow angel. Except I didn’t wave my arms back and forth to make wings. I just lay there, tears trickling out hot, turning to ice as they traveled down the sides of my face. Snow melted into my clothes and my hair and the crevices of my ears. Pain where an itch had once grown. Pain to cloud the memory. Pain and wet and cold.

Pain until I couldn’t feel my fingertips and the old car rumbled back beside me. My eyes stayed closed so I wouldn’t have to face him. But I felt my face grow colder as his shadow blocked the sun. I opened my eyes and saw Troy’s outline, the darkness where the light used to be.

He reached down for my hand and I took it. I took it. He pulled me to his body and I let him. He whispered in my ear and I listened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry about your friend.” He wiped the tears off my cheeks with his rough thumb and I leaned my face into his hand. He brushed the snow off my back, my arms, my hair—and held me until the shaking subsided. And when he whispered, “Let’s go,” I followed.

I followed until he stepped in the imprint where Carson had been. Where Carson had lived. Where Carson had died. Where Troy had watched him die.

I froze at the border of his body. “I’m not going with you.”

He turned around and let out an aggravated sigh. “You can’t take that.” He pointed at Mom’s ruined car. But he was looking at me, trembling, incapable of driving. He pulled my bag from the driver’s side, turned off the ignition, and locked the doors. I walked to his car in a wide berth around the two body prints in the snow. Wingless and immobile.

A tribute to death.

I slid into the passenger side, my bag between us on the bench seat. I leaned against the door, far from Troy. The car was old. The door was old. Leaning against it was downright dangerous. I didn’t care. Maybe if I fell out I’d hit my head on the pavement and an ambulance would take me away and I’d sleep for days in the hospital, not quite existing, and when I’d wake nobody would care that I didn’t save Carson. And they’d run an MRI and see my brain was damaged beyond repair and they’d pump me full of painkillers, keeping me in a haze where the neurons in my brain couldn’t form connections to make memories. And Decker would sit by my bed and hold my hand and sometimes he’d kiss my forehead when he thought I wasn’t awake. And it wouldn’t matter whether I was valedictorian or a miracle or a complete waste of a life.