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Cate, back beside me, her bare shoulder touching mine:
I love you, Travis.

Me:
Ditto.

Cate, crying.

Me, wrapping my arms around her and falling asleep.

I was glad I met Hatton on the first day back. He was funny in that unintentional way where he mostly just said more of the truth than anyone else around, at least when he wasn’t making things up to flirt with girls. In chemistry I watched him tap a cute girl on the shoulder and tell her she was the only person he ever dreamed about. She looked disgusted, and I nodded my head in affirmation to try to help. Then she gave us both the finger and never turned around again.

At the end of the day Mom picked me up and had this look on her face that asked a million questions all at the same time. So I answered them as efficiently as possible to ease her mind.

“School was good. I made a new friend. He’s hilarious. And I saw Audrey Hagler, and she is so different and grown-up now. But also the same. It’s weird, but I can
make it work. I like my new clothes, too—thanks, Mom.”

And she smiled so big, even though she was sort of crying. I wondered if she’d ever smile again without crying, or if this had become her default setting. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who needed a reset button. I turned on the radio and pretended not to see it. That’s what she wanted anyway. She didn’t like getting attention like that, which is something I really loved about her.

“Any word from Cate?” I asked as we turned onto our street.

“No, sweetie.”

“Sucks.”

“Maybe she’ll be ready soon.”

“I want it all to go back, you know. All of it.” I looked out the window, my forehead pressing up against the glass.

“You may want to think about that a little longer before saying it again, Travis.”

But I had thought about it. It’s all I could think about since I’d woken up. And, to be honest, I couldn’t really see all that much difference between the life where I was dying and the one where everyone had become a stranger. Some of my happiest moments were in those few months leading up to the surgery, so maybe this wasn’t right. All those hours in the hospital that I spent thinking about whether or not this crazy procedure would work, whether or not I’d get to come back, and it hadn’t even once occurred to me that it could happen this way. I thought if I woke up at all, it would be in a hundred years to a
brand-new world full of new people. But instead there I was stuck in this mutated version of my old life where everyone had grown-up just enough to forget about me. Or, at the very least, move on to lives I could no longer fit into. My best friend had secrets and my girlfriend had a fiancé. I came back from the dead for this? Joke’s on me.

She’d always been there in very small ways, I’d say. I didn’t really know her before middle school, but then we had a few classes together and I eventually noticed that she was the only other kid who got my jokes, the only one who knew the exact
Saturday Night Live
reference I was making or the impression I was botching. She’d always be there laughing and, in the cutest way possible, following up whatever I’d said with something she hoped would be funnier. She was competitive in that way alone, and I realized after a while that she was only this way with me. In classrooms full of more attractive, more popular, and all around better guys, Cate Conroy would take pains to sit next to me and be my partner on projects and ask me for help on assignments. By the end of eighth grade she mentioned being tired of riding the bus every day, so I asked my mom if we could start picking her up
in the mornings. Luckily, her house was on the way to school from ours.

She lived with her mom and stepdad in a very small house that was actually one half of a car repair shop. It was nicer on the inside than I’d imagined, but something about it never quite felt like a home to me. Maybe because Cate was shy about it and always made sure to tell everyone that they were saving up to buy a new place. Her stepdad, a mechanic, was a nice guy from Chicago who talked faster than an auctioneer. He was always covered in grease from his fingertips to his elbows, usually with a smudge or two on his face, and before Cate and I ever started dating, he would whisper things to me like “I’m rooting for you, buddy.” And I’d always pretend not to know what he was talking about and walk away embarrassed.

I told Cate I loved her, that I was
in
love with her, outside of a movie theater in downtown Kansas City. She was supposed to say, with tears in her eyes, that she felt the same way. She was supposed to let me grab her and swoop her dramatically down to one side and kiss her like no one’s ever kissed anyone else in the world. Instead she said, “Thank you, that’s sweet,” and hugged me good night when her mom pulled up to take her home.

The next day, after school, she showed up at my house holding a large, flat square, something wrapped in plain brown paper. She asked if we could go upstairs, and as I led her up, there was the sort of quiet between us that
made every creak of our steps echo through the house. We got up to my room, and even though no one else was home, I shut the door behind me. She just stood there, holding the mystery gift, and she had this grin on her face that at least made me step away from the door and let go of the handle. I was ready to bolt, ready to run out of that room as soon as she broke my heart, so I wouldn’t have to face the mortification.

“Relax,” she said.

“What’s that?” I asked, my voice shaky just like the rest of me. Even my chest.

“It’s a present for you.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t know what to say last night.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Why would you be sorry for saying something like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Open it,” she said, handing it over.

It was a painting. But I’d known that much when she’d walked in. For starters, Cate was always painting. And also, right as she handed it to me, I saw a smudge of red on her hand. She was messy that way, never unkempt but always looking like she’d just been working on something important, something that just couldn’t wait.

Something like this painting she handed me. It was us, right in the center of the canvas, sitting alone and side by side in a big empty movie theater. I had my arm around
her, my feet kicked up on the seat in front of me. She even made the sneakers green and yellow. You could only see our backs. You could see her wavy blond hair hanging over the back of the seat and my short brown hair jutting just a little over the tops of my ears. There were empty black seats all around and behind us. Nearly the entire far background was a white screen with little tatters and cracks at the edges with huge red curtains on either side. It looked exactly like our theater.

“This is amazing,” I said.

“Like us.”

“I love it,” I said.

“I love you,” she said. “I do. I’m stupid and I don’t like surprises and you caught me off guard. But there it is.”

“Don’t say it just because you feel obligated, Cate.”

“I only feel obligated because it’s the truth, Travis.”

Cate Conroy was a good girlfriend who used to draw dragons on my arms in black Sharpie ink and send me messages of photos that I’d have to translate into words. And she made me laugh like no one else could, this hard laugh that shook my whole body and brought tears to my eyes. The best thing about it, though, was that she could be so funny, so incredibly ridiculous and goofy sometimes, but never at anyone else’s expense. For that, and for a lot of other reasons, I was better when she was around me. That’s how I knew I loved her so much, because not loving her didn’t make any sense once I’d known what it felt like.

Before Cate I was just Travis. I was a quiet kid who
would blush easily when he got too much attention and always walked with his head down and his hands in his pockets. Usually I was sitting in class thinking about something funny to say and never being brave enough to speak up and say it. In my mind I pretended I was too mature and intelligent to clown around with my classmates, but even I knew that wasn’t totally the case. I just wasn’t quite sure how to be one of them. Not until she helped me figure that out. Before she was there to be my audience, to pay me attention when everyone else had given up on it, I was quite sure I’d always sort of fade into the background.

I remember the first real time we talked. It was in eighth-grade French class, and we were working on a group project. She’d been assigned to my group, along with Daniel Thompson and Marybeth Cutler. We had to choose a poem from a book the teacher had given us and then translate it into French.

“I think we should do this one,” Daniel suggested, presenting us a four-line poem.

“Too easy. I want a good grade,” Marybeth said, grabbing the book from him.

“She said size didn’t matter,” Daniel added.

To me, the moment was too funny to keep from laughing. I was turning red, I knew it, and I was trying my best to keep my mouth shut and sort of look away, like something else was on my mind. Then Cate leaned over and whispered into my ear.

“Let’s hope size doesn’t matter, for Daniel’s sake.”

And we both burst into laughter that was so loud the teacher walked over and gave us her death stare. But I couldn’t stop. And neither could she. After that it didn’t take us long to go from being Cate Conroy and Travis Coates to being just Cate and Travis. I’d be somewhere without her, and the first thing I’d get asked was “Where’s Cate?” She said it was the same exact case when she was without me.

And now I just wanted to see her. I didn’t care if she looked different. I didn’t care if she had a fiancé and I didn’t care if she said she didn’t want to see me, because that’s bullshit. I was there first, and after seeing Kyle and Audrey and all those kids at school and all my old teachers and classrooms and hallways, all I could think about was seeing and hearing and touching the one person I’d promised to come back for. We had to finish what we started. We got to do that now. No one else could say that. Well, Lawrence Ramsey could but no one else. We had to go for it. I had to go for it. Just like those doctors had done with my head and Jeremy’s body, I had to take my old life and mash it together with this new one. That meant there’d probably have to be a few more scars.

•  •  •

She still lived in Kansas City, that much I knew. Kyle said she was working some temp job at a law firm and taking night classes to be a paralegal. All I heard, though,
was that she wasn’t doing art. Something wasn’t right about that.

“I need you to call her for me,” I said to Kyle on the phone the day after I started back at school.

“Travis, I just think if she were ready, she’d have already contacted you.”

“Kyle, please. I’m trying to be cool about this, but you know it’s weird that she hasn’t seen me yet. It has to happen.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Then what happens? Do you just pretend you aren’t a teenager and run off with her and live happily ever after?”

“No. I don’t see why we’d have to run off anywhere.”

“Damn, Travis. Listen to yourself. I know it’s hard, but listen. We’re older now. It sucks, but it’s how it is. If you show up bringing back the saddest time in her life, what will that do to her?”

“She just didn’t know, man. No one knew I’d come back. I get that. I didn’t know either. I thought if I woke up, it’d be so far in the future that you’d all be gone. I can’t make sense of it, really. And I never gave much thought to seeing any of you again, you know? I can’t just tell myself that it’s all okay. It’s not. I’m here. That’s got to mean something.”

“It means a lot. It means you’re alive again and everyone in the world is happy about that. You’re a freakin’ miracle. But, for whatever reason, she’s avoiding you and
you have to find a way to respect that until she’s ready. Okay? Don’t pretend you don’t see where I’m coming from here.”

“No, we wouldn’t want to go
pretending
things would we?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Look, I’m sorry. Thanks. I’ll figure it out. Can you just, if you talk to her, can you just tell her I want to see her? Can you do that?”

“Sure, Travis.”

“Kyle?”

“Yeah?”

“Anything you want to tell me?”

“No, Travis. I gotta run. Big test tomorrow.”

“Good luck, then.”

“Good-bye, Travis.”

I know I’m not supposed to be talking about dying. That’s not what this is about. But, see, I sort of have to break my own rules for a bit so you’ll understand what I was missing when I got back.

When we said good-bye in the hospital in Denver, Kyle had already been crying in private, so I could see the sadness in his eyes just as he grabbed my hand and pulled me toward him. I was probably just as nervous about what he would say to me as he was. I’m not a huge fan of sentimentality, and even in those last days I was finding it hard not to laugh at what others would consider very meaningful, emotional moments. I wasn’t coldhearted—I was exhausted and, unlike any of them, I was relieved.

So I started laughing and crying pretty hard when he leaned down, with all seriousness, with those same sad eyes and years of shared memories floating heavy in the
small space between us, and whispered: “Can I have your Xbox?”

And it was perfect.

When Kyle had left the room with me still laughing and Cate knew it was her turn, she walked in quietly and carefully slid herself into the bed with me. We just lay there for a while not saying anything. She looked up at me a few times and then closed her eyes again, tears squeezing their way out. But she knew time was running out because she suddenly popped her head up and looked at me with the most horrified expression I’d ever seen. I was about to remind her to keep breathing when she interrupted my thoughts.

“Tell me you really think you’ll come back.”

“I really think I’ll come back.”

“Bullshit,” she said, almost smiling but still pale, still very careful with her motions.