As I sat on the cold metal in the darkness, part of me wondered if I imagined the whole thing. I
knew I didn’t. I could still see those stitches in the sky, no matter how dark it was.
Still, I didn’t move.
If I left, it would be real.
If I left, she would be gone.
I don’t know how long I sat there trying to make sense of everything, but the sun came up, and I
was still sitting in the same spot. No matter how many times I tried to work it out, I kept getting
stuck.
I had this old Bible story in my head, playing over and over, like a bad song from the radio. I’m
probably getting it wrong, but I remember it like this: There was this city of people who were so
righteous, they got picked right up off the earth and taken to Heaven. Just like that.
They didn’t even die.
They got to skip dying, the way you pass Go and head directly to Jail if you pull the wrong
card in Monopoly.
Translated—that’s the name for what happened to them. I remember because Link was in my
Sunday school class, and he said teleported, then transported, and finally transportated.
We were supposed to act real jealous about it, like those people were so lucky to get plucked
up and taken into the Lap o’ the Lord.
Like it was a place or something.
I remember coming home and asking my mom about it, because that’s how creeped out I was.
I don’t remember what she said, but I decided right then and there that the goal wasn’t to be good.
It was to be just good enough.
I didn’t want to risk getting translated, or even teleported.
I wasn’t looking to go live in the Lap o’ the Lord. I was more excited about Little League.
But it seemed like that’s what happened to Amma. She was lapped right up, transported,
transportated—all of it.
Did the universe, or the Lord and his lap, or the Greats expect me to feel happy about it? I had
just been through hell to get back to the regular world of Gatlin—back to Amma, and Lena, and
Link, and Marian.
How long did we have together?
Was I supposed to be okay with that?
One minute she was there, and then it was over. Now the sky was the sky again, flat and blue
and calm, as if it really was just painted plaster, like my bedroom ceiling. Even if someone I loved
was trapped somewhere behind it.
That’s how I felt now. Trapped on the wrong side of the sky.
Alone on the top of the Summerville water tower, looking out over the world I had known my
entire life, a world of dirt roads and paved routes, of gas stations and grocery stores and strip malls.
And everything was the same, and nothing was the same.
I wasn’t the same.
I guess that’s the thing about a hero’s journey. You might not start out a hero, and you might
not even come back that way. But you change, which is the same as everything changing. The
journey changes you, whether or not you know it, and whether or not you want it to. I had
changed.
I had come back from the dead, and Amma was gone, even if she was one of the Greats now.
You couldn’t get more changed than that.
I heard a clanging on the ladder beneath me, and I knew who it was before I felt her curling around
my heart. The warmth exploded across me, across the water tower, across Summerville. The sky
was striped with gold and red, as if the sunrise was reversing itself, lighting up the sky all over
again.There was only one person who could do that to a sky or my heart.
Ethan, is that you?
I smiled even as my eyes turned wet and blurry.
It’s me, L. I’m right here. Everything’s going to be okay now.
I reached my hand down and wrapped it around hers, pulling her up onto the platform at the
top of the water tower.
She slid into my arms, falling into sobs that beat against my chest. I don’t know which one of
us was crying harder. I’m not even sure we remembered to kiss. What we had went so much
deeper than a kiss.
When we were together, she turned me completely inside out.
It didn’t matter if we were dead or alive. We could never be kept apart. There were some
things more powerful than worlds or universes. She was my world, as much as I was hers. What
we had, we knew.
The poems are all wrong. It’s a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper.
And sometimes gold can stay.
Anybody who’s ever been in love can tell you that.
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