“Isabel sends her brother a look that could boil him in oil if she had that particular paranormal talent. A thought hits me: maybe she has. It will be fun to find out.”

“She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt it, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day. When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the corn field in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too. “You’re a really good poet Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.”

“Isabel had hated me on sight, and not because I was fat. Just because she could.”

“She glanced down at the ground and the inert form of her brother. “What happened to Travis?”Mitch winced. “I hit him with the door after I tore it off. It was a total accident.”“Marry me,” she spouted before she could stop herself.”

“She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.”

“She was getting over it. She could feel it. Maybe she would never entirely be over him, but she thought she was beginning to see that a fairly normal future could be hers again.”