Free Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley Page A

with me, standing up, watching.
    “I’ll find you,” Jason says, and I hear him. I hear him. I trust him.
    The lights flicker. I hear a giant impact up in the sky, and there’s an explosion, fire, the smell of smoke and ozone. Something snags me and pulls hard, out the ambulance doors, outside, and my dad is swearing, and Jason’s still telling the girl on the gurney he’s not letting her go, and Eli’s screaming, and then
    the
    s
    i
    r
    e
    n
    s
    S T O P.
    And after that? There’s nothing.

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    3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510 582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798 214808651328230. One day, two days, three days, four days, fivedays later.
    This is what I want to do: I want to pick up my phone and call Aza. I want to hear her voice.
    “Why are you calling me?” she’ll say. “I hate the phone. Text or show up. How long is this gonna take? Are you here yet? Get here.”
    But this is what Aza’s new number is like: 66470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491. Onward infinitely, no answer. Dial, dial, dial.
    I’m back to old habits. Recite, recite, recite. Not so that anyone can hear.
    This is an old thing, and supposedly conquered.
    Not conquered, turns out.
    41273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609433057270365759591953092186117381932611793105118548 0744623799627495.
    I know more pi than that. She knows even more than I do. But at some point in the memorization of pi I’m definitely going to pass the point she stopped at. It’ll be the same as driving past her on a road, not seeing her hitchhiking. Which is about as crap as anything I can think of, in a universe of, at this point, unimaginable crap.
    I’m not sleeping. I’m not fine. There are things I’m never going to want to talk about.
    Things like what happened in that ambulance. Things like: I saw that medic cut Aza open.
    Things like: We called for a medevac. The medic from our ambulance jumped out to try to wave the copter down. I heard the helicopter coming, toward the storm cloud above the ambulance. Then there was an impact. The clouds caught on fire. Four people died that day, the pilot and the medic on the copter, and also one of the medics with us, who was out trying to signal for the helicopter when it exploded. I only have grief enough for one. I am barely holding it together.
    Things like—I can’t even—
    We waited on the highway for an hour, and then the ice got covered enough with snow that we could keep going, Aza’s dad driving. By then it was way too late.
    I rode in the back with her.
    All I want to do since then is press my head against a wall and feel it on my forehead.
    If I were in the living room right now, with my moms, they’d sit me down and have a sympathetic and nervous discussion with me about how she’s “gone.” Turns out, I hate that word. Also “we lost her.”
    In the last few days, I’ve lost lots of things, just to check and see how losing feels. For example, I keep losing it .
    I hit my head into the wall and bruise my forehead. I smash a window, with my fist wrapped in a T-shirt. Some kind of movie plan for fixing pain. Did not help.
    People keep saying infuriating things about fate and chance and bad luck and how she had anamazing life despite it being only fifteen years, eleven months, and twenty-five days long. I don’t feel like this is amazing. I feel very, very unamazed.
    I stay up at night staring at screens.
    Since Aza, I kept looking for some analogy, something to explain this, some version of lost that made sense, but nothing was right. Then on a middle-of-the-night internet wander, I found something from 475 BC, a Greek cosmologist