Free Die for Me by Amy Plum

festivities, were taken to nearby hospitals. I took notes from the first few pages, and then flipped back to the two-page spread of obituaries and their accompanying black-and-white photos. And there he was.
    Halfway down the first page. It was Vincent. He had longer hair, but he looked exactly like he had a month ago. My body turned to ice as I read the text.
    Firefighter Jacques Dupont, nineteen years old, born in La Baule, Pays de la Loire, was killed in duty last night in a building fire believed to have been sparked by a Molotov cocktail thrown by student rioters. The residential building at 18 rue Champollion was in flames when Dupont and his colleague, Thierry Simon (obit., section S), rushed into the building and began pulling out its inhabitants, who had taken cover from the fighting at the adjacent Sorbonne. Trapped under burning timbers, Dupont expired before he could be evacuated to the hospital, and his body was received by the morgue. Twelve citizens, including four children, owe their lives to these local heroes.
    It can’t be him, I thought. Unless he is the spitting image of his dad, who happened to sire a son before he died at  . . . (I glanced back at the obituary) nineteen. Which isn’t impossible  . . .
    As my reasoning foundered, I forwarded to the next page and scanned the S s for “Simon.” There he was: Thierry Simon. The muscle-bound guy who had turned Georgia and me away from the fight at the river. Thierry had a voluminous Afro in the photo but wore the same confident grin that he had flashed me with that day across the café terrace. It was definitely the same guy. But more than forty years ago.
    I closed my eyes in disbelief, and then opened them again to read the paragraph under Thierry’s head shot. It read the same as Jacques’s, except it gave his age as twenty-two and place of birth as Paris.
    â€œI don’t get it,” I whispered, as I numbly pressed a button on the machine to print both pages. After returning the microfilm spools to the front desk, I left the library in a daze and hesitated before stepping on the escalator going to the next floor. I would sit in the museum until I figured out what to do next.
    My thoughts were being yanked around in ten different directions as I drifted through the turnstile and into an enormous high-ceilinged gallery with benches positioned in the middle of the room. Sitting down, I put my head in my hands as I tried to clear my mind.
    Finally I looked up. I was in the room dedicated to the art of Fernand Léger, one of my favorite early- to mid-twentieth-century French painters. I studied the two-dimensional surfaces filled with bright primary colors and geometric shapes and felt a sense of normalcy return. I glanced over to the corner where my favorite Léger painting hung: one with robotic-looking World War I soldiers sitting around a table, smoking pipes and playing cards.
    A young man stood in front of it, his back to me as he leaned in closer to inspect something in the composition. He was of medium height with short-cropped brown hair and messy clothes. Where have I seen him before? I thought, wondering if it was someone from school.
    And then he turned, and my mouth dropped open in disbelief. The man standing across the gallery from me was Jules.

Chapter Ten
    MY BODY NO LONGER FELT CONNECTED TO MY mind. I stood and walked toward the phantom. Either I’m having a mental breakdown that started in the library, I thought, or the guy standing in front of me is a ghost . Both explanations seemed more probable than the alternative: that Jules had actually survived a head-on collision with a subway train, not only in one piece but apparently uninjured.
    When I was a few feet away, he saw me coming, and for a split second, he hesitated. Then he turned to me with a completely blank look on his face.
    â€œJules!” I said urgently.
    â€œHello,” he said calmly. “Do I know