Free We Were Never Here by Jennifer Gilmore Page A

asking me. I hadn’t even thought to look or take my phone out and take a picture. I just didn’t think of it.”
    I swallow, hard. “It’s not your fault you didn’t look at the plates!” I say, with feeling. It isn’t, I think. I mean, what a horrible thing! “And anyway, you ran to help the girl. And also? That wouldn’t have kept the girl from getting hit,” I say. I feel the need to call her the girl, to keep her a stranger.
    â€œShe died,” he says. “The girl.”
    I don’t say anything.
    â€œLike, right in front of me. I had all this guilt. I still do. It’s hard not to think about it. My mother’s friend, who’s a doctor, suggested I do this.”
    â€œA psychiatrist,” I say.
    â€œYeah, so he said I should get Verlaine his Canine Good Citizen certificate and take him into hospitals. That was like six months ago.”
    â€œWow.” I say it again. The situation seems to demand the word.
    He’s silent.
    â€œWhat did he have to do to get the certificate?”
    â€œCrazy stuff,” Connor says. “I had to open umbrellas in his face. Scream at him as he heeled. He was epic. He’s a fantastic dog.”
    I pet Verlaine’s head. “I can see that.” I look outside the window and watch a crane dump more dirt on a pile of dirt.
    â€œHe thought it would make me feel better to do something positive.”
    I nod. “So positive,” I say. My heart, like, spills out. It’s so big for him, big for Connor. All that gratitude again.
    â€œIt’s like I get to give joy. Verlaine does anyway.”
    â€œYou do too,” I say because I forget to stop myself.
    Connor looks me in the eye, and I don’t care that my hair is greasy and flat and that my cheeks are swollen, or that I’m in these hideous powder-blue hospital robes. He’s so close. I can see his soft, light lashes, almost as long as whiskers. They flutter. What else aside from lashes flutters? I think only wings.
    I know I need to get back to my room, but I don’t say anything about it. If it were anywhere else, even in the sun, we would kiss. Right now. But in here is a place of sickness and sadness.
    I can’t even picture it. I mean, I won’t let myself. I’m trembling,but not from feeling sick or cold or in pain. That—this—is fear and it’s also hope. I try to push it down and make it stop, which makes me swallow a lot of air, which makes me cough. Good to know this dignity of the sick you hear about will never, ever apply to me. But really, take all that away and I am trembling from possibility and panic and wishing.
    â€œSo that’s the story. Okay?” Connor asks.
    Is it okay about the story or am I okay, I can’t tell which he’s asking, but I do know this: If I don’t move, maybe he won’t realize I’m here and maybe I won’t detonate the future.
    â€œYou’re still you, too,” I say.
    I can see Connor swallow, his little Adam’s apple bobbing along his neck. “Hard to tell,” he says.
    I nod.
    â€œSo!” Connor says.
    â€œAnyway,” I say.
    â€œAnyway.”
    We look outside and I try to steady myself, waiting for what comes next.

Day 11 Continues! We Were Never Here
    Connor and Verlaine and I walk slowly, as slowly as I have ever walked, back to my room. They wait outside while I run to the bathroom in my room, run being the operative term for stagger, lurch, stumble, lunge, and then when I’m sitting on the side of my bed, breathless, trying to untangle all my various wires, I say, “Okay, you guys can come in.”
    In they come, the very portraits of good health. It just kills me.
    â€œWhat do you miss most in here anyway?” Connor sits down in my mother’s chair.
    â€œWell, aside from, like, my life, you mean? Like my freedom?”
    Connor smiles, this time with no teeth, which, I gotta say, manages