Free Everyone We've Been by Sarah Everett

music-room window, I see that he’s gone. There’s no one there.
    I come to a stop a little ways from the window so no one from orchestra can see me, and try to catch my breath. I look for footprints or a dropped item or some sign that he was here, but there’s nothing.
    And then I hear it.
    A scrambled noise not far away, like feet crunching through snow.
    I know it’s him immediately. It has to be.
    “Hey!” I call. “Hey, wait!” I take off running again, sprinting on a shoveled walkway in the direction of the noise. I round the corner of the building too fast to stop myself from crashing into someone. He catches my elbows to stop me from toppling over.
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he exclaims.
    His voice is thick, and his face is wide, weathered by too many hours in the sun. He’s also in his forties.
    “Where are you going in such a hurry?”
    I blink several times, giving the image in front of me a chance to change, but it’s still Bert, our school groundskeeper. There’s no sign of the boy.
    “And you’re not wearing a coat. Do you want to catch your death?”
    I give a ferocious shake of my head, too out of breath and too disappointed to form words.
I said almost exactly that to Bus Boy days ago.
    “You okay?” he asks, letting me go, and I nod. He continues to give me an odd look, so I force myself to speak.
    “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
    He looks like he doesn’t quite believe me, but he seems to let it go. “All right. Go back to class.” He starts to walk toward the snow-covered football field.
    I turn and head back in the direction I just came from, stopping at the music-room window again to see if there’s anything I missed.
    I
saw
him.
    I freaking
saw
him.
    With the adrenaline gone now, the cold sweeps over my skin and I hug myself to keep warm. My teeth are chattering, and I remember I saw his chattering, and I can’t be crazy. I can’t.
    I slide down against the wall and sit on a snowy patch of ground, going over everything in my mind.
    Every now and then, I have this one dream. I’m standing in the middle of a crowd—the food court in the mall or the park during a summer festival, sometimes a subway platform I’ve never actually been to—and suddenly all these things start to disappear. Cars, the grass, tables. People. It’s when the sound goes with them—the swirling wind or scores of laughing voices or the marching band that plays at summer festivals—that I start to panic. Force myself awake.
    I’m most afraid of the silence.
    Of the space that is left by all the lives and people and things I can’t hold on to. I don’t know what makes them disappear, or where they disappear to. Only that the feeling terrifies me.
    I skip back to the accident again, rewind to when he got on the bus, after
I
got on the bus. Fast-forward to the hospital and the movie theater and this window, five minutes ago. I’ve been doing it a lot the last few days, but I go over every detail I can think of again.
    Just one more time. Just so I can figure out what I’m missing.
    The weird thing is, he got on the bus before the accident, before I hit my head. Shouldn’t it have been after, if he’s the result of some sort of concussion? There has to be a way this makes sense.
    But I can’t come up with anything, and by the time a couple of minutes have passed, I know I really am going to catch my death if I don’t go back in now.
    I haven’t told my parents what I saw, and I’ve stopped telling Katy the truth. Because I don’t want them to think I am crazy. Because I don’t want whatever this is—this tangled, itching cloak over my mind—to cost me the things I want most. But I have to understand what’s happening.
    I need to
stop
whatever’s happening.
    My jeans are damp from the snow when I stand.
    I can’t handle this on my own.
    There has to be someone I can go to without involving my parents.
    The vaguest of plans forming in my mind, I hurry back into the building. My wet