Page 53 of Ex Somnis

Dead people don’t learn new nicknames or reinvent their smiles.

This place made a copy of them.

And it got them all wrong.

I grab Tessa’s arm and pull her a few steps away.

“Lenny, what is going on with you today?” She frowns down at me.

“We’re in 5D, Tessa,” I whisper-shout at her. “We’re in elsewhere.”

“I know, silly.”

“We have to…” Wait. “What?”

“We made it,” she says softly, like she’s reminding me of something obvious.

As if I’m the one being difficult.

“We’re here.” She takes my hand and covers it with both of hers. “We have everything we ever wanted.”

“But it is fake.” I look at the bench, at the man wearing my father’s face who just called me honey. “My parents aren’t real. The restaurant isn’t…”

“I’m real.” Her hands tighten on mine. “You’re real.” She tilts her head slightly toward Lucien, standing a few feet back. “He’s real.”

“Tessa.”

“Everything you wanted is here. The things you couldn’t have in waking life, you can have here. That’s the point.”

For one horrible second, I understand.

Because my mother is laughing.

Because my father is breathing.

Because nobody leaves.

I could stay here.

I could sit on that bench and listen to my dad call me “Lenny-honey” forever. I could open our restaurant every evening, complain about customers, burn garlic bread, and listen to my mother hum while she folds napkins with my best friend.

No hospitals.

No funerals.

No watching people disappear, one piece at a time, while you stand there, useless and smiling, because they need you to be brave about it.

My chest hurts so badly I almost fold in half with it.

But it still isn’t real.

I look at Tessa, then at the freckles across her nose. The tiny scar near her eyebrow from when we were twenty and she tried to jump a fence after two wine coolers and immediately ate shit into somebody’s hydrangeas.

The girl who used to scream-sing in my car with the windows down.

The girl whose body is lying in a bed connected to a machine.

“I came here to get you out. Not to lose you here too.”