Earl is sitting beside me. His cheap cologne hovers in the air around me like teargas. Inside, he is furious. I can feel it like red-hot needles on my skin. Outside, he’s all smiles. A smile on his face is a scary thing. He flirts with the nurse. She laughs and ducks her head. He pats my arm with his sandpaper hands and calls me Alexander. Then he gives my arm a tight squeeze as if I don’t know what the fuck “Alexander” means.

Eyes down. Mouth shut.

My first thought is for my sister, Kim. She’s not my real sister but definitely the next best thing. She’s all I have, and Earl knows it.

“You took quite a spill,” the nurse says.

I don’t say anything. I just nod.

“I’m Gillian.” She checks my bandages. “Goodness.” She pulls back in surprise. “Almost healed. How on earth is that—?” She stops and fixes her expression. “That’s amazing. I bet you’ll be able to go home soon.”

I nod again and wince at the longing she feels for me. She wants a kid. A boy just like me. Sweet. Polite. Respectful. She has no idea what I am. How filthy I am. How bad. I feel sorry for her.

“You ready to go home, sport?” Earl asks me.

He ruffles my hair. My fucking hair like I’m a two-year-old. Heat wells inside me. Burns my skin. I bite down and nod like the good little bitch I am. His words. Little bitch. I just happen to agree with them.

Gillian laughs. Her eyes sparkle when she looks at me. I turn away. She needs to save that for someone a little more deserving.

“It could be a few more days, unfortunately,” she says. “We still don’t know what’s causing those seizures. But I bet you’ll be out of here in no time.”

Earl’s anger peaks to a new high.

“You have some interesting markings on you,” she says. She wants to look. To see them again. To examine them more closely.

I don’t encourage her. Earl doesn’t like it when people notice them. My birthmarks. The curves and lines that cover much of my shoulders and back. They were really light when I was a kid. Barely noticeable. They’re getting darker, though, and the shapes have started showing up in my dreams. Like they mean something. Like they lead somewhere. Probably into darkness.

Earl nods. “Been there since he was born,” he says, like he would know.

“Well, I’ll let the doctor know he’s awake.” Her smile is innocent like sunlight on a flower.

A man comes in, a custodian, as she writes on the chart. He glances at her, grabs the trash, wipes down the counters in the bathroom, and glances again. I look at him hard. Then I look back at Gillian. Then back at him.

His name is Donald. He has oily brown hair and thick glasses, and he is going to stab her to death in a few weeks. He wants her to go out with him. She’s nice. Nobody is nice to him. But when she tells him she only wants to be friends, he’s furious. Calls her a tease. Calls her a slut. He’s waited so long for her. Hoped for so long. If he can’t have her, no one will.

I close my eyes. Try unsuccessfully to block out the scene that unfolds inside my head. A scene I can envision only because he is going to hell as a result of it, and I can see the thing that brands people for hell. That first horrible act they commit that sets their fate. I know the names of everyone going to hell, and I know if a person is going there the minute we meet, whether the person has committed the sin yet or not.

Hell is not a good place. I’ve seen that in my dreams, too. In my nightmares. Most of them are about Earl. About his hands and his nails and his teeth. But sometimes I dream about hell. About the fire and the agony and the soldiers. The devil’s army. I see them from on high as they march. As they battle. I command them as though I’ve done it for centuries, and that just can’t be good. There’s only one way I can see such things. I’m bad. I’m evil, because only an evil person would know things about hell.

I want to tell Gillian about Donald, but I can’t. Not with Earl right there. She wouldn’t believe me anyway.

Earl’s anger rises when the nurse tells him it will be a few more days, and I know I’m in even more trouble. But that’s okay. I can still feel the light. It permeates the crust. The outer shell. Sinks deep inside me. He can’t take that away. I want to dream about her some more, but the minute the nurse leaves, Earl rips out the IV, throws my clothes at me, and tells me to get dressed. Quietly. Or I know what will happen.

Damn straight, I do.

3

I don’t see the light for a while after that. I’m in the basement for days and everything is blurry. Kim stands guard. I can hear her moving around behind the door.

My throat hurts because Earl choked me. He doesn’t normally do that. Goes to show how pissed he was. Not even at me. He’s mad because the girl he was seeing found me in the basement. That’s how I ended up in the hospital in the first place. Earl had gone out for beer and she went to the basement, looking for a washer to do his laundry. She was going to surprise him. Kim must have been in the shower. She would’ve explained that I was okay. But since I was unconscious, she thought I fell, so she called 911 before Earl got home. He had to go along with it, I guess, but he got angrier than I’ve ever seen him.

Sometimes I wonder why he has girlfriends. He doesn’t like them. He pretends to. Tells them what they want to hear. They never last long, though. He gets tired of them pretty quick. This last one made a huge mistake. I’ll never see her again, and I liked her. She didn’t smoke and she smelled like peppermint and made me spaghetti.

I lie back against the concrete and think of Dutch. Of the girl made of light. Of the people in her life who didn’t work out quite as one would expect.

When she is about a year old, her dad brings home a girlfriend. I don’t like her. She is too much like Earl. She’s fond of the dad well enough, and Dutch’s sister, but there is something strange about the way she looks at Dutch. She oohs and ahhs when the dad is around, but when she is alone with Dutch, something isn’t right. I feel contempt come off her. Jealousy. Why would a lady be jealous of a baby?

I don’t understand people. They smile when they are mad. They hug people they hate. They steal from people they genuinely love. And they are jealous of babies.

Dutch’s eyes sparkle and her light is brighter than ever. A dead lady is pretending to eat her toes and Dutch laughs and laughs. Her dad laughs, too, but it makes the lady angry. That’s when I know for sure what the woman is. A problem.

4

I’ve died a hundred deaths, but I’m alive. Because of her. Because of her light. Because of her smile. Every time I die, I float toward her, and I am saved. I am healed. Her light soaks into me. Oozes inside me. Fixes all the broken parts, accomplishing something all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never have done.

Sometimes I’m grateful. Sometimes I’m not, because I know it will happen again and again, and I figure there comes a time when it needs to end. When I just need to die and stay dead. But she saves me whether I want to be saved or not.

And now she’s doing it again. I am at her house, drifting toward her light. She brushes past me in the hall and turns around real fast, like I’ve startled her. She’s wearing a summer dress and sandals, and her hair has been pulled up into a ponytail.

I stay back. I always cover myself in the hooded cloak and try to stay back, but she stands there with her gold eyes wide and her pretty mouth open. She’s nine going on thirty. Full of sass and spark and secrets. She shimmers with life. She is the exact opposite of me and I’ve grown to understand the “opposites attract” thing.