Page 29 of Haunted

She looks at me over the rim of the cup. She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t say “are you sure?” She doesn’t say “what about Lance?” or “what about your job?” or even “what about me?”

“What do we need to get so you can be ready?” she asks. She reaches for a pen. “Let’s make a list.”

“I have the insurance money,” I say. “And the savings from the Bean Stop. I have the passport we never used.”

“Then what are you waiting for?”

I laugh. It comes out startled and wet, like I’ve surprised myself. “I don’t know anything about India.”

“That’s the point, honey.”

I take a deep breath and look out the window. On this side of the apartment, I can see the bus slowing to collect students waiting by the curb. I wonder, suddenly, where they’re going, and about what kind of lives they have when they leave this place. The sketches in my portfolio are empty. All those rooms with nobody in them. All those careful, technically perfect drawings of a world I’ve hollowed out.

I remember Lance’s face when he kissed me. It would be so easy to call him, to say yes, to let him build the life he’s already planned for both of us. San Diego on his leave. Fairhaven when he’s home. The café and the courtyard and the string lights. It would be a good life.

But it would be his life, with me in it, and I want my own.

I turn back to Aunt Shelley. “So, how hard is it to get a visa to go to India?”

“Why don’t we find out?” she asks, pulling open her laptop and spinning it to me.

I pull up the flights. Delhi. Mumbai. Jaipur. The names alone feel like doors opening. Aunt Shelley reads over my shoulder and points at Jaipur. “Rajasthan,” she says. “I had a colleague who did fieldwork there. She said it was like stepping into a painting.”

“Rajasthan,” I repeat. I click the link. A one-way ticket is cheaper than I expected.

I close my laptop and get my passport from the drawer. BISHOP, PARKER JONATHAN. I run my thumb over the name. In the photo I’m barely eighteen, taken that spring for a trip we didn’t take, my face still thin from the months after the fire. I barely recognize him.

“Well?” Aunt Shelley asks.

“I’d need a visa. I can get one from the consulate in about three to five business days. That’s long enough to work out my notice at the Bean Stop.”

Aunt Shelley cocks her head and looks at me closely. “You know I’m going to ask this. I know you say you’re okay, and I have to trust you when you say you are, but if things get…black again, you’ll call me, right?”

“I will. I want to be part of things. I don’t want to be living in a cloud, isolated and empty forever. I want to…I want to eat food that has a story to it and dance in the rain and…colors. I want colors. I want to be surrounded by them. I want to be bombarded by them.”

“That is literally what Holi is about.”

“Yes! That’s the thing where they throw the things at you, right? I want to feel alive. And I want to try out being this guy,” I say, staring at my face in the passport. “Jonathan Bishop. Somebody who’s not one quick browser search away from Lance and the fire.”

Aunt Shelley looks at the passport, and then at me. “Jonny for short,” she says.

“Isn’t that running from being Parker Bishop?”

“No,” she says. “It’s giving you an honest chance to experience the life you should have had, regardless of what name you went by. Just remember that inside, you are Parker Bishop, and he’s special. Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.”

“You’ll need to tell Lance,” she says.

“I know.” Suddenly I feel very lonely and really scared. I don’t feel adventurous. I feel young and stupid. “I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

She squeezes my shoulder, picks up her chai, and takes a sip. “You can do this, Parker. And if you don’t like it, you can come home.”

My hands itch for a pencil, and for the first time in months, I want to draw a person.

I set the passport on the table next to the laptop. In the morning, I’ll book the ticket. I’ll call Greg at the Bean Stop and give my notice properly. I’ll sit down with Lance and tell him the truth: that he was the best thing in the worst time of my life. And then I’ll arrive in a new place as Jonny Bishop. Someone nobody knows yet. Someone I haven’t met either.

Chapter eleven

Lance