Chapter One

It's not so bad being dead. People generally tend to ignore you. Like today in Rocker Hall, down in the depths of Our Lady of Perpetual Help High School. There I was, flat on my back just off center court, and the paramedics and the student nurses were stepping over me like I was a muddy puddle. Everyone except Angela Martinez, who knelt suddenly at my side in her shiny white sneakers, setting down a white box with a red cross. After checking the index card in my shirt pocket, she rested her hand on my chest and held it there, waiting. For a heartbeat or two I thought I might have a chance, and the hope of salvation through mouth to mouth brought my eyes up to her thin lips, but there was no smile. Looking straight into my eyes, she said what I've known for a long time. "This one's a goner."

Angela wrote something across a piece of cardboard, and behind her the big light that hangs over center court, above even the balcony bleachers, cast a halo around her dark hair. Last month one of the million smaller lights up there came crashing off a rusty girder. Nobody was hurt, but it got the old talk going about tearing the school down. They have all those lights up there because Rocker's a basement gym, completely below street level — no windows and no sunlight. This also explains the faded yellow signs scattered along the walls proclaiming it a CERTIFIED CLASS B BOMB SHELTER. Nowadays, I doubt it could handle a rowdy pep rally. The whole school is falling apart. To raise money for repairs, they force the students to participate in fund-raisers with snappy names like "Peanut Brittle to Pave the Parking Lot!" and "Wind Chimes for New Windows!" But really, everybody knows this place is a lost cause.

Angela finished and gently set the cardboard on my chest, then rushed off to diagnose another "victim." I lifted my head. Even upside down, the big, black Magic Marker letters she had written were clear. D-e-a-d. No underline, not all in capitals, not even a lousy exclamation point.

Maybe the only thing saving Rocker from caving in on itself is the good grace of its very own guardian angel. Hung high on the wall above the baskets, higher than all the frayed sports banners with things like 1953 FOOTBALL, 2ND PLACE, so high He almost touches the ceiling, is the Wrong-Hearted Jesus. He watches everything from up there, the basketball games and the graduations and the little fake masses. The life-size statue has gold streaks beaming out of His head, and His heart is on the outside, showing how wounded He is and everything.

But the problem is, His heart's on the wrong side. I heard some ritzy church in Philly paid for it, but when they saw it wasn't perfect, they didn't want it hanging in their church, so Father Halderman told them to ship it here. We have an open-door policy concerning misfits.

There was some movement close to my body. Tony Dickert and Adam Marshall, the only other ninth-grade boys who got drafted into coming to school on a Saturday, were being checked out beneath the basketball net. Tony went to St. Joe's Elementary like me, and his mom always used to volunteer to come along on field trips. Sometimes on Sundays, if I go to mass alone, I see the Dickert family at church. Mr. and Mrs. Dickert hold hands when they pray.

Tony flashed his cardboard sign to Adam, boasting SEVERE HEAD TRAUMA. Two paramedics rolled him onto a stretcher and raced him toward the girls' locker room — today's emergency room. Laughing to Adam, Tony shot a thumbs-up and yelled, "To boldly go where no freshman has gone before!"

"Dickert. Shut up. You're in shock." This came as the stretcher passed Mr. Strubek, Head Football Coach and Health Instructor Supreme at Our Lady. He played football back before they thought up face masks. He held his clipboard, the one he always seems to have, and was pointing out something to a guy in a long white lab coat, the doctor who helped plan this Authentic Disaster Simulation. I guess the two of them were making sure the catastrophe was running smoothly.

Last week, Mr. Strubek cornered me by the first-floor water fountains and told me if I wanted to pass my health class I would need some extra credit. I got a thirty-five on my test of human sexuality. Out of a hundred. He also reminded me of my well-below-average performance during the school's participation in President Carter's Youth Fitness Achievement Test.

So this morning, when I should've gotten off the bus at Hamilton and walked down to Jerry's International Newsstand like I do every Saturday, I stayed on till Sixth, where the bus comes closest to school. Jerry puts the new comics out on Saturdays and by Monday it's hard to find a clean copy. But today, while all the clean copies were being ruined, I walked in the freezing November rain to school and Mr. Strubek poked an index card in my shirt pocket and told me to lie down on the court until someone came to see just how bad my "condition" really was.

About half the victims had been seen to, and some were sitting behind me on the bottom row of bleachers. Jen Riley and Lisa Carlson, both Mild Shock, were just a few feet from me, twittering away about nothing at all. I heard every word because they weren't whispering. Nobody whispers around me, even when I don't have a dead sign on my chest. Moving through the hallways between classes, I keep my head down. The tiles pass beneath my feet and I notice which ones have cracked corners and which ones have petrified gum. I don't look at anybody and don't talk to anybody and I'm sure they all figure I'm some kind of zombie, which may not be altogether wrong.

But if people don't notice you, they can't give you a hard time. And more important, they can't blame you for anything.

Another one of the nice things about being a zombie is that people don't watch what they say around you. So I hear more than people think I hear. That's how I know things about this school. Like what Jen and Lisa were talking about. Jen's mom and dad took her car shopping this week because she just turned sixteen, and she fell in love with a used VW Bug. Her brother's going to help fix it up. I pictured her whole family standing in some sunny driveway, with buckets full of sudsy water, washing the car together. Then I imagined the four of them hunched inside, smiling as Jen eased the VW out into traffic. I'm turning sixteen in two weeks, but nobody in my family has said one word about it.

While I was leaning my head back to eavesdrop on Jen and Lisa, I noticed some guy in wrestling sneakers walking among the dead. He looked familiar, but I couldn't place him because he was still at the far end of the court and for some reason he had a black wool cap on his head. Then I caught a dirty look from Mr. Strubek. I didn't want to get yelled at for not playing my part, so I dropped my head and closed my eyes quick and went back to being dead, wondering about my birthday.

I lay perfectly still and tried to slow my breathing, concentrating on moving my chest just enough to get air. I relaxed the muscles in my face and tried to shut out all the sounds of the gym. After a while I felt peaceful, and I started to slip away, thinking about the day I'll turn sixteen and what a big deal it's supposed to be and how probably nobody will even notice. You'd be surprised the things that occur to you, on the twilight of sleep, when you're just about dead. I suddenly imagined I was on my back in a coffin, only for some reason there wasn't any top, so as they lowered me down I could read part of the headstone: HERE LIES LITTLE KEEGAN. I couldn't quite see the date. As I sunk deeper into the grave, I looked up at the people along the edge. Big Keegan, Dad, was there, and Mom was next to him. In one hand I saw her fingers working the worn beads of her rosary, and her lips twitched with prayer. She had her arms crossed like she was hugging herself, or was strapped in a straitjacket.

Dad wasn't even looking at her. Patrick and Andrew and Sean stood by, all with the same blank look on their faces as Dad. And as my coffin disappeared into the darkness I heard him speak. "Well," my father said, "that took longer than we thought."

Then dirt was coming in on me, one shovelful at a time, dropping down from the blue sky a hundred miles up. Little by little I was buried, like when you get covered in sand at the beach, until I couldn't move my arms and I couldn't move my legs and only my face was left exposed. I knew I should be trying to move, trying to break free. And I felt just a second of panic and I think I was about to come to, and that's when I heard the voice. It sounded so familiar at first that I couldn't place it. But Michael's voice was crystal clear, as if he were whispering in my ear when he said, "Don't fight it."

For some reason his voice calmed me, and once I realized who it was it made perfect sense because he was right there next to me, one grave over. Our coffins were no farther apart in the Consolata Garden Cemetery than our incubators had been at Queen of Heaven Hospital sixteen years ago. Twins born six weeks premature. Too small to live. Bad hearts. Even though I came out first, he was bigger, and they thought he'd be the one who might live. But then he turned for the worse and nobody knew why. I can imagine Father O'Donnell with his hand cupped on Mom's shoulder. Best pray that God takes them quickly. So in charged the priests, and we were baptized and confirmed and we both received Anointing of the Sick. Only Michael got Last Rites, but you can bet they kept the page marked for me.

After that, I was alone under the glare of the incubator. Through my eyelids I could sense the shine from the light above me, could hear the light's steady buzz. I could feel the strange warmth, warmth they thought was saving me. I realized I wasn't breathing and searched in the void for my heartbeat. Its pumping rhythm slowed like the wheels of a train coming to some unstoppable end. The currents of my blood waned and then froze and there was no movement in my body. I waited for the rising I felt was just ahead, the rising that would set me free and the pure white light that would transform me, and I was almost there; I was so close, and then I heard the words, "Hey, Lazarus."

My eyes popped open and I looked straight up into the big gym light that hangs over center court. I felt the sweat on my cheeks. My heart was beating. The light was bitter and I turned my head and saw the black-capped wrestler standing over my body, staring down at me with his hands on his hips. Up close like that I recognized him as Nicky Carpelli, a sophomore who sits behind me in Sister Teresita's freshman religion class. He flunked it last year.

I sat up and looked around feeling kind of dizzy. The disaster drill was over. The wounded were up and staggering off the court. Nobody was coming for the dead.

Nicky said, "You Keegan Flannery?"

I got to my feet. I couldn't tell if he was pretending not to know me or really didn't.

"Morgan wants to see you. In his office. Pronto."

Morgan's the wrestling coach. He teaches sophomore social studies, but I hear he can't spell medieval. Nicky went left toward the wrestling room and I went right toward the lockers.

I dumped my Dead sign in the garbage can by the pay phone. Coming up the stairs were Mr. Strubek and the doctor. Both were staring at the clipboard and smiling so I guess the disaster was a big success. I wanted to know if I did okay being dead, but Mr. Strubek brushed past me like I was invisible. You'd think he would at least tell me if I might pass health now, or if he was going to send the file off to Washington and tell the president I was the only kid in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who couldn't do ten pull-ups.

I was real sick for a long time after I was born, so I never grew quite right. By the time Mom finally let me go to school, I was two years older than everybody else. So it's not bad enough I'm the smallest freshman, I'm also the oldest. Not that I broadcast this embarrassment. If things were right, I'd be a junior like Jen Riley. Then again, if things were right, a lot would be different.

When I was a kid, I didn't mind so much that I was small. I didn't care that year in and year out I got all the lousy parts in the Christmas pageant, always a shepherd or an innkeeper with no room. I couldn't picture myself as a wise man or an angel. Angels aren't short and skinny. And to tell the truth, I don't care now. The fact is that sometimes I wish people would stop pretending that I'm normal. Two months back, on my first day of high school, everybody acted like I was Flannery Boy-Genius Number Four. Father Halderman patted my head and Sister Regina tried to pinch my cheeks. Only senile Sister Cecilia Agnes, who's misfiled half the library and who always ignores fire drills, let anything slip. When I was introduced to her she shook my hand and looked me square in the eye. "Of course," she said. "The sickly one."

Mr. Strubek disappeared and I walked down into the locker room, shuffling toward the coaches' office. The whole locker room is beneath the home-team bleachers, so the ceiling angles down and you can see the metal underbelly of the steps. The top of the door to the coaches' office is cut at a forty-five-degree angle, which is about the only thing I've figured out in geometry class. Coach Morgan was standing in the crooked doorway talking to our janitor Mr. Dan, who's so thin he seems like a scarecrow.

As I came close, I heard Mr. Dan say, "When a boiler's as beat up and old as that baby, you may as well write Ôgrenade' on the side. It's just a matter of time."

The boiler broke down again yesterday and we had to wear our coats during classes. They'll probably have us selling Christmas candy next month as part of a "Band-Aids for the Boiler" campaign.

Morgan saw me over Mr. Dan's shoulder and said something that made him look back at me and slide away on those long legs. Then Morgan reached his hand out to shake mine. No adult shakes your hand unless he wants something. He crunched my knuckles and his smile widened. Across his T-shirt, in two rows, was printed, A LITTLE PAIN NEVER HURT ANYBODY.

Morgan's not too tall, but he's thick. He graduated from Our Lady fifteen years ago, but came back after Vietnam. They say this place has a gravity to it.

He led me into the office, ducking beneath an angled girder. He sat at a wooden desk scarred with forty-odd years of graffiti history. i love my job was knifed in deep in one corner. It looked fresh. I grabbed an aluminum chair and folded it out across from him. Right away I knew one leg was short because the chair tottered back and forth, so I had to sit real still.

"You know Bill Miscio?" Morgan asked.

I know Miscio from biology and geometry. He's small like I am, but he's really fast — the kind of guy that gets picked early in gym.

"He called twenty minutes ago. Sick as a dog. Can't make our match today."

I thought about Bill and wondered if he was at home on the couch watching TV like I did back in first and second grade on those days Mom kept me home because of a fever or sore throat. She'd cut up a watermelon into little squares and pick the seeds out, then bring the juicy cubes to me in a big bowl, and we'd watch cartoons and soap operas. Sometimes I wouldn't even feel all that sick, but she'd still keep me home. That's how lonely she could get.

Morgan picked a manual off the desk and started flipping through it. The cover was a cartoon of some kid running into the end zone, a football in one hand and a textbook in the other. He asked me, "What do you know about AA sports regulations?"

I wasn't sure where all this was going, and I guess Morgan saw that in my face, because he stood up and closed the door.

"Look," he said, "Halderman — Father Halderman — has cut my wrestling budget to the bone. He says there's no interest. Talks about starting a golf team. Golf. Now that's a manly sport."

A vein bulged on his neck.

"It's bad enough I have to forfeit my 185-pounder every week. But Bugalski's a pound and a half over and he's not gonna make it. Now Miscio's out. If I can't field ten wrestlers, we have to forfeit today's match. And if that happens, we'll have one foot in the grave."

He planted himself on a corner of the desk and leaned toward me. "Ever wrestle?"

I told him I hadn't.

"That's okay. We can teach you. And look, Miscio said you're a nice kid so I'll be straight with you. I don't need you to win. I just want a warm body who can make ninety-eight to weigh in. I don't care what happens after that."

Keegan Flannery: Warm Body. Finally a position I was perfectly suited for. Here was someone who wanted nothing more from me than to be a loser.

Morgan stood up. "Let's check your weight."

Over in the corner was a beat-up scale. He set it at ninety-eight and told me to slip out of my shoes. When I stepped on, the metal pointer arm didn't move. The coach tapped the countermeasure back, reading the numbers off. "Eighty-nine . . . eighty-seven . . . eighty-five . . ."

Finally the end of the metal arm rose gently and hovered in the air. "Eighty-four and a half," he said, then turned back to the desk.

I looked closely at the scale. "Three-quarters."

"What?" He came back and squinted at me.

"My weight," I said. "I weigh eighty-four and three-quarters."

His face was close to mine now. His eyes shifted to the scale, and he reached up and barely touched the countermeasure. "Sure," he said, "eighty-four and three-quarters."

He sat on the edge of his desk again and I put my shoes back on.

"If you did this," Morgan said, "I would consider it a personal favor. Do you know what that means?"

I had no idea, but nodded my head.

Morgan started talking again, saying he'd give me a ride home after it was all over, and I heard some bit about not having any trouble passing his social studies class next year.

I kept thinking about what had happened on the court, and that shining warm light and Michael's voice.

The coaches' office was small and I didn't want to say no to Morgan's face so I figured I'd tell him I had to use the bathroom and disappear. The words were right in my mouth when I heard him say, "Besides, Three-Quarters, we'll make a man out of you."

And it occurred to me at that moment that the whole time we were talking, Morgan never used my name. He never once called me Keegan. For some reason I liked that, and I took a quick breath and found myself saying, "I'll do it."

So that's how I ended up standing on the edge of the wrestling mat, rolled flat across the same basketball court where two hours earlier I'd been declared dead, staring at Benedict the bulldog and wondering if he could get loose. Benedict is our school mascot. Our Lady of Perpetual Help Bulldogs. Other schools call us the Perpetual Dogs. Benedict was alongside the mat, and the cheerleader who was holding his leash didn't seem to notice that he was snapping and growling at me. Somebody had put a big piece of white tape on the front of Benedict's collar so it looked like a priest's. Morgan stood on one side of me and told me I'd do fine. Just before Morgan pushed me out, Angela Martinez walked out and sat on one of the chairs behind me, back with the other wrestlers. She had changed into jeans and was carrying the same white box with the red cross on it, and it reminded me of the plastic first-aid kit Mom always had under the front seat of the station wagon.

When I reached the center of the mat, I stood in the stance that Morgan had shown me and looked down at the mat in front of me. I listened to Benedict barking and the rumbling chant rising from the Bethlehem Vikings' bench. It went faster and faster and stopped with three loud shouts and all at once my opponent's leg was across from me, twitching with short quick beats, his knee wrapped inside a bruised knee pad. Just above, a muscle rose like an island on his thigh.

No part of my opponent's body was still; he dipped and swayed on the spring of his knees. His hands floated in the space between us, waiting to reach for me. I remember Morgan telling me to focus on his waist and not look him in the eyes because then it's easy to get faked out. But even as I was thinking this, I felt my gaze rising to my opponent's face. His eyes were waiting for me.

They were clear and sharp and he didn't seem to notice that I was looking straight into them. He stared at me, stared through me, and though I wanted to look away, I couldn't. His head weaved and rolled, and all the while his eyes held mine. I felt the sharp pinch of my chin strap biting into my jaw and realized I had sucked my lower lip into my mouth and gripped it between my teeth. I couldn't make my eyes blink.

The referee came over and leaned in between us, and when he said, "Shake hands, gentlemen," his voice told me his view of the scene. He looked at my frozen body with my hands planted on my legs, and he saw the medical tape pulling the straps together in the back of my singlet so it wouldn't fall. Then he looked at my opponent. We must have seemed strange reflections of each other. Here was a body almost the same height and weight as mine, but everything my body was not.

I held out my hand and my opponent slapped at it and there was a sting in my palm and the sharp shot of the whistle and suddenly his face was gone and I could see the other team's coach standing straight across from me off the edge of the mat. Something rammed my gut and I thought I was falling but instead I started coming up, away from the mat completely. I looked down at the top of my opponent's head, tight to my stomach. His arms wrapped around me and I felt the squeeze of air leaving my body. For a second I was taller than the referee, but then came this spinning of colors. The back of my head bounced and my teeth caught a piece of the inside of my cheek when I smashed into the mat. I caught a flash of the ceiling and the center-court light before he was on me. His chest across my chest. One arm shot around my neck and the other scooped behind my leg and he brought his hands together and my nose whacked my knee as I was yanked beneath him into the darkness. My spine curved and he began tilting me back and forth, trying to get my shoulders flat to pin me.

I couldn't move. It was my fault I was about to be pinned, but I knew there was nothing I could do. So I just closed my eyes and waited for the end of things. But in that rocking darkness, I felt Michael's presence once again. I felt the strange slickness of my brother's embrace, and the wet warmth of his unborn body in my arms. Then the white light split the sightless void and he began slipping away, rising toward the escape. But my hand caught hold of his ankle, and it was soft like jelly and I pulled him down as easily as a balloon on a string, but only because he did not struggle. Even when my hands pulled on his shoulders and pushed him down, away; even when I stood on his body and shoved myself up to be born, my brother never fought.

As I was drifting toward that brightness a horn blasted and a smack cracked the mat next to my head. I got up off the mat, defeated, and Morgan waved me back to the bench. He sat me down and told Angela to get me some water. Then he looked in my face and yelled to bring the bucket too.

I was glad when they finally left me alone, and I slumped to the floor behind the bench, beneath the accusing eyes of the Wrong-Hearted Jesus. To escape His stare I hung a towel over my head and tried to sort out what I'd seen. I'd always had a feeling I was to blame for my brother's death. I'd just forgotten how. And I was happy in a way, to finally know the details. Because then I understood that the mess in my life isn't just some accident but the result of something I did. And once I knew it was my fault, once I knew how it was my fault, I became overwhelmed with the idea that I could make up for it. That somehow I could fix everything.

By the time Morgan drove me home and dropped me off after the match, the understanding inside me felt ready to explode. The old urge to spill my secrets to Dad about what I'd done and what I was going to do rumbled in my gut. I pictured the two of us alone, talking out problems the way we used to. Even when I saw Andrew and Sean's rusted Mustang in the driveway and remembered they were home for the weekend, I still stayed excited. I came through the front door and stormed straight to the dining room and found my brothers finishing off some Shake 'n Bake pork chops. Dad's chair was empty.

I said, "Where's —" but Andrew cut me off with a finger to his lips and a "shhh!" He nodded to the kitchen, where I saw the wall phone was off the hook.

"Of course," my father said. "Whatever you think is best, Carl."

Dr. Carl Becker looks after Mom at Hellman House. I met him once, a few years back.

"No," my father said. "Don't worry about that. It's not a concern. . . . I understand. Thank you for calling. Thank you."

He hung up and stepped back into the dining room. Part of me was desperate to know what news he'd learned of Mom, but part of me just wanted him to ask why I was home late, so I'd have an excuse to explain all that had happened. Instead, Dad sat down and said, "Your brothers made pork chops." He picked up his knife and fork and started sawing at a corner.

Still standing in silence, I watched him lift the meat to his mouth and pull it off his fork. Andrew looked at me and said, "Me and Sean got most of the yard in shape. How was your field trip?"

I didn't even waste a look at him. I sat down looking at Dad, still hoping.

"Maybe you can strain yourself tomorrow and help with the woodpile," Andrew said. "We come back from college, and you take a vacation."

"Enough," Dad said, waving away the insults. Again the room fell into silence as the three of them ate. Looking at the two empty chairs, one next to Dad, the other at the end of the table, it was hard for me not to think of the days when Mom and Patrick were both still here. When dinner meant our stories of the day and Dad's game of "King Solomon" when we finished. He'd explain some case he was working on or make one up, then ask each of us what we would decide. Like the farmer who sold his neighbor a cow but then found out it was pregnant. Who did the calf belong to? Or the man who lied to get a job but then did good work. Should he still get paid?

Nowadays, on the rare nights we even sit down together, dinner is the sound of the knife across the plate, the ice tinkling in the glass, the creak of the wooden chairs. But tonight, out of nowhere, Sean suddenly broke our code of silence. "Do you think we could go see her?" he asked. "Maybe for Christmas?"

Dad's hands stopped cold, his knife and fork frozen in the meat. He inhaled deeply, let the breath out, and said, "We'll see."

He finished cutting, lifted his fork to his mouth, chewed, swallowed. "You should eat something, Keegan," he said to me.

I looked at the plate set out for me. "No, thanks," I said. "I don't have much of an appetite."

Safe inside my room, I closed the door and rolled onto the bottom bunk. I reached under my pillow and pulled out Patrick's drumsticks, the ones he left behind when he took off. His drum set is still set up in his room. But nobody goes in there. I've slept in this bunk bed for as long as I can remember, and always on the lower mattress. Before me, Andrew and Sean used to sleep in this bed. And before that, Patrick and Andrew. I've always slept in it alone.

But when Mom used to change the sheets on my mattress, she'd change the ones on the top bunk too, and even though nobody ever used that bed during all those years, I knew she was making it for Michael.

Most kids conjure monsters from scratches behind closet doors or deep breathing beneath their bed. When I was little, my nightmare sounds came from above. Nothing like growls or roars, just soft sighs and the easing of springs, like someone was gently sleeping. If I woke up in the darkness to those sounds, I'd tug the blankets over my head and lie frozen until Mom came in to get me up for school. As a dead brother, Michael was a comforting angel in Heaven, but on Earth he became the worst of all terrors.

In the wooden slat above me, I found a swirl that looked to me like an eye, and I imagined Michael watching me here. I searched the silence for some sign of him, wondered what would happen if he were suddenly right there above me, right on the other side of that mattress. I began to feel dizzy and tired, and that eye began to grow larger. As the top bunk slowly descended, lowering on top of me like the lid on a coffin, I remembered Michael's words — "Don't fight it." I lay frozen, not thinking about calling out for help, not trying to roll off the side of the bed. I waited for it to press down onto me, and just before it was about to crush me, my world went completely black.

After a time, I heard distant sounds in the darkness, and then foggy shapes began to form, and even before I recognized them, I knew I was back at my grave.

It was different the second time. I wasn't in my body anymore and my burial was complete. Invisible, I stood across from Mom and Dad and the boys, all of us standing over the mound. I sensed a swelling in the fresh soil. My halo rose up through the ground, beaming so bright I couldn't see my new face at all. Wings, white and pure, sprang from the muscles in my shoulders. They barely pulsed, and the rest of my body, hard as oak, lifted easily from the earth and hovered. It was clean and naked, the body of an angel.

Dad had his arms around Mom and her head was pressed to his chest. He reached into his pocket and offered her a white handkerchief. Patrick had come home, and he and Andrew and Sean all crowded around Mom and Dad, like one big, happy family.

And Michael was there too, standing with Mom and Dad, the whole family now embracing. His body wasn't like the earthly body I had; it was small like mine, but healthy, strong. Seeing him there, standing over my grave, I understood that Michael was supposed to have lived and I was supposed to have died. And with that realization all the disasters of the Flannery family made sense. From the very first day of my life, when I grabbed my brother's ankle, I had upset the balance of God's plan, of what was supposed to be.

My heavenly body rose out of the scene, but none of them saw it, and even I didn't follow its ascension. If I had, I would've missed the whole reason Michael granted me this vision. Because I know now that Michael wants the same thing that I do. He wants the balance restored, and like a good brother he's giving me a chance to right my own wrong. Just before the vision faded, my eyes fixed on the headstone, where I saw the date carved plainly in stone.

I don't know why I'm hesitating, why I don't just close my eyes and whisper an acceptance to Michael's offer. After all, it's the answer to all my prayers. And that's why part of me is almost grateful to know my brother Michael wants me to die on the day before my sixteenth birthday, just fourteen days from tonight.