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"My lungs are burning."
Everything is blurry but slowly the world comes into focus. I lie there looking up into the low gray sky at the flakes of snow sifting sullenly down upon us.
"How'd I do?"
"Not bad for your first try."
"We're going to do it again, aren't we?"
"In time, yes."
"That was wicked cool," Sam says.
I sigh, then take a deep, labored breath. "That sucked."
"You did well for your first time," Henri says. "You can't expect everything to come easily."
I nod from the ground. I lie there a good minute or two, and then Henri extends a hand and helps me up, bringing about the end of training for the day.
I wake in the middle of the night two days later, 2:57 on the clock. I can hear Henri working at the kitchen table. I crawl out of bed and walk out of the room. He is hunched over a document, wearing bifocals and holding some sort of stamp with a pair of tweezers. He looks up at me.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Creating forms for you."
"For what?"
"I got to thinking about you and Sam driving down to get me. I think it's foolish of us to keep using your real age when we can just as easily change it according to our needs."
I pick up a birth certificate that he has already finished. The name written is James Hughes. The date of birth would make me a year older. I'd be sixteen and able to drive. Then I bend over and look at the one he is in the process of creating. The name listed is Jobie Frey, age eighteen, a legal adult.
"Why didn't we ever think to do this before?" I ask.
"We never had reason to."
Papers of different shapes and sizes and densities are scattered across the table, a large printer off to the side. Bottles of ink, rubber stamps, notary stamps, metal plate-looking things, various tools that look as though they belong in a dentist's office. The process of document creation has always remained foreign to me.
"Are we going to change my age now?"
Henri shakes his head. "It's too late to change your age in Paradise. These are mostly for the future. Who knows what will happen that will give you reason to use them."
The thought of moving in the future makes me nauseous. I would rather stay fifteen and unable to drive forever than move someplace new.
Sarah returns from Colorado a week before Christmas. I haven't seen her in eight days. It feels as though it's been a month. The van drops all the girls off at the school and one of her friends drives her straight to my house without first taking her home. When I hear the tires come up the drive I meet her with a hug and a kiss and I lift her off the ground and twirl her in the air. She has just been in a plane and a car for ten hours and she is wearing sweatpants and no makeup with her hair pulled into a ponytail and yet she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen and I don't want to let go of her. We stare into each other's eyes beneath the moonlight and all either of us can do is smile.
"Did you miss me?" she asks.
"Every second of every day."
She kisses the tip of my nose.
"I missed you, too."
"So do the animals have a shelter again?" I ask.
"Oh, John, it was amazing! I wish you could have been there. There were probably thirty people helping out at all times, around the clock. The building went up so fast and it's so much nicer than it was before. We built this cat tree in one of the corners, and I swear the whole time we were there, there were cats playing on it."
I smile. "It sounds great. I wish I could have been there, too."
I take her bag and we walk into the house together.
"Where's Henri?" she asks.
"Grocery shopping. He left about ten minutes ago."
She walks through the living room and drops her coat onto the back of a chair on her way into my bedroom. She sits on the edge of my bed and kicks her shoes off.
"What should we do?" she asks.
I stand there watching her. She is wearing a red hooded sweatshirt with a zipper down the front. It is only halfway zipped. She smiles and looks at me through the tops of her eyes.
"Come here," she says, and holds her hand out to me.
I walk to her and she takes my hand in hers. She looks up at me and squints her eyes from the light shining overhead. I snap my fingers with my free hand and the light turns off.
"How'd you do that?"
"Magic," I say.
I sit beside her. She tucks a few loose strands of hair behind her ear, then leans over and kisses me on the cheek. Then she cups my chin and pulls my head to hers and kisses me again, softly, delicately. My whole body tingles in response. She pulls away, her hand still on my cheek. She traces my brow with her thumb.
"I really did miss you," she says.
"Me, too."
A silence passes between us. Sarah bites her lower lip.
"I couldn't wait to get here," she says. "The whole time I was in Colorado, you were all I could think of. Even when playing with the animals, I was wishing you were there with me playing with them, too. And then when we finally left this morning, the entire trip was hell even though every mile we traveled was another mile I was closer to you."
She smiles, mostly with her eyes, her lips a thin upturned crescent that keeps her teeth hidden. She kisses me again, a kiss that starts as slow and lingering and goes from there. Both of us are sitting on the edge of the bed, her hand on the side of my face, mine on the small of her back. I can feel the tight contours beneath the tips of my fingers, can taste the berry gloss on her lips. I pull her to me. I feel as though I can't get close enough to her despite our bodies being pressed tightly together. My hand ru
She places her hand on the back of my neck and pulls me to her and all at once we're kissing again. Entangled. Meshed. Our arms tightly around the other. My mind clear of every plague that normally visits and every thought of other planets, my mind free of the hunt and pursuit by the Mogadorians. Sarah and I on the bed kissing each other, falling into each other. Nothing else in the world matters.
And then the door opens in the living room. We both jump up.
"Henri's home," I say.
We stand and quickly brush the wrinkles from our clothes, smiling, a secret shared between us that makes us giggle as we walk out of the bedroom holding hands. Henri is setting a bag of groceries on the kitchen table.
"Hi, Henri," Sarah says.
He smiles at her. She lets go of my hand and walks over and hugs him and they start talking about her trip to Colorado. I walk outside to get the rest of the groceries. I breathe in the cold air, try to shake my limbs free of the tension of what just happened, and the disappointment of Henri coming home when he did. I'm still breathing heavily as I grab the rest of the groceries and carry them into the house. Sarah is telling Henri about some of the cats that were at the shelter.
"And you didn't bring one of them back for us?"
"Now Henri, you know I would have happily brought you one if you had told me," Sarah says, her arms folded across her chest with her hip cocked to the side.
He smiles at her. "I know you would've."
Henri puts the groceries away and Sarah and I head out into the frigid air to go for a walk before her mom arrives to take her home. Bernie Kosar comes with us. He takes the lead and runs ahead. Sarah and I hold hands, walking through the yard, the temperature slightly above freezing. The snow melting, the ground wet and muddy. Bernie Kosar disappears for a time into the woods and then comes ru