Sometimes I remember that Noah was a kid who was very much a Kid: laid-back, kind of a dick, but probably no worse than any other teenage boy, liked shitty pop punk and fast cars and being alive, two parents and sisters at home, girlfriends,
And then he was murdered.
It wasn’t even premeditated.
And he never got to grow up.
Everything that made him Alive died that day. Everything that made Noah Noah
And when Blue walks in the room he gets a little jolt because all of a sudden he Remembers. Remembers the taste of cilantro. Remembers his chest burning while he held his breath underwater, swimming in a lake with his sisters.
He’s forgotten what it was like to be alive and all of a sudden he’s hungry for it, starving. He comes right up to her and presses his cheek to hers, heedless of how weird it is, how animal, how inhuman, heedless of whether or not she wants the contact, and when he touches her he gets a flash of turning and seeing Whelk with his skateboard already mid-arc, a starburst of pain like nothing he’d ever felt before and then
Nothing.
He blinks himself back to reality, or whatever passes for reality for him these days and Blue’s backed up from him, hugging herself, and there are goosebumps all up and down her bare arms. He wonders for a second if she saw what he saw, felt what he felt, but no. They were his memories. She was just the light in the projector booth.
“Sorry,” he says, and he didn’t know ghosts could feel hate but he hates the faded sound of his voice, hates the faded afterimage of real anger that seems to be all he can muster.
He used to be More, once.
