My head was heavy, filled with fog. I heard the words Eloise Montgomery had uttered more than a decade ago ringing in my ears. But I hadn’t really heard them when she’d first uttered them. Like so many things I didn’t want to deal with, I’d buried her advice and warnings deep. Anyway, I had just been a kid. What good advice was ever seized upon by an adolescent boy? I lay still, listening to my childhood home, still in the clothes I’d been wearing yesterday. There was a large rust-colored water stain on the low ceiling. It looked like a mushroom cloud, burgeoning, spreading, a quiet, deadly mass. I was the last man in the postapocalyptic world of my life. A leaden fatigue dragged at my limbs, and I felt as if I could lie there forever, never moving again. The thought of it was almost a comfort. I imagined myself slowly starving to death in my twin bed, my corpse rotting, becoming one with the cheap mattress. Who would miss me? Megan for a time, and my mother. Then I thought of Megan’s news—a baby, our child.
