Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Greg likes pretty much everyone, but Anna has a special place in his heart like Sara-the-Bee and Beatrice. She is an Older Girl, so he views her as an adoptive big sister (also like Sara-the-Bee and Beatrice), which means when Wirt isn’t around the cabin he goes straight to her with all his questions and rock facts and game ideas. Because she is so kind, Anna never tells him to get lost. She smiles at him—truly smiles, not one of those tense fake grins that people have been wearing like Halloween masks whenever they run across Greg at home. In the Unknown, Wirt isn’t missing, so it’s refreshing to spend time with somebody who plays with him because she wants to and not because her parents told her to.

Even Wirt appears to enjoy Anna’s company, and that ol’ bashful badger hardly ever warms up to anybody.

One morning, while Anna is feeding the chickens and The Beast is tending the vegetable garden, Greg tugs on Wirt’s pant leg. “Hey, Wirt, when’re you gonna let Anna see that handsome face?” Three days after his big brother brought him through the woods and to Anna’s farmyard/woodland property, Greg still hasn’t caught Wirt out of his shadows; the neurotic teenager has been wearing that funeral garb since he swooped Greg away from Beatrice’s mill and—to be honest—it’s worrying Greg. The blackness is like hiding, and Wirt hides whenever he’s not feeling good. Usually Wirt hides in his bedroom but obviously there’s no bedroom for him to slip into in the forest. “Mom says you’ll grow into that there nose, and besides, you’ve got a good profile—”

“This is a Beast Thing, Greg. I just look like this now.” Wirt uses the same excuse he’s been plopping on Greg like an Uno “Skip” card for a fortnight. The antlers are a Beast Thing. The glowing eyes are a Beast Thing. The growling, the weird voices, the disappearing, the strange things that happen that Greg doesn’t understand and that Wirt won’t explain are all Beast Things.

It bothers Greg, that his brother resorts to calling himself The Beast so thoughtlessly. Greg gets it, somewhat. He knows that Wirt has transformed, and that he’s got a big job in the Unknown (although, regrettably, Greg is not privy to all the details of this big job). He simply wishes that Wirt would distinguish himself more from the creature that shows up in Greg’s bad dreams occasionally. Wirt would never want to hurt him, not like that evil jerk who tricked him into the Edelwood’s grasp.

That span of time between the mill and the cabin had been pretty darn rough. It’s nice that Wirt speaks in full sentences again, and that the bad birds have stopped following them, but… Greg had hoped that Wirt would go back to being Wirt. He’s been very patient and very kind to his older sibling. Surely, at some point, Greg will recognize the person he’s been missing under that inky cape as the same guy who used to walk him to school.

On the bright side, Wirt lets himself be hugged more, and he also hugs Greg. There’s a closeness and ease of affection that hasn’t always existed between them, and Greg is absolutely on board. There’s only one more thing he wishes he could get Wirt to do for him…

“Could I have a piggy-back ride?” he asks when Wirt finishes dusting the soil off some enormous rainbow chard leaves. His question is met with a long sigh, so he doubles down. “I can wait until you give the veggies to Anna. We can do a quick lap around the wall—”

“No.” The word comes out too harshly, and Wirt rushes to fix it. His eyes cool from the yellow they’ve burned for a while into a sweeter Jolly-Rancher-blue. “I mean… sorry, Greg. Not right now.”

The little boy follows him like an extremely vocal duckling. “How come! You did a super good job before we got here, you were a regular trusty steed! I won’t even kick your ribs this time, promise.”

The blue flickers back to lemon-drop-yellow. “I… you see… my shirt! My shirt is s-so dirty, and—and I wouldn’t want to get you dirty, and I’d be so emb-barrassed if Anna saw what a slob I am ha ha… ha…”

“Your shirt’s too dirty?” A weird excuse, but Greg knows how finicky his brother can be. “Why don’t you ask Anna for a shirt? She told me she lives here with her dad and I bet her dad has stuff you can wear, huh?”

Another sigh, this one dour and full of woe. “I asked. She couldn’t find any shirts that button up.”

“Why would you need a fancy button-up… ohhhhh.” The antlers! Duh! Wirt couldn’t fit normal shirts overtop that wide ol’ rack! The absurdity throws Greg into a giggle-fit that makes Wirt groan and shuffle his hooves faster to escape.

Toward the end of the week, Greg has not asked Wirt for another piggy-back ride. He has, however, adjusted his list of “Stuff to Bring Wirt” to include shirts with buttons so that his role model won’t be humiliated by his limited fashion options. Wirt hasn’t said when he plans to leave the cabin—nor where he wants to go after they leave—so Greg figures he should bring enough that Wirt is comfortable and Anna won’t have to do too much laundry.

He doesn’t expect Wirt to inform him that it’s “The Day” from a second-story window at the crack of dawn. The Beast’s eyes are all the colors of sky outside—hypnotic Morning Glory and baby-pink and a pale yellow—and he stares at Greg from the tree branch he’s balanced upon like a mountain goat. Er, a tree goat. Some tree-climber with hooves.

Greg rubs the sleep from his eyelids and yawns. He’d passed out in this room after trying to reenact a scene from one of Anna’s picture books. Downstairs, he can hear their hostess clunking around the kitchen. Early to rise, that one. Always busy.

“I want to try something,” Wirt says softly. The green leaves above his head rustle in the cool morning breeze. “Do you trust me?”

“Time to go already? Wow… You gonna make me climb down that tree?” Greg yawns again. “Gimme a few minutes to wake up, Brother-o-Mine… don’t wanna break my neck or my legs or both.”

“Nah, I don’t need you to climb.” Wirt extends his claws through the open window. The bough sways under him, yet he keeps his balance like a practiced gymnast, effortlessly balancing himself with a few shifts of his lower body. He’s talking to Greg the way Greg heard him talk to a baby bird they found on the ground once, all quiet and reassuring. They’d brought the baby bird home and put it in a shoebox and fed it wet cat food until it got all its grown-up feathers and flew away. “Just take my hand, okay? Then we can go down to breakfast with Anna.”

“Didja bring more blueberries?” Greg’s bare feet scuffle on the rug he’d fallen asleep on. He hears Anna calling him downstairs.

“You know I did,” Wirt assures. “Some blackberries, too. You’ll be purple all over.”

Greg laughs drowsily at that mental image. His palm meets Wirt’s—and he’ll never get over how it feels, warm with a hint of roughness, not the same kinda-sweaty palm it was before—and then Wirt’s claws fold over his hand.

“I’m going to try a magic trick. Ready?” A thickness enters Wirt’s tone, as if he’s trying his hardest not to laugh or cry. Greg hopes it’s laugh, on account of he can’t see Wirt’s face under the shadows and he can’t tell if there’s a smirk hidden in there.

“What’re the magic words?” Greg asks. He’s more awake now, excited to see where this goes. Wirt was never into magic stuff—he prefers fine arts like music and paintings and boring old buildings. When did he have time to practice magic tricks behind Greg’s back? Is this what he’s been doing when he disappears from the cabin on “Beast Business”?

Wirt gives his hand a squeeze. The magic words are a whisper. “I love you, Greg.”

Greg’s about to scoff that those are silly magic words… but his vision snuffs out like somebody turning off the TV and he's too astonished to speak.

He thrashes away from Wirt’s hand and tangles himself up in his blankets, his heart pounding and a startled yell jumping from his wide-open mouth. “Hey, no fair! That’s not a magic trick, that’s a prank—ya hoodlum! Magic tricks are s’posed to be sparkly and the magic words are ‘abracadabra’ not ‘I love you’...”

No answer.

Then a frog croaks, and Greg spooks so hard he falls out of bed. He’s not at Anna’s cabin, he’s in his own bedroom with teeny raindrops pattering on the window, and he’s wearing his dinosaur pajamas and not hand-me-downs from Beatrice’s brothers, and the abruptness of this unwanted change in scenery makes Greg carsick. “Jason Funderfrog?” He doesn’t appreciate how shaky his frog’s—their frog’s—name trips from his tongue. “Wh-where’s Wirt? Did he finish the magic trick?”

The bullfrog gives him a concerned “Rorrop” and hops from his tank to land next to the scared little boy. Wait—not scared, Greg’s not scared, he’s disoriented sure but this is probably part of the surprise that Wirt wanted to show him. In fact, if this is a magic trick and Wirt wanted to pull it off with a flourish, Greg can guess where Wirt is!

Joy overwhelms his jitters instantly. Greg scoops up his best bullfrog friend in his arms and erupts out of his bedroom and plows down the hall to Wirt’s room and reaches for the door handle—

“Whoa, whoa, whoa buddy! Where’s the fire?”

Strong arms wrap around Greg’s middle and heave him up; caught off guard, Greg goes limp and waits for Dad to finish flipping him around like a sack of potatoes before he says anything (Dad has done this maneuver enough times to compensate for Jason Funderburker and chuckles when the frog grumbles in his arms). As soon as Greg is upright, legs dangling and Jason secure, he cranes his neck to share the news.

“Daddy-o! Guess what! I was in the Unknown and I met my friend Beatrice’s family and she’s not a bird anymore—”

The loving expression doesn’t falter from Dad’s face… but the glitter in his eyes fades before he pitches his voice lower and starts walking toward Greg’s room… away from Wirt’s room. “That’s nice, champ. You can tell me all about it over breakfast, okay? I’m taking you to IHOP.”

Normally, this news would have Greg breaking the sound barrier on his way out of the house—but today he and Jason Funderburker struggle in Dad’s embrace and when Dad sets him back down on the carpet his impatience inflates like a soccer ball in his ribs. “Wait, listen, I was getting to the most important part! Remember how I said Wirt is there?”

Dad’s shoulders droop ever so slightly. “You dreamed about Wirt again?” he asks, and he’s doing his best to sound interested and supportive but Greg can tell that Dad is gloomy. And who could blame him? It’s been actual months since Greg brought Wirt up, and Dad doesn’t know about Wirt’s magic trick!

Greg claps his hands over his mouth. Oops… he’d almost ruined the surprise. What good is a magic trick if he spoils the big reveal? Gotta be sneaky about this.

“Uh… yep! We were eating blueberries for breakfast.” Nice save, Gregory.

Dad ruffles his hair, and gives Jason Funderburker a pat on his shiny frog head for good measure. “That sounds like a nice dream,” he replies in an undertone, as if he’s trying not to wake Mom. “Maybe we should get a stack of blueberry pancakes.”

“Maybe we should,” Greg agrees slyly.

After ensuring that they can bring leftovers home for Jason Funderburker, Greg gets dressed at the speed of light. If he had rabbit ears, they’d be perked ramrod straight listening for the sound of Wirt stirring from his bedroom. He wonders why his big brother hasn’t announced himself yet… but then he remembers that Wirt is the dramatic type and he’s probably awaiting the absolute best and most suspenseful moment to leap back into their lives. Plus, there’s the antlers and claws and hooves to worry about… maybe Wirt is looking for a clean shirt so he can make a good impression? He’ll have to be presentable if he wants to go to the esteemed International House of Pancakes.

“Where’s Mommy-o? Still pickin’ an outfit?” Greg meets his Dad in the living room, glancing in all directions to see if Wirt snuck out of his bedroom—or if he’d concealed himself somewhere else instead, like he would for a surprise birthday party.

Dad pinching his cheek distracts Greg from his search. “We’re letting Mom sleep in today, buckaroo. But we’ll bring her some breakfast, too, no worries.”

“Yeah… no worries.”

He wants to ask if they can bring extra for Wirt, like how Anna makes extra breakfast in case her own dad comes home, but he can’t get the sentence out. Dad buckles him into the car and the carsick feeling returns before they’ve rolled out of the driveway.

They talk about school and dinosaurs and bullfrogs and cartoons over lakes of syrup and boats of butter. Dad does not inquire further into Greg’s “dream” about Wirt; concerned that the magic trick didn’t work as planned, Greg also does not try to bring it back up. He reasons that there’ll be plenty more times to take Wirt out to breakfast when Wirt’s out of the Unknown for good. His older sibling wouldn’t miss pancakes for the world.

Leftovers are packed in styrofoam boxes for later (along with an order of plain flapjacks for Jason and french toast with strawberries for Mom). Impatient to find out if Wirt’s trick was delayed somehow, Greg hops back into the car and begs Dad to hurry back.

“Actually, buddy, I thought you and I could have a day at the park. The rain cleared up, and I bet there’ll be all kinds of animals to watch. Sound good?” Dad adjusts the rearview mirror distractedly and pulls out of the parking lot.

“Sorta,” says Greg. He watches sunlight leap from puddle to puddle, turning the shallow oil-slicked pools to brilliant gold. He imagines Wirt looking up at him from each scintillating surface and his tummy does the twisty thing it did when he fell out of bed only it’s worse due to the five hundred pounds of breakfast he ate. “Can we take Hops McGee with us so he can play in the puddles?”

“Aw, you don’t want to turn around and go home yet, do ya?” Dad is trying to coax him. It’s not working.

Greg presses his hands against the cold glass of the car window; when he takes them away, there’s an antler-shaped imprint in the condensation. “Please? Can we? I don’t w-want to go without…” His own quivery words unsettle him—and they clearly unsettle Dad, for Dad assents without further argument and steers the car faithfully toward their street. It’s fine. It will be okay. Mom and Wirt will be waiting on the front porch so Wirt can feel more comfortable outside and let his branch-antler blossoms soak up the sunshine.

Except Mom and Wirt aren’t on the porch when Dad and Greg arrive. Greg smooshes his face against the window in alarm. “Are we moving?!”

Several cardboard boxes are stacked by the front door. They’re not labeled, and the tops aren’t taped shut. An orange sweater sleeve dangles over the side of one like a sick elephant’s trunk.

Dad mutters a bad word under his breath. His reflexes aren’t fast enough to lock the car doors before Greg unbuckles himself and stumbles onto the driveway, leftovers and takeout abandoned. Dad is telling him to wait, wait; Greg ignores him and busts past the front door so hard he bonks his shoulder; upstairs and down the hall Mom calls out “Honey? Greg?” and when he careens around the corner he sees her walking out of Wirt’s room carrying another box, this one also unlabeled but most definitely filled with—

“Wirt’s stuff?” Mom’s face goes white as a ghost at his inquiry. Then her eyes slide toward the walls and the floor and yes, that’s guilt, he doesn’t witness that look on his parents very often but that’s guilt. “Are we moving?” Greg asks again. They wouldn’t force him to move before school is over, right? All his friends are here, and his favorite ice cream parlor… and the wall where he and his brother climbed into the Unknown for the first time. What if Greg doesn’t dream as well in a new house? What if Wirt finds his way back on his own, and they’re not here to welcome him, and he thinks they left him behind and that they don’t love him anymore?

“Sweetheart… we’re not moving.” Mom gingerly sets down the box and pats her knee for Greg to come closer. Unfortunately Greg can’t seem to make his legs move… the hallway lurches around him like one of those spinning tunnels in a funhouse and he has to slide along the wallpaper until Mom can crouch down and squish him like she’s comforting him from a nightmare. “We’re doing some spring cleaning, that’s all. Straightening up and airing things out. It’s good for us.”

She’s trying to make her tone light and carefree but it’s so, so fragile. Greg peers over to the open-top box and there’s Wirt’s posters rolled up with rubber bands and a few candles. The pancakes in his stomach are in danger of being introduced to Mom’s Mickey Mouse sweater.

“Sorry, dear, we came back for the frog…” Dad puffs up the steps and strides toward them but Greg can’t pull his eyeballs away from the box. Wirt loved those posters. They’re of his favorite things and now his walls are gonna look all bare…

“Then you should grab Jason and be on your way, right?” Mom probably means to sound chipper but instead each syllable is clipped and terse. “Get to the park and enjoy the fresh air. I know Mister Greg isn’t interested in boring cleaning—”

Greg pries himself out of her embrace and dives into Wirt’s room. “Wirt?” His brother is not hiding by the bed or in the closet. There is no glow to give him away, or branchy shadows on the wall. “Wirt? Come out… abracadabra…” He sits down hard in the middle of the carpet and shakes. His parents are talking worried-fast and angry-low in the hall but all he registers is a droning buzz. He swallows. “...I love you.”

His worst fear is confirmed. The magic trick didn’t work.

Chapter Text

An “ambiguous death.” That’s how Sara’s psychiatrist describes what happened to Wirt. Since he was never recovered from the lake, there was no body to cremate or lay in a casket for a respectful viewing, no ashes or grave. If there’d been a funeral, Sara hadn’t been invited. All the traditions this culture has for dealing with the deceased and sending them off rely so intently on there being something to say goodbye to… but only Greg had been found. No one had any proof that Wirt had died. Her grief—which has no right to hurt this deeply—has stalled in the “shock and denial” stage, because as far as Sara’s heart is concerned Wirt is stuck in a Schrodinger’s limbo: not alive, not dead, but both and neither.

Actually… that isn’t completely true. Sara has cycled through a few other expressions of grief. “Anger” is a big one, sullen and bitter and sharp-edged. “Guilt” is in there too, and “Pain,” though what keeps her awake on nights when the moon is half-lidded and hazy isn’t always the ache of loss or the despair at not having been a little braver, a little more forward, a little more obvious in her interest. As she stares up at the glowing star cutouts spangled on her ceiling, Sara wonders for hours what happened… where Wirt went… why he vanished… if he’d been drowning, tangled in the weeds and crushing darkness, watching helplessly as his brother was pulled to the surface.

She drives herself crazy imagining Wirt lonely down there in the murk, even today, waiting for someone to rescue him.

Saturday morning wakes her with a platinum sky and drizzle that is more mist than rain. It had stormed hard all night; she’d dreamed about sitting at the bottom of a pool and gazing up at the shattered water above her, breathing like a mermaid, surrounded by turquoise. The vision ends when she turns to speak to somebody sitting next to her in the liquid calm… she smooshes her nose into the wall that her bed is pushed against and the magic flees like bubbles from her lungs.

An articulate “Ughhh” drawls from between her lips upon viewing her alarm clock. Too early to be alive. Luckily, it’s also too early for her parents to be awake… so Sara has a few hours all to herself.

She doesn’t bother changing out of her pajama pants before shoving her feet into her rainboots and shrugging on her NASA jacket. One of her front pockets had once carried a precious tape, which currently rests on her bedside table next to her clock and a dragon figurine she painted in middle school; now that pocket is weighted with a Swiss Army knife. The front door only protests the tiniest bit as she steps beyond it and into the hoary grey of dawn. Sara has snuck down to the cemetery often enough that the path is engraved in her muscle memory, and she slips into autopilot while she cuts through yards, hops fences, and glides down deserted streets.

Dew glitters on the diligently manicured grass and on the fresh spring bouquets left on tranquil graves. This place has never creeped her out; Sara feels more restful among the eternally resting than she does in her own bedroom. Besides, she wants to visit the spot. It's become a habit. Part of her stunted grieving process, or whatever.

Wirt wasn't given a tombstone, so Sara made him one. She heads there slowly, detouring around family plots and angel statues, her breath fogging in the early chill. Her tribute isn’t much: a tree near the high back wall that is ugly as sin in winter without its verdant finery but glorious in the fall, displaying a range of transformation that Sara knows Wirt would wax poetic about if he were here. Toward its base she’s carved his name, year of birth, and a question mark; it doesn’t seem fair to put a year of death down without any bones to show for it. There’s plenty of space for an epitaph, should Sara ever think of a good one. Maybe she’ll pull a line of poetry from the tape he made for her. There’s bound to be poetry on there.

She doesn’t know for sure. She hasn’t listened to it yet.

A rational side of her insists that playing the tape will be good for her; Kathleen Hodgkins has offered to let Sara borrow her personal Walkman several times, so it’s not like listening to it is an impossible goal. Maybe whatever’s on the tape will actually be comforting, and not the wrecking heartache Sara dreads. Maybe it’s just a few songs from the radio that are only special because Wirt picked them out. Closure, her psychiatrist would insist. The unicorn which eludes those affected by an ambiguous death.

But once Sara listens to the tape… she will kill the mystery. There will be no awkward scene to look forward to after, no butterflies and stuttering confessions, no future for her and the boy that wrote her name in permanent marker one way or the other. That will be it. An unsatisfying ending. Non-closure, she thinks, the definitive destruction of possibilities when Sara needs there to be more.

"Good morning, Wirt." The season's warmth has encouraged lush carpets of moss to texture the north side of the grave-trunk. She pets the stubbly softness absently before she flicks open her knife and digs at the scar she’s carved into the cinder-colored bark, refreshing the letters in Wirt’s name. She’d never steal flowers off a grave, but there are plenty of lilies growing along the cemetery’s dirt paths; Sara picks a modest handful to lay in the crook of some roots, having moved past the awkwardness of the gesture long ago. Wirt would appreciate flowers, right? He was a sensitive guy. He probably knew all that “language of flowers” stuff that some of Sara’s friends are into.

The sky dries as she works to freshen the lost boy’s arbitrary resting place. Eventually rays of sunshine are striping her back, and she realizes she must have an hour until her folks are up. “That's still lookin' pretty good, I guess. Until next time.” She salutes and backs off. Better to make it out of here before people visiting legitimate graves showed up to gawk.

Sara wanders along the garden wall for a few minutes before she heads home, scuffing her knuckles against a groove in the stone-stacks that runs a few inches higher than her hip. She’d broken her left hand on this wall in November; that’s when her mom rushed to sign her up for therapy. At least Greg had signed her cast, adding his frog's signature and forging Wirt's in an effort to cheer her up. He's not gone forever, Sara-the-Bee, you'll see. He's just taking longer than I did.

What she wouldn’t give for some of that hope... or for a merciful death for this sickly-clinging feeling that only drags her down.

Limpid blue has replaced the rainy clouds above her when she kicks her muddy soles across her front steps at last. Across the street, she happens to note that Greg’s porch is laden with big cardboard boxes… and that the family car is in the driveway with two doors still open. Huh. They can’t be moving; Sara’s mom would have heard that news from Greg’s mom, and there’s no moving van parked on the curb. Maybe they’re just getting rid of some junk?

Sara’s throat suddenly contracts. She’d bet her entire bookcase on whose stuff is in those boxes.

Her hand is frozen on the doorknob. When Greg slams out of his house, his attention arrows straight to her as if he knew she’d be waiting.

“Sara!” A derailed train of panic blares behind that single cry. Greg’s father is behind the hysterical little boy a second later—but Greg is fleeing at top speed out of his reach and clutching a bundle of important things he looks desperate not to lose.

“Greg—it’s okay! I’m right here. What's wrong?” Greg sprints up her front lawn in tears and she meets him halfway; newspapers and spiral-bound notebooks are bunched in his arms and they scatter across the damp grass in his wake when they flutter from his grip.

“Sara, you gotta help me, please.” He blubbers as if she’s the only one who can pull him from the ocean into a lifeboat. “They’re going to throw away Wirt’s comics, you have to take them—” Sara bends her knees to drop to his level on reflex and opens her arms; Greg runs into her embrace and crushes the newspapers and notebooks between them while he hiccups and rambles in wet, unsteady gasps. “I’ve been saving them for months,” the little boy cries. “I st-stacked them up all nice in his room but Mom is cleaning everything and she said these are just trash and I’m n-not allowed to keep them. I’m only s’posed to pick one or two things… how do I pick one or two things? Wirt needs all his stuff, he’s going to be so upset when he comes back and there’s n-nothing there in his room for him anymore…”

Sara squeezes Greg with all her strength, her whole body tensing as if somebody kicked her in the chest. This is really none of her business. It’d be ridiculous to expect Greg’s parents to keep Wirt’s room preserved like some sort of museum dedicated to a son who is never coming home. That’d be absurd… that’d be…

“They’re trying to act like he was never here,” Greg sniffles into her shoulder. Sara’s stomach wrenches.

Hadn’t everyone at school been doing the same thing?

Seating arrangements had been reordered to shuffle the empty desk to the back of the classroom. The anonymous well-wishes and kind notes had been removed from the facade of Wirt’s locker and the inner contents dumped when nobody wanted to take them. There hadn’t been an assembly, or any sort of memorial event, only a somber announcement sent out to students and families asking to keep the missing boy in everyone’s hearts. Without answers or catharsis, without close friends to reminisce about the good times or to openly mourn the loss in their lives, people just sort of… forgot.

No—that was cruel. Nobody “forgot” Wirt. It’s just that no one was close enough to him for the pain of his absence to matter like it did to Sara. No one else had to step in as an older sibling figure for Greg. No one else was sent up the front stoop with casseroles covered in tin foil, thinking with every step how wrong it was that this was the reason she was finally going to Wirt’s house, that it would be Greg or Greg’s mother or father to open the door and not Wirt. Not the shy clarinet player who talked like someone out of a historical drama, not the boy who quoted Wordsworth and Shakespeare but stumbled over his own tongue saying "hello." The Wirt-shaped hole in the world doesn’t feel like a ravine to any of Sara’s classmates… so of course they learned to move around it as if it isn’t there.

Sara understands perfectly what Greg is afraid of.

She pats the little boy once on the back and releases him so that she can take the crumpled newspapers. He watches her handle each page as if it’s as delicate as a bird with a broken wing, and hastily wipes his eyes when he thinks she’s preoccupied with stacking the comics near the mail piled just past her threshold (miraculously, Sara’s eyes are dry… she keeps waiting for the tears to come and worries what will happen when they catch up). “I’ll keep them safe,” Sara promises him, smoothing his hair down. “You can come back and read them whenever you want.”

Relief makes the kid go boneless. He releases a wobbly breath before asking Sara to help him gather the stray pages that escaped him; only one blew into the storm gutter, but Greg dismisses its importance, telling Sara that they’ve saved the “most importantest issues anyhow.”

“Is there anything else you want to… keep?” The cardboard boxes on Greg's stoop look like a barricade. While they’d been retrieving pages, Greg’s father had gone back inside; Sara suddenly dreads that Greg will answer "all of it" and then she'll have to walk over there, carry all that stuff over to her place, and explain to her mom why she has a dead boy's belongings. She sweats as Greg rubs his chin thoughtfully.

"Actually, Sara-the-Bee, I think there is."

Without preamble he tucks her hand into his and tugs her impatiently across the pavement. Air whistles through Sara's windpipe as if she's sucking it through a straw. She can see the sleeve of one of Wirt's shirts poking up from one box's folded corner and her dry eyes burn. It's wrong that she can remember watching that shirt pass her in the hall and yet it's hard to picture the face that went above it, the reddening ears and the mop of brown hair that always whisked itself in front of eyes that could never quite meet hers—

Greg rifles through a different box and starts pulling out graphic tees, some with holes worn into them and others so faded it takes Sara a second to discern the design. She catches a bunched-up Battle Space shirt before it hits her in the face. "Bud, I don't know how I feel about rifling through Wir… your brother's clothes. It's kinda..." Spooky? Intimate? She's dug into her friends' closets to borrow things but she’s convinced that if Wirt were here right now he'd rather die than let Greg display his wardrobe into the open, especially in front of her. "I don't think he would miss all these tops."

"He can't wear most of this stuff anyway, 'cause it won't fit over his head." Greg unveils three button-up shirts that Sara could see her grandfather wearing, but not a teenage boy; she accepts them with a small, fond smile that leaves her dark eyes sad. "I can't let Mommy-o give away the Battle Space one on account of that's his favorite jammies. Even if he can't wear it, I bet he can use it for a pillowcase like how I'm usin' his sweater for my pillow—beans! I hope that doesn't count towards the freebies I'm allowed to keep at home…"

"I'll hide these," Sara reassures him. "Is there more?"

Greg snaps his fingers. "Yeah! In Wirt's room! C'mon, I'll give ya the tour—"

"No. I shouldn't, Greg. Sorry. I'll… I'll wait out here for you. Just bring down whatever you want me to save."

"You got it, Sir-Ma'am."

Huffing and puffing, he charges into his house, the front door swinging wide open behind him. Sara wonders if she should close it before his parents can see her standing uncomfortably on their porch with their eldest son's belongings like some lovesick creep. Her face heats. What the hell is she doing? This is inappropriate, it's not as if she and Wirt ever dated. If it weren't for Greg counting on her to rescue some mementos she'd fold these shirts back into their boxes and walk back across the street and…

And what? Move on like everybody else was trying to do? Why did that feel like betrayal?

The slap of shoes on hardwood has Sara protectively clutching her bundle. She frees the breath she was holding when Greg races outside minutes later with a shoebox that clatters every time his feet hit the floor.

"Wirt's tapes!" he pants. "I definitely can't pick less than ten. There's too many good ones. Could you pretty please save these too, with whipped cream and cherries on top?"

All the tapes sport handmade labels like "Melancholia" or "Classical Clarinet" or "my thoughts" and Sara can't help but see how this handwriting matches that on the tape she found in her jacket pocket months ago. And sitting atop all the tapes like a crown upon a treasure chest, begging to be taken, is a tape player.

Sara sees it and static roars in her ears.

"That's all really special," Sara hears herself murmur. She knows she's slipped into the numb monotone that bothers Greg so much but she can't help it; a feeling that might be terror or frantic need thumps in her pulse and if she doesn't control it she'll lose it right here on the Welcome mat. "Are you sure your mom or dad don't want to hang onto these?"

An uncharacteristically troubled expression sours Greg's cherubic face. He wipes it away with forced indifference and pushes the box toward her. "Mama-bear is all tuckered out from spring cleaning. Wirt's room is really messy so…" An audible gulp fails to stabilize the faint warble in his tone. "I think she and Papa-bear are taking a break right now so we gotta work fast, Agent Sara. Can't let the goods fall into the wrong hands."

She takes the heavy shoebox and settles it on top of Wirt's shirts like a nest. If Greg's parents want the tapes, she can always give them back. She's just… storing them. Temporarily. In case they realize they don't want to erase Wirt's history from the house.

Sara has to brace herself when Greg abruptly pounces toward her and python-grips her in a hug. She melts. Eh… to hell with it. The family is cleaning out Wirt’s room anyway. They’re not going to miss whatever they’re tossing. With planning, she could set up a real memorial service for Wirt, give her classmates something physical to say goodbye to. Somebody has to do it. If she’s fast she can cache a box or two in the garage before her folks have finished their second cup of coffee and later she’ll move them up to the attic—

“Oh. Sara.” Greg’s father clears his throat uneasily from the doorframe. Sara turns into a statue in Greg’s stubborn stubby arms. How long had that man been standing there? Did he think she was weird? God, he totally thought she was weird. “Could you… would you mind watching Greg for an hour or so?”

She blinks, doelike. “Sure.” Then she commands herself to make direct eye contact, and jerks her chin toward the shoebox of tapes. This isn’t creepy. She and Wirt were friends. Not boyfriend-girlfriend friends, but they’d grown up on the same street for goodness sake. Not creepy. “So… uh… can I take these?”

The man is stunned. His throat bobs as he processes what Sara has asked him. Unable to formulate a reason as to why she wouldn’t be allowed to filch what they’re essentially throwing away, he nods, exhaustion weighing on his features. “I don’t see why not. Maybe some boys in your class…” He thinks better of what he’s about to say (who on earth would want a dead boy’s wardrobe? Who on earth but Sara?) and starts backing into his house again. “If… there’s anything else, you and Greg can divide it up.”

Sara would swear he sounds ashamed. Of course, she’s fully prepared to heft most of these boxes back to her place like a hoarder, so she has no room to judge.

“Thanks,” she responds, polite. The two nod woodenly to one another, and that’s that.

Greg refuses to speak or acknowledge his father; only after she’s brought him home to a confused but amiable welcome from her folks does the little guy perk up, thankfully keeping his lips zipped about the contraband Sara tucked under the garage workbench prior to waltzing into the kitchen. While Sara’s dad cleans up the dishes from their very late breakfast, Greg follows Sara up to her room—this time with Wirt’s shirts, tapes, and tape player in tow.

“Hey—now you can listen to your ‘For Sara’ tape!” Greg pipes up belatedly. He sits in his spot at the foot of her bed and watches her tetris the items in her closet to best hide what she doesn’t want to explain to her snooping mom later. “You haven’t listened to it yet, right? ‘Cause you never got a player for it?”

They have not discussed that tape together since December. Sara glaces over her shoulder at her nightstand and bites her lip. It’s kismet, isn’t it? To put off facing the tape until she had Wirt’s tape player?

“Maybe I will. When I’m ready.” Sara mumbles her reply and finishes stuffing Wirt’s Battle Space t-shirt under her karate karategi. At Greg’s disappointed noises, she plasters a grin on her face and changes the subject. “You wanna go outside and play Two Old Cat?”

It’s midnight. The only glow to soften the dark emanates from Sara’s bedside lava lamp, which turns everything the deep amber of a vintage lightbulb. Greg went home eight hours ago, when his dad came to get him. She expected tears, or a tantrum, or more devastated silence… but since she and the little boy managed to smuggle the majority of Wirt’s most prized possessions into Sara’s attic (including some poetry journals and an annotated The Lord of the Rings trilogy), his attitude was much improved. He’d bid her adieu with a terribly executed wink and a stage-whispered “Taaaaape.”

Sara sits cross-legged and hunched around her pillow as if combating a stomach ache. The titular tape is in the tape player on her bed. She’s been staring at the play button as if it will bite her for the past fifteen minutes. “Come on, Sara,” she coaches herself gruffly. “Game face. Do it. Do it, coward.”

The worst thing she can feel is sad—and she’s been sad for two seasons, so what’s the big deal? Closure, damn it, closure.

She pushes play like she punched that stone wall in the cemetery: too quickly to second-guess herself, all-in no matter what.

White noise. A click. The first quavering clarinet notes float toward her ceiling like embers cast off a cozy campfire, lonesome and faintly crackled.

Not even ten seconds pass and Sara's eyes overflow like a busted dam. She rakes in a ragged breath and muffles her face into her pillow so she can still hear every ardent poetic stanza, every hesitant musical note, each track as fuzzy as a wool blanket where it wraps around her trembling shoulders. This was made for her. She’s going to listen to the whole freaking thing no matter how much it feels like her insides are being wound up by the tiny teethed reels that spin the tape ‘round. This is all she or anybody else has left of Wirt’s voice. He’s alive when he’s talking to her. He’s alive in this tape. It’s too much. It’s anguish, a full-body cringe, making her blush despite her stupid tears…

Goodnight, Sara.

It’s exactly as embarrassing and wonderful as she’d hoped it would be.