They watch together for a while. Shelby is tapping her foot the way she did when she was upset before the hospital, and her father is trying his best not to mention it or even notice it. Thump against the floor. Against the couch. Like she’s wound up.

“I’ll bet she went over to the Boyds’,” Shelby finally says. “Didn’t she? I told her it was stupid and vile and disgusting. I told her not to go.”

“Maybe there’s some truth in what people say. It doesn’t hurt to see.”

“Don’t make me vomit.”

“You’d have to be alive to do that. Living the way you do isn’t being alive.”

Shelby stares at her father. He looks older. He’s a big, unhappy man who clearly wishes he were elsewhere.

“If I wanted to be dead, I would be,” Shelby informs him.

“That’s comforting,” her dad says.

“It is to me,” Shelby says.

She goes back to the basement. She takes two Ativan, then slips on her coat and goes out through the cellar door. She sits down on the picnic table, even though it’s cold outside. The air is like crystals; it hurts just to breathe.

Her mother’s car pulls up and parks. The headlights turn everything yellow, but when they’re cut off the night becomes pitch. All the same, Sue spies her daughter perched on the picnic table. She heads across the yard. “It’s freezing,” Sue says.

“I’m counting stars. That should keep me busy.”

Sue and Shelby lie down on the wooden table. They both look up.

“It’s not the way you think it is,” Sue says. “It’s peaceful over at the Boyds’. She’s peaceful. She means something to the people who come to see her, Shelby.” No one could count all the stars. There are far too many. What’s above them is endless. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

Shelby makes a sound that she hadn’t expected to be a sob. She doesn’t even know who she is anymore.

“I think I lost my soul,” she says.

“That can’t happen,” Sue tells her.

“You have no idea what can happen, Mom.”

Shelby takes out a cigarette and some matches. She used to be so against smoking she would go up to complete strangers to ask if they knew what they were doing to their lungs when they lit up. She was so sure of how to set the world right.

Now she goes back into the basement and phones Ben Mink. She tries not to think of her mother all alone in the backyard, counting stars. Sometime after the accident, her parents stopped talking to each other unless they needed to discuss a household chore or a doctor’s appointment. It’s true, tragedy can bring you closer or drive you apart.

“I’m desperate,” Shelby tells Ben. “Beam me out of here.”

He says he’s managed to score some pot from a guy he used to know in school. He’ll meet her on Main Street at nine. His parents live a few blocks from town. He rents an apartment with a bunch of guys, but he also spends nights at his parents’. They always give him a good meal and ask what he plans to do with his life. If he eats and shrugs it’s all pretty painless.

Shelby hates to leave the house, but she pulls on extra socks and her old boots, then gloves and a hat. The TV is still on; the blue light from the window falls across the lawn and out into the road. Ice. Crystals. Trees without leaves. Real things. Shelby walks toward Main Street. Every­thing is closed except the pizza place, where a few high school kids are hanging out. Shelby wraps her scarf around her head, then loops it around her neck and keeps going. She can hear herself breathing because the inhalations are sharp, sob-like things. She can hardly catch her breath. All that smoking and the cold air and how fast she walked here. It all adds up. It makes her want to cry.

Ben Mink is standing outside the Book Revue, a regular meeting place for them. He spent a lot of time in the science fiction section in high school. He read entire books while crouched down on the floor. Now he has his hands in his pockets; he’s freezing. When Shelby arrives he peers into her cloaked face. Hat, scarf, big eyes, bald. She looks like an orphan in a comic book.

“Damn it’s cold,” he says. “That is you in there, right?”

“Who else would meet you, Ben? As I recall, you don’t have any friends. Oh, the guy you got the pot from.”

“He’s more of an enemy,” Ben says. “You’re my friend.”

“Yeah, right.” Shelby gets her money from stealing from her parents; very grown-up to paw around in her mother’s purse and her father’s wallet. She is well aware that they pretend not to know. Shelby gives Ben the cash, and he hands her a plastic baggie that she slips into her pocket. “Okay,” Shelby says. “We’re friends.”

“I’ve brought something else for you.” Ben presents her with a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. “This will blow you away,” he says. “Some guy is covered with living tattoos. Each one tells a story.”

“You don’t have to give me anything.” All the same, Shelby takes the book.

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to be around much longer,” Ben says.

“Really? Leaping from a bridge?”

“Don’t laugh when I tell you. Promise?”

Their breath comes out like clouds. They’re the only ones on the street. Ben is wearing old Doc Martens boots that crunch into the snow when they start to walk. The crunch echoes up and sounds like steel.

“I’ve been taking classes at Empire State College. It’s independent study. An accelerated program. I started classes when I was in high school.”

“A program for what?” It’s so cold that Shelby thinks her fingers inside her gloves are turning blue. Maybe they’ll turn to sugar candy and break off and there’ll be a fairy-tale ending when one taste of her sugar-stick fingers will cure Helene.

Ben shrugs, somewhat embarrassed to have succeeded at something. “I have a BS in science.”

“What does that stand for? Bullshit?”

“I didn’t mention it, because I wasn’t sure I would graduate. But I did and now I’ve decided to go to pharmacy school. I’ve already been accepted. I got a four thirty on the PCAT admission test.” Shelby doubles over with laughter at this news. Ben grins as he watches her. She looks so pretty when she laughs. “So I’m smart,” he says. “So what?”