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soul, Sully, was a baby too, the big fat kind that crashes around in a diaper, pulling furniture over. Heidi never did that kind of stuff. She was also big, and also wore a diaper. But there was no crashing around. She was all ladylike, and for a while, I hoped it would be enough to get me out of rehab.
    But I guess deep down I knew I was never getting out.
    They paired me and Howard up a lot on account of our souls were around the same age. Part of me wonders if that’s what made her think that douche box Sully was worth thinking about for more than two seconds. I knew all about her crush on him. Anyone within a mile could see it like it was written on her forehead. He was out of her league looks-wise, and she was out of his in every other way. But there was another reason they paired us up — a reason I learned about real early on in soul rehab.
    We’d both killed cats. But mine was an accident. Me and Mike were drunk on Jägermeister. He was sixteen and I was fourteen, just out of Mrs. Domino’s class. It was one of those hot summer days that make you do stupid things because you’re pretty sure the day is never going to end, no matter how you fill the hours, and that life is always going to be the same sweaty mess. We wanted to see if this cat that was hanging around us would keep landing on its feet if we dropped it off higher and higher things, giving it a good hard flip each time. It was wrong. I knew it. But I didn’t know what it would be like to live with something like that.
    And forget about dying with something like that on my soul.
    The cat stopped moving after we dropped it off the roof. It closed its eyes and gave one last creaky meow and it just lay there and I thought I was gonna be sick. All the blood rushed out of my fingers and they felt freezing even though it was almost a hundred degrees out. Mike got a shovel and we took turns digging a hole and I couldn’t even feel my hands as I was scooping the dirt. It was a deep hole, way bigger than we needed, and we put the cat in and covered it up, all without saying a single word to each other.
    Later, the cat’s owner put flyers on all the telephone poles in the neighborhood, and they stayed up there till the rain washed them down that fall. I memorized the phone number and thought about calling it, but what would I say?
    We never told anyone what we’d done, but there isn’t hiding anything like that when it matters, and when theweight of your life is being measured and you come up worth less than a pound of hamburger meat.
    During one of my first group sessions, Xavier split me and Howard off from the rest so we didn’t have to confess doing such horrible things in front of everyone else. He told us we could be each other’s partners in penance. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t want Howard to get off on my story.
    Howard had all these questions for me, like Did blood come out its ears? and Did you ever dig it up again, just to see the bones? And this one … Were you watching at the very second it died? What happened in that moment its soul left its body? That’s what I wanted to see when I killed my cat. That moment in time. But I didn’t know then that souls live on, and now what I really want to see is what happens if a soul is extinguished, you know? Does it disappear? Leave a pile of dust? Smell like burning rubber? Scream for mercy? Wouldn’t it be awesome to find out?
    I didn’t want to be like that Howard guy, but there was no getting around the fact that we were both killers. That made us the same. Still, it didn’t make me want to spend any more time with him than I had to.
    He cornered me by the craft table the afternoon Heidi stink-bombed the talent show. We were in the place where group meets, a sort of rec room with fluorescent overheads that buzz so much you feel like you’re surrounded by flies. The carpets are the color of