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lunch. You call me if you need anything else, okay?”
    Breckon bobs his head in agreement and reaches for the doorknob. He and Jules stand in the open doorway, both their faces dropping in surprise. Out in the hall Breckon’s father stops and registers their twin presence. His mouth slumps too but only for the briefest of moments before he rectifies that by saying, “Julianna, hello.”
    “Hi Ky">ies t, Mr. Cody.” Jules pronounces his name cautiously, as though in anticipation of being forced to admit a mistake.
    The only names I’ve picked up so far are first names, and I perk up at the nugget of information and tuck it into my memory.
    “I’m just walking Jules out,” Breckon explains, avoiding his father’s eyes.
    “Ah,” Mr. Cody replies, as though this makes perfect sense. I congratulate myself for guessing Breckon’s parents would be more understanding than he gave them credit for and watch Mr. Cody turn and continue his way along the hall. Breckon and Jules hang in Breckon’s doorway until his father has disappeared back inside his own room. Then they proceed quietly along the hall and down to the side door where Breckon thanks her again.
    “Stop thanking me already,” Jules says, grabbing the end of his shirt.
    Breckon’s pupils are tiny. He looks every ounce as tired as before he went to bed last night, and he wraps his arms around her and holds her to him. “Do you want me to get you a cereal bar or something?” he asks as he pulls away. “You can eat it on the way to school—what do you have first period anyway?”
    “Bio.” Jules frowns at the thought. “And it’s okay, I’ll swing by Second Cup and get some coffee on the way.”
    “Bio,” Breckon repeats. “Right. Now I get why you’d want to hang around here instead. You don’t want to deal with Gallardo’s early-morning rantfest.”
    “Yeah, so you should really think about letting me stay.” Jules fingers Breckon’s shirt again. “Save me from a fate worse—” Her lips pause on the unspoken words, her face creasing in regret.
    “Worse than death,” Breckon finishes. His shoulders jerk up into a detached shrug. “Saying it doesn’t make things worse than they are.”
    Jules sighs soundlessly and steps towards the door. “Okay, I’m going. Call me later?”
    Breckon nods in confirmation, and once she’s gone he heads directly back upstairs, steps out of his clothes, digs another sleeping pill out from his bedside table and pulls the covers over himself, waiting for it to work.
    Even when it does, and there’s nothing for me to see or hear but a slight rustling of sheets or the noise of a van driving by outside the window, I’m completely stuck within the walls that surround Breckon.
    It’s eerily intimate, watching someone sleep, especially a guy my age. It’s just a dream and I shouldn’t care, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m invading his privacy. No one but me knows about that morning sleeping pill or how he cried in the shower until he was shaking and sick yesterday. I feel an unfair responsibility for him tug at my consciousness and it makes me home in on his breathing again—or more accurately, the breathing beneath his being.
    Asleep, what previously sounded agonizingly similar to lungs filling up with shards of glass currently resembles a more muted noise, perhaps like that of shredding paper with your bare hands. Perhaps? The word doesn’t sound like me. This is what I mean about beginning to feel more and more like Ashlyn Baptiste—realizing she doesn’t use words like perhaps .
    Even in my amnesia state, I remember more words than I would probably use in conversation. Hence, doth, perchance , each of those feels exotic and ancient to me, though less so than they ever were in life, as though I could think in Shakespearean terms if I chose to. “Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say good night till it be morrow.” Why is it that I can recall the story of