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my presence. The cuffs of her pajamas fluttered from the wavering rise of heat.
    I looked down at the mirror on the floor. I couldn't see myself, only a crack in the ceiling.
    "Rachel," I said in a pleading voice. I wanted her as my girl. My loneliness was deep as that mirror. What could I do but feel self-pity because the one life I had was gone?
    I sat on Rachel's couch, and using all my will, I snapped off the television set. The monster truck had been climbing onto the back of a Chevy Nova Super Sport, the kind of car that I would have gotten if I had lived. The destruction disappeared in an egg of light, and the television screen went black.
    Rachel put a hand to her mouth. She brought the hand from her mouth. "Chuy?"

    "Yeah, it's me," I answered. I could see that she was beginning to shiver, in spite of her position over the furnace vent.
    "I'm sorry, Chuy."
    And she was. Tears formed in her eyes and spilled in a long line down her cheeks. I noticed that more tears were coming out of her left eye and was troubled that I couldn't ask my biology teacher, Mr. Knight, about tears, why one eye would tear more than the other. Then again, I could have asked why some people cry over romantic movies while the guys I ran with watched the screen dry-eyed, their hands buttery from the popcorn.
    "Chuy, you shouldn't have gone." She rubbed her index finger under her nose. She reached into her pajama pocket for a Kleenex.
    "It's okay," I said. "I'm still getting around."
    Then I saw how that would soon change. My left foot was gone! It had disappeared, and this frightened me. I touched the place where my foot had been. "Man, it's gone," I whispered. I looked around the living room, as if my foot had just walked off. Maybe it's in the kitchen. Who knows? It could be walking down the street right now.
    "Jesus," I moaned. "I'm dying after all." But I
realized that I was already dead, though my spirit, it seemed, was going as well. First this foot, then the other?

    "Chuy" Rachel cried, her face pinched with lines. "Jesús, Jesús."
    Jesús,
I wondered. Was she calling for Christ, or for me, a seventeen-year-old ghost disappearing one body part at a time?
    She cried over the floor furnace, and, with her face smeared with mascara, pushed away from the wall. She walked down the hallway that led to the bedrooms, but I didn't follow. I then heard water running in the bathroom. The shower went on, and it was time for me to leave the house. It was time to see my parents, two souls who were crying, maybe in front of the muted television, over the loss of a son.

Chapter Four
    I FELT THE NEED to say good-bye to my parents and to my uncle Richard and cousin Eddie, plus friends, distant friends, and every kind soul I had met on the street. Then there was my track coach, Mr. Morales, who was just out of Fresno State and could run faster than any of his distance runners. Maybe I could find out where he lived and run over there. Until now, I never understood what "good-bye,
adios,
see you later, alligator" meant. I always assumed that I would go to school in the morning and come back in the afternoon, and things would be the same. Now I knew different.

    I left Rachel's house, disturbed because my foot was gone and because I knew that in time—three days? four days?—I would disappear. I felt lighter—the wind picked up and, like it or not, I was tossed westward again back to downtown and the Fulton Mall. I peered into the boutique that I had visited earlier, and the girl—what's her name?—was still reading
People en Español,
a different issue, but still speeding along and taking in the fashions. There were no customers; she had to find ways to kill time. I guess she could think about how to prop up those drooping candles or put a little color back in those plastic flowers.

    I straddled a splintery bench and listened to the spines of water splashing from a fountain. Sparrows flew through my ribs, and a pigeon the color