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isn’t so unusual, even at eight o’clock at night. She sleeps so she doesn’t have to be awake, so she will be conscious of what’s happened as little as possible.
    I wish I could sleep like that.
    I spend an hour doing homework. Then I reach that time when normally I would go downstairs to watch TV.
    This is a dilemma. I haven’t ventured into the basement in four days, not even to do laundry. I haven’t watched TV. I haven’t brought it up with Mom that maybe the cologne thing wasn’t so ridiculous after all.
    Yes, I’m aware that I’m a total coward.
    I take out the journal Dave gave me. For a few seconds I actually consider writing in it again, scribbling down a long confession about everything I haven’t said out loud. About the ghost. Aboutthe text. About Steven. About Ty. About me. But I can’t make myself do it.
    So I stick the moleskin notebook under my mattress as a tribute to clichés and curl up on my bed for a while, reading A Beautiful Mind , which I can’t get into. Then I try Contact by Carl Sagan, which is my favorite novel ever, but my eyes move across the page without finding meaning in the words. I keep thinking about the look on Ty’s face when I threw the phone at him: startled and offended and a little sad. I’d never thrown anything at him before. We weren’t like that. We always got along.
    Suddenly I’m furious. I think, So what, I’m never going to go into the basement again? I’m going to tiptoe around my own house until I leave for college? I’m going to be scared of what, a figment of my imagination? What am I, like ten years old? Afraid of the dark?
    Get over yourself, Lex, I tell myself. Grow a pair.
    So I jump up. I march straight down into the basement and stand for a few minutes glaring at that spot where Ty appeared the other night, at the small dent in the wall that is of course still there from where I chucked my phone at him. I make myself stand there for a full five minutes.
    I don’t see anything weird. I don’t smell anything weird. I just feel stupid.
    His bedroom door is open.
    I go to the doorway. The moon is shining through the window. I haven’t been in Ty’s room since we went in to get the clothes he was buried in, but it looks the same as I remember. His desk iscluttered with books and school stuff. Clothes on the floor. Shoes. A partially deflated basketball. A dusty old model airplane dangling from the ceiling that he and Dad built together when he was eleven. Pictures of his friends taped to the walls. Posters of bands and movies he liked and NBA players.
    As I step inside, his scent envelops me—not just his cologne but that slightly goatlike aroma he had, and his deodorant, which smells faintly minty. Pencil shavings. Dirty socks. Wood glue.
    Ty.
    I swallow. It’s like he’s still here, not in a ghostlike way, but like it never happened. If I stay here, if I close my eyes, I can imagine that Ty is just out somewhere and that he’ll be back.
    I wish I could cry. That would be the appropriate thing to do at this moment: to remember my brother and cry.
    But I can’t.
    I turn to go out, and that’s when I see someone sleeping in his bed. The covers are lumped up around a figure on its side, back to me.
    My heart starts to pound. I know it’s not Ty, I know it can’t be, but in that moment I want it to be. I want to see him again even if it means I’m crazy. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t tell Dave, or why I can’t write it down, because then they’ll very definitely make me take the pills and what happened the other night with the phone won’t happen again, and I’ll never see Ty, not ever, for as long as I live, and I don’t believe in an afterlife so I won’t get to see him then, either.
    I know this isn’t the best reasoning.
    But I still think it.
    I creep around to the other side of the bed. I touch the