The Thing Nobody Believed

I saw him the night before the viewing, alone, because I asked Mr. Whitfield for ten minutes and he gave me twenty out of pity.

His hand felt warm. Not room-temperature-warm, not the specific cool a body gets — actually warm, the way a hand feels when someone's been holding a mug of coffee. I told my mother that on the phone that night and she started crying in a new way, a tired way, and said, "Ethan, honey, that's not possible, and I need you to stop saying things like that to me right now, I can't do this and grieve him at the same time."

I told my uncle the next morning. He put a hand on my shoulder and said the kind of thing people say when they've decided a teenager is in denial: "Grief does strange things to the mind, bud. It's okay to not be okay."

I told Mr. Whitfield, who had seen a hundred grieving kids swear a hundred impossible things, and who told me, kindly, that bodies sometimes retain warmth longer than people expect, that it didn't mean anything, that I should let myself say goodbye and let him rest.

Nobody was cruel about it. Everybody had a reasonable explanation. And every single one of them was wrong, in a way that was about to become impossible to explain away in a hallway.