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She first saw the boy near midnight.
Waking not from nightmares, but from black dreams composed of emptiness was routine- Nene would lie on her back, counting the ceiling tiles, unable to move under thin sheets and the air heavy with the sound of her heartbeats.
It was upon one of these occasions, an insignificant night in autumn, when the haze of her vision drifted to the gap between a cabinet and footstool. A flash of gold, glint of black, and the shadow was gone, disappeared from the outlines of her vision, as if he’d just been nothing more than a spark of electricity.
The next time was when she was crying.
Nene had thought she’d simply run out of tears years ago. That’s what she would have liked to think, except some days all it took was a glance at the vase of cosmos on her bedside table, or the unworn pastel slippers on the ground, and her shoulders would start to shake.
She rubbed the redness from her eyes, blinked back her sadness, and at the foot of her bed, he was there when she regained her sight.
“Why are you crying?” he asked.
“I’m not crying,” she choked out.
“I’ve been in this room for years, I know crying when I hear it.”
Before she could muster up a response, he was gone, and Nene inhaled. It came in shaky, uneven, in small amounts that her lungs should have welcomed, but instead expelled from her body like oxygen was a foreign thing.
Like she hadn’t played soccer after school, gasping for breath, full of life and vibrancy and the futures she’d been planning. Like she’d never dived into the ocean, scooped seashells up off the sand, and held her nose against the water. Like she hadn’t laughed so hard she was doubled over at the stomach, cheeks flushed from happiness.
Instead, she was five miles from home with two cylinders of oxygen in the corner of her hospital room, legs that couldn’t get halfway down the hallway, and still-healing bruises from falls that winded her more than they should have.
~~~
She learned his name was Hanako.
“I’ll call you Hanako-kun,” she told him one morning, when he sat on the edge of her bed reading a postcard out loud. “It’s more like we’re friends, right?”
Hanako told her he didn’t have friends. He told her he was dead, told her he was a ghost, as if it would scare her away and fill her body with terror and send her scrambling to the nurse call button.
“I already knew,” she laughed instead. “It’s a bit hard to miss.”
“And you’re not afraid of me?”
“Not in the least bit.”
The light, piercing when he drew the curtains aside, dissolved him into transparencies and sunbeams.
“I’ve never had many friends. I wouldn’t be a very good one.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she smiled, “I’ll just have to prove you wrong.”
Sometimes he was gone for weeks at a time. Sometimes he’d spend whole days with her, flipping through the three channels her television picked up, reading novels over her shoulder, playing with her hair.
She learned how to coexist with his touch, with the body of a corpse. Not cold, nor warm, nor something in-between. It was the sensation of nothingness brushing over her fingers- an assigned weight and volume, yet no discernible temperature. Hanako dispelled the scent of disinfectant from the room and replaced it with something metallic, earthy, and sickly sweet. He left his presence trailing over the posters on the walls, wrote it into her everyday life, and like all things, she adjusted.
She learned he loved the stars, and in turn, learned to love them herself.
Bad news had become a way of life. First an innocuous cough had turned into a doctor’s visit. Then her feet, which gave out on the stairs at school, turned into another weekend spent in the hospital. Finding that her breathing didn’t come easy as it used to turned into a look exchanged between her mother and father, sympathetic smiles, and get-well cards signed by all of her classmates.
This still didn’t lessen the shock when her nurse looked at a chart, frowned, and went to retrieve a doctor. And so Nene when couldn’t fall asleep that night, with her legs that only could feel static, and Hanako was right there with her.
“Talk to me,” she asked, and he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Anything. Why the sky is blue, the invention of the airplane, I don’t mind.”
He got up, and parted those curtains again, the ones with the ugly design she had always hated. This time there was no sunlight to stream through, and he pointed to the stars.
“How about these?”
Nene closed her eyes, and found sleep in the tales of Casseopia and Aries, red giants and constellations, how the universe was an explosion still in motion.
She learned he’d once been in the same bed as her, though that was many years ago, he said, and his brother in the next room over.
She learned he’d been fourteen and much too young to have a knife in his hands.
She learned what it felt like to be promised he’d be there for her in the morning and to wake up with arms around her. A long dead, warmth-stealing embrace, but an embrace nonetheless.
And on her worst days, he’d sit in the chair across the room until she was ready to talk. Aoi would visit, her parents would visit, and when they left the room she would let Hanako hold her until the knot in her chest unraveled.
“You know these don’t really work, right?” he said one day, flicking the origami dangling above her bed.
She knew: a thousand paper cranes, even a hundred thousand, no matter how expertly folded, couldn’t be anything but based on flimsy hopes.
“Maybe there’s some truth in it,” she lied, “Maybe I’ll get better soon.”
Hanako looked her up and down.
“Soon, huh?”
Nene kept her steady expression and nodded.
“I’m sure of it.”
~~~
Hanako stood on the empty third level of the hospital parking lot, where all that stretched out in front of him was sky and a moon visible even before the day plunged into the late hours of twilight.
“Hanako-kun!”
He turned.
Nene was climbing up the steps, exhilaration shining in her eyes, oxygen filling her lungs, legs strong. He’d never seen her run, had barely seen her walk without aid, and it seemed so out of place for her to wear the perfect picture of health.
“I found you,” she proclaimed with a note of glee, taking his hand. Hanako cleared his throat, erased the creases from his forehead, grinned.
Nene was there. Nene was there with him, and he could feel her and touch her and tell her about the stars where the air wasn’t sterilized with the scent of lavender cleaning solution.
“You found me,” he repeated back, with a lilt in his voice, feeling the fabric on her shoulder when it pressed against his own. A school uniform, he thought- striped ribbons, scalloped hem, a skull-shaped brooch that almost elicited a laugh when he noticed it. “What are you doing out here?”
“I wanted to show you!” She released him and gestured to herself. “I got better, see. Proved you wrong again!”
Nene twirled, arms outstretched to the sky. Her shoes squeaked on the concrete, the toes colored with red-painted rubber.
He learned she’d been a first-year high schooler when she died.