There was something absurd—almost comical—about the way the manifestation of my worst fear materialized, like a cartoon wrecking ball falling out of the sky and smashing a brand new car.

I stared at it, and it seemed to stare back; a pale apparition standing behind a brown, faded picket fence. It was just barely visible in the beam of the truck’s headlights.

Most of it was obscured by the shadows cast by the fence, but the important parts were bright and clear.

The sign said in bold, red letters: “FOR SALE”. Below that was a real estate agent listing, a bit harder to make out.

My first thought was, Huh.

For a while, possibly several minutes, I sat frozen in the driver’s seat, letting the engine idle.

You don’t know. You don’t know what it means.

But I did, though. I could feel the cold, numbing certainty of it. The reality. The only other time I’d felt this—though to a lesser degree—had been in the backseat behind my parents, just before the collision. The same “Huh.” The same “I wonder.” All the while, actually knowing.

Oscar’s parents are moving.

The front porchlight zapped on, flickered. Oscar was standing on the front step.

I shut off the engine and got out of the car.

Oscar walked down the steps toward the front gate. I looked for some expression on his face, something to go off of, but it was just shrouded enough by shadows that I couldn’t make it out. I was watching a clockwork mannequin, a moving statue in the night.

Usually, he moved with the type of comfortable, straight-backed confidence that never ceased to make me feel at least a little jealous. I always had terrible posture.

Honestly, I didn’t even know how the straight-backed thing was even achieved. Is it surgical? Are rods injected at the base of the shoulder and into the spine? I bet they are.

But that night, he didn’t have that comfortable-in-his-own-skin energy I was used to. He made slow steps across the grass, shoulders hunched, hands in his jean pockets.

It was hard to imagine I’d still been in a wheelchair the day we met. I had been trying to reach a comic on the top shelf of a display. The comic’s cover said, in bold print: “RITHIUM”. Volume number seven.

I still thought that volume had the best cover art in the entire series. It had this grassy, sprawling vista, with bits of grass being blown up into the air. A hunched figure stood in the foreground, at the edge of the vista, his back to the reader, his dark hair and trench coat tails flapping in the wind. He had a revolver slung at each hip, and a sheathed katana strapped to his back. High in the sky, a red-scaled dragon spread its wings, spewing flames into the blue.

Oscar, who’d come into the shop looking for the same volume, had reached over and handed it to me, letting me take the last copy.

It turned out he owned a limited edition figure of the character on the front of that volume. In my opinion, the best character in the whole series: The Drifting Gunman.

Rithium had been a world we both loved back then, but not in the same way it was now. Back then, it hadn’t been a Simworld, a real actual place we could visit and see. Just a fantasy world. A fiction.

I suppose, in a way, both versions are just as real. As real and tangible a part of your life any fantasy world can become.

“Waylaid by bandits?” Oscar said. I still couldn’t quite make out his face, even with the porchlight on, backlighting him.

“Worse. Chores. Also,” I said, pointing in the direction of the sign, “I think someone’s trying to sell your house.”

“Did you get my texts?”

“No?” I said. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and started flipping through the notifications. “I haven’t looked at my phone since I finished up. I showered, changed, and came straight here.”

“I was going to talk to you about it, tonight.” He came to a stop next to the waist-high gate. “And then, I wasn’t sure if you were coming, so I texted you…” There was the shrill scrape of metal as Oscar opened the gate, stepped through it.

I glanced up from the phone. “Why wouldn’t I be coming?”

I could see his face, now. It was wired with these uncharacteristically tense lines. He was bracing, on edge.

He thinks I’m going to flip out at him.

And maybe I was. I had a tendency to do that. I wasn’t great at making friends, despite how desperate I could be for a relationship. I was so scared of being alone, especially now. But as soon as I got close with someone, there was always that sense of vulnerability, of needing another person. And that terrified me too. So something would happen, and I would lash out. Most of my memories with Oscar—especially my earlier ones—involved me hanging with Oscar at his place, sometimes talking about stuff we liked, sometimes playing RPGs and MMOs together. Being able to be his friend gave me this feeling of community and belonging that was unlike anything I’d felt before. But it also brought out the worst in me, marring the best memories with some of my worst. A heartfelt photo album tarnished by black, oily handprints and scuffs.

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Oscar shrugged. “You said you might be short. Wasn’t sure if you’d worked something out.”

“Yeah, well, I did. I worked something out.” Stealing. I’m a thief, now, Oscar. Isn’t that swell. “I was just late with chores, that’s all.”

Oscar checked his watch, angling it at the light of my phone. “Hopefully, we won’t be too late.”

“He won’t care. Not as long as he gets his money. ‘We should talk’!?” I lowered the phone. “Way to be ominous. That’s some girlfriend crap, right there.”

“How would you know?” Oscar said.

“Ouch.”

After a moment of hesitation, both of us standing there, neither of us knowing what to say, we both started to amble toward the pickup truck, and climbed in.

We slammed the side doors in unison. I started the engine.

I was looking into the rearview mirror, avoiding eye contact.

“I didn’t know.” Oscar said. “Not until just a few days ago. But you know they were always talking about it. My parents...they’ve never been crazy about his place. They don’t like the schools. And dad always thought he’d be able to find better work somewhere else. Last week he got a job offer, and I guess he’s taking it.”

I had no idea what Mr. Wilson did for a living. He must have explained it to me four different times, and I still didn’t understand. To be honest, I could never bring myself to care. Every time he opened his mouth about it I could feel my eyes going glassy. I would do that thing where I imagine the speaker’s head being magically removed from their body and bounced around the room, knocking into various objects. This kept me stimulated and aware of my surroundings, appearing attentive. A trick normally reserved for hour-long sermons at church.

“Where at?” I said.

“Missoula.” He answered quickly, all one syllable. Like ripping off a bandaid.

“Huh.”

Honestly, it could have been worse. Missoula wasn’t Paris. It wasn’t Baghdad. It wasn’t freaking Narnia. It was just a city on the other side of the state.

All the way on the other side of the freaking state. That’s an eight hour drive, pal. When’s the next time Evelyn’s going to let you off of work for an entire day? And that would just be getting there. It’s a whole other day to get back.

I decided to ignore those thoughts, for now. Nothing productive would come of it. Why ruin what could be one of the last times that Oscar and I got to hang out like this?

“You could always stay with me and Evelyn.” I said, forcing myself to smirk. “Work on the farm. It would be a blast.”

Oscar grinned. He knew how I felt about the farmwork. All I wanted was a life closer to what he had. Farmers don’t get a day off, and the homeschool on top of that was making me feel increasingly claustrophobic, smothered.

“My parents think I can get into a decent college.” Oscar said, looking over at me.

I frowned. “They’ve got those here, don’t they?”

“Not according to them. Not like what they want. They really want the best for me.”

And that involves getting away from me.

It was nothing Oscar had said, or even insinuated. Just my own personal suspicion. I could imagine them peeking through the blinds late at night, wondering where we were, wondering what I was doing with their sweet, precious boy. Time spent playing arcades and goofing around in town(even though that wasn’t really what we were doing) was time that could be spent on productive, character-building things, like studies, and maybe a part-time job.

“So you’re definitely not going to run away?” I said. “You could fake your own death. Or a kidnapping. There’s a crawl space behind the wall in my room I’m pretty sure Evelyn doesn’t know about.”

“You know,” Oscar said, “I know you’re joking. But I also know you’re kinda not.”

“That settles it.” I said. “Kidnapping. We’ll leave a note at your dad’s work.”

“Not that we’re not joking,” Oscar said, “But you know my parents would tear your aunt’s place apart looking for me. They’d find that crawl space.”

“...well, yeah…” I said, eyes on the road. “Probably.”

Then, it came to me. It was a silver-lining, of sorts. Or just the bargaining phase of my grief.

“Maybe there’s a cloudbox somewhere in Missoula.” I said. “Maybe—”

“Maybe...”

I felt my brows knit together. “What?”

Oscar shrugged. “I—I dunno.”

“No, tell me.”

He sighed, drummed his fingers on the dashboard, then seemed to freeze, head tilted at an angle.

“You remember that spring break when all we did was play Final Fantasy XIV?”

I couldn’t help but grin. All that week I’d managed to cop out of a decent amount of my chores so I could leave early and head straight to Oscar’s every day. We’d holed up inside Oscar’s room with Doritos and Mountain Dew, with a chair braced against the doorknob to keep Jackie out.

“You’re asking if I remember one of the best weeks of my sorry life?”

“It wasn’t bad.” Oscar said, looking wistful. “Sometimes it’s good to just shut out the world, to get lost in something. And I think it was good for you, too, back then. I think it was one of the things that helped you get back on your feet. Literally.”

“Yeah right.” I said. “Look at me. I’m useless. I don’t even know what the next step is.”

“When I first met you, you had all those muscle problems. You couldn’t walk. You kept getting those hand tremors. Couldn’t even unscrew a bottle cap.”

“Couldn’t play Street Fighter, either.” I said. “Talk about a disability.”

“Now look at you. You’ve completely recovered. You earn your keep, doing honest work every day. You’re driving. You haven’t totaled the truck yet.”

“Give it another month or so.” I said.

“You’re gonna be okay.” Oscar said, looking over at me. “I believe that. But you’ve got to stop running.”

“You know I don’t like running,” I said. “It’s high impact. Hell on the joints—are you going somewhere with this?”

I could feel my jaw clenching up. I didn’t like it when Oscar got like this. He was my friend, not my mentor. Certainly not my psychoanalyst.

Maybe sometimes that’s what being a good friend calls for, though.

Yeah, no. Shut up.

“Look at it this way,” Oscar said, adjusting in his seat. He seemed almost uncomfortable with what he was about to say. Nervous. “If you’re moving at the speed of light—”

“A sensation I’m sure we’re all familiar with.”

“You’re always going to be faster than sound. Sound is fast, too. But it’s never going to catch up to the speed of light. The question is, how long can something maintain the speed of light? What happens when the speed runs out?”

“Wow, Oscar.” I said. “Your existential crisis metaphor is blowing my mind right now, but what does—”

Just then, we went over a bump at the top of a hill on Ash Creek Road, and there was a loud thump in the backseat.

Oscar and I exchanged glances. I tilted the rearview mirror.

There was a thick, brown blanket draped across the backseat. Evelyn liked to keep there in case—I mean, I don’t know. I got stuck somewhere and started to get cold, I guess. So it was normal that when I looked back there, the blanket was there.

What wasn’t normal was that there was what appeared to be a human-shaped lump underneath the blanket.