Felix didn’t think there was anything he hated more than being wet, which was why it was indeed unfortunate that Glönsby was in its Fog season again. During a Fog, he could very nearly drink the air. His clothes had a perpetual dampness, meshing into a giant, Felix-sized wet sock. The neighborhood muddied into blue-purples and grays, not that he could see much anyway. He needed to wipe his glasses about as often as he blinked, always with his perpetually damp sleeves.

He once talked to his science teacher about building tiny, little windshield wipers for his glasses lens. The little rotors would be on the sides, and the arms would swipe up and down from them. Felix presented a diagram for Mr. Alm, and his teacher made a half-hearted comment on his artistry. The next day, Mr. Alm gave him a handkerchief. Felix didn’t like the pattern, a not-quite-plaid that reminded him of the mildewed fences around his great-aunt’s house that gave him splinters once. He never used the handkerchief, nor did he think about the eyeglass wipers again. Felix always had his sleeves.

Felix was, of course, never unique in his distaste of the Fog. The neighborhood residents disliked it to the specific extent that they never spoke of it, like it was the Devil. Felix was content to ignore the Fog too, except at home. Mamma was always telling him to be careful with hot showers. The extra humidity might ruin their ventilation.

Between complaining about Felix’s lack (of many things. It changed by the day. Most often it was his lack of resolve), she also complained about the ringing in her ears or the stuffiness of her nose. Whenever she got congestion in particular, her cooking would worsen and Felix especially hated it when she made soup. He could boil water and it would taste the same with less effort.

Sometimes, Mamma wouldn’t say anything at all, but she would open the blinds and stare at nothing. Her eyes glazed over, not wet but rather translucent. The walls didn’t stop the Fog. Nothing did.

Besides the Fog, Felix also hated living on the outer islands because his bus was terribly slow. If he missed one, he had to wait another hour, assuming the next bus was on schedule. Felix had already been blinking water from his eyes for forty minutes when a girl in a bright green raincoat sprinted over. She stopped to glance at her watch, groaned, and then plopped down next to him on the bench. At the sight of her coat and her sleek black hair, Felix had recognized her quickly as Sayori.

She was a jittery girl, always moving and always faster than everyone in their grade, even the boys. Felix had thought that she was fairly harmless, as long as you weren’t in her way when she was careening down the halls for whatever reason.

He smiled at her.

“Felix Nyström, am I right?” Sayori did not smile very often, but she was thoughtful of others. Or at least had an impressive memory.

“Yeah.” He had heard too many hall monitors and teachers yelling her name to not know it, although Felix didn’t want to seem like a creep for remembering.

“Sayori Svenson,” she said.

“Cool.”

A bead of condensed fog slipped down the back of his neck before the icy trail was swallowed into his knitted collar. Felix wished he hadn’t stayed back talking to Mr. Alm for so long today.

“The Fog comes from the Brook, did you know?”

Felix had an urge to wipe his glasses, as if it would have any effect on his ears. He looked at her for a moment, reading nothing from her dark, flat eyes. “What brook?” he said.

“The Blue Brook. It’s in the woods behind my house, a few minutes from the Vestergrensvagen stop.” She gave him enough detail that it almost sounded like an invitation. “I’ve been desperate to tell someone. I say the best secrets are the ones that shouldn’t be secrets in the first place.”

“Right.”

Sayori leaned too far into his space, before pulling back a fraction. “Everyone at school is so stuffy about the Fog. I know you know what I mean.”

Felix glanced around the road before saying, “The Fog makes everyone feel stuffy.”

“Not you. You have clouds in your eyes,” she said. “That’s different.”

“Thanks,” he murmured and angled himself away by roughly 91 degrees.

Felix would think, for some time later, that this was the nicest compliment he had ever received.

Felix once had good friends. He still remembered all their names. If he saw them in the hallway or on the street, the sound of their name would shape his tongue, but the call would suffocate there, because he remembered they already forgot him. It was understandable. It had been some years since Felix had spoken to any of them.

On the first day of the Fog this year, it happened with Erik. Felix was turning a corner, and they almost bumped into one another. While Erik whispered an apology to him, Felix noticed that Erik’s tan had deepened since Felix last saw him, almost concealing his freckles. Wherever he had moved to three years ago must have had more sun than Glönsby. By the time he finished that trickle of thought, Erik had brushed past him. Felix’s mouth felt empty as he turned the corner and rushed out of the school. At the bus stop, he sat down twelve minutes ahead of schedule, which was more silence and dampness than he ever liked to bear. He pushed his glasses on top of his head and closed his eyes for what he hoped was twelve minutes.

“Hey, Felix.”

The next thing he saw was the splotch of Sayori’s green coat. She dropped down onto the bench, a respectable distance away. Her tone had been perfunctory, and she didn’t make any move to look at him after he returned the greeting.

Eventually, nineteen minutes passed, silently and damply, after which they filed onto the bus. Felix let Sayori board first. He listened to music on his headphones and stared out the blurred window, as he often did when he wasn’t getting extra homework done on the ride. At Vestergrensvagen, out of the corner of his eyes, he spotted green walking slowly down the aisle. Off-kilter with a backpack slung on one shoulder.

The realization popped in him like a bubble. Felix leaped up from his seat and flung himself out of the bus just as the doors slid close. He almost barreled into Sayori, who was staring at him in consternation.

“Sayori.”

“This isn’t your stop,” she said.

“You never get on the early bus,” Felix replied.

The bus, leaving with a rumble, drowned out Sayori’s response.

“What?”

“I said ‘Sometimes I want to leave early.’ You got a problem with that?”

“No. No!” Felix wrung a hand around the back of his neck. “I was wondering. That’s all.”

Sayori raised a single eyebrow, making her appear positively adult-like, which was somewhat terrifying. She seemed to be waiting for him to say more, but Felix couldn’t even pretend he had more to say. He shifted on his feet.

Sayori dropped her shoulders. “Remember what I said about the brook?” she finally said.

Felix raised his head a little higher. “Yeah.”

“Since you’re here,” she muttered, “let’s go.”

He vaguely had the thought that his mother might be upset with him taking such a detour, but Felix followed her onto the road, because there were no sidewalks. Sayori didn’t say much until they went off-road altogether.

“It’s a bit of a hike from here. Keep up.”

For no reason at all, he held his breath as they ventured into the woods. It proved to be difficult as the incline grew. When his body had forced him to breathe again, he kept it shallow, although the coldness still slid down his throat, lazy and viscous. The sound of Sayori’s footsteps was perhaps the only concrete object in his senses, and even then, it came at a distance and cadence a slight beat faster. Felix could just barely see the faint trail at his feet and an imprint of her reflective coat ahead of him, but each time it began to fade, a spark of fear quickened his pace, all the way until he heard the water. Then, like the eye of a storm, the Fog completely cleared at the banks of the brook. As he took the air in, the crispness of it almost cut. His exhales produced white puffs, clouds for an instant. Felix quickly numbed to the cold. It came with a clarity that burned in opposition.

He opened his mouth to speak, but a shape in the water stopped him. It moved, unlike a current, unlike a fish, and unlike a stone. He had no chance to make sense of it before a ripple of water dispelled all notion of its existence.

“Did you see that?” he asked, but Sayori wasn’t listening.

She had gotten even farther up the brook, where the rocks were mossy and Felix felt cautioned against a slip as he bound after her. Sayori eventually kneeled down at the very edge of an empty bank, and he sat down a ways behind her, hugging an arm around one of his knees.

She dipped her hand into the water and held them there, even as her fingertips tinged red. “You know, I turned fourteen today.”

Felix’s mouth fell open. “You’re a year younger?”

She struck a peace sign with her rosy fingers. “I skipped a grade.”

He expected her to flaunt it a little more, but Sayori only dropped her hand back down to the brook, this time only dipping a single finger in and watching the water part around it. The sound of trickling seemed to speak for her differently, whispering in long, subliminal syllables. She had a soft smile on her face, the kind you could only see when looking from the side.

Felix plunked his cheek down onto his propped knee. “Happy birthday, Sayori.”

Her eyebrows, both of them, lifted in surprise before a grin flashed across her face. “You’re the first person who’s told me that today.”

He was genuinely surprised at that, and it must have shown on his face, because she then said, “Thank you for keeping up with me.”

Felix shook his head. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I still couldn’t actually catch up to you.”

Another part of him simply knew. Sayori had taken it slow, for his sake.

His högstadiet years concluded with only a pat on the head from Mr. Alm.

“I enjoyed having you in my classes,” he told Felix. “Just get your head out of the clouds, alright?”

Felix met with Sayori after. Not at the bus station, but at the Blue Brook, because no amount of coaxing from him seemed to ever get her on time to anything except by accident. He loved to recall the time she arrived early at their favorite lunch spot for the first time ever, only to realize it hadn’t opened yet because of holiday hours. Felix had a good laugh at that. That aside, Sayori’s lateness made him early. It was like his own little secret.

He would rest near the banks, enjoying the sounds of the water. Most of the time, it was a hum, a continuous but cacophonous chord. The noise cleansed his head, flooding out every nook and cranny where thoughts festered. It rushed through his orifices and smoothed out every crooked nerve. He could have sat there until his brain was as flat as a river stone if it didn’t also leave him vulnerable to Sayori’s shenanigans. 

A sting on his scalp caused him to spin around.

“Why would you do that?” Felix said to Sayori, who was holding a strand of his hair.

She pulled it taut. “It’s gotten so long!”

His hand whipped out to snatch it back, but Sayori darted to the side and then away. She balanced on a trio of stones nearer the center of the brook, from which she shot him a cheeky smile. Felix rolled his eyes. He stood up, cold hands stuck in the openings of his jacket.

He took a quick sprint forward, but Sayori caught it for the fake-out it was. Felix loosened his shoulders and waved a hand. “Okay, you have my attention. What is it?”

“When winter comes around, the Blue Brook freezes over for roughly a week,” Sayori said, hands held behind her back. “It’s thick enough to jump on.”

Felix was apprehensive of what she would say next.

She held a foot over the water as if she was about to step off. “Do you own ice skates?”

He was immediately terrified of the idea of Sayori on skates. “Yeah. My dad has a pair,” he answered. “He never skates though. I’ll probably fit them.”

And like that, plans were made.

Sayori had told him much about the Blue Brook, in bits and pieces, like droplets falling into the space between his eyes. She never withheld her secrets but rather forgot about them until she remembered. Felix thought himself familiar enough after a while. He knew that after a period of rain, the brook hissed and snapped at his toes in a foamy fury. On days of lighter trickles, it babbled like a child, tripping over itself and gurgling without rhyme. Felix liked to watch, like a caretaker, and because of this, he knew things that Sayori didn’t.

There were oysters in the water, camouflaged so well with the rocks that Felix was amazed he spotted them at all. In his periphery just then, he saw one of them, a crooked and gray thing jutting out at an angle. And there was that flicker again, of the light or the water or the glare on his glasses. It was only once the Blue Brook iced over that he would stop seeing them.

When winter later rolled around and the times after that, for one reason or another they never did go ice skating.

“Ow! Stop doing that!”

Sayori was gripping another strand of his hair.

This time, he dashed after her. Sayori decided to play fair and stayed on the grass as she broke into a sprint, the wind sweeping her hair into a whip. The current of the brook rushed past them in the opposite direction, and her laugh rang in his ears. Before long, Felix’s throat burned. The further they ran, the further Sayori slipped ahead.

Sometimes he wondered why he bothered, chasing someone who would never be caught.

Felix’s hair was about the only thing that his mother complimented him on. It was lovely, thick, and golden like the fuzzy edges of sunset-struck clouds. His bangs always got into his eyes since she didn’t let him cut his hair often, so he eventually decided to grow it out. It didn’t hurt to have more of his most redeeming quality, and he could at least tie it back once in a while. Then also, Sayori loved to plait it.

Felix heard the snap of the elastic near his ear and felt the braid drop against his shoulder.

“All done,” she said, turning around. “Now me.”

Felix didn’t think his hair could compare to Sayori’s. It draped down her back like a single stroke of just-dipped ink, glossy and dripping between his fingers as he gently gathered it. Her hair tapered at her hips, but as he braided it, the length protracted to the small of her back.

When he finished, Sayori wasted no more time. “Let’s go.”

The longest Fog season happened during the second year of secondary school. Their first year had passed by in a blur, and it wasn’t until the second that they were ever in a class together. When Felix looked back on it, the rest of his school years were a blur too, but one of multiple paints dragged off a paper with a slow, broad brush. It was perhaps this dragging length why Sayori was always itching to move. Why he and Sayori were able to wander farther along the Brook that day. Sayori would talk, or Felix would talk, and they wouldn’t notice how very mossy the stones under their feet became. They stopped when the sound of the waterfall drowned out their voices.

“Did you know this was here?” Felix asked Sayori.

“Nope.”

He left her to gawp as he stepped on ahead. The waterfall cast a thin, misty haze that bellowed past him. Its roar became ever louder as Felix approached, like the perfect scratch of an itch he was never able to reach. When he finally saw it in its entirety, he found it towering, taller than any building in his town. It had the full width of a two-lane road at the height of its drop but was spun narrow by the funnel of slanted rocks, twisting its cascades into the brook Felix stood upon. But what drew his attention in the end was not the water.

The boy at the waterfall had the sternness of a statue—not the kind that he once saw in the National Museum, but rather one forgotten in the woods and taken by foliage. The shadows obscured his face, giving him a profile of stone, and it was why it took Felix so long to recognize him.

Erik’s head jerked up, and that was when Felix knew that he had gotten too close. He froze in place, and he couldn’t differentiate the rushing in his ears from the rushing of the water.

But at the sight of him, the boy grinned with his entire face, his eyes softening into crescents and his slightly bucked teeth on show.

That was when Felix slipped and fell into the brook.

His arms flailed against the slippery rocks before he caught himself. Felix sat up, sputtering. His glasses were about to slide off his nose, and there was water stinging his eyes.

Erik’s shadow fell over his head. “Still capable of drowning in anything, aren’t you, Felix?”

The shadow extended a hand, and Felix took it. Erik pulled him up like it was nothing. He gripped him a little harder when he almost slipped a second time. Steady, Felix first wiped his glasses with his soaked sleeves, which did very little. He sighed as he put his glasses back on.

“You still remember that?” Felix asked, quiet against the waterfall. He thought about clarifying what he meant, but Erik knew.

“Of course. I saved your ass from that lake.”

Felix scrunched up his nose. “You almost drowned with me.”

“I don’t recall that,” Erik said with a smile. “But I’ve learned to swim since. Have you?”

Felix pursed his lips.

“That’s what I thought.”

Erik’s hands were in his pockets, effortless in a way that seemed to be inversely correlated with Felix’s own calm. He had so many questions yet couldn’t find a single one that wouldn’t make him feel stupid for asking.

Again, Erik saved him. “Nobody else knows about this place. How did you find out?”

“You don’t think I could’ve found it on my own?”

Erik tilted his head. “You didn’t go outside your bubble often. Although, maybe you could have changed.”

“Your bluntness hasn’t.”

“He does like his bubble.” Sayori appeared at Felix’s side. She propped an elbow on his wet shoulder. “He probably hasn’t changed.”

Felix considered falling back into the brook.

Erik smiled at Sayori. “Who’s this?”

“How Felix found out,” she said.

“She showed me where the Fog came from,” Felix explained.

Erik’s lips quirked up higher in amusement. “Here?”

Felix glanced at Sayori for help, but she wasn’t looking at him. “Yeah,” he answered. “From the Blue Brook.”

“That’s not how fogs work.”

“The Fogs in this town aren’t really like other fogs.”

“And it’s always the thickest by the brook,” Sayori said.

Erik sniffled, a common symptom of Glönsby residency. “This is too big to be a brook,” he said. “It’s a river.”

Sayori turned toward the water, hair flipping over the front of her shoulder. “It looks pretty small to me.”

Felix felt enough pressure on either side of him that his ears threatened to pop. They both turned to him, and he could only shuffle his feet before he managed, “So this is Sayori. Sayori, this is Erik.”

“I know,” they both replied at the same time.

“Everyone knows her name,” explained Erik.

“He always sits in the front of every class and never says a word,” said Sayori, an explanation that didn’t explain anything to Felix.

But their smiles lost some of their edge.

“Erik,” Felix said, “show us around the waterfall.”

He still wanted to know how they really knew each other, but he didn’t ask. Felix figured that it must not have been a secret worth telling.

Erik would tell him other ones, though. It started when Felix had a fight with Sayori one morning over the merits of biking, of all things. She had called him a “lazy ass” for not walking like a human should, then Felix flipped her off, and they had been nonverbally snapping at each other for five hours since. In literature class, he had enough and moved to sit with Erik, where he almost started another argument.

They were paired together on a worksheet when Erik said, “Remember when you used to tutor me?”

Felix’s pencil stalled. “I did your homework for you, you mean.”

“Well, you would explain it to me while you did it.” Erik tapped his pencil against Felix’s. “It’s probably why I survived the next few years of mathematics without you.”

A cold part of Felix cracked just a little bit at that statement. He tried to continue the answer he was jotting down, but his grip on the pencil only tightened in place.

“What?” Erik said. He had stopped writing too.

Felix was not sure why, but he always had a harder time holding down his emotions when it came to Erik. “You buzzed off to the States for a ‘few years’ and never said anything,” came out of him in a rush.

For the first time that Felix had seen, the easy expression dropped from Erik’s face. However, instead of backing off, he leaned closer. “I came back and you never came to say ‘hi.’ You never even looked me in the eye.”

Felix did just then. Erik used to have deep brown eyes, but since he’d returned, they had lightened to a reddish-gold hue, which would probably look a light brown if Felix was any farther away. No matter the color, they were always reading, slowly sliding from point to point and absorbing every little detail. Except like now, when Erik was struck by something he didn’t quite understand and his gaze honed to a single focus.

Felix broke eye contact. “You never came to say ‘hi’ either,” he muttered lamely.

Erik let out a laugh and Felix instinctively shrunk back, but he nudged Felix’s shoulder with his. “I missed you too.”

Erik laughed again at Felix’s wide eyes.

“You never said stuff like that,” Felix said in another mutter.

Erik’s mouth curled to the side, a dry expression. “I didn’t want to be in the States. I was an ocean and a sea away from home. That’s the kind of distance that swallows up everything you have to say. Water, no matter the form, is a sort of distance.”

Felix huffed a dry chuckle. “Then take your drink.”

“Ha!” Erik pointed at him with his pencil.

They return to work, and a few jotted answers later, Felix said, “So you’re staying for real then?”

Erik responded, “After I tried so hard to get back to Glönsby? You’re never going to get rid of me again.”

Felix’s mood improved after that, and for once, he forgot about his argument with Sayori about as quickly as she would. 

They started going to the brook every day after school, together. They were an odd trio, where the three of them were more comfortable in silence than in conversation, and Sayori was usually the one who broke the silence.

“What would you guys do if you only had six days left to live?” She was tiptoeing barefoot on the edge of a long, marbled rock.

“Why that number?” Felix asked.

“Hook up with someone,” Erik said.

“Who the hell would want to hook up with you?” Sayori quipped.

Felix added, “You have six days. That can’t be the only thing.”

“Six hookups.”

“Oh my god.” Sayori dropped off of the rock and shouldered into Erik. “How boring.”

“All with the same girl or six different ones?” Felix was not sure why he kept prodding.

“Hey, who said they’d all be girls?”

Felix flushed. He was saved from having to respond by Sayori still trying to tackle Erik. “Boring!”

“Cut it out!” Erik shouted.

Felix pried her off of Erik, which was surprisingly difficult to do despite her size. After accidentally kicking Felix in the shin, they finally stood next to each other again.

“Sayori,” he said. “What would you do if you had only six days left to live?”

She let out a bright hum as if she’d been waiting for him to ask. “I’d like to go to the ocean one last time.” Sayoru stepped backward into the stream, where the current rushed over her ankles. “Follow this brook to the Baltic Sea, through the Øresund to the Northern waters.”

“With what? Your Viking ship?” said Erik, with a tilt of his head.

Felix saw another glint in the water. Briefly, the noise of Erik and Sayori bickering fell to the wayside. Something about Sayori’s answer bothered him too—made his stomach stir too fast. He would later realize that it was the mere thought of their deaths that unsettled him.

Felix saw that glint again. He tried to ignore it again, but this time, Sayori was about to step on it. “Careful!” he shouted, yanking her by her arm.

His momentum almost pulled them both off-balance. It was Erik’s quick arm on his back that kept the two of them from falling over the opposite way.

“What was that?” Sayori asked.

“Something in the water,” Felix answered.

She bent over to look, then stuck her hand in the brook. “It’s an oyster.”

“You can’t just pull it out.” Erik handed her a triangular stone. “Use this.”

Just like that, it wasn’t Felix’s secret anymore. It had slipped out of his hands, with only a faint sting in its wake.

Sayori dislodged the oyster and gave it to him. “You technically found it, so do the honors.”

Felix took the rock too, turning it on its thinnest side. He found a good place to wedge it into the oyster, twisting it until it popped apart.

The oyster cradled a hefty pearl, right by its lip. It glinted at Felix, winking at him almost like it had done so before.

“Well, look at that.” Erik pulled his wrist over to get a closer look. “Bet you could sell it for something decent.”

Gingerly, Felix picked out the pearl, holding it up to the light. It had a light grayish hue and a purple iridescence. The size and roundness was probably average for a river pearl, although he had never held any to know.

Sayori held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

He handed her the pearl.

She took it with a frown. “No, the oyster.”

He gave it over, and she slurped up all the inside of the bottom shell before tossing them both.

“Delicious. Nothing fresher,” Sayori said. “And there’s a lot more around over here.”

Erik grinned and got to work. He didn’t much like seafood, so Sayori ate all the oysters, all next seven of them. Felix too found himself pulling up oysters, nearly knee-deep in the water. The Blue Brook was swelling after a recent storm, but even that didn’t stop him from seeing the sudden shine by Erik’s feet.

Erik whistled. “Score.”

When he cracked it open, there was another pearl, roughly the same if a little lumpier. Sayori ooh-ed at it for a second before she devoured the oyster.

Felix didn’t see any more of those lights, and they gave up after three hours. They had even shifted upstream to a different patch so as to not exhaust the first one. At the end, Felix wiped his forehead with his forearm, where wet strands of his hair clung to his face. He didn’t really mind not having a pearl.

Erik threw his catch up and down in his hand. “All that only for two.” He tossed it to him. “You can have mine.”

Felix extended it back. “I’m fine.”

“Take mine then,” Sayori said, as she was wringing out the soaked ends of her skirt.

“I said I’m fine.”

Her eyes cut toward him. “I didn’t ask if you were fine.”

“Good thing I was fine then.”

Sayori stomped over and held out the pearl. “Just take it already,” she snapped.

He was taken aback, enough to take a step back too. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You never even answered my question from earlier!”

“What does that have to do with this?”

“Why,” she said, “won’t you take it?”

For a moment, Felix almost thought a fourth person had joined them. Her voice was so colorless that it didn’t sound like Sayori, even as he watched the words pass through her mouth.

She took advantage of his shock to press her pearl into his hand.

“I really don’t—”

She was looking at him, but her pupils were contracted, as she was peering at something far behind him.

“What is it?” he asked. Felix glanced at Erik, who followed the path Sayori’s gaze and only shrugged.

“I think I’m tired,” Sayori said softly, as her hand dropped back to her side.

Erik shrugged at him again.

She went home after that. She was often the first to leave. Felix lost track of time, and Erik liked to stay. It was fun, enjoyable simply because it was. Maybe also because he liked to show the pearls he found to Sayori and Erik. After a while, though, Sayori stopped joining them for pearl-picking. She would say she was too tired.

“I think she’s getting sick of me,” Erik said, sounding almost proud of the fact.

On the day of Walpurgis, they lit a fire. Erik said he would go over early to start it. Apparently, he had learned how to make fires while in the States. Sayori wondered out loud if that meant he was an arsonist, and Erik told her he would commit arson on her bedroom. Felix just wiped his glasses to the side.

Felix and Sayori got coffee and walked over to the brook a little bit later. The fog was thick in the chill, like the moisture was on the verge of crystallizing on his face. About halfway, Felix looked over to see that Sayori was shivering. He let out a silent sigh that fanned out like a puff of smoke. He had told her to dress warmer. It was like she had grown out of the green jacket and forgotten that all others existed. He pulled off his jumper and dropped it on her head.

She let out a muffled “Thanks!” as she shoved her arms through the patterned sleeves, and her head popped out through the collar.

“You always reminded me a lot of my older sister,” she said as she pulled her hair out from the jumper, “which is odd because you two are nothing alike.”

He frowned and then tried to hide it. “You never told me that you have an older sister.”

“She died when I was ten.”

Felix rushed to apologize, but Sayori was quicker to continue.

“Well, I might as well tell you the whole thing. She was only thirteen at the time. I think she was sick for a while before, but it wasn’t until that year that we noticed, and then she was gone. The family didn’t take it very well though. My parents divorced, and I moved to Sweden with my dad.” She paused to laugh. “I only chose Pappa because I thought Sweden would be cold enough, so I could be numb all over, but I think I really just wanted to be somewhere other than home.”

Felix watched their shoes and how they stepped in time with one another.

“She used to give me her jacket sometimes, especially when I was cold. Kind of like you do.”

Sayori was wearing a pair of black boots. She never grew out of those.

“It felt like the right time to tell you about her,” she said.

“Yeah?” Felix said softly. “Why is that?”

She didn’t respond, mind already somewhere else. Or perhaps nowhere at all. It didn’t matter because they had made it to the brook.

Their bonfire wasn’t as spectacular as something college students would make, but it was warm and a little too big for their brook bank. Erik was already lounging by it, head lolling to the side as they approached.

“Hey.”

Sayori dropped down next to him, legs crossed. “Hey hey.”

Felix sat on top of a flat rock, next to her and roughly across the fire from Erik, who then pulled out three bottles of beer that he had hidden behind him.

“You didn’t,” Felix deadpanned.

“You didn’t!” Sayori exclaimed, taking one and the bottle opener from Erik’s other hand.

“I’ve already had one,” Erik said.

Felix tried it and hated it. He took tiny sips of it to minimize the taste, and it kept him at the barest buzz the entire night. Sayori finished the whole thing and barely seemed any different, which was a mystery. Erik…

Between whorls of flame, he caught Erik’s eyes. In this light, they shimmered gold instead of bronze. They had sharpened over the years, ceaselessly intelligent but forged and fired to a finish. His friend had an unwavering suaveness that made Felix feel childish in comparison. It clearly wasn’t Erik’s first time drinking.

Erik got up and sat next to him at some point. “I can finish the rest if you don’t like it. Don’t need to force yourself.”

The idea was irritating enough that Felix took a long swallow. “I’m fine.”

“I’m not. I want more.” Sayori made grabby hands at his drink.

Felix knocked his bottle into Erik’s, took another hard swallow, and then handed it to Sayori. Erik made a half-laugh through his nose, before clinking his drink with hers. They both downed the last of it.

She was always parched, and Erik was oversaturated, and both were somehow one and the same. It was in the kind of way that Felix was sure one day they would have some egregious piece of miscommunication and finally murder each other. He just didn’t know how close he would stand, to the risk of becoming collateral damage. In this most motionless season, with the brook frozen over and red ears swathed in scarves, all ire was beautifully, temporarily arrested. Dumped in the fire to burn for their warmth. Frigid faces and only the edges of them mellowed by alcohol and the blaze. And Erik told them about how he convinced his parents to let him take some beer. Apparently they trusted him to be responsible, which he was.

Sayori had laughed at that and called him “Mr. Charming, but not Prince Charming because you aren’t that charming.”

The conversation dwindled to Erik and Felix, though they didn’t notice at first. For a long while, she had a great, far-off look in her eye again, as if she saw something deep within the fire. It was a trance so taut that Felix was sure the light must be burning her retinas. Yet, he was hesitant to break her out of it.

He shook her gently by the shoulder. “The fire’s going to die soon. Let’s head home.”

She blinked at him, then nodded.

The Great Fog ended a year before they graduated. After that one, they were never so long again.

The shortest Fog that Felix had ever experienced lasted a total of two hours. It happened during dawn when he hadn’t been able to fall asleep and decided to stay up till daybreak. The dewy morning brightened his room for a moment before it turned Foggy. A gray wash settled over him like his eyes had become blinks of grainy black-and-white film.

Felix’s father was a door closing in the early morning and a door opening at twilight. A few pats on the head. Mamma was the soft nails on his scalp as she washed his hair and a kiss on his forehead, eleven years past. His great-aunt snuck him hot mulled wine on the winter solstice with his favorite saffron buns. Mr. Alm gave him a handkerchief once, and it was still in a drawer somewhere at home. Anyone else of note were Sayori and Erik, and they were present and there. He knew he was going to see them later today.

The peculiar thing about today was that it could stretch into a question of tomorrow. There were multiple of them, strung together and chafing his ankles until they dragged him over the precipice like an anchor in the sea.

He had known exactly what he would miss and had been drowning for just as long.

Felix rubbed his tired eyes, and the Fog was gone once again.

“I sense a storm coming,” Erik told him one day.

Felix, on the other hand, sensed that Erik was not commenting on the weather, which was simply Fog again. The Fog always made talking an uncomfortable affair, especially as they pushed their bikes up the hill, which was probably why Erik didn’t elaborate and Felix didn’t ask for it. They were going to Erik’s house where his mother was cooking dinner, and Felix planned to leave before she was done. They let the moisture wick off of them as they lay sideways across Erik’s bed. It was nothing like the one from the previous apartment, but it had the same burgundy colors Erik always liked.

“That day we met at the waterfall,” Felix said. “What were you looking at?”

Erik thought about it. “I think it was the ripples, from little droplets falling into the water. The rocks sometimes make still pools to the side of the river, separated from the current,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“It was what I wanted to ask you before I fell in the brook.”

“River.”

“Let up already. It’s two against one.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Felix propped himself up on his elbow. “Sayori’s been going to the brook way longer than you have. How could she be wrong?”

Erik swung an arm over his eyes. “Ugh, especially Sayori.”

Completely unrelated, a week later when the Fog phased out, Sayori was hospitalized.

They visited her at first, but it was clear that they all hated the arrangement. Sayori hated looking vulnerable in her ugly hospital gown. Erik hated hospitals. Felix hated that nobody had any way of making light of the situation, including himself. It all dwindled into a week doused in quiet, of the uncomfortable kind. He went to the Blue Brook a lot on his own, which might have been his first mistake.

Felix had started hearing whispers in the brook, like little blips in his ear. They formed words that only made sense when he stared at the water, the writing in the ripples. He could only focus on them when he was alone.

He didn’t tell Erik that he was hearing or seeing anything, but he did eventually relay, “I need 34 pearls.”

Erik laughed in surprise. “Why do you need that many?”

”It’s the right number.” He gathered his hair up into a bun and rolled up his sleeves. “Considering what we’ve found so far, we only need 18 pearls.”

“That’s still going to take forever.”

“Better not then,” Felix said.

Erik propped a fist on his hip. “And why’s that?”

“Because it’s how we’ll save Sayori.”

They spend almost all of this Fog searching for the pearls. They gathered a total of 32 by the end.

It came to him in a cold tingle, like a chill that just avoided his spine. Felix thought he could die for either of them. Both of them. This was joined by the acute realization that he didn’t deserve either of them either, something he should have known for a long time. He sifted through the jokes whispered in ears and the afternoons drying their clothes in the sun and the soft sensation of hands in his hair and was left with a growing emptiness that hadn’t dried enough. Not healed enough to be an ache but rather a fresh, acidic burn. The feeling gathered in a clump of abstractions, emulsified by the human impulse to care.

Felix visited the hospital again.

Sayori greeted him with a glare, which was better than he had expected. She had paled, and her hair was dry and limp everywhere it was not frizzy, sloping over the pillows she was half-buried in.

“I have something for you,” he said finally. “It took me a while to finish it. That’s why I didn’t visit sooner.”

The pearls pooled in his palm when he showed it to her.

Her bruised eyes flicker down at it. “What’s this?”

“A necklace. We got all the pearls from the river.” Felix picked it up with his other hand, letting it dangle. “It’ll protect you from the Fog.”

“I don’t need it. The Fog isn’t going to get me.”

“But—”

“Nothing,” she said, sitting up, “catches me.”

Sayori dropped back into the thick pillow, hard enough that her whole head almost disappeared into it.

Felix took a deep breath, which did nothing. “What are you talking about?” he said, voice raising. “It’s already managed to ‘catch’ you!”

“I’ve thought about it already. God knows I’ve had plenty of time to. I know how to escape the Fog, of course!”

“Is this another one of your dumb secrets?”

“Fuck you. You’re not the one who’s dying.”

They both dropped their gazes. Felix shoved the necklace back into his pocket as if that would undo the conversation.

Sayori let out a dry sigh before yanking out her IV. “Okay. Help me get out of this. I might as well show you myself.”

Felix didn’t protest for very long. By some miracle plus the cover of Fog, they snuck out without anyone noticing. He carried Sayori on his back, and the whole way, he could feel her tying little braids into his hair that each broke loose by the time they made it to the Blue Brook.

When he set her down, Sayori said, “No, all the way to the falls.”

With the extra distance, Felix started to get winded. At the waterfall, he bent over to catch his breath, hanging his head between his knees. He had never been very fit, and the thought reminded him suddenly of when he was younger, and his parents would jointly hark on him for his lack of athleticism, never strong nor swift.

Sayori had been unusually quiet for a bit too long. Felix lifted his head to see her on her tiptoes, on one of the tallest rocks beneath the waterfall.

“What—”

They made eye contact as soon as he spoke, and one of her feet slipped.

“Sayori!”

She teetered. It took three of his skipped heartbeats before she caught her hand on a mossy rock face, just above her head.

“Get down from there! What the hell are you doing?” Felix ran toward the base of the rocks, but he couldn’t even fathom how she climbed up in the first place, much less so fast.

“When you came, it got me thinking. I could feel it in my body. I just know it. I have about six days left to live.” She was smiling, eyes crinkling. He could see it even from down there. “I’m going to the ocean now.”

Felix was at a loss for what to say, because he knew very little could coax Sayori into or out of anything.

“My last secret to you. It’s the greatest thing that I learned from the brook. You have to be with the water—of the water—but you know what I like about that? Water comes in so many forms. For a lot of people, it’s just Fog. I am the current that will make its way across the lands and to the ocean.” She stretched her fingers out under the rush of water. “What will you be, Felix?”

“Don’t get in,” Felix said. “Let’s just go home.”

Sayori cocked her head to the side. “Felix. We aren’t meant to stay in one place forever.”

Felix started running, clambering up the rocks and stones, but he was never going to make it in time. She disappeared into the waterfall. He let out a shout. His hand dived into the fall, but the torrent of water forced it back out.

Felix spent hours searching the brook. He followed it down the current until the edges of the Fog. All of him was soaked by the time he realized a very simple fact. The Blue Brook was too shallow for it to have carried her body away. Sayori was simply gone.

He went back to the waterfall, and he sat down.

That was how Erik found him later, tear-stained and wringing his hair. He was staring at the puddles of water that had formed from his footsteps. Erik looked at him with those downturned eyes, then he grabbed him by the arm, pulled him up, and wrapped him in a tight embrace.

“I heard that Sayori went missing,” Erik said. “I went straight here.”

“She’s not missing,” Felix murmured into his shoulder. “She’s in the water.”

Erik pulled back. “Are you sure?”

“I can find her. I found all those pearls.” Felix pawed at his pockets. “I always knew where they would be.”

The necklace wasn’t in his pocket anymore.

“Did you give the necklace to her?” Erik asked.

While Felix tried to breathe, his silence responded for him.

Erik scoffed, “I told you she wouldn’t want it. She never cared about a single thing that lasts. You knew that long before I did.”

“Stop it. She was running out of time.”

“Running through it, more like.”

Felix shoved him. “What do you always have against her?”

Erik stumbled back, but he didn’t anger like Felix thought he might. “I never had anything against her,” he said. “I just never liked her as much as you did, and the feeling was mutual.”

“But why? I could never understand that!”

“Felix.” His voice was overly level, as if he wanted to skew their average calmness to the calm side. “The two of us knew we were never going to be more than people who were just friends at some point in time.”

“I got along with both of you fine.”

“And you liked it. You liked having us to yourself. Did it ever really matter to you if Sayori and I got along?” That was the closest Erik had probably ever come to yelling at him. 

Felix’s breath became shallower and shallower, and his next words came out painfully thin. “Are you going to leave me behind too?”

Erik brought a hand toward Felix’s face. It hovered near his cheek before pressing against his forehead. His skin felt shockingly cold against his. Felix stayed still as Erik dropped his head, the dark whorls of his hair shaking as he sighed. “This is stupid. Come with me.”

He tugged Felix by the wrist toward the waterfall, close enough that the spray dotted his glasses. Erik cupped his hands and dipped them into the waterfall. The water gathered, splashing droplets onto Erik’s sleeves. He brought it to his mouth, drinking it in. Rivulets dripped down his chin and forearms and glittered under a patch of sun. He cupped his hands again and proffered it to Felix.

“Come here, Felix.”

He coaxed him to drink, but Felix hadn’t needed it. He tilted the bowl of Erik’s fingers and let the icy water fill his mouth and flood up his nose. He almost choked on it, how cold it was. He coughed, and Erik rubbed his back.

“Let’s just both go home.” As if he knew what Felix was thinking, Erik kept his hand around Felix’s wrist. He had always had such a strong grip when he wanted to.

His lungs grew heavy yet his head felt light. His entire body tingled with a negating sensation, a slippery force. Felix thought that was what allowed him to relax enough that Erik let go, thinking he had agreed. The feeling carried down to his feet, and then he was running.

“Felix!” Erik wasn’t fast enough to stop him. “Where are you going?”

He answered when he was already much too far to be heard. “I don’t know!”

Felix imagined this must have been how Sayori always felt. He didn’t need to turn around to know that Erik would not catch him. The wind pulled his hair from his face and caressed his skin. The elation was gauzy and airy and not yet enough. His lungs burned and it was not enough either.

His foot collided straight into an upturned rock. His arms pinwheeled. There was nothing to catch himself on, and Felix fell into the Fog with a cry and a splash.

His chasm of the universe went quiet. His clothes turned buoyant. His body lifted on its own, feet never returning to the ground. Each of his cells had become singular bubbles that coalesced into his being, held together by only a few heartstrings and a shared buoyancy. It was surprisingly easy for him to push his arms and kick his feet. Felix was swimming through the Fog.

The view ahead was a haze of filtered gray. It was heavy in his eyelids. Any piece of exposed skin felt cold and slimy if he focused on the sensation. He was not sure if he was even breathing. He could have been drowning on any number of liquids and airs and long-drifted tears. His hands propelled through waterfall mist and firewood smoke and bus exhaust and soup steam.

Finally, Felix broke through the clouds. He took a heaping, gulping breath and almost choked on it.

He stared at the impossibly blue sky, his hands wading in nothingness, and thought only that he could not remember where his home was.