Which she did, eventually. He’d rehearsed what he’d say to her all morning: Do you believe me? What am I? Am I like you? Do you still love me? Are you still my friend? I don’t understand it any better than you do, but now, now there are two of us who know about it, and maybe we can make sense of it together. God, it’s such a relief to not be the only one anymore.
But now, standing there with Marci, in the distant catcalls of the playground and the smell of the new snow and the soughing of the wind in the trees, he couldn’t bring himself to say it. She either knew these things or she didn’t, and if she didn’t, he didn’t know what he could do to help it.
“What?” she said at last.
“Do you—” he began, then fell silent. He couldn’t say the words.
She looked irritated, and the sounds and the smells swept over him as the moment stretched. But then she softened. “I don’t understand it, Alan,” she said. “Is it true? Is it really how you say it is? Did I see what I saw?”
“It’s true,” he said, and it was as though the clouds had parted, the world gone bright with the glare off the snow and the sounds from the playground now joyous instead of cruel. “It’s true, and I don’t understand it any more than you do, Marci.”
“Are you… human, Alan?”
“I think so,” he said. “I bleed. I eat. I sleep. I think and talk and dream.”
She squeezed his hands and darted a kiss at him. “You kiss,” she said.
And it was all right again.