She spun away from the window and saw the ghost on the couch.
Rosa had to push both fists against her mouth to keep from screaming. He was doing a terrible thing, sucking steam from a snaky plastic tube into his mouth. The tube was attached to a box, which emitted the hissing sounds.
Finally she found her voice. “What are you doing?”
He pulled the tube away from his mouth. “This helps me breathe,” he said. “It’s a portable bronchodilator.”
She edged a little closer, but still felt wary. He was very skinny, lying on a leather sofa with a sailboat quilt covering him up. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and had a nice face, nicer than you’d expect for a ghost boy. Pale yellow hair, pale blue eyes, pale white skin.
“You need help breathing?” she asked.
“Sometimes.” He set aside the tube, hooking it into a holder on the side of the machine. A wisp of steam coughed from the mouthpiece. “I have asthma.”
“Can you get rid of it?” Rosa tensed up, wishing she hadn’t asked. Sometimes a person got sick and there was no way to get better.
“No one can tell,” he said. “It can be controlled, and maybe it’ll improve when I get bigger and my lungs grow. What’s your name?”
“Rosina Angelica Capoletti, and everyone calls me Rosa. What’s yours?”
“Alexander Montgomery.”
“Does everyone call you Alex?”
He offered a mild, sweet smile. “No one calls me that.”
“Then I think I will.”
They verified that they were just a year apart in age, but in the same grade. Alex had started kindergarten a year late on account of having trouble with his asthma. He admitted that he disliked school, and she got the impression that he got bullied a lot. She declared that she, too, despised school.
“I know I have to go,” she lamented. “It’s the only way to get ahead.”
“Ahead of what?” he asked.
She laughed. “I don’t know. My brothers were in ROTC and joined the U.S. Navy for their education.”
“You go to college to get an education,” he said with a frown.
“If you go in the navy first, then the navy pays for it,” she explained patiently. “I thought everybody knew that.” She indicated the book that lay open across his lap. “What are you reading?”
He picked it up and showed her the spine. “Bulfinch’s Mythology. It’s a collection of Greek myths. This one is about Icarus. There’s a picture.”
Rosa sat beside him on the sofa and scooted over to see. Alex thoughtfully put half the book on her lap. “He’s flying,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t look like he’s having much fun.”
“Well, he’s in pain.”
“Why would he fly if it hurts him?”
“Because he’s flying,” Alex said as if that explained everything.
Rosa stuck out her bare foot. The beestings formed red dots on her ankle and shin. “I tried flying, and trust me, it’s not worth the pain.”
“I saw you,” he said. “I was watching from the window.”
“I know. I saw you watching me.”
“I was going to come and help, but I didn’t know what to do.”
“That’s all right. Mrs. Carmichael came straightaway when she heard me yelling.”
He nodded gravely, studying her with such total absorption that she felt like the only person on the planet. “Do the beestings hurt?”
“Not anymore. Mrs. Carmichael put baking soda on them. She said I’m lucky I’m not allergic.”
“You are lucky,” he said with a funny, dreamy look on his face. “You get to be outside and do whatever you want.”
She thought about telling him just how unlucky she was. She was a girl without a mother. But she didn’t want to say anything. Not just yet. It might be too scary for him, this sick boy, to hear about a sick person who had died.
“You mean you’re not allowed outside?”
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Not without supervision. I might have an asthma attack.”
“Going outside causes an attack?”
“Sometimes.”
She’d heard of a heart attack. An attack of nerves. But not an asthma attack. “What’s it feel like?”
“It’s like…drowning. But in air instead of water.”
Rosa had some knowledge of the sensation. More than once, while swimming, she’d gone out too far and under too deep, and she’d experienced the momentary panic of needing air. The feeling was horrifying. “Then you’d better not go outside.”
He stared down at Icarus, whose mouth was twisted in agony as he flew too close to the sun. Then he looked up at Rosa, and there was a new light in his blue eyes. “Let’s go anyway.”
“Really?”
“My lungs were twitchy this morning, but I’m better now. I’ll be okay.”
She looked at him very closely. There were no lies in that face of his. She could just tell. “I have to get my clothes. Mrs. Carmichael put them in the dryer.”
“I think that might be in the utility room.”
As she followed him through the house, she marveled that he didn’t know for sure where the dryer was. At her house, everyone knew, because laundry was everyone’s business. He opened a painted door in the kitchen to reveal a dim, cavernous room dusty with dryer lint. “It’s in there.”
“You wait here.”
“Are you sure?”
“I have to change. I sure don’t need any help doing that.” The room smelled of must and dryer lint, and a hissing sound came from the water heater. Her clothes were still damp, but she put them on anyway—undies, cutoffs and a T-shirt from Mario’s Flying Pizza. The sun would finish the job of drying them. She left the bathrobe on top of the dryer and hurried back to the kitchen.
There, she found Alex and Mrs. Carmichael locked in a staredown. “I’m going,” he said to the housekeeper.
She sniffed. “You’re not to leave the house.”
“That was this morning. I’m better now.
