Two days after they found Austin’s watch on the beach, I stand on the railroad tracks.
            My arms are stretched out, trying to steady myself on the rail. I’m wearing a scuffed pair of white Adidas, my green windbreaker zipped up high. According to my watch, it’s twenty-three minutes and thirty-five seconds past eleven p.m. At eleven on the dot, I slipped out of my house while my parents slept. I traipsed around the beach and stood ankle-deep in the sea, let the unusually low tide seep into my tennis shoes and watched the water slosh over the place where the police found Austin’s watch. Then I scaled the dunes and came to stand on the tracks.
            “When did you last see him?” the policeman asked me yesterday. He had graying brown hair and a wispy moustache. His buddy was writing down notes with Ticonderoga pencil that was missing its eraser. I reported that I last saw Austin, my best friend and semi-boyfriend, in his room because he always invited me over on Fridays. I knew I saw him at 6:41 p.m. because he was concerned with time and always had me log it on my phone.
            “We were planning a trip to Texas,” I told the policeman.
            Austin’s uncle raised his brows. Even then, the bastard still had a beer in his hand. Austin didn’t tell me about his past much, but I knew his uncle, Mark, adopted him when he was twelve because his parents died in a train wreck. Mark spent half his time drinking, the other half yelling. Sometimes at the TV, but mostly at Austin. By Mark’s clueless face, I guessed Austin never told him about the trip or my semi-girlfriend status.
            “You planned on going together?” the policeman asked me.
            Now my eyes snap open, his question reverberating in my brain. Yes, we planned on going together. I’ve known Austin since we were fifteen, and over two years, I’ve learned that he’s fixated with not only time, but Austin, Texas. I asked if the city was his namesake, but he shook his head. Still, he invited me over every Friday to plan his trip. The first few times, we researched train schedules over slices of greasy pizza and discs of Mario Kart. He taught me about the city’s history, and in exchange I talked about stars dying in explosions called supernovae, elements sparking life, black holes absorbing time. I explained gravity’s constant attraction, trying to direct his eyes away from the maps and toward me. He realized I was good at math and instructed me to calculate the prices of food and train tickets for a trip to Texas.
            But two days ago, he said he was traveling alone.
            “Did he say anything unusual that evening?” the policeman inquired during the interrogation.
            I said he told me he was traveling alone. I said he promised we’d go together. I said he always felt like he had to be somewhere else, flying, drifting among the stars, because something simple like pizza or Mario Kart was never good enough, because time was always running out, because the world weighed heavily on his shoulders, like he could feel the gravity of every person and star pulling on him. I said he went to Texas.
            The policeman glanced at Mark. The other cop’s gaze flicked up from his notepad.
            “Believe me,” I pleaded.
            Everyone’s voices come back to me now. The policemen. Mark. The neighbors. My mother as she placed her hand on mine and murmured, “Honey, they found his watch on the beach.” But all of them don’t understand. They’ve got it all wrong. A discarded watch and missing swimming trunks don’t mean he went in the water, because he’s scared of the ocean. His abandoned suitcase and missing body aren’t evidence against my theory, because there’s one thing nobody else knows: he is afraid of vanishing.
            Two months ago, I explained the Schrödinger’s cat experiment to him in our science classroom after school. We were supposed to be working on our overdue assignment. “Imagine you put a cat in a box,” I began. “In the box, there’s a switch, a radioactive substance that may decay, and a tube of poison. If the substance decays, the switch is flipped and the poison releases—killing the cat. But if it doesn’t, the cat’s alive. So, after you close the box and before you open it, is the cat alive or dead?”
            Austin slipped into a supply cabinet and shut the door.
            “What are you doing?” I laughed. I climbed over a lab table and pressed my ear to the closet.
            “Lily,” Austin murmured, “What if I disappear someday?”
            His face was just behind the wood, but I couldn’t see him. He could have been smiling, frowning, or crying for all I knew.
            “Then you’ll be both alive and dead,” I concluded. “Simultaneously.”
            I opened the door and there he was. Alive.
            The next day, I went over to his house and found him crouched on his bed, crying. “I don’t want to be both alive and dead,” he sobbed, and I rubbed his back until the spell passed.
            “You’re alive, Austin,” I shout now to the railroad tracks, the expansive sky, the wavering air. My voice fills a tiny blip of space, then dissipates as time marches on. I imagine my shout amplifying, stretching, traveling like light through a vacuum, reaching a train traveling toward Austin, Texas, striking a window where Austin is sitting.
            I lower myself onto the rail, ocean water escaping from my shoes and seeping into the gravel. “Did he seem sad?” the policeman asked me two days ago. “Did he ever act strangely? Did he ever talk about killing himself?”
            Then I broke down and the policeman handed me a box of tissues as he said evenly, “That’s all we need, Lily. Thank you.” Now I look up at the stars. Some are long gone; some have been born, but I can’t see them yet. “Sometimes he seemed sad,” I answer to nobody. “But only when he couldn’t bear counting time and miles anymore. Only when his uncle yelled at him. And he always acted strangely, because that was just Austin. Nobody else read about a wedding in the local paper and cried because he knew that someplace else, there was a funeral. He never said he was going to kill himself. He would never.”
            No, Austin never talked about killing himself, but he talked about traveling. During class, he slipped me notes: Destinations in Austin, TX: Blanton Museum of Art. Add one for yourself? and Take a photo of me in front of the town sign, will you? Austin in Austin. Once when we were watching a movie, a train barreled onto the screen and he began to sob. I never asked him what was wrong. Or why he loved Austin. Or why he counted time like it was radioactive, bound to decay and activate the poison.
            I imagine Austin dropping his watch in the sand, ridding himself of the time that plagued him. I imagine him boarding a train. In Austin, he’ll buy a disposable camera and ask a stranger to take a picture of him in front of the town sign.
            When I peer down Main Street, a figure is walking toward me. “Austin?” I whisper, and my heart picks up. He’s here. He isn’t drowned; he hasn’t gone to Texas. There is no switch, no poison. Sadness isn’t a symptom of a larger problem. He’s alive.
            The figure comes closer and lowers himself on the rail next to me. But it isn’t Austin. It’s his uncle.
            “Can’t sleep either, huh?” Mark says.
            I want to spit in his eyes. “You’re not Austin,” I scowl.
            “Were you expecting him?” he asks, then wrings his hands and stares out at the dark town. “I’m sorry, Lily.”
            My heart aches. Gravity pulls at me from every star, train, and boy in the universe. I pray that he is out there somewhere. “He’s not dead,” I insist.
            Mark looks at me for a long time. Then he plucks a pebble from the ground, aims, and tosses it down the rail. It bounces off and clatters to the gravel. “The day his parents died,” he murmurs, “their train was heading to Austin, Texas.”
            Slowly, memories fall into place. Austin’s packed suitcase, his favorite polo shirt folded neatly next to his blue jeans. The ratty stuffed elephant on his dresser he dismissed as a purchase from a yard sale. All this time, he wanted to make the journey his parents never survived.
            “We were supposed to go together,” I choke out.
            Mark stares down at his feet. “There never was a trip for you, Lily. Just one for him. And he wanted to travel alone.”
            I lift my eyes to his face. He places his hand on my shoulder, and I know. Austin didn’t want to disappear, so he had to choose. Life or death. And to him, living felt like vanishing.
            But he got it all mixed up. Until the police find him, he’s still lost. Before he left, he was positively, definitively alive. He just didn’t see it himself.
            I close my eyes, and I remember standing in our science classroom with my ear against the cabinet, listening for a boy neither alive nor dead. Sitting next to Mark, I strain my ears to hear Austin—his unsure footsteps, always sounding like he was a little bit nervous; his voice calling my name softly, like it was tugging on my sleeve. I can see his soft black hair that curled around his ears, his blue-green eyes, his sprinkling of freckles that were like a constellation of his own.
            But when I open my eyes, the boy is gone.