As Simple as It Seems by Sarah Weeks

see.”
    â€œThanks a lot,” I said. “Bats are hideous mice with wings. And they eat bugs.”
    â€œI think mice are cute,” said Pooch.
    â€œYou would. What did you do with that mouse that you caught in the mousetrap?” I asked.
    â€œMy mom picked it up with some salad tongs and put it the trash,” he told me.
    With all the unfortunate pets my mother had taken in over the years, there had been plenty of deaths. Sometimes my mother would take the bodies back to Dr. Finn at the shelter, but the smaller animals she quietly buried in our backyard. My mother would never have put any animal, even a mouse, in the trash.
    â€œWhen I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes sprinkled outside Gray’s Papaya,” Pooch said.
    â€œWhere’s that?” I asked.
    â€œIt’s on the corner of Seventy-second and Broadway. They have the best hot dogs in the world. Hot dogs are carcinogenic—that means they give you cancer—but so is pretty much everything else.”
    â€œLovely,” I said. “You must be a lot of fun at a cookout.”
    Pooch got up and went to get a fresh piece ofsandpaper out of the package I’d brought with me. He folded it in half and started rubbing it back and forth along the edge of the boat.
    â€œIf reincarnation were real,” he said, “it sure would explain a lot.”
    I groaned. It was my own fault for having asked about what had happened to the mouse in the mousetrap, but it was clear that if I didn’t stay on top of Pooch, one way or another he was going to find a way to circle back around to his favorite subject—death. And I didn’t want to think about death. I’d had a dream the night my father told me about what Mike Colter had done to get himself thrown in jail. I saw Mike put his hands on the man’s shoulders and push him. The dream was so vivid that when I woke up I could still hear the sound of the bones in the man’s neck breaking. I’d been afraid to go back to sleep.
    â€œWe made a deal about this death stuff yesterday, remember?” I told Pooch.
    â€œReincarnation isn’t about death,” said Pooch. “It’s about life. Don’t you think it would be cool to get to live life all over again as something other than what you were the first time around?”
    â€œLike what, a rock?” I said.
    â€œWell, not a rock. That would be pretty boring.But how about a bird?”
    â€œI wouldn’t want to be a bird, “I said. “They don’t have hands. The only way they can pick anything up is with their beaks.”
    â€œI never thought about that,” said Pooch. “It would be a drag not to have hands.” He reached around to scratch the back of his neck. “Especially if you were itchy.”
    â€œI wouldn’t mind being a horse, I guess,” I said. “I think they’re beautiful.”
    â€œI hate to break it to you, but horses don’t have hands either,” Pooch pointed out. “You don’t have to come back as an animal though, you know. You could be a person. I read about this woman who swears she was Abraham Lincoln in another life.”
    â€œDo you believe that?” I asked.
    â€œI’m not sure what I believe anymore. It all kind of changed after I met you.”
    Part of me wanted to come clean and tell Pooch the truth. It wasn’t right for me to be making him question what he believed. Selfishly, though, I didn’t want the game to end. In a way, it was almost as if the wish I’d made when I’d blown out the candles on my birthday cake had come true. I was a different person when I was with Pooch. Sure, I was TracyAllen’s ghost, but I was also myself—my old self—the one I’d been before everything had gone wrong. All this time I’d thought it was only Annie I missed, but what I realized now was that the person I’d been missing most was me.

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