Dying was supposed to be easy.
It should’ve been a two step process—one, realize you’re dying, come to terms with it, and accept your spirit leaving your body. Two, slip into the infamous white light, kiss that old life goodbye, and make a list of all the things you plan to do for the rest of eternity. They don’t tell you that letting go is easier than it sounds—you’d be surprised what you’d give up when the sweet sounds of Heaven were all but serenading you from above.
Supposedly.
The pain was worse than I could’ve ever imagined—something that they never bother to tell you. Before you realize that death is imminent and that your road will ultimately stop there, the pain is blinding, so much so that even blacking out seems redundant. The agony would just bring you back to, and screaming would just add an unneeded ache to a body that already felt as though it was being set on fire and then stomped on.
Later rather than sooner, I grasped that it was my end and that my time on earth was slim and on its last legs. An oily warmth was beginning to spread through me, my brain detaching from my body and settling into a place where the gaping wound in my abdomen felt more like a papercut. I couldn’t feel the surges of blood sliding over my skin.
My head lolled in his arms, muscles forever relaxing.
For a second I wondered how he’d managed to pull me from the car—the driver’s side door had been crushed from impact. They’d swerved, trying to pass me on a deserted back road when the eighteen-wheeler carrying building supplies had come around the corner, veering into the left lane to keep from crushing the minivan…
And then the fence pole had launched itself off the trailer and through my windshield, catching me in my liver.
The world went dark and I woke up on the pavement too soon after, my limp body cradled in my best friend’s desperate grasp.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he kept saying over and over, “Everything’s fine. You’re gonna be okay.” Tears brimmed the corners of his eyes.
I’m not so sure about that, I wanted to say, but breathing was so hard. I could only stare at him through half-closed eyes.
His face was bloody. I could only figure that the glass had shattered in his direction, slicing miniature gashes along the side of his face. His voice was fading. I could only hear him if I focused all my strength.
I knew that I didn’t have long.
“Serah, I swear, I won’t let you go.” He pulled me close to him. “I won’t let you go.”
He smelled just like he always did. Old Spice, and chlorine from long hours practicing with the swim team. The warmth of his body melted into the heavenly white light pooling on my skin.
I was going to miss this.
I felt myself letting go, my grip on life slipping. It’s going to be okay, I wanted to tell him, I promise. I wanted to wrap my arms around him, to hug him as much as he was hugging me.
I could only muster a small, half-smile.
Tears spilled out onto his cheeks, his voice dying in his throat. My glorious white light glared most of his features, but his warmth was still there. I tried to concentrate on his face, to remember it the way it was right now before I left it forever.
For a split second, I watched him smile back.
It was enough. Mind pulling away from body, I looked into those eyes one last time and closed my own. I couldn’t hold on any longer, and I waited for Heaven to take me.
Things would’ve worked out just fine, had Sam kept his big, fat mouth shut.
Sobs racked through him. “Come back to me,” he begged, shaking my shoulders. “Serah, look at me! Look at me!”
I couldn’t. His voice was an echo in the distance. The warmth had wrapped a cocoon around me, the light drawing me away from him. Things were already seeming so much better—I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to be rid of this place, away from the pain and disappointment that came as a package deal and burned holes in my heart.
I wanted this. This was my happily ever after.
I watched Sam stroke my hair with shaky hands as I forever separated from my body, smoothing the stray hairs that’d been soaked with his tears. His voice was a dry rasp that turned sobs into moaning hiccups, a keening escaping the back of his throat. I still felt him holding me, his strength the only thing seemingly holding me together.
Holding me here.
His lips grazed my ear. I shivered. “Please,” he whispered, the hope dead.
A twinge of guilt hit me in the spot where my wound should’ve been, the spot that remained perfectly intact in my new spirit body. How could I leave him here, in this way? What would happen to him? What would forever be like without him there beside me?
I felt his warm breath skim my skin. “Please,” he said again, this time with even more despair than the last. “You can’t leave me.”
I have to, I realized, the sound of his voice falling away from me. Heaven was pulling at me from above, an invisible tether dragging me backwards and away from the only thing I’d ever known. The warm glow had taken over my core, a luminescence radiating from within.
I couldn’t wait anymore. It was my time.
I was far away when Sam’s head dipped low for the final time, forehead leaning into mine.
“I love you,” he muttered, his mouth brushing against my cheek as the last spark of life left my body.
Ice locked around my heart. I was falling, spinning, crashing back into the earth as confusion wrapped around my brain, my glow snuffed out as a swirling darkness burned inside me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t feel.
I hit the ground hard, spread-eagled and aching down to my last fiber.
He loved me, I thought, staring up into the cloudless sky as the last bits of Heaven receded without me. My warmth was gone, the divine light tucking itself somewhere behind the sun, in a place where it hurt too badly to look for it. I was cold, sprawled out on a slab of hot asphalt in the middle of the day in July.
He loved me.
An eerie silence oiled the air around me. I sat up, ignoring the slightly dizzy feeling you get when you move too fast and all the blood rushes to your head, and scrambled to pull my thoughts together. He had been in love. With me. I almost left him. Almost…
I had to find him.
Somehow I managed to pull myself to my feet and get them moving—I ran. I cut through the air like the end of a sharpened blade, the wind whistling in my ears as I pounded the pavement, taking the burning in my lungs as if it were nothing.
I had to find Sam. If Heaven had made a mistake, had given me a second chance, he had to be the first one to know. I had to tell him I was alive, that I came back because of him. That his love brought me back.
I rounded the corner, and there he was.
With me.
Sill wrapped up in his arms.
Lifeless, and cold.
Panic slid through me, a weight that settled into my gut and churned while a cold realization hit me in the place where my heart should’ve been. I was here. And there. I was…
Dead.
The ambulance finally arrived. I was running to them before the vehicle had even completely stopped, screaming over the blare of the sirens. The driver didn’t give me a second glance, taking one look at Sam and my old body doubled over on the asphalt and barking orders to the other in the passenger seat beside him. He threw the van in park.
I pounded the window, but my fist went straight through.
“Someone help me!” I grabbed for their hands, shoulders, elbows—anything I could get my hands on. They pushed right through me, my hands slipping off of their bodies as if I were only wind. I screamed in their faces. I pulled at the medical bags in their hands.
They wrenched my body from Sam’s arms, one of them settling me onto the pavement while the other checked Sam for vitals and signs of trauma. He fought around them, screaming, scrambling back to my body with tears pouring down his face.
“I won’t leave you!” He fell on top of me, shielding my body with his own.
I was so cold. Terror lodged itself in my throat; panic swallowed up what little was left of me. This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t real. They were going to save me, they had to.
The no-nonsense driver guy pulled him away from me as the other one warmed up the defibrillator paddles. “Keep him away from her,” he said smoothly, tuning the machine.
Chaos reigned with Sam’s desperate screams, wails of the sirens, and the pulsing electrical sounds of the machine as it tried to pull me back to life.
And they say dying is easy.
The afternoon hummed with the sound of loneliness. With the sound of laziness, and time creeping by in the heat-oppressed hours like small droplets of water hitting the bottom of a bucket—the slow, rhythmic waves blending one second into the next. The air teemed with nonexistence, humanity and creatures otherwise holed up somewhere where the long hours meant an escape from the ungodly heat.
For those that still knew what heat felt like.
I couldn’t remember how long I’d spent sitting here. I’d watched the night fall, the sun rise, the heat pile up on the sidewalks as the afternoon blaze crested high above the average tolerance. I’d watched them leave for work, come home, and then leave again. I watched children play on the sidewalks, ride bikes in the driveway, and eat popsicles in the shade and away from the sun.
None of them saw me, though.
I left because I got tired of seeing everyone cry. Mom had keened for two days straight, my dad stayed up for hours weeping over the photo album. My grandparents did nothing but pray since they got the news, and my friends wore black twenty-four seven.
And Sam.
I couldn’t look at him without hurting. There was pain in his eyes, a look that said somewhere not so deep inside him he was dying. He made my yearning for life that much more real, and made my death ten times more painful than it should’ve been.
I’m dead, I thought for the ten thousandth time, I’m not supposed to be here.
In truth, there were a lot of things I shouldn’t have been doing since my demise. I should’ve lost the ability to feel pain—I didn’t. My new spirit body should’ve been intact and free of wounds—it wasn’t. I shouldn’t have had to run away from the only people I loved, sitting on a stranger’s front step and watch small segments of time stretch into eternity.
I did.
They don’t tell you that being dead and not moving on is pretty much the same thing as being human—you wake up stiff and hurting, yearning for what could never be, and you fall asleep missing what you never had in the first place while everything else slips from your fingers.
Only, there’s no one around to pull you out of the quicksand that is self-pity.
I followed him home from the funeral.
“You’re late,” I said to him as he slid into the last pew, eyes full of sorrow and soul heavy. “You were supposed to be here thirty minutes ago. I thought you weren’t coming.” I fell into the seat beside him. I was afraid you weren’t coming.
The muscles in his jaw tensed. He shifted his hunched shoulders uncomfortably underneath his dress shirt, gaze fixed unblinkingly forward.
So he didn’t know I was there.
A sense of embarrassment and relief tingled under my skin. I’d spun myself into worried fits thinking of how this moment would be—the first time I’d actually tried talking to him. If he did respond, if he did understand that I was “back from the grave”, what would I say to him? Dead or not, someone whom I’d known since elementary school had professed his love to me, and it wouldn’t make for an easy conversation. If he couldn’t hear me, then how was I supposed to get all the unsaid words out into the open, to clear the air between us? If I couldn’t convince him to move on, how was I supposed to move on myself?
A twinge of disappointment ebbed inside me, even though ninety percent of me knew how this was going to turn out.
He stayed seated until every last person left the church. When even the pastor had retired to his office, Sam got up very slowly, left his dark corner, and made his way to the front row.
He put a single hand on my casket. “Without you, I don’t belong,” he whispered, and he left.
San’s parents looked as if their worry lines had been etched into their faces when we walked through the door. Neither one of them dared to say a word; they watched as their only son loosened the tie from around his neck and unbuttoned his collar as if he were a monkey in a zoo, waiting for him to do something either extremely crazy or extremely reckless.
“Jesus, say something to him,” I said, leaning up against the counter.
They didn’t react in a way that said they’d heard me, but his mother was the first to speak. “Sam,” she said carefully, stretching out the word as if she were trying to keep him calm, “Sam. Honey.”
He didn’t appear to hear her, or either he didn’t care. He shuffled through the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, rummaging through drawers.
The shoes had come off too, and he padded across the floor in a pair of dark dress socks.
His dad cleared his throat. “Son?”
Sam didn’t look them in the face, but raised his eyebrows in a symbol of comprehension. He pulled out the loaf of bread.
“Well, uh, how—how did it go?” His gaze nervously flitted from his son to his wife, who silently pressed him to continue. “How was the—the service?”
I watched his muscles go rigid for one, seemingly unending second as a tension-filled silence electrified the air. His hands froze halfway in the silverware drawer. His grip tightened around the edge of the counter.
And then he looked up.
What I saw in his eyes wasn’t Sam anymore—there was no feeling, no life left in his drained, withered expression. He looked like the kid who’d had the sense beaten out of him every day of his life, and every ounce of hope chopped down to stumps. He had the look of a tired man who’d been burdened with more than he could carry.
The muscles in his jaw jumped, biting down before he could finally compose an answer. “Fine,” he said, tone dismissive. “It was just the way she would’ve wanted it.”
He sat down at the table, crushing his newly made sandwich between two fists.
His mom reached across the table, fingers gently touching his arm. “Sam, please. You know you can talk to us. It’s okay, we want to help you—”
Sam shrugged away. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said around a mouthful of ham and cheese. The look in his eyes told them to drop it. “I’m okay, I swear.”
Before she could get another word out he stuffed the last corner of bread between his teeth, scooped up the crumbs, and hiked up the stairs—a shutting door marking the end of the conversation.
Oh, this was so much worse than I thought.
I pushed away from the counter, leaving his parents silently conversing to one another with a series of facial expressions while they both watched the head of the stairs. His mother had tears in her eyes.
I watched them for a long moment, biting my lip. “I’m sorry that I’ve done this to your family,” I said. “You have no idea how badly I want to fix this.”
It took a while to gather up the courage to push myself through his bedroom door—I still hadn’t gotten used to how unpleasant the feeling of it all actually was. To pass through completely, you had to temporarily bond yourself with the material you were slipping between—an entirely distasteful event when you put yourself back together on the other side and you realized that you still felt like the barrier you purged. I hesitated, balancing on the carpet fibers unmoved by my presence, forcing memories of the worst-case-scenario from my mind.
The last thing I wanted was to get stuck—I’d taste maple for days.
Not only that, but crossing the threshold felt morally wrong in my mind, like I was nothing more than a common peeping tom. I knew I could never be caught, but still—it was that fact that probably made this whole thing so much worse.
But this was Sam we were talking about, and so I stuck my head through anyway.
It took a minute to refocus my swimming head as I pieced myself back together on the other side of the door, my insides quivering as if they were made from jelly. I choked back the nauseating sensation rolling through me. I blinked, forcing my senses to organize the prism of swirling shapes and colors into familiar sights, sounds, and feelings.
My vision shifted as I fought to come to grips with the faded forms lost in the shadows. Every inch of his room was covered in darkness—the shades had been drawn, and curtains thrown together so that not even a speck of light could manage to wriggle its way through. I took a step forward, and noticed that it didn’t smell the same; it had lost the familiar traces of boy smell and chlorine, a certain staleness filling the air. The whole room smelled like a closet that’d been shut up for years, or a boy that’d been hiding out here for weeks.
Sam’s faded form came into view.
He sat on the edge of his bed, hunched over, staring into his hands. The digital clock on the edge of his night table cast a green glow over his features, burning new holes of heartache into me as I watched the agony rip across his face. He balled his fists up, hands shaking, breathing deeply as if trying to keep some sort of composure.
And then it all shattered, and the Sam I knew fell to pieces.
He cried. Not just a sniffle in the back of his throat, not just tears cascading down his cheeks. No, Sam—the one who I’d known forever and not once let out more than a whimper—broke down, sobbing, weeping until he couldn’t catch his breath anymore and then still moaning as he struggled to breathe around his tears. He gasped for air, clutching his midsection while the sound locked up in his throat and silent howls fought to escape around rib-racking sniffles. His whole body shook, and I watched with pure misery while he attempted to bite his lip and keep quiet, tears and snot pouring down his face.
My insides burned. It felt as if my heart had been set on fire, and yet my soul had been coated over with a layer of ice. I struggled to keep my head from spinning, to keep myself whole and from disappearing into nothingness. I can’t do this, I thought, I can’t do it. I can’t watch him suffer this way. I can’t…
Because he was in just as much pain as I was.
If there was ever a way to die twice, I had just succeeded.
I sat down, and pulled myself close to him. He quivered like I imagined myself doing, should ghosts have the ability to react emotionally like the living. I pictured his body heat bleeding onto my skin, his arm falling around me and actually connecting with solid skin and bone and a smile on his lips as he looked down on a face he could actually see. I wanted to be there with him, body and soul, my heart beating against his.
And I wanted to stop hurting, so, so much.
“I’m here,” I whispered, gently resting my arms around his waist. “I’m right here.”
And I prayed that he could hear me.
High school, even for a dead girl, is no fun—there are so many pairs of eyes, so many chances for a false sense of hope as you look into the crowd and see someone’s gaze connect with yours, smiling, and waving. For a split second you believe that, finally, someone has recognized your existence and will finally talk to you.
And then they push straight through you, meeting up on the other side with a friend, boyfriend, or just some random stranger whom was decidedly way more interesting than you.
Talk about a major ego boost.
I heard my name everywhere. I was the girl who died in a tragic accident over the summer, the sadly missed face from the senior class. I came up in hushed whispers, in heartrending accounts of that day from newspaper clippings and gossip that had leaked through the town.
For my friends, I never came up at all.
Laura, May, and Susan acted as if I never existed. For all intents and purposes, I was imaginary—the poor dead girl created from a figment of the mind to down everyone’s mood. They were tired of mourning and ready to party, and the memory of a friend that was long gone was not going to ruin their senior year.
Their words.
The truth of the matter was, though, that I didn’t care. Not really. I didn’t come here to see how they were doing or how they were getting along without me or if I was getting the sympathy I deserved from my so-called “best friends”.
I came for Sam.
He was beginning to worry me. He quit the swim team. He sat in the back of the class and slept. He hadn’t touched a single college application. He went home and locked himself in his room, and slept some more.
I sat across the cafeteria, watching him pick at the sandwich on his tray.
“You know, you sitting there like that, it makes you look like you almost belong.”
I turned, expecting to see a group of kids gathered behind me. The lunchroom was littered with cliques, the ones that weren’t eating standing around, talking to each other. I’d thought I was able to dodge most of them, picking the farthest corner of the room to sit and watch, undisturbed.
I met the face of a single freckly-faced, bespectacled kid hugging his lunch tray to his chest. He looked me dead in the eye.
“You—you can see me?” I asked, disbelieving.
He grinned. “Those blood stains kind of throw off the whole look, though. Makes you look like more of a deranged serial killer than a student.” He slid into a seat across from me.
“You’re talking to me?” I asked, breathless.
“Yeah.” He said, shoving a fork into his macaroni and cheese. “Who else would I be talking to?”
Any of the other hundred and fifty living souls milling about this place, I thought to say, but let it die in my throat. I could only manage to stare, mouth gaping.
Someone can see me.
“Why?” I asked. You’d think that after yearning for someone to notice me, I’d come up with something better to say.
But I was too shocked to even piece together intelligent thoughts.
“Because you’re sitting at my table.” He said around a mouthful of macaroni noodles, wagging his fork in the air. “It’d be impolite if I didn’t.”
“But I’m dead.” I said, “People’ll think you’re crazy.”
I watched in disbelief as he shrugged his shoulders, tearing into his bread and dipping it into the cheese sauce as if talking to a ghost was the most normal thing in the world. He pushed his glasses up on his nose, shifting his notebook aside with his elbow. Then he twisted the cap off his soda, and took a gulp.
“People already think I’m crazy. Crazy Kevin.” He said after he set the bottle back down, lifting up his fork again. “I figure I should at least give them something to talk about.”
I glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the cafeteria, and already he was attracting attention. I watched some fingers point at his back, whispers erupting as some of them turned to watch. A couple of losers from two tables over shouted at him, waiting for him to turn around so they could throw their food at him.
He just kept staring at me, grinning.
“Nice to see you again, Serah.”
“How do you—?”
“Oh please,” he said, “Don’t be like those other ones who are all like, ‘OMG, how do you know me?’” He raised his hands up in the air in mock terror, crying out in the highest-pitched voice he could manage. That got a couple of them laughing. “It’s really pathetic.”
“Was that voice supposed to be me?” I teased, a smile playing out along my lips. A strange sense of ecstasy flooded into my core. How long had it been since I’d been able to do that? “I do not sound like that.”
“Face it, Serah, you’re like the hot topic around here. You’re famous.”
“I’m dead,” I answered bitterly, joy fading from my face.
He shrugged. “So? A lot of people are more famous when they die. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Elvis…”
“Elvis Presley was a rock star. He was famous when he was alive.”
Kevin nodded, grinning. “Yes, but back then people knew him as Elvis Presley. Now you can say his first name and everybody’s like, ‘Oh, the rock star’.”
He lowered his voice to mimic the dumb jocks jeering him from across the room, and again I couldn’t help but smile. “It would be better if I were famous and alive, though.”
“Most of them say that,” he said, sighing.
I put my head in my hands, eyeing at him as I leaned across the table on my elbows. “So, do you do this often? Talking to people that aren’t really there?”
I hadn’t been watching Sam, otherwise I would’ve known that he was standing up, taking his plateful of uneaten food over to the trashcan that was a mere feet from our table. He dodged flying food, rowdy jocks, and groups of gossiping girls as he crossed the floor.
If I had, I would’ve told Kevin that he needed to keep his mouth shut.
He gestured a sign of indifference. “When they need me, you know, to help them with their unfinished business and stuff. That’s kinda why I figured you were here.”
“I don’t have unfinished business.”
That’s when it happened.
Kevin raised his eyebrows in blatant doubt. Sam was within inches of us. “Face it, Serah, everyone knows that if you’re not in Heaven right now there’s a reason why.”
I felt the air stiffen. Sam froze, muscles going rigid at the sound of my name, knuckles going white around his lunch tray before he released it as if it were on fire, food rolling everywhere as it clattered to the floor. He spun on his heels, looking Kevin straight in the eyes with a look that could kill.
The whole lunchroom went dead with an eerie, energy charged silence.
“You should get out of here, Kevin,” I said, fighting the shudder rolling out of me at the malice in Sam’s eyes. He had never looked like that before. Ever.
It was clear that times had changed.
Kevin didn’t say another word. Leaving his tray where it sat, he scooped up his notebook and backpack with quivering hands, pushed his chair away from the table—the scraping of the four legs against linoleum echoing against the silence of the empty space—and he was gone.
No one moved.
Sam was shaking, his brown eyes almost black with rage. The veins in his neck rose and fell with the rapid beating of his pulse, the muscles in his jaw tense. His hands were curled into fists.
I tried to concentrate on the steady sound of his breathing to keep the icy fear from trickling into my heart.
I wanted so much to reach out and touch him right then—I wanted to put the flat of my hand against his chest like they do in the movies to get the hotheads to calm down. I wanted to look him in the eye to tell him that it was going to be okay, that I was sorry that he had to live this way, and that it was all my fault. I wanted him to know that I had been here the entire time, and if it would make him happy I always would be.
His rage hit me like a wave, and before I could react he was gone in the same direction Kevin had left, the cafeteria erupting in surge of instigative applause.
I bolted after them with a speed I didn’t even know I had, forcing myself through the swinging door. I ignored the metallic taste that coated the back of my mouth afterwards, the panic rising in my throat. I had to help Kevin—if Sam really wanted to hurt him, and I had a feeling he really did—he could be in serious trouble. If I didn’t get there quick enough…
I followed the sounds of Sam’s bellows echoing down the hallway.
“Please, please!” I heard Kevin whimper. “I swear to you—I—”
“SHUT UP!” Sam roared. I rounded the corner, and found Kevin pinned up against the lockers, Sam with a death-grip on his shirt collar.
“Stop!” I shouted, running down the hall after them. My feet pounded the floor, silence following them. “Let him go! Stop it!”
Kevin turned to look at me, but Sam snatched him back. “If you EVER use her name again, I swear to GOD I’ll make you pay! Do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME?”
I beat against Sam’s back with both of my fists. “Let-him-go!” I shouted as each hand came down.
Kevin had gone completely white, a sheen of sweat cropping up along his face. He tried to hold his hands up, and his mouth moved as if he wished to form words, but every time he shifted Sam would snatch at his shirt collar. Kevin shuddered.
“Do you think this is a joke?” I cringed as Sam threw him against the locker again. “Is this a JOKE to you? Answer me!”
He stopped shoving, but his hands stayed close around his neck. Kevin looked like he was trying to keep himself from fainting, opening and closing his mouth while the syllables rolled around and fell off his tongue. Sam fought to comprehend his slurred speech, then threw him up against the locker to knock some sense into him.
“She’s—” he started, stopping so he could, what looked like, keep down his own vomit. “She’s right here.”
“What?” Sam and I shouted in unison.
Kevin stared at Sam through half-closed eyes. “She’s standing right beside you. She has been, this whole time.”
The lines in Sam’s face softened, and his hands fell away from Kevin’s collar. He stepped back, turned, paced back and forth in small circles. Kevin focused on catching his breath, grabbing the glasses off his face and cleaning them with a cleaning cloth he’d pulled from his pocket. I stood back, shaking in disbelief, trying to coax my heart out of my throat.
It dropped down into my stomach when I watched Sam twist back around with that same look of malice in his eyes, fists tight as he shoved one into Crazy Kevin’s face.
Kevin let out startled squeal, his glasses skittering out of his hands as he reacted one moment too late to protect his face. Blood gushed between his fingers, his eyes blinking rapidly in either an attempt to adjust his vision, or because of the pain that’d taken over. He sunk to the floor, body going limp.
I fell to his side. “Hey, Kevin, you all right? Come on, look at me. Don’t go passing out on me now, you’re my one hope. You have to help me with my unfinished business!” His eyes slipped beneath his lids as I coaxed him to stay conscious. I tapped his cheeks, hoping he could feel it. “Come on, Kevin! Look at me, this is my unfinished business. You have to help me talk to him.”
“And have him punch me again?” His voice came out as a squeak.
Sam screamed from above. “You think I’m stupid? You just haven’t had enough, have you? Well, you just wait until I get finished with you—” He grabbed him by the leg, dragging him across the hallway.
Kevin screamed, begging for mercy.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Tell him I was there the night after the funeral!”
He reiterated in between screams for help.
Sam froze. Kevin’s leg fell out of his grasp, of which he took every opportunity to scramble as far away as he could. He looked at him in disbelief. “Wha—what did you say?”
“Tell him I was there when he cried,” I whispered, a spark of hope catching in my heart.
Kevin gave me a wide-eyed look of fear, blood still dripping from his nose. “I’m not gonna say that!” His voice seemed to be at a permanent falsetto.
“What?” Sam asked, “What happened?”
Kevin’s gaze flitted between the two of us, not sure of which side to choose. “She—she says that she was there when you were really upset. She thinks that you’re her unfinished business.”
“Don’t edit for me,” I snapped.
I watched something in Sam’s eyes click. All of a sudden it was there, and he understood that Kevin was telling the truth. That I was there. He shook his head, falling into a state of shock.
“Tell him that I heard what he said on the day of the accident, and that I came back because of it. I saw how much pain he was in, and I realized that I was lost without him. All my life, I’d had him there beside me, and I was scared to go to a place that didn’t have him in it. Tell him—”
The words all began to fall. Kevin had to babble to keep up with me, and I made him go back and repeat all the important parts that he’d raced through. I watched with exhilaration as the expressions on Sam’s face slowly melted from one to another—confusion, curiosity, pain sadness, happiness, peace, back to happiness again. He smiled through what looked like tears.
I shifted so that I was in his direct line of vision, so that I could imagine he was looking straight at me. “Tell him that I want him to be happy, and that I know things are gonna be okay.”
Sam nodded in agreement.
A happiness rose in my chest, a feeling of radiance smoldering beneath my core. I watched as a golden light cascaded down, warmth for the first time in what felt like forever brushing my skin. I looked to Kevin. “Tell him that I love him.”
Tears rained down Sam’s face, sliding along his smile. “Can I see her one more time?” He looked to Kevin.
He shrugged. “That depends on her.”
We both looked to him, confusion etched into both our faces. Of course I wanted him to see me, I needed it to happen. He needed to see that I was going to be okay. I needed to know that I was doing the right thing. Nothing else mattered, nothing else was more important…
Golden light flashed from above. Both the boys raised their hands to their faces, shielding themselves from the light. It filtered inside my spirit, illuminating my core. I smiled, ecstasy pouring through me.
In a second, the light was gone, and I stood before them—whole, and breathing.
We were both crying by the time I was pulled into his arms, his grip strong around me.
His heart beat strong against mine, his warmth pooling onto my skin. I held on tight, my body rocking as he pulled me close to him, close enough not ever close enough. I wrapped myself in the smell of him, vowing to myself that I would never forget it.
I pulled away—just an inch, but still entirely too far—and looked him in the face. I would never forget that face. “I can’t stay,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said, stroking my cheek, “But this is enough.”
My mouth met his, and instantly the world fell away. I was consumed by the warmth of him, by the love that kept me close to him. It was a kiss that would forever keep him in my heart, in my soul.
I let it end, and Sam pressed his forehead close to mine. “I love you more than you could ever know,” he whispered.
“I love you more than that,” I muttered back.
Heaven’s invisible tether was pulling me. I smiled, looking up at the sky, letting in a deep, golden breath. “Be happy,” I told him, letting myself be pulled out of his arms.
“Be brave,”
I was. Heaven called for me, and this time I let them come. The white light embraced me, warmth sliding over my body. Happiness filling me. Acceptance allowing me to say goodbye.
And in that moment, I was gone.
It should’ve been a two step process—one, realize you’re dying, come to terms with it, and accept your spirit leaving your body. Two, slip into the infamous white light, kiss that old life goodbye, and make a list of all the things you plan to do for the rest of eternity. They don’t tell you that letting go is easier than it sounds—you’d be surprised what you’d give up when the sweet sounds of Heaven were all but serenading you from above.
Supposedly.
The pain was worse than I could’ve ever imagined—something that they never bother to tell you. Before you realize that death is imminent and that your road will ultimately stop there, the pain is blinding, so much so that even blacking out seems redundant. The agony would just bring you back to, and screaming would just add an unneeded ache to a body that already felt as though it was being set on fire and then stomped on.
Later rather than sooner, I grasped that it was my end and that my time on earth was slim and on its last legs. An oily warmth was beginning to spread through me, my brain detaching from my body and settling into a place where the gaping wound in my abdomen felt more like a papercut. I couldn’t feel the surges of blood sliding over my skin.
My head lolled in his arms, muscles forever relaxing.
For a second I wondered how he’d managed to pull me from the car—the driver’s side door had been crushed from impact. They’d swerved, trying to pass me on a deserted back road when the eighteen-wheeler carrying building supplies had come around the corner, veering into the left lane to keep from crushing the minivan…
And then the fence pole had launched itself off the trailer and through my windshield, catching me in my liver.
The world went dark and I woke up on the pavement too soon after, my limp body cradled in my best friend’s desperate grasp.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he kept saying over and over, “Everything’s fine. You’re gonna be okay.” Tears brimmed the corners of his eyes.
I’m not so sure about that, I wanted to say, but breathing was so hard. I could only stare at him through half-closed eyes.
His face was bloody. I could only figure that the glass had shattered in his direction, slicing miniature gashes along the side of his face. His voice was fading. I could only hear him if I focused all my strength.
I knew that I didn’t have long.
“Serah, I swear, I won’t let you go.” He pulled me close to him. “I won’t let you go.”
He smelled just like he always did. Old Spice, and chlorine from long hours practicing with the swim team. The warmth of his body melted into the heavenly white light pooling on my skin.
I was going to miss this.
I felt myself letting go, my grip on life slipping. It’s going to be okay, I wanted to tell him, I promise. I wanted to wrap my arms around him, to hug him as much as he was hugging me.
I could only muster a small, half-smile.
Tears spilled out onto his cheeks, his voice dying in his throat. My glorious white light glared most of his features, but his warmth was still there. I tried to concentrate on his face, to remember it the way it was right now before I left it forever.
For a split second, I watched him smile back.
It was enough. Mind pulling away from body, I looked into those eyes one last time and closed my own. I couldn’t hold on any longer, and I waited for Heaven to take me.
Things would’ve worked out just fine, had Sam kept his big, fat mouth shut.
Sobs racked through him. “Come back to me,” he begged, shaking my shoulders. “Serah, look at me! Look at me!”
I couldn’t. His voice was an echo in the distance. The warmth had wrapped a cocoon around me, the light drawing me away from him. Things were already seeming so much better—I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to be rid of this place, away from the pain and disappointment that came as a package deal and burned holes in my heart.
I wanted this. This was my happily ever after.
I watched Sam stroke my hair with shaky hands as I forever separated from my body, smoothing the stray hairs that’d been soaked with his tears. His voice was a dry rasp that turned sobs into moaning hiccups, a keening escaping the back of his throat. I still felt him holding me, his strength the only thing seemingly holding me together.
Holding me here.
His lips grazed my ear. I shivered. “Please,” he whispered, the hope dead.
A twinge of guilt hit me in the spot where my wound should’ve been, the spot that remained perfectly intact in my new spirit body. How could I leave him here, in this way? What would happen to him? What would forever be like without him there beside me?
I felt his warm breath skim my skin. “Please,” he said again, this time with even more despair than the last. “You can’t leave me.”
I have to, I realized, the sound of his voice falling away from me. Heaven was pulling at me from above, an invisible tether dragging me backwards and away from the only thing I’d ever known. The warm glow had taken over my core, a luminescence radiating from within.
I couldn’t wait anymore. It was my time.
I was far away when Sam’s head dipped low for the final time, forehead leaning into mine.
“I love you,” he muttered, his mouth brushing against my cheek as the last spark of life left my body.
Ice locked around my heart. I was falling, spinning, crashing back into the earth as confusion wrapped around my brain, my glow snuffed out as a swirling darkness burned inside me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t feel.
I hit the ground hard, spread-eagled and aching down to my last fiber.
He loved me, I thought, staring up into the cloudless sky as the last bits of Heaven receded without me. My warmth was gone, the divine light tucking itself somewhere behind the sun, in a place where it hurt too badly to look for it. I was cold, sprawled out on a slab of hot asphalt in the middle of the day in July.
He loved me.
An eerie silence oiled the air around me. I sat up, ignoring the slightly dizzy feeling you get when you move too fast and all the blood rushes to your head, and scrambled to pull my thoughts together. He had been in love. With me. I almost left him. Almost…
I had to find him.
Somehow I managed to pull myself to my feet and get them moving—I ran. I cut through the air like the end of a sharpened blade, the wind whistling in my ears as I pounded the pavement, taking the burning in my lungs as if it were nothing.
I had to find Sam. If Heaven had made a mistake, had given me a second chance, he had to be the first one to know. I had to tell him I was alive, that I came back because of him. That his love brought me back.
I rounded the corner, and there he was.
With me.
Sill wrapped up in his arms.
Lifeless, and cold.
Panic slid through me, a weight that settled into my gut and churned while a cold realization hit me in the place where my heart should’ve been. I was here. And there. I was…
Dead.
The ambulance finally arrived. I was running to them before the vehicle had even completely stopped, screaming over the blare of the sirens. The driver didn’t give me a second glance, taking one look at Sam and my old body doubled over on the asphalt and barking orders to the other in the passenger seat beside him. He threw the van in park.
I pounded the window, but my fist went straight through.
“Someone help me!” I grabbed for their hands, shoulders, elbows—anything I could get my hands on. They pushed right through me, my hands slipping off of their bodies as if I were only wind. I screamed in their faces. I pulled at the medical bags in their hands.
They wrenched my body from Sam’s arms, one of them settling me onto the pavement while the other checked Sam for vitals and signs of trauma. He fought around them, screaming, scrambling back to my body with tears pouring down his face.
“I won’t leave you!” He fell on top of me, shielding my body with his own.
I was so cold. Terror lodged itself in my throat; panic swallowed up what little was left of me. This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t real. They were going to save me, they had to.
The no-nonsense driver guy pulled him away from me as the other one warmed up the defibrillator paddles. “Keep him away from her,” he said smoothly, tuning the machine.
Chaos reigned with Sam’s desperate screams, wails of the sirens, and the pulsing electrical sounds of the machine as it tried to pull me back to life.
And they say dying is easy.
The afternoon hummed with the sound of loneliness. With the sound of laziness, and time creeping by in the heat-oppressed hours like small droplets of water hitting the bottom of a bucket—the slow, rhythmic waves blending one second into the next. The air teemed with nonexistence, humanity and creatures otherwise holed up somewhere where the long hours meant an escape from the ungodly heat.
For those that still knew what heat felt like.
I couldn’t remember how long I’d spent sitting here. I’d watched the night fall, the sun rise, the heat pile up on the sidewalks as the afternoon blaze crested high above the average tolerance. I’d watched them leave for work, come home, and then leave again. I watched children play on the sidewalks, ride bikes in the driveway, and eat popsicles in the shade and away from the sun.
None of them saw me, though.
I left because I got tired of seeing everyone cry. Mom had keened for two days straight, my dad stayed up for hours weeping over the photo album. My grandparents did nothing but pray since they got the news, and my friends wore black twenty-four seven.
And Sam.
I couldn’t look at him without hurting. There was pain in his eyes, a look that said somewhere not so deep inside him he was dying. He made my yearning for life that much more real, and made my death ten times more painful than it should’ve been.
I’m dead, I thought for the ten thousandth time, I’m not supposed to be here.
In truth, there were a lot of things I shouldn’t have been doing since my demise. I should’ve lost the ability to feel pain—I didn’t. My new spirit body should’ve been intact and free of wounds—it wasn’t. I shouldn’t have had to run away from the only people I loved, sitting on a stranger’s front step and watch small segments of time stretch into eternity.
I did.
They don’t tell you that being dead and not moving on is pretty much the same thing as being human—you wake up stiff and hurting, yearning for what could never be, and you fall asleep missing what you never had in the first place while everything else slips from your fingers.
Only, there’s no one around to pull you out of the quicksand that is self-pity.
I followed him home from the funeral.
“You’re late,” I said to him as he slid into the last pew, eyes full of sorrow and soul heavy. “You were supposed to be here thirty minutes ago. I thought you weren’t coming.” I fell into the seat beside him. I was afraid you weren’t coming.
The muscles in his jaw tensed. He shifted his hunched shoulders uncomfortably underneath his dress shirt, gaze fixed unblinkingly forward.
So he didn’t know I was there.
A sense of embarrassment and relief tingled under my skin. I’d spun myself into worried fits thinking of how this moment would be—the first time I’d actually tried talking to him. If he did respond, if he did understand that I was “back from the grave”, what would I say to him? Dead or not, someone whom I’d known since elementary school had professed his love to me, and it wouldn’t make for an easy conversation. If he couldn’t hear me, then how was I supposed to get all the unsaid words out into the open, to clear the air between us? If I couldn’t convince him to move on, how was I supposed to move on myself?
A twinge of disappointment ebbed inside me, even though ninety percent of me knew how this was going to turn out.
He stayed seated until every last person left the church. When even the pastor had retired to his office, Sam got up very slowly, left his dark corner, and made his way to the front row.
He put a single hand on my casket. “Without you, I don’t belong,” he whispered, and he left.
San’s parents looked as if their worry lines had been etched into their faces when we walked through the door. Neither one of them dared to say a word; they watched as their only son loosened the tie from around his neck and unbuttoned his collar as if he were a monkey in a zoo, waiting for him to do something either extremely crazy or extremely reckless.
“Jesus, say something to him,” I said, leaning up against the counter.
They didn’t react in a way that said they’d heard me, but his mother was the first to speak. “Sam,” she said carefully, stretching out the word as if she were trying to keep him calm, “Sam. Honey.”
He didn’t appear to hear her, or either he didn’t care. He shuffled through the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, rummaging through drawers.
The shoes had come off too, and he padded across the floor in a pair of dark dress socks.
His dad cleared his throat. “Son?”
Sam didn’t look them in the face, but raised his eyebrows in a symbol of comprehension. He pulled out the loaf of bread.
“Well, uh, how—how did it go?” His gaze nervously flitted from his son to his wife, who silently pressed him to continue. “How was the—the service?”
I watched his muscles go rigid for one, seemingly unending second as a tension-filled silence electrified the air. His hands froze halfway in the silverware drawer. His grip tightened around the edge of the counter.
And then he looked up.
What I saw in his eyes wasn’t Sam anymore—there was no feeling, no life left in his drained, withered expression. He looked like the kid who’d had the sense beaten out of him every day of his life, and every ounce of hope chopped down to stumps. He had the look of a tired man who’d been burdened with more than he could carry.
The muscles in his jaw jumped, biting down before he could finally compose an answer. “Fine,” he said, tone dismissive. “It was just the way she would’ve wanted it.”
He sat down at the table, crushing his newly made sandwich between two fists.
His mom reached across the table, fingers gently touching his arm. “Sam, please. You know you can talk to us. It’s okay, we want to help you—”
Sam shrugged away. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said around a mouthful of ham and cheese. The look in his eyes told them to drop it. “I’m okay, I swear.”
Before she could get another word out he stuffed the last corner of bread between his teeth, scooped up the crumbs, and hiked up the stairs—a shutting door marking the end of the conversation.
Oh, this was so much worse than I thought.
I pushed away from the counter, leaving his parents silently conversing to one another with a series of facial expressions while they both watched the head of the stairs. His mother had tears in her eyes.
I watched them for a long moment, biting my lip. “I’m sorry that I’ve done this to your family,” I said. “You have no idea how badly I want to fix this.”
It took a while to gather up the courage to push myself through his bedroom door—I still hadn’t gotten used to how unpleasant the feeling of it all actually was. To pass through completely, you had to temporarily bond yourself with the material you were slipping between—an entirely distasteful event when you put yourself back together on the other side and you realized that you still felt like the barrier you purged. I hesitated, balancing on the carpet fibers unmoved by my presence, forcing memories of the worst-case-scenario from my mind.
The last thing I wanted was to get stuck—I’d taste maple for days.
Not only that, but crossing the threshold felt morally wrong in my mind, like I was nothing more than a common peeping tom. I knew I could never be caught, but still—it was that fact that probably made this whole thing so much worse.
But this was Sam we were talking about, and so I stuck my head through anyway.
It took a minute to refocus my swimming head as I pieced myself back together on the other side of the door, my insides quivering as if they were made from jelly. I choked back the nauseating sensation rolling through me. I blinked, forcing my senses to organize the prism of swirling shapes and colors into familiar sights, sounds, and feelings.
My vision shifted as I fought to come to grips with the faded forms lost in the shadows. Every inch of his room was covered in darkness—the shades had been drawn, and curtains thrown together so that not even a speck of light could manage to wriggle its way through. I took a step forward, and noticed that it didn’t smell the same; it had lost the familiar traces of boy smell and chlorine, a certain staleness filling the air. The whole room smelled like a closet that’d been shut up for years, or a boy that’d been hiding out here for weeks.
Sam’s faded form came into view.
He sat on the edge of his bed, hunched over, staring into his hands. The digital clock on the edge of his night table cast a green glow over his features, burning new holes of heartache into me as I watched the agony rip across his face. He balled his fists up, hands shaking, breathing deeply as if trying to keep some sort of composure.
And then it all shattered, and the Sam I knew fell to pieces.
He cried. Not just a sniffle in the back of his throat, not just tears cascading down his cheeks. No, Sam—the one who I’d known forever and not once let out more than a whimper—broke down, sobbing, weeping until he couldn’t catch his breath anymore and then still moaning as he struggled to breathe around his tears. He gasped for air, clutching his midsection while the sound locked up in his throat and silent howls fought to escape around rib-racking sniffles. His whole body shook, and I watched with pure misery while he attempted to bite his lip and keep quiet, tears and snot pouring down his face.
My insides burned. It felt as if my heart had been set on fire, and yet my soul had been coated over with a layer of ice. I struggled to keep my head from spinning, to keep myself whole and from disappearing into nothingness. I can’t do this, I thought, I can’t do it. I can’t watch him suffer this way. I can’t…
Because he was in just as much pain as I was.
If there was ever a way to die twice, I had just succeeded.
I sat down, and pulled myself close to him. He quivered like I imagined myself doing, should ghosts have the ability to react emotionally like the living. I pictured his body heat bleeding onto my skin, his arm falling around me and actually connecting with solid skin and bone and a smile on his lips as he looked down on a face he could actually see. I wanted to be there with him, body and soul, my heart beating against his.
And I wanted to stop hurting, so, so much.
“I’m here,” I whispered, gently resting my arms around his waist. “I’m right here.”
And I prayed that he could hear me.
High school, even for a dead girl, is no fun—there are so many pairs of eyes, so many chances for a false sense of hope as you look into the crowd and see someone’s gaze connect with yours, smiling, and waving. For a split second you believe that, finally, someone has recognized your existence and will finally talk to you.
And then they push straight through you, meeting up on the other side with a friend, boyfriend, or just some random stranger whom was decidedly way more interesting than you.
Talk about a major ego boost.
I heard my name everywhere. I was the girl who died in a tragic accident over the summer, the sadly missed face from the senior class. I came up in hushed whispers, in heartrending accounts of that day from newspaper clippings and gossip that had leaked through the town.
For my friends, I never came up at all.
Laura, May, and Susan acted as if I never existed. For all intents and purposes, I was imaginary—the poor dead girl created from a figment of the mind to down everyone’s mood. They were tired of mourning and ready to party, and the memory of a friend that was long gone was not going to ruin their senior year.
Their words.
The truth of the matter was, though, that I didn’t care. Not really. I didn’t come here to see how they were doing or how they were getting along without me or if I was getting the sympathy I deserved from my so-called “best friends”.
I came for Sam.
He was beginning to worry me. He quit the swim team. He sat in the back of the class and slept. He hadn’t touched a single college application. He went home and locked himself in his room, and slept some more.
I sat across the cafeteria, watching him pick at the sandwich on his tray.
“You know, you sitting there like that, it makes you look like you almost belong.”
I turned, expecting to see a group of kids gathered behind me. The lunchroom was littered with cliques, the ones that weren’t eating standing around, talking to each other. I’d thought I was able to dodge most of them, picking the farthest corner of the room to sit and watch, undisturbed.
I met the face of a single freckly-faced, bespectacled kid hugging his lunch tray to his chest. He looked me dead in the eye.
“You—you can see me?” I asked, disbelieving.
He grinned. “Those blood stains kind of throw off the whole look, though. Makes you look like more of a deranged serial killer than a student.” He slid into a seat across from me.
“You’re talking to me?” I asked, breathless.
“Yeah.” He said, shoving a fork into his macaroni and cheese. “Who else would I be talking to?”
Any of the other hundred and fifty living souls milling about this place, I thought to say, but let it die in my throat. I could only manage to stare, mouth gaping.
Someone can see me.
“Why?” I asked. You’d think that after yearning for someone to notice me, I’d come up with something better to say.
But I was too shocked to even piece together intelligent thoughts.
“Because you’re sitting at my table.” He said around a mouthful of macaroni noodles, wagging his fork in the air. “It’d be impolite if I didn’t.”
“But I’m dead.” I said, “People’ll think you’re crazy.”
I watched in disbelief as he shrugged his shoulders, tearing into his bread and dipping it into the cheese sauce as if talking to a ghost was the most normal thing in the world. He pushed his glasses up on his nose, shifting his notebook aside with his elbow. Then he twisted the cap off his soda, and took a gulp.
“People already think I’m crazy. Crazy Kevin.” He said after he set the bottle back down, lifting up his fork again. “I figure I should at least give them something to talk about.”
I glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the cafeteria, and already he was attracting attention. I watched some fingers point at his back, whispers erupting as some of them turned to watch. A couple of losers from two tables over shouted at him, waiting for him to turn around so they could throw their food at him.
He just kept staring at me, grinning.
“Nice to see you again, Serah.”
“How do you—?”
“Oh please,” he said, “Don’t be like those other ones who are all like, ‘OMG, how do you know me?’” He raised his hands up in the air in mock terror, crying out in the highest-pitched voice he could manage. That got a couple of them laughing. “It’s really pathetic.”
“Was that voice supposed to be me?” I teased, a smile playing out along my lips. A strange sense of ecstasy flooded into my core. How long had it been since I’d been able to do that? “I do not sound like that.”
“Face it, Serah, you’re like the hot topic around here. You’re famous.”
“I’m dead,” I answered bitterly, joy fading from my face.
He shrugged. “So? A lot of people are more famous when they die. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Elvis…”
“Elvis Presley was a rock star. He was famous when he was alive.”
Kevin nodded, grinning. “Yes, but back then people knew him as Elvis Presley. Now you can say his first name and everybody’s like, ‘Oh, the rock star’.”
He lowered his voice to mimic the dumb jocks jeering him from across the room, and again I couldn’t help but smile. “It would be better if I were famous and alive, though.”
“Most of them say that,” he said, sighing.
I put my head in my hands, eyeing at him as I leaned across the table on my elbows. “So, do you do this often? Talking to people that aren’t really there?”
I hadn’t been watching Sam, otherwise I would’ve known that he was standing up, taking his plateful of uneaten food over to the trashcan that was a mere feet from our table. He dodged flying food, rowdy jocks, and groups of gossiping girls as he crossed the floor.
If I had, I would’ve told Kevin that he needed to keep his mouth shut.
He gestured a sign of indifference. “When they need me, you know, to help them with their unfinished business and stuff. That’s kinda why I figured you were here.”
“I don’t have unfinished business.”
That’s when it happened.
Kevin raised his eyebrows in blatant doubt. Sam was within inches of us. “Face it, Serah, everyone knows that if you’re not in Heaven right now there’s a reason why.”
I felt the air stiffen. Sam froze, muscles going rigid at the sound of my name, knuckles going white around his lunch tray before he released it as if it were on fire, food rolling everywhere as it clattered to the floor. He spun on his heels, looking Kevin straight in the eyes with a look that could kill.
The whole lunchroom went dead with an eerie, energy charged silence.
“You should get out of here, Kevin,” I said, fighting the shudder rolling out of me at the malice in Sam’s eyes. He had never looked like that before. Ever.
It was clear that times had changed.
Kevin didn’t say another word. Leaving his tray where it sat, he scooped up his notebook and backpack with quivering hands, pushed his chair away from the table—the scraping of the four legs against linoleum echoing against the silence of the empty space—and he was gone.
No one moved.
Sam was shaking, his brown eyes almost black with rage. The veins in his neck rose and fell with the rapid beating of his pulse, the muscles in his jaw tense. His hands were curled into fists.
I tried to concentrate on the steady sound of his breathing to keep the icy fear from trickling into my heart.
I wanted so much to reach out and touch him right then—I wanted to put the flat of my hand against his chest like they do in the movies to get the hotheads to calm down. I wanted to look him in the eye to tell him that it was going to be okay, that I was sorry that he had to live this way, and that it was all my fault. I wanted him to know that I had been here the entire time, and if it would make him happy I always would be.
His rage hit me like a wave, and before I could react he was gone in the same direction Kevin had left, the cafeteria erupting in surge of instigative applause.
I bolted after them with a speed I didn’t even know I had, forcing myself through the swinging door. I ignored the metallic taste that coated the back of my mouth afterwards, the panic rising in my throat. I had to help Kevin—if Sam really wanted to hurt him, and I had a feeling he really did—he could be in serious trouble. If I didn’t get there quick enough…
I followed the sounds of Sam’s bellows echoing down the hallway.
“Please, please!” I heard Kevin whimper. “I swear to you—I—”
“SHUT UP!” Sam roared. I rounded the corner, and found Kevin pinned up against the lockers, Sam with a death-grip on his shirt collar.
“Stop!” I shouted, running down the hall after them. My feet pounded the floor, silence following them. “Let him go! Stop it!”
Kevin turned to look at me, but Sam snatched him back. “If you EVER use her name again, I swear to GOD I’ll make you pay! Do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME?”
I beat against Sam’s back with both of my fists. “Let-him-go!” I shouted as each hand came down.
Kevin had gone completely white, a sheen of sweat cropping up along his face. He tried to hold his hands up, and his mouth moved as if he wished to form words, but every time he shifted Sam would snatch at his shirt collar. Kevin shuddered.
“Do you think this is a joke?” I cringed as Sam threw him against the locker again. “Is this a JOKE to you? Answer me!”
He stopped shoving, but his hands stayed close around his neck. Kevin looked like he was trying to keep himself from fainting, opening and closing his mouth while the syllables rolled around and fell off his tongue. Sam fought to comprehend his slurred speech, then threw him up against the locker to knock some sense into him.
“She’s—” he started, stopping so he could, what looked like, keep down his own vomit. “She’s right here.”
“What?” Sam and I shouted in unison.
Kevin stared at Sam through half-closed eyes. “She’s standing right beside you. She has been, this whole time.”
The lines in Sam’s face softened, and his hands fell away from Kevin’s collar. He stepped back, turned, paced back and forth in small circles. Kevin focused on catching his breath, grabbing the glasses off his face and cleaning them with a cleaning cloth he’d pulled from his pocket. I stood back, shaking in disbelief, trying to coax my heart out of my throat.
It dropped down into my stomach when I watched Sam twist back around with that same look of malice in his eyes, fists tight as he shoved one into Crazy Kevin’s face.
Kevin let out startled squeal, his glasses skittering out of his hands as he reacted one moment too late to protect his face. Blood gushed between his fingers, his eyes blinking rapidly in either an attempt to adjust his vision, or because of the pain that’d taken over. He sunk to the floor, body going limp.
I fell to his side. “Hey, Kevin, you all right? Come on, look at me. Don’t go passing out on me now, you’re my one hope. You have to help me with my unfinished business!” His eyes slipped beneath his lids as I coaxed him to stay conscious. I tapped his cheeks, hoping he could feel it. “Come on, Kevin! Look at me, this is my unfinished business. You have to help me talk to him.”
“And have him punch me again?” His voice came out as a squeak.
Sam screamed from above. “You think I’m stupid? You just haven’t had enough, have you? Well, you just wait until I get finished with you—” He grabbed him by the leg, dragging him across the hallway.
Kevin screamed, begging for mercy.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Tell him I was there the night after the funeral!”
He reiterated in between screams for help.
Sam froze. Kevin’s leg fell out of his grasp, of which he took every opportunity to scramble as far away as he could. He looked at him in disbelief. “Wha—what did you say?”
“Tell him I was there when he cried,” I whispered, a spark of hope catching in my heart.
Kevin gave me a wide-eyed look of fear, blood still dripping from his nose. “I’m not gonna say that!” His voice seemed to be at a permanent falsetto.
“What?” Sam asked, “What happened?”
Kevin’s gaze flitted between the two of us, not sure of which side to choose. “She—she says that she was there when you were really upset. She thinks that you’re her unfinished business.”
“Don’t edit for me,” I snapped.
I watched something in Sam’s eyes click. All of a sudden it was there, and he understood that Kevin was telling the truth. That I was there. He shook his head, falling into a state of shock.
“Tell him that I heard what he said on the day of the accident, and that I came back because of it. I saw how much pain he was in, and I realized that I was lost without him. All my life, I’d had him there beside me, and I was scared to go to a place that didn’t have him in it. Tell him—”
The words all began to fall. Kevin had to babble to keep up with me, and I made him go back and repeat all the important parts that he’d raced through. I watched with exhilaration as the expressions on Sam’s face slowly melted from one to another—confusion, curiosity, pain sadness, happiness, peace, back to happiness again. He smiled through what looked like tears.
I shifted so that I was in his direct line of vision, so that I could imagine he was looking straight at me. “Tell him that I want him to be happy, and that I know things are gonna be okay.”
Sam nodded in agreement.
A happiness rose in my chest, a feeling of radiance smoldering beneath my core. I watched as a golden light cascaded down, warmth for the first time in what felt like forever brushing my skin. I looked to Kevin. “Tell him that I love him.”
Tears rained down Sam’s face, sliding along his smile. “Can I see her one more time?” He looked to Kevin.
He shrugged. “That depends on her.”
We both looked to him, confusion etched into both our faces. Of course I wanted him to see me, I needed it to happen. He needed to see that I was going to be okay. I needed to know that I was doing the right thing. Nothing else mattered, nothing else was more important…
Golden light flashed from above. Both the boys raised their hands to their faces, shielding themselves from the light. It filtered inside my spirit, illuminating my core. I smiled, ecstasy pouring through me.
In a second, the light was gone, and I stood before them—whole, and breathing.
We were both crying by the time I was pulled into his arms, his grip strong around me.
His heart beat strong against mine, his warmth pooling onto my skin. I held on tight, my body rocking as he pulled me close to him, close enough not ever close enough. I wrapped myself in the smell of him, vowing to myself that I would never forget it.
I pulled away—just an inch, but still entirely too far—and looked him in the face. I would never forget that face. “I can’t stay,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said, stroking my cheek, “But this is enough.”
My mouth met his, and instantly the world fell away. I was consumed by the warmth of him, by the love that kept me close to him. It was a kiss that would forever keep him in my heart, in my soul.
I let it end, and Sam pressed his forehead close to mine. “I love you more than you could ever know,” he whispered.
“I love you more than that,” I muttered back.
Heaven’s invisible tether was pulling me. I smiled, looking up at the sky, letting in a deep, golden breath. “Be happy,” I told him, letting myself be pulled out of his arms.
“Be brave,”
I was. Heaven called for me, and this time I let them come. The white light embraced me, warmth sliding over my body. Happiness filling me. Acceptance allowing me to say goodbye.
And in that moment, I was gone.
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