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I slumped down on the couch with the kids.Cocohad been such a big movie last year. What would be the next Pixar hit? Whatever it was, Aunt Linda would never get to know it. Even if it was bigger thanFrozen, she’d never know it existed.

Any song that came out from this week onward, Aunt Linda would never hear. Not once.

Everything she was ever going to know about had already happened. Britney Spears could be voted the new president of the United States, and Aunt Linda would never know. The government might finally admit they have aliens in a warehouse, and Aunt Linda would never know. The world would keep moving, and tragedies would happen, and beautiful things would happen, and we’d invent things and grow and Aunt Linda would never see any of it.

And… God, I was so selfish and self-absorbed, but while I was completely devastated about Aunt Linda, I was also scared for myself. I mean, I knew about death, obviously, but it had always been in the abstract. Now it felt startlingly real. Real people I knew would die. All of us. Every real person I knew would die.

And I would die, too.

One day, I would see the last thing I was ever going to see. And the next day, someone would release a song I’d never hear. Statistically, the most amazing events that would ever happen in the world would probably happen sometime in the far future, and I’d never get to know about it. So many beautiful, wonderful things would happen one day, in a world that didn’t have me in it. And I didn’t want the world to keep going if I wasn’t in it. I mean, obviously Idid, it’s not like I wanted to take everyone else down with me. But the idea of just being here, and then not beinghere, and the world not really caring that I was gone was so… it just… it made me feel hollow.

Will would laugh at me and call me goth if he saw me, because I was probably filling all those existential stereotypes right now, but seriously, what was the point? What was thepoint? Of any of this? If we were all going to just vanish at a moment’s notice, why bother even trying while we were alive? It’s not like we’d be able to remember any of it once we were dead.

I kicked off my shoes, brought my knees up to my chest, and tuned back in to the movie.

A part of me expected the kids to ask me questions about the afterlife, like if that’s where their mom was, and if she was a skeleton now, or something. But they didn’t. They were weirdly quiet. Like, weirdly quiet. Crista, who never took a break, just stared at the TV. Or, really, she staredthroughthe TV with glazed-over eyes, snuggled into her bright pink beanbag.

Dylan, sitting in a beanbag covered in pictures ofThomas the Tank Engine, was clutching a bottle without drinking out of it. I sat up, confused. Since when did he ditch glasses and mugs? “Hey, Dyl. I haven’t seen that bottle in a while.”

“It’smybottle.”

“Yeah, I remember it.”

“My bottle.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You can’t have it.”

“That’s fine. I don’t want it.”

“You can’t have it. It’s my bottle.IT’S MY BOTTLE, I WANT IT, IT’S NOT YOURS!” he screeched, curling up into a ball on his beanbag. Crista barely glanced at him. “IT’S MY BOTTLE! MY BOTTLE, MY BOTTLE!”

Oh shit. “Dylan, yeah, it’s your bottle. I’m no—”

“DON’T TAKE IT!”

“I’mnot!”

“IT’S NOT YOUR BOTTLE, OLLIE! NOT, IT’S NOT, IT’S NO—” He broke off and started full-blown wailing, screaming the room down and summoning a demon from the pits of Hades’s lair.

I hopped to the floor and went over to try to calm him down. “Hey, hey, Dyl, it’s okay.”

He swiped at me with the bottle. “NO! NO!”

“I’m not—”

He threw the bottle at me, and it hit me square in the forehead. Nearly knocked me the hell out, too.“Dylan!”

In response, he roared at me, his little face purple with rage. I held the bottle out to him and he knocked it out of my hand and started kicking in the air, screaming as loudly as he could.

Crista kept watching the movie like this wasn’t even happening.

I stood up, helpless, and Uncle Roy came into the room. I was about to explain, but he didn’t look surprised at all. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, picking up a still-kicking-and-screaming Dylan. “It’s time for your nap.”

“NONONONON—”

“Yes. Say good night to Ollie and Crista.”