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Me being dead and then alive doesn’t feel as wrong as Mom and Dad being apart. They were meant to be together forever. Like me and Calvin were.

I need to see Calvin. To believe that love can survive.

I go back to my room, claiming to need a nap. I wait until Dad’s truck pulls out before I poke my head into the hallway. Mom and Dad’s—no, Mom’s—door is still closed, the Do Not Disturb sign I made her when she started graduate school hanging on the door. Missy is in her room, on her computer. I creep past and slip into the garage, wheeling my bike out before jumping on and pedaling as fast as I can toward downtown.

I try to picture the last time I saw Calvin. Yesterday, on my way home, it seemed like I’d just seen him, but when I try to pinpoint a specific memory, it’s fuzzy, like trying to read a book in a dream.

Here’s what I do remember: Calvin and I getting our college acceptances to the same school, feeling like this was the first step in our life together. Calvin and I having sex for the first time after junior prom. Calvin and I exchanging our first kiss at the bake sale. All those firsts. But even the memories feel distant now, like memories of memories, the way Mom and Dad’s stories of when they first met do. I wasn’t there, obviously, but I’ve heard the tales of their meeting, of the wedding, of Mom crying at the jeweler’s, so often that they have become mine.

I’ve never been to the Bitter End, but I know where it is. Everyone does. It’s been around forever, a low windowless building with a blinking neon sign on a corner next to a parking lot. The town declared the sign a landmark so it’s not allowed to be taken down, no matter who owns the place. It’s changed hands a bunch of times, but it’s always been a dump. It’s like the name has cursed it.

When I push open the door, a tiny bell tinkles, such a sweet sound for such a dark, dank place. It’s nearly empty, with only one couple arguing at a corner table. Which sums up the vibe.

How could Calvin—who worked so hard to avoid this kind of thing—have wound up here?

The only other person around is the bartender. He’s older, maybe around Aunt Pauline’s age, and is wearing a bandanna low across his forehead. I approach him to ask if I could speak to the manager, because Calvin must be in charge. His gaze is downward as he writes in some sort of ledger and doesn’t look up when I approach.

I clear my throat. “Excuse me,” I say.

His head whips up and that’s when I see the face, so familiar and not at the same time, and then the ledger, which isn’t a ledger. It’s a sketchbook, full of doodles and drawings I would know anywhere.

“Calvin?”

How can this be Calvin? Who was big, substantial, like a monster truck, he used to joke self-deprecatingly. He was self-conscious about his size, but I loved it because you would never guess that kind of body could house that kind of heart. His heft made him feel solid. Made me feel safe.

But this person is so thin—it’s like one gust of wind and he’d be knocked right over. He’s gaping at me like I’m a stranger.

“Calvin, it’s me. .”

He blinks and says nothing.

“I’m . Your .”

A strangled sound escapes from his mouth as he pushes himself away from the bar and for a horrible second, I think he’s going to do what my mom did: scream, hide, reject me. But he catapults his entire body over the bar and grabs me by the shoulders. His eyes blaze with something as he raises his hand and for one brief moment I think he’s going to hit me.

But he doesn’t. He pulls my head into his chest and I let out a sigh of relief from the deepest part of me. Calvin. My forever love. Here.

I pull him toward me, reaching up to take off the bandanna. To see Calvin. My Calvin. Calvin’s lips. Calvin’s hands. Calvin’s stubble. Calvin’s spit. I want to drink it all in.

He reaches behind me to lift me up. His girth may be diminished but he is still tall, and he lifts me easily. I swing my legs around his hips, hanging on for dear life.

Walking backward, he pushes us through double swinging saloon doors, and then opens another door, closing it behind him with a powerful kick. He lays me down on a couch. He climbs on top of me and I wait for it, for the weight of him. The permanence. The safety. But even with his body on mine, I don’t feel anything. It’s like he’s hovering.

My shoes come off. My pants. My shirt. My bra.

I start to shiver. It’s freezing in here, even colder than it was at home.

Calvin stands up to kick off his shoes, his jeans. I see his desire. I used to have so much for him. But it’s like something on a distant shore. Is this a byproduct of coming back to life? Does it take a bit of time for the systems to fire back up?

I grab at his shirt. I want it off. I need to feel all of him, to bring me back, truly back. I yank again, tugging so hard at the shirt it rips down the center, the shirt hanging open like a gash. Underneath, Calvin’s once powerful chest is as concave as a collapsed cake.

I gasp. “Calvin!”

He blinks once, then twice, and looks right at me. They’re his eyes, and they’re not his eyes. They look empty, like a home once lived in but now abandoned. What happened to him? I think.

“,”

he says. It sounds less like he’s saying my name than answering my unspoken question.

What happened to him? I happened to him.

His expression has changed, a dark curtain blocking out the dim light.

“You’re not ,” he says.

“I am,”

I say. “I know it seems impossible, but I am.”

Calvin flattens his palms against his eyes and pushes hard, the sinews in his diminished muscles straining. I’m scared he might pop out his eyes or something. He is so strong. Or was.

“You’re not .”

His voice is ragged and desperate. “ died.”

“I know I did. But I’m back now. I know it makes no sense, but I’m here. And I still love you. I forever love you.”

The room goes still. Calvin leans over and heaves into a bucket, only unlike when I puked, something comes out, and though I can’t smell it, I can tell it has the same boozy reek of defeat that emanates throughout the bar.

“Calvin,”

I cry again, but he’s already yanking up his pants and running out of the room. I put on my clothes and chase after him, but when I get back to the bar, it’s empty now, save for the echo of the bell ringing over the door.

Casey

Eight Years Before

Casey Locke did not understand why people made such a big deal over weddings. You got to dress up, sure, but never as nice as the bride or bridesmaids, who had their hair and makeup done professionally. Then you had to sit there with a straight face as people made all sorts of bogus promises about loving each other forever.

Casey might have been only sixteen years old, but she knew this was a crock. Marriage was a cage, maybe a diamond-encrusted one, but still a cage. Just look at her parents.

They’d made her come to this wedding, even though she barely knew the couple. The groom was some colleague of her dad’s. She’d tried to get out of it until her dad had pleaded, “Please, princess. I want to show off our beautiful family.”

Plus, to sweeten the deal, he said she could get a new dress.

And so now, here they were, the beautiful Locke family, milling during the cocktail hour before the reception. Her parents held hands and smiled with too much teeth as they were greeted by her father’s employees, some of whom remarked on just what a woman Casey was becoming, eyeing the low-cut sleeveless silk sheath she’d bought for the wedding with an expression that suggested this was not necessarily a compliment. As soon as they moved on, Casey’s mom’s smile dropped and she complained about the open bar serving only wine and beer, which she called “cheap,”

or the bride’s beaded dress, which she deemed “tacky.”

Speaking of cheap and tacky, in the corner of the room, a woman in a blue-spangled dress started playing the piano. It was the song “Memories”

from Cats.

“Hey, Dad,”

Casey said in between all the glad-handing. “I’m thinking of trying out for the school musical.”

It had been ’s idea. “We’ll have so much fun,”

she’d said in that annoyingly gushy way of hers. “They’re doing Guys and Dolls. You could be Adelaide and I’ll be Sarah.”

“Why, because Sarah’s so pure and Adelaide’s a slut?”

Casey had replied, half joking, half not. She knew she had a reputation at school as someone who “got around.” The irony was, she hadn’t even had sex while , the pure one, had. But she let people believe the rumors. It gave her an edge. Her father said it was important to have an edge.

“What? No!”

had replied, aghast. “Sarah’s more of a soprano part, that’s all.” It hadn’t been an insult, exactly. But it felt like one. was a really good singer, all those years of practicing in her church choir and going to her theater camp.

“I’ve got better things to do than hang out with a bunch of drama geeks,”

Casey had replied. But later, after she’d thought about it, she’d reconsidered. At least she’d have some alone time with . Calvin was practically glued to her side these days but he wouldn’t be at play rehearsal.

“Can you even sing?”

her father asked now, though it didn’t sound like a question so much as an accusation. You can’t sing.

Casey hadn’t been in church choir since she was eight, but she could hold a tune. Maybe there was a voice even better than ’s lurking inside her. And if there wasn’t, the PTA was always scrounging for money to pay for drama productions, and if her dad wrote a large check, that would give her an edge.

“That piano player’s really good,”

her father said. Casey watched as he walked over to her, pulling a bill out of his wallet. Instead of dropping it in the tip bowl on top of the piano, he handed it to her. She smiled and put the bill into her bra. It was a fifty. The piano player definitely wasn’t that good.

Soon they were invited into the reception, held in the same room the ceremony had taken place in, only now a temporary dance floor had been laid over the area where the bride and groom had declared their forever love.

Casey sat down at their assigned table. The chairs had tall backs covered in white taffeta, like they were brides. She kicked the shoe off her left foot, where a blister was forming on her heel. She pushed the shoe against the chair leg, the pain strangely satisfying.

The salad plates were already on the table and a server in a tuxedo began to distribute bread rolls like a pitcher lobbing fastballs, dropping one onto her mother’s plate before she could refuse it on account of her self-diagnosed gluten allergy, which Casey knew to be a calorie allergy. Her father ate both rolls and then stood up. “I’m going to go to the little boys’ room before the rubber chicken arrives.”

Several minutes passed, long enough for a second server to deliver the entrées. Casey watched her mother mentally calculate the calories in the chicken breast, the brown gravy, the mashed potatoes, the broccoli. Casey knew she would eat maybe half the chicken, sauce scraped off, a bite of the potatoes, and all the greens.

And sure enough, her mother began to painstakingly knife the gravy off the chicken. While she was distracted with her surgical work, Casey shoved her foot back in the shoe and stood up. “I’ll be right back,”

she said, heading toward the bar, which she hoped would be unattended. Maybe she could chug back a few unfinished drinks. On an empty stomach, it would work fast and if she didn’t eat much, the buzz might last for most of this horrible reception.

The bar was mostly empty. Just one guy wolfing down a plate of the crab puffs and spring rolls that had been passed during the cocktail hour. He looked a little familiar: dark hair, Asian, tattoos, the guy version of a resting bitch face. He was too busy eating to pay her any attention, so she sidled up to one of the tall tables in the far corner where several discarded glasses of wine remained. Half full. And who said Casey was not an optimist!

She downed two and was just about to snatch a third when she heard a girlish giggle. In the far corner, the piano player was sitting at a table. And the person making her laugh was Casey’s father.

It was a not-so-well-kept secret in their family that Casey’s father had what her mother called “a tendency to roam.”

Which meant, Casey understood, he had affairs. “But he always comes back to me,” her mother said, once, through tears, a sunk bottle of Chardonnay on the table. Casey was not sure she’d ever witnessed anything more pathetic. She vowed then and there never, ever, to wind up as powerless as her insipid mother.

The guy at the bar was standing now, holding a camera—that was why he was familiar; he was the wedding photographer—watching her looking at her dad. He wore an expression of pity, which pissed Casey off far more than her dad flirting with some cheap slut did. “Asshole,”

she hissed at him as she made her way back to the dining room.

Her dad returned a few minutes later, smiling at her. Casey felt a curtain of despair descend. Why did her dad make her come to the wedding, when he couldn’t be bothered to pay any attention to her?

She watched her mother cut her chicken into centimeter-sized cubes. At the head table, the groom whispered something to the bride that made her laugh, revealing the lipstick on her front teeth. Casey thought of the way the piano player had tucked her father’s fifty next to her breasts. Nope. She was not going to audition for the musical, she decided. There was no way she was playing second fiddle to . Casey deserved to have something all her own.