Page 17

In the name of keeping up appearances, Mom and Dad declare that everyone should act as if everything is normal. They both will go to work. Missy will go to school. “And I keep being dead?”

I complain.

Mom shoots me daggers.

“What? Too soon?”

“I’ll be home after school,”

Missy promises.

“No, you have work today,”

Mom replies. “You should go.”

“Where do you work?”

I ask. Of all the things I can’t quite wrap my head around, my sister being a teenager is the hardest. She’s not Missy anymore. She’s Melissa. She’s almost the same age as I was when I died.

“At a thrift store.”

“Explains the wardrobe,”

I quip, and stop myself. The habit of teasing Missy—no, Melissa—is hardwired in me. “Sorry.”

“Why?”

she asks. “It’s funny and true.” She gathers up her jacket, the kind of thing someone at a service station would wear. “See?”

I nod. “It’s kind of cool,”

I say. “You’re kind of cool.”

“I know, right?”

she says with a smile. “You can use any of my things while I’m gone. Since you don’t have any things. My computer is on.”

“I’ll skip the clothes but maybe take you up on the computer.”

“I’ll pick up some new clothes for you but you are not to communicate with anyone!”

Mom exhorts. “No phone calls or emails or any online chatting.”

As soon as they leave, I fire up Melissa’s computer to get a hold of Dina. Technically, this is against the rules, but Dina already knows about me because Mom broke the rules, so it feels like a wash.

Melissa’s computer has a program open, the social media application everyone is using now, I assume, so I search for Dina and pull up a dozen Dina Westons that aren’t her. Which tracks. Dina was never one to follow a trend. It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t have any accounts.

I try searching for Calvin on the app but find nothing. I have more luck with my old best friend, Casey, who’s very active, posting a ton of pictures. Unlike Dina, she looks older, her hair now blond instead of brown, but she still has that same bright, let’s-party grin on display in the multiple shots of her at bars with other girls who look like her. Casey’s still Casey, I think. She used to say she could have fun at a wake.

After a few pages of Casey-in-bars shots, I try Alexa Santiago’s page. If Casey was the party girl, Alexa was the serious one. I was in between. Casey used to call me the glue. I wonder what happened when the glue went away.

Alexa is far less active online than Casey. From what I can tell, she’s in law school, and is engaged. She hardly posted in college, so I switch to the site everyone used when we were in high school where I find a few posts from college, some really nice ones about me after I died, and then before that, posts that I remember.

Deep into her feed, I find a picture of Calvin and me that I’ve never seen before. Casey was the one who apparently took it and she tagged Alexa but not me. How much do you love this pic of Cal, Casey wrote. Which is weird because no one called him Cal except his mom. And again, weird because she didn’t tag me. And weirdest yet that she was complimenting him. She thought Calvin was basic and dumb. She used to secretly call him the Meat Puppet.

As I keep scrolling, I find a picture of all of us from junior prom taken inside the rented limo. And before that, the picture of Calvin pinning the corsage to me. Prom king and queen? Alexa had written in the caption, even though Fiona Tucker and Nolan Sacks won that year. More like Beauty and the Beast, Casey wrote in the comments. And beneath that in a separate comment. JK.

I remember when Calvin pinned the corsage on me that night. And later that night, I remember when he removed it. His hands had trembled both times. “I don’t want to hurt you,”

he’d said. And I had told him that he didn’t need to worry. He could never hurt me. How could my father think that he could?

I type in my name and click on the news icon.

There are a bunch of articles. The digital version of my obituary. One about the hit-and-run and another about crowdsourcing trauma, with a quote from Casey, who I guess raised all that money for my family that I’d heard Mom and Dad arguing about. There’s another big National Geographic article about the white-bicycle memorials, bikes spray-painted white and stationed where there was a bicycle-related fatality. I guess someone made one for me, according to the article.

And then I get to this article.

“A Father’s Crusade,”

reads the headline. There’s a grainy photo of Dad holding an even grainier picture of me. Brian Crane vows to keep looking for the driver who struck and killed his daughter, reads the caption.

The article itself is as much about the investigation into the accident that caused my death as it is about Dad. It discusses the forensic evidence, or lack thereof, taken from the scene. The tire skid marks were identified but it was a “ubiquitous”

brand of tire. There were no paint scratches found on my bike, and though investigators distributed swatches of my bike’s unusual shade to auto body shops within a five-hundred-mile radius, asking mechanics to notify them if any car had scratches with such paint, this led nowhere.

The police had pursued the possibility that the accident was intentional but had ruled that out. There was a quote from Detective Weston: “ Crane was not just a member of our community, she was a family friend. The department is pursuing all possible leads to solve this tragic accident, but hit-and-runs are notoriously difficult. Sadly, only about ten percent of such perpetrators are ever caught. That said, the investigation is ongoing and we’ve set up a tip line for people to report any and all leads.”

The article then pivots to Dad. How he didn’t believe the police had done enough. How he had hired a private investigator to look into theories that were, in his words, “unpopular with local law enforcement but nevertheless very feasible.”

He pledged he would not stop his crusade until the driver was found. He had taken out a full-page ad in several local newspapers asking for leads, had even rented a billboard. “This is my promise to my daughter. It’s a promise I won’t break as long as I live.”

I can’t help thinking of how the old me would feel about all this. I was a little famous. In a national magazine, even. But seeing this now it’s so clear that my life had really amounted to nothing. The only thing notable about me was that I died. And now even that’s up for debate.

Arnold

Six Years Before

Anyone who taught high school long enough would witness a few deaths. It was the age, really. Teenagers. Prime time for risk-taking. Unfinished prefrontal cortexes. A misguided sense of invincibility. Arnold had read the studies showing spiked mortality rates for young adults. Over the years, he’d attended a number of student funerals. Adam DeJesus, car accident. Nicola Hynes, drowning. Hayley Fetterman, suicide. Peter Alston, cancer.

It came with the territory, so Arnold wasn’t entirely sure why Crane’s death should linger.

It was probably his age. At sixty-five, he understood mortality in a way that he had not before. The hourglass was emptying, and his time was on the ebb now. He couldn’t help feeling that he’d wasted so much of it. Seeing a seventeen-year-old robbed of the life in front of her hammered that home.

His biggest regret was that he had no family. He’d always thought he would have a large one and had been married when he was young, but the relationship had fallen apart in less than a year and he’d never married again.

His students had come to be his children, at least for the fifty minutes a day he had them. Mostly they treated him with a casual disdain that he knew not to take personally. Occasionally, however, a student would reach out to him for some kind of help. It was these moments that Arnold lived for.

Which was maybe another reason he could not stop thinking about .

Late last year, Calvin Judd had requested a letter of recommendation. Arnold had asked him what schools he was applying to and Calvin had named a few decent colleges in state, and one out of state. “That’s quite a good school,”

Arnold had said.

“I know,”

the young man had replied. “But I might not get in.”

“And you also might get in.”

“It’s far away.”

“Lots of young people go away for college.”

“Yeah, but my girlfriend is going to school here. She wants to stay close to her family.”

Arnold knew that his girlfriend was Crane. They had both been his students. He had seen them around campus, holding hands. They made a sweet couple, she so slight, he so substantial. Watching them filled him with a sort of unease. Maybe it was that at sixteen those two had something he never had. Or maybe there was something slightly suspect about spying on teenage children.

He had agreed to write Calvin a letter of recommendation (particularly after he had looked up Calvin’s record and been happily surprised to see he had been an admirable student, overcoming a learning disability).

When Calvin was accepted to the out-of-state school, he had come to Arnold to share the news and seek counsel. He still had not told his girlfriend that he’d applied. He didn’t even know why he’d applied. The school was so expensive and far away. What should he do?

Arnold advised him to await the financial aid offer before making any decision, but reminded him that whatever he chose, true love would wait. (As if he had any experience with this.)

Months later, after the Crane girl died, and Arnold learned that not only had Calvin not gone to the out-of-state school, but he had also dropped out of Kennedy High five weeks prior to graduation, he had been sorely upset.

Maybe that was part of the reason he was stuck on the Crane girl. He somehow felt complicit in her death. He couldn’t stop thinking about the obituary assignment he had failed her on. If he could have, he would have retroactively amended her grade. Because her obituary had turned out to be the most prophetic of the lot. She’d never had the chance to live her dream life.

Unlike most teachers, Arnold dreaded the summer, when the yawning quiet of his daily routine became nearly unbearable. He usually completed a large home-improvement project to occupy his time: a new roof; a new deck; last summer he’d replaced his house’s siding. But the summer after died, he could not face being home alone with his thoughts.

So he began his drives. Each day, he ventured farther—two, three hours, sometimes longer. He had no destination in mind. He was happy to be lost.

He’d lived in the same town for more than forty years, but his life was circumscribed by school and home. Which was maybe why out on the drives, he discovered things that had been there all along, only invisible to him.

He did not know there was a farm stand at McBurney Farm where one could buy peaches so fresh off the tree that they were warm, as if bearing sunshine in their flesh. He had never noticed the baseball diamond carved into a ring of trees near the butte. It seemed fantastical, like in that movie where Kevin Costner built a ball field in the midst of all that corn.

There was a diner twenty miles out of town that served a variety of fresh pies. The waitress’s name was Rhetta. He stopped in twice that first summer, and when he returned this year, Rhetta still knew his order and still called him “honey.”

She was at least twenty years younger than him, so he had no illusions, but it felt good to be remembered.

Every day, he discovered something new.

Today, for instance, he had found the bicycle, chained to the lamppost out at the four-way stop on Summit. He had driven past it any number of times but noticed it today only because someone was photographing it.

Before, Arnold would not have interrupted a stranger. But today, he got out of his car, staying a respectful distance from the man with the camera until the man called out a welcoming “Hello.”

“Don’t want to interrupt you,”

Arnold said.

“That’s okay. The light is dying.”

He approached the young man, who appeared to be in his midthirties, young enough and familiar enough to have been one of Arnold’s students, though he couldn’t place him. The man was squatting in front of the bicycle, which he now saw wasn’t a working bicycle.

“It’s called a ghost bike,”

the man said.

“What’s it’s for?”

Arnold asked.

“It commemorates people killed in bike accidents. They’re popping up all over the country, as memorials but also as a warning to drivers to slow down, to look what can happen.”

“It’s rather . . . ghostly,”

Arnold said.

“It does feel a little bit sacred,”

the man said. “I’ve been coming here for the last few weeks to photograph it. I have this wild plan to go shoot other ghost bikes. Try to do a feature on them for someone.” He made a face. “Does that make me sound morbid?”

“Not morbid at all,”

Arnold replied. “Just curious.”

“I am curious. There’s a Filipino saying that someone has itchy feet, meaning they have wanderlust. My lola used to say I have itchy feet and an itchy brain because I want to go everywhere, see everything.”

“Itchy feet and brain sound like excellent qualities.”

The man chuckled, then was quiet for a long time before he smiled. “I appreciate you saying so.”

“I knew the girl on the bike,”

Arnold told the man. “She was a student of mine at Kennedy.”

“Really?”

the man said. “Maybe I’ve shot her. I do school pictures there.”

“Ah, so you’re a photographer, then?”

That explained his familiarity.

“I’d hardly call it that. I wanted to be one. A photojournalist, really, but I’m not.”

“Not yet,”

Arnold corrected. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-four,”

the young man said.

“Still plenty of time,”

Arnold said. “I expect that one day I’ll see you in print. Tell me your name so I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Nick Flores.”

Arnold took out the marking pen he kept on him at all times, even in the summer, and on a scrap of paper from his pocket wrote down the name.

“One day, Nick Flores, I will see your byline. I just know it.”

He had no idea if this was true, but from years of teaching he knew that sometimes you had to help students see a bigger future for themselves. It was the entire reason behind the obituary assignment.

Nick was quiet for another moment. Then he asked, “What was the name of the student?”

“,”

Arnold said. “ Crane.”

“ Crane,”

Nick repeated. “Thank you.”

The sun was dipping below the horizon, the white bicycle a beacon somehow in the golden light.

Arnold got back in his car, waiting to see where the road would take him next.