Page 34

To my sister’s credit, she does not freak out that I’ve been chatting with a dead girl. But then again, she didn’t freak out when her dead sister returned.

I, however, am a different story. Because suddenly it’s not now, or seven years ago even, but longer. It’s a few weeks before middle school graduation. Dina and I are sitting together in the cafeteria. I’ve unwrapped my sandwich. Dina is picking it up and saying, “What do you have today?”

and taking a bite. We’d been eating lunch together for years and she knew that I knew all the rules.

Except that day. I’d broken them. On purpose, never contemplating what would happen. Which was that she took a bite before I could tell her it was a peanut butter sandwich. I’d been warned about the severity of her allergic reactions, but I had never seen one like this. It happened so fast. She started taking these panting breaths. She threw up. She passed out.

She’d stopped bringing her EpiPen with her every day. It was middle school. It was embarrassing. She knew the rules so well. So did I. She could’ve died. That was what Detective Weston told me after Dina had been rushed to the hospital. Her throat had closed up. They’d had to insert a breathing tube. “She could’ve died, ,”

her mom told me.

“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to,”

I’d cried. And I hadn’t meant to hurt her, not like that. But I didn’t want to sit with her and only her at lunch anymore. When we went to high school, I wanted to eat with whoever I wanted, make new friends with people who didn’t get snickered at in the halls for being weird, who at age thirteen didn’t want to still spend weekends galloping around pretending to be horses. I thought that if I ate a peanut butter sandwich while sitting next to Dina, I could trigger a mild reaction. Then, I’d no longer be allowed to sit at the special table. I thought it was a way to tell her without having to say the words that I wanted other friends.

“I didn’t mean to,”

I told her mother a third time.

“I find that hard to believe, ,”

she said. She was a detective. She paid attention.

After that, Dina and I didn’t sit at the same table anymore. After that, Dina and I didn’t speak anymore.

“Good riddance!”

Casey had laughed when I told her the story. By freshman year, I’d upgraded to Casey as a best friend and had convinced myself that the incident with Dina had been an accident. “She was such a loser. You’re so much cooler than her.”

The shame of it was suffocating. Not just that I’d done it but that some part of me agreed with Casey. I was better off without Dina.

I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d done. Not my family, not even Father Mercer during confession. I didn’t see how even a merciful God could forgive this.

“Was it—was it an allergic reaction?”

I ask Melissa now. The thing with allergies is that they get more severe with every exposure. That peanut butter sandwich I’d given her could have made her next reaction even worse.

“No,”

Melissa says. “She had an aortic aneurysm. They say she died instantly.” She pauses. “Same as you.”

Same as me. We had been friends. Best friends. There is no way I’m a miracle. Even before I died, I destroyed things.

“She’s dead?”

I whisper.

Melissa nods.

“How can I see her?”

My sister shrugs. “How can I see you?”

“Because I’m here. I’m back.”

Melissa turns on her indicator light and pulls a U-turn. “You keep asking why I’m so calm about you returning. It’s because to me, you never left. You’ve always been here.”

Melissa taps her heart. “And here.” She taps her head. “I could see you and hear you and talk to you and I could feel you. And it didn’t feel like you’d gone away forever so much as moved to a different sort of existence. And you were by my side so much, you helped me so much.”

“Me help you? Help anyone? Please, I only make everything worse. I always have. I was always a terrible person. How I was with you. And with Dina . . .”

My voice gives out. Shame, it turns out, has a long half-life. “You have no idea what I did to her.”

“Of course I do,”

she says. I stare at her. She raises an arm from the steering wheel. “What can I say, I really was a good spy.”

She knows. My sister knows. She has always known. Always paid attention.

“Then how can you even bear to look at me, let alone sacrifice your entire life for me?”

“I’m not sacrificing anything. Nothing is forever. So I don’t mind leaving if that’s what brings our family back together. And for what it’s worth, you are a good sister. You weren’t always. You screwed up because you were learning, because you were human, but I know you would’ve figured it out. You did figure it out. You have no idea how much you’ve helped me these past few years.”

“But I was dead!”

I cry. “How do you even know you were talking to me? How do you even know I’m back?”

She doesn’t answer, just keeps driving. I press my nose to the window and look at our town. It’s then I realize we are heading back in the direction we came, back toward home.

“Wait? Don’t you want to say goodbye to Lenny?” I ask.

“Not now.”

“Why not?”

She looks at the blank notebook in her lap. “I don’t think I believe in goodbyes.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know you asked me how if I’ve always seen you, how do I know you’re actually back now?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

She smiles at me. Her eyes are so full of love and also pain. “I don’t.”

We get to the light at the top of the hill where all sectors of the town are laid out. In one direction is the school, the business Dad spent the last twenty-five years building, the house Mom and Pauline grew up in, the one that Pauline briefly owned but never lived in and then abandoned to Mom as some sort of penance. In another direction is our house, the one Pauline moved to when she was evicted from Gammy’s house, the one we all grew up in together. In the other direction is Casey’s house. I used to envy her for it, with its three floors, swimming pool, finished basement with a screening room, and her bedroom with the wide canopied bed. Where she was with Calvin the day I died.

In the last direction is Whittaker Court, where Calvin lives.

The sting of the betrayal is already receding, if it was ever there. Like the ember from the fire Dad built that landed on me, it can’t truly hurt me now. I’m different, maybe because I was dead and then I wasn’t. Or maybe after being dead seven years, I still grew up a little. Or maybe Melissa is right and it’s not too late to become a better person. I want to be that better person, to be more like my sister.

“Hey,”

I say to Melissa, taking hold of her notebook and pen. “Can we make one more stop?”