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I throw up in the rosebushes. Nothing comes out. No food, no liquid, no bile. It’s like there’s nothing in me. I blink. Mom’s rosebushes are starting to bloom. She plants one for each of us, with little placards next to them with the variety of the rose and our names: Missy, Dad, Pauline, and I all have one.

“Please,”

I say to the blue-haired girl who is claiming to be my sister. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“Maybe we should go inside.”

She turns to Mom. “And call Dad.”

Mom nods numbly.

The girl heaves Mom’s arm around her shoulder and starts to walk. Mom stumbles but the girl catches her. I watch them go together, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. The blue-haired girl turns around. “Are you coming?”

I look down at the rosebushes. Mine used to be in the middle. It was called Wildfire because of the color, a smoky orange, amber, like me. I’m standing right in front of where it used to be, only there’s no flower, just dirt.

Inside, Mom is pulling a dusty bottle of whiskey from the kitchen cabinet. Aside from a Christmas toast, I’ve hardly seen her drink. The bottles were for guests, most of them gifts from Dad’s clients.

The blue-haired girl who claims to be my sister is on her phone again. “Dad,”

she says. “You need to come home. To the house. Now.” She pauses. “It’s an emergency. No, not like that. You won’t believe it unless you see it. Please come. Now.”

She hangs up. I glance at the graduation photo on the wall. There’s a plaque beneath it with two dates. One I recognize. One I don’t.

The blue-haired girl claiming to be my sister comes up next to me. She touches one of the dates: August 8, my birthday. Then the other, April 28.

“Is this . . . ?”

I ask her.

She nods.

“How?”

“You got knocked off your bike on your way home from school.”

“That’s insane! I’m literally standing right here. I rode home on that very bike.”

Mom shoots back another glass of whiskey. The girl walks over to the secretary desk and opens a drawer, extracting a file folder. She hands it to me. , it reads in my dad’s neat block print. I open the file. Inside is a sheaf of newspaper clippings with pictures of me in them, with my family, one with Calvin.

“Here’s your obituary,”

the girl says, handing me a small article.

Marie Crane died Thursday afternoon from injuries sustained in a hit-and-run bicycle accident. She was seventeen years old.

A senior at Kennedy High School, was set to graduate in the spring and attend college, where she was hoping to apply her lifelong love of musical theater to a career in teaching or music therapy.

starred in frequent productions at Kennedy High School and at Sing a Song! musical summer camp, where she also worked as a counselor.

is survived by her parents, Gloria and Brian Crane, her sister, Melissa, and her aunt, Pauline Clarke.

A funeral mass will be held at Church of the Holy Name Tuesday at noon followed by a wake at the family’s home.

I hold the paper in my hands. It says nothing. It says exactly what I thought it would.

Arnold

Nine Years Before

Arnold King had been giving his sophomore ELA class the same assignment for more than two decades. It never failed to start a conversation. That was why he liked it. There had been a few principals over the years, usually the younger ones, who had not yet grown into their shoes, who questioned it. “Isn’t it morbid?”

they asked. One particularly foolish one had wondered if it might encourage suicide.

By now he had been doing this long enough—twenty-eight years; he was eligible for retirement but he had no interest in hanging it up just yet—to know how to handle the nervous Nellies.

“I’m not asking my students to think about their deaths,”

he explained. “I’m inviting them to imagine their lives.”

This year’s sophomore class was no different. When he announced that day’s assignment was to write their own obituary, the class went through the usual stages: the laughter, the posturing and bravado, and then, as they got to work, a near universal silence.

“This is not an exercise in morbidity,”

he told the class as he had done each year. “Quite the opposite. I want you to envision the life you want to have lived. You can write whatever you want. Be an NBA champion or president or the first woman to walk on the moon if you want. Write whatever future you want for yourself.”

“Oh, I see what you’re doing,”

one principal had said. “You’re having them manifest their dream lives.” That was a very touchy-feely way of looking at it and Arnold had objected with a huffy “I most certainly am not.” But he did want them to think concretely about the life they wanted to live, how it would look after they’d lived it. More than anything else he taught them—the persuasive essay, the proto–college essay, the short story, the cover letter—this felt like the most important exercise he did with his students.

After they’d completed their assignments, he invited them to share what they’d written with the class. “They say you never get to read your own obituary,”

he told his students. “Here’s your chance.”

They never ceased to surprise him. Today, for instance, Jaime Rodriguez, the shy boy who sat near the window and never spoke unless called upon, said he had had a full career as an opera singer, with very specific details about the parts he had performed. Calvin Judd, the wrestler who sat in the back and never seemed to pay attention, had some vague details about how after going to business school and “making millions”

on inventions (which showed that Calvin had not fully grasped the details of how business school worked), he had come home to marry his high school sweetheart.

With the way Calvin had blushed red to the ears, Arnold understood he had a specific sweetheart in mind.

Next up had been Francesca Stolari, a chatty girl who was constantly passing notes and whispering to her friends, no matter how many warnings he issued.

She wrote that she had opened an animal reserve in Botswana (he was surprised she even knew where that was) and had never married and never had children but had left a legacy of offspring in the animals she’d rescued.

But maybe this year’s biggest surprise was Crane.

She was one of his most gifted writers.

Lively and imaginative, she’d excelled on the more creative assignments.

The one-act play she had written showed particular promise.

He’d expected great things from her.

When it was her turn to read her obituary, she’d come to the front of the room, the paper in her hand shaking.

This was not completely unheard of.

Facing mortality was hard.

“ Crane was born on August 8,”

she began in a shaky voice and then she stopped.

“Go on, ,”

he encouraged.

“That’s all I have,”

she said. “I just couldn’t think of anything more.”