Page 3 of Into the Deep Blue

When Fi turns into my driveway, it’s an agonizing crawl the whole way down, because sh.

“can’t see anything.”

It’s my fault. I didn’t turn on the lights—the pot lights lining the driveway, the house lights, any of the ten thousand lights that Dad installed and can be turned on with a tap of a button by an app. The problem is the driveway lights up like a runway, and it triggers me every time, so I usually leave them off.

Fi cuts the engine and texts her dad. He won’t text her back, and it kills me that she still bothers.

It’s not that the guy doesn’t care. I know he does.

The first night she stayed over, he showed up at midnight in an ambulance just to se.

“what we were up to.”

He hovered in the foyer for a solid ten minutes, waiting for a pack of partying teenagers to crash out of a closet.

“Don’t do anything stupid,”

he threatened in a dad tone-of-death while swirls of cherry light strobed across my living room. He said it to both of us, but we all knew it was meant for me. I think it was supposed to be intimidating, but come on, it was just an ambulance, not a police cruiser.

The next day, at their house, I had to play twenty questions over dinner. I guess he could tell there wasn’t a single romantic vibe between us because he was okay with the sleepovers after that. Listening to each other rehash the worst day of our lives in group wasn’t exactly a springboard for romance.

As I wrestle my bike from the back, Fiona gives me a dirty look over her shoulder. I sail it onto the lawn and watch it unceremoniously topple over.

Fi scrambles out of the car and catches up to me. She’d have a heart attack out here alone in the dark. To be fair, this place gives off some serious haunted vibes. Our porch swing creaks in the breeze, and the sound is straight out of a Halloween playlist.

The second I unlock the door, I tell Alexa to turn on the lights.

The house illuminates.

There’s something weird about talking to Alexa since my sister Alex moved out. It’s like Alex 2.0 except Alexa has her shit together, and Alexa doesn’t tell me what to do. Whenever Alex comes home, it feels like an instant downgrade. Thankfully, that isn’t often.

Fiona drops her bag on our blue floral sofa. Mom was big into flowers, so the house is covered in them. She even painted a floral scroll around the mailbox, and hung a fake blue hydrangea wreath over the front door. The thing about flowers is once you stick them on stuff like furniture, they just look dead. It’s wrong when the outside of your house looks more alive than the inside. The same can be said for me.

“Movie?”

I suggest, heading into the kitchen.

“Sure.”

Fi scans the room, still not entirely settled, as if the ghosts followed us inside.

I pull two Cokes from the fridge and a bag of Cheetos from the cupboard. I toss Fi the bag. She digs through her tote for her glasses, and we head upstairs.

My room is the only one not covered in flowers. The walls are a deep steel blue. I painted the whole damn thing myself, and I don’t think either of my parents noticed.

It’s a well-organized disaster. I drop my hoodie on the floor, on top of all the other hoodies. Fi tosses the Cheetos, and they land on my pillow. I swipe my laptop from the desk and flop onto the bed, beginning an endless scroll through Netflix, expecting Fi to join me, but she doesn’t.

She’s standing by my desk, her fingers twitching to pry. She can’t help herself. Fiona goes through my things every chance she gets. Honestly, I don’t mind being the puzzle she wants to solve.

She opens the cover of a book about Jane Goodall and her work with chimpanzees. It came in the mail yesterday, so this would be new to her. I’m sure it seems like an odd choice of reading material, but grief has a way of turning you into a junkie for details. She flips through the pages, but doesn’t ask why I have it. Then she moves to my messy stack of notebooks, her finger trailing down until it stops and like a magician performing a card trick, she pulls out Mom’s bucket list that I buried in the middle. No matter where I stash it, she always finds it.

LIZ’S BUCKET LIST

1. Keith Urban concert

2. Grand Canyon

3. Swim with dolphins

4. Fly first class

5. Jane Goodall Experience

6. Watch E.T.

7. Hot-air balloon ride

8. Bathe in milk

9. Shelling in Bermuda

10. Rent a convertible

“You should frame this.”

She flips the list over to face me.

“I’m buying you a frame.”

I turn back to my screen, half expecting the paper to ignite. It hurts to see Mom’s loopy handwriting on the page. Her unfinished life laid out that way.

“Or I could burn it.”

Fiona drops the list to her side.

“Way to lean into the dark side.”

“It’s not dark, it’s cathartic.”

The bucket list is an impossible problem. I don’t want to acknowledge it like ever, but I can’t let it go, either. Fi’s still watching me.

“You know what it’s like. You have those random things you’re tied to.”

She slides the list gently back under the other papers.

“Serial killers call them tokens.”

Sometimes Fiona comes up with the weirdest stuff.

“That’s amazing. Zero degrees between serial killers and the grief-stricken. And you keep, like, everything, so how afraid of you should I be right now?”

“You should be very afraid. Tonight’s the night, ,”

she whispers, moving closer to the bed. “F-f-f-f—”

I think she’s doing an impression of Hannibal Lecter. It’s terrible and fascinating.

“What are you doing? Are you channeling an angry beaver?”

She laughs and tries again.

“F-f-f-f-fava beans. What was his line?”

It’s so bad, it’s good.

“Don’t. Don’t do that.”

“How does he do it without looking ridiculous? It’s impossible.”

She scams a pair of Simpsons pajama pants from my drawer and carries them to the bathroom down the hall.

I’ve never really had a girlfriend. I hooked up with a few girls over the years, but it was nothing like whatever the hell this is. Thos.

“relationships”

had all the depth of an Instagram post. They were having fun, I was having fun, and that was the end of it. With Fiona, it’s different. I know everything about her, and maybe I have Mom’s death to thank for that—for pushing me to be real with someone. The way Fiona slid into my life felt so easy, like it was a place she always belonged.

It’s not like I never think about us being an us. Sometimes I suspect she’s looking at me with something more in her eyes, but then the next time I see her, those vibes are long gone. It’s like the whole passing ships in the night thing, except how many times can the ships keep passing before they move on for good?

When she comes back in my pajamas, she bends over, shakes her messy chestnut waves over her head and ropes a scrunchie around them, forming a topknot. Then she slides on her glasses. And I can’t explain why this transformation makes me smile. Every. Time.

She tramples over me, to get to the side by the wall and tears open the Cheetos while I scroll through the same comedies we scroll through every weekend. The second I hit play, she lets out a sigh, and I may as well close the laptop. Something’s on her mind.

She’s staring out into the hall.

“Do you ever feel like jumping over the railing?”

This seems like a good time to press pause.

“The hall railing?”

“Yeah.”

“No, can’t say that I do.”

I wait for some kind of explanation, but it doesn’t come. She eats a Cheeto.

“Do you think about it?”

Her head falls to the side.

“Sometimes. It’s not a big deal. Like we’ll be sitting here, and I imagine I step out of my body, walk over, and jump off.”

Alarm bells ring in my head—five-alarm—so I turn back to the screen, because people can always see that kind of worry on your face.

“It’s not weird,”

she says.

“I googled it. It’s normal. It’s the call of the void.”

“The what?”

“The call of the void. Wow. Do I really know something you don’t?”

She pushes the bag away and licks her fingers.

“This is incredibly satisfying. You’re going to google ten articles about this as soon as I leave, aren’t you?”

I make a face. “No.”

But, yes. I absolutely will.

“It doesn’t mean you’re going to do it. It’s just a thing like when you imagine driving your car into another . . . ”

I shoot her a look.

“Hold up. You do that too?”

“Not as much as the railing.”

It’s time to close the laptop. “Okay,”

I say, holding out my pinky finger.

“Promise me right now, that you won’t pull any Rogers or jump off any railings without at least texting me first.”

“Pinky swear? Really?”

I mean, it’s all I can think of. I don’t know what the hell people do these days.

“You want to do the blood thing?”

She swats my hand away. “Eww, no.”

I wiggle my pinkie closer to her face until she hooks it with hers, and I look straight into her hazel eyes. It’s not fair that she’s wearing glasses, it’s like the barrier shaves twenty percent of the promise away.

“Swear it.”

“, I swear I will not drive through a Starbucks or any other fast-food establishment or jump off so much as a trampoline without letting you know.”

She’s phoning it in, but that’s okay. She needs this more than I do.

It seems safe to open my laptop again.

“The Wedding Singer”

is still frozen on the screen. I hit play and push the screen farther back so it’s resting on the bed between us, but I’m not watching, because I’m looking into the hall, at the railing, with a level of anxiety I haven’t felt in a while. I get up and close the door as if this is a normal thing and has nothing to do with what Fiona just said.

I flop back onto the bed and grab a handful of Cheetos, pretending not to notice she’s watching me. Pretending she doesn’t know how freaked out I am, because losing her would be losing everything.

“Next time we should stay at your house,” I say.