Page 46 of Not Quite Dead Yet

‘What password you gonna use?’ Billy asked as Jet started to type.

‘Emily Mason,’ she said, reentering the new password to confirm. ‘Think Nina would have approved.’

Password successfully updated, the page told her. It didn’t have to tell her twice. Jet flicked back to the log-in page, typed her sister’s name into the empty password box. Remembered to breathe and guided the arrow over to the Log In button. Pressed it.

The page disappeared, replaced half a second later with a Facebook homepage, blue and white, and all the other colors too, scrolling photos and status updates. A tiny picture of Nina on a sunset beach at the top, arms open like she didn’t have a care in the world. But Jet knew she’d had many.

‘Can’t believe this worked.’ Billy leaned closer. ‘There, click into Messenger.’

Jet did.

‘Probably going to have to scroll really far down,’ he said.

‘Yeah, Emily hasn’t replied in seventeen years. She’ll be right at the bottom.’

Jet sat back, let Billy do the scrolling for her; it was easier with two hands, and they had years to get through.

The page stuttered, reloading each time they reached the bottom, a little spooling circle that started to test Jet’s patience.

‘OK, last messaged a Mike Fraser in August 2012,’ Billy read from the screen. ‘We’re getting there. Four more years.’

Down, down, down.

The conversations reloading.

The page slowing down, like it got harder the farther back they went, dragging those old messages back into the present.

‘We’re here, 2008,’ Billy muttered. ‘Now where is … ah.’ His hands drew up. ‘There she is.’

Emily Mason.

The second to last name on the screen.

Offline, it said. Yeah, no shit.

Billy sat back, gave Jet some space. She took it, fingers back on the trackpad. She looked at him, held it for another second, then clicked her sister’s name, opening a chat box that appeared at the bottom of the screen. A conversation between the dead.

Jet’s eyes started reading before she was ready.

Nina’s final message to Emily, never opened, never read:

It was your funeral today. I sat with your family, held little Jet’s hand. I can’t believe you’re really gone. I’ll miss you forever. When I have a daughter, I’ll name her after you. Goodbye Emily.

Billy’s breath shuddered. ‘Hard to read,’ he said quietly.

That was June 8, the date of Emily’s funeral.

The next message up was from Emily, on Friday, May 30.

‘This is the day before she died,’ Jet said. ‘ No, I started to, ’ she read her sister’s message aloud. ‘ But she had to leave. I’ll do it next week. ’

‘What was she talking about?’ Billy asked, but Jet was already scrolling up, to Nina’s message before that.

‘ Did you talk to Mrs Finney yet? ’ Jet read, eyes catching Billy’s just as his caught hers. A lump in Jet’s throat, blocking her heart.

‘My mom?’ Billy’s voice dropped into a whisper.

‘She was their math teacher too,’ Jet said, around the lump. ‘Probably just school stuff.’

‘Emily wanted to talk to my mom about something,’ Billy said, not really a question. ‘But she never made it to next week .’

Jet scrolled up again, finding another back-and-forth conversation. ‘This was two days before that,’ she said. ‘Wednesday the twenty-eighth. Emily wrote: I’ll tell you at school tomorrow. ’

‘ What? ’ Billy said, taking Nina’s role.

‘ Nina, it happened again. Heard them talking, they didn’t know I was awake. Heard something. It’s ab-about … Luke. ’ That pause hadn’t been Emily’s, it was Jet’s, stumbling over the words. She read it again without the gap. ‘ It’s about Luke. ’

Then nothing, no messages until the weekend before, something about Andy White’s birthday party.

‘Luke,’ Jet said again, sounding out his name, as though the shape had changed, new angles, that crunch in the middle. The thirty-year-old and the thirteen-year-old that Emily was talking about, and one word that somehow described them both.

‘You think that’s the secret Nina was talking about?’ Billy turned to her. ‘It’s about Luke?’

‘It’s about Luke,’ Jet copied him, repeating her long-dead sister, like she’d lost all her own words, and maybe she had, out that black hole in her head or the one in her eye.

‘Emily overheard them talking about him.’ Billy returned to the screen. ‘She means your parents, right? Talking about Luke. You think this is the secret? Nina did say it was right before Emily …’

‘Fuck sake, Emily,’ Jet said, words all coming back to her at once. ‘Why did you have to tell her at school tomorrow? Why couldn’t you have just told her right now?’

‘Maybe she knew she couldn’t,’ Billy said, ‘in case someone ever read it. Do you think this is what Emily wanted to speak to my mom about? The thing with Luke?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jet sighed, scrolling back down. ‘We can’t tell from this. Could be something totally unrelated. It was a couple days after.’

‘So, she tells Nina the secret at school, on the Thursday. And then, on the Saturday, Emily … dies.’

Jet didn’t like all the space Billy had left around that word.

‘Her death was an accident,’ she said, sharpening that last word into a point. ‘The timing is just a coincidence. You were there, Billy, you saw it: Emily was alone and it was just an accident. Nothing to do with this.’

‘Yeah,’ Billy said, staring at the screen, a silver reflection on the surface of his watery eyes, the scrolling words of two ghosts imprinted there, rippling when he blinked.