He’s okay, as far as I know. Oh, come on, Ellie, I know you’re wondering. I can see it on your face. Every time I say his name, you look like my cat does when my dad yells at her for getting underfoot. I know how much you loved him, Ellie. I know. Everyone knew.
I haven’t seen him for a while, though. Not since I found my way…into Couri. All I can say is that the last time I saw him, he was with Ingrid.
That’s how it was when I woke up in that fog, too: Noah was standing with Ingrid, holding her hand so he didn’t lose her, and when I spoke up, he reached down to where I’d been kneeling and found me, pulled me up with his other hand, and then the three of us stayed like that for what seemed like forever, a chain of silhouettes, until we could find our way out of the white fog.
When we finally did, it was nighttime. Stars glittered above us, winking in the black of outer space, while all around us, the world wailed with sirens and the cries of people.
We didn’t know it at the time, but some of those cries were people still trapped in the rubble of the school’s west wing. People who didn’t die in the explosion like we did, who’d instead been pinned beneath the bricks and concrete and the pieces of roof that had fallen in. Some of them were saved, but by then the three of us already knew we were dead. That the bodies with our faces the emergency workers would pull from the wreckage wouldn’t be salvageable. We’d figured it out when we tried to get the attention of a group of firefighters who couldn’t hear us shouting for help just inches away from them.
Noah, Ingrid, and I eventually climbed a hillside overlooking the wreckage of Main Street to watch as the emergency crews worked to find survivors from the school. I was so jealous as I watched people loaded into ambulances, sobbing, then driven off to hospitals, where I imagined their moms and dads would meet them and hold them and cry with them and tell them how much they loved them. And I kept thinking about how, weirdly, maybe their lives would somehow be better than they were before the outbreak. Because they’d had a close call. Because now they knew what it felt like to be close to death; that it was no longer just an idea that had nothing to do with them. And because they had that new knowledge, they’d want to fix anything that might have been wrong in their relationships with the people they loved beforehand. They’d recognize how trivial their fights were, parents and kids alike, and they’d promise to never let themselves forget what it felt like in those horrible hours when they thought they’d never see each other again.
I’d never get that, I realized, as I sat on the hillside next to Noah and Ingrid, my knees pulled up to my chest, my arms wrapped around them, shivering even though it was late spring and the night air was warm around us.
Ingrid was still crying and whimpering as Noah sat beside her with his arm around her shoulder, rocking her back and forth slightly like a baby. But having just realized I would never have the chance to fix things between me and my family, that I’d never get a chance to grow up and become someone even I’d be surprised to discover if I saw her face in the mirror one day—I got angry with Ingrid, and shot her a glare.
“Stop it,” I spat. “Crying isn’t going to change anything, Ingrid.”
At my words, though, Noah took a sharp breath and pulled back a few inches to look at me with wide eyes, and Ingrid just cried harder.
Noah got mad. He said I didn’t have to be like that and that at least the three of us were together. We should be helping each other, he said, not making each other feel worse.
“But nothing’s worse than this,” I told him. “Is it?”
That took Noah back a little, and I felt sorry for even saying it. You know me, Ellie. Sometimes I can’t help myself. The truth just flies out of this mouth like I have no control over it.
So I told him I was sorry, that he was right, and then we all looked away from each other for a while afterward, feeling bad about finding ourselves in this situation. We were just three spirits, invisible to the world, lingering on a hillside, trying not to make eye contact.
* * *
We spent those first few days wandering, trying to find other people we might know, wondering aloud occasionally about how weird it was that none of us felt hungry, that we could walk and walk without sleeping, that we made no sound wherever we stepped, even when we were in the woods, where the ground was littered with twigs and broken branches. Newfoundland looked like a set from an apocalyptic movie. Tree upon tree toppled over long stretches of empty road. Fields where the earth had been dug into and ripped up by the tornadoes. Abandoned gas stations, abandoned grocery stores. Beyond the downtown, where the majority of the recovery efforts were focused around the school, the signs of life came mostly from birds that still sang, from squirrels that still barked at each other, from rabbits that would suddenly dart out of their hiding places, as if they could sense us approaching.
They really weren’t able to sense our presence, even though stories and movies try to tell us that dogs and cats can sense ghosts because they’re so much more in tune with things than human beings. Let me tell you, Ellie, dogs and cats and squirrels and bunnies may be in tune with something, but it’s not with spirits.
The first time I possessed something, it was a cardinal, and I didn’t even know I was doing it. I found it perched on the branch of a fallen oak tree we were sitting on while we lingered one day, unsure of where to go next, unsure if the rest of our afterlives would be this endless wandering around Newfoundland, unable to get past the gray wall surrounding this place.
The cardinal was male. I knew that from his bright red feathers. No hiding behind muddy ruddiness like the females, not him. I was taken by how close I was able to get to him, because he couldn’t seem to sense us there near him. And this, I decided, was at least one benefit of being dead. You could get close to things in death that, in life, would have run or flown away from you as soon as the sound of your steps reached their ears.
I decided that I might as well take advantage of that, and crept over on my hands and knees to the branch the cardinal was perched on. No matter how close I got to him, though, he never flinched. At one point, my face was only a few inches from his, and I stared directly into his beady black eyes, which couldn’t see me, watching his small body inhale and exhale, over and over. It felt like a dream, being that close to him. And the longer I watched him breathing, the closer I wanted to get. Before I even realized what I was doing, I’d taken him into my hands. It was only then that the cardinal understood something was wrong, and he squirmed, struggling to be released.
“Stop, stop,” I cooed to him, trying to calm him.
But there was nothing that would make him settle again. He wriggled and squirmed, trying to get free. I don’t know why, but I wouldn’t let him go. I couldn’t. I wanted that closeness, that warm body, that life he held inside.
And just like my first impulse, when I took him into my hands almost without realizing it, I leaned down now to kiss him on his beak, trying to soothe him. I closed my eyes as I held my lips against his head, and again it felt like a dream, like nothing else before that moment had been real or meaningful.
Within my hands, I felt the cardinal stop his struggle.
And when I opened my eyes again, I saw through his.
I think that cardinal lived for all of ten minutes with me inside him, taking up his bones and flesh as my own. And in those ten minutes, I flew. I flew the cardinal’s body—my new body—up and into the air like a pilot, landing on a branch of a nearby pine tree, which dipped and swayed under my bird weight. And, oh, how wonderful it felt to have mass again, to be awkward, to be able to make the wiry limb of a tree bend beneath me.
Then the cardinal’s heart stopped, or his brain broke, or his lungs exploded. Something. I don’t know what for sure, but everything went dark, the way it did when I died in my human body, and the next thing I knew, I wasn’t in the bird’s body; I wasn’t really anywhere. But then I re
gained myself and realized I was kneeling over the body of the bird beneath the pine tree, and he was as dead as dead can be.
I heard Ingrid gasp behind me. She asked what I’d just done.
I shivered and turned to look over my shoulder at her and Noah. They were looking at me and the bird with shock on their faces.
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head, stunned by what had just happened, but also excited. I already wanted to do it again.
* * *
I’d gone inside the bird without realizing it. The three of us put that together pretty quickly when I told them what I’d experienced and they told me what they’d seen happen. How one moment, I’d been gently nuzzling the bird’s head, and then how I started to go fuzzy around the edges and my body seemed to dissolve into a black mist that slipped inside the bird through his beak.
Ingrid wanted to know what it was like. She seemed more curious than shaken, taking hold of my arm as she asked me how I did it and how it felt.
I had to think for only a moment before I was able to answer.
“It felt like freedom when I got closer to the sky, all blue above. It felt like being alive again.”
She wanted to know if I thought I could do it again. Hearing that, Noah turned to look at her like she was crazy.
“Why would she want to do it again?” he said. It was clear he didn’t like what I’d done, even though it had happened by accident.
“You heard her,” Ingrid said as she twirled a daisy she’d picked from a nearby meadow in one hand. “Don’t you want to feel that way, too? Not weighed down any longer? No more gray walls fencing you in?”
Noah shook his head and said he didn’t know about any of it. He said none of it felt right and that we shouldn’t do things like that just because we’d found out that we could.
Ingrid didn’t seem to care what he said, though. She looked away from him, back to me, and said, “Come on, Adrienne. Show me.”
* * *
Ingrid’s first possession was a rabbit. Noah’s was a snake. I know, right? In the end, he grudgingly gave in and tried it, just so he could know what it was like, and in any case, he said he hated snakes, so that helped him not feel as bad about it.
After we felt decently capable of possessing small creatures, we tried out bigger ones. Ingrid and I chose stray dogs we found wandering the back roads. We couldn’t tell if they’d lost their way in the outbreak like we had, or if they’d always been on their own, out in the wild. We left their expiring bodies in a ditch, side by side, three days later.
Noah chose a cow from a farm near the ditch we left the dogs in. Of course, it was a sick cow, so Noah could feel like he was just putting it out of its misery if it died as a result. He spent a few days inside it, waiting to see how long he could stay, before it started to die from him using its body, then leaving to see if it would regain its strength afterward. It turns out you can keep a host alive, if you give them time to recover without you inside, burdening them. If you gave them time to be themselves again for a while.
After that, we moved on to people. Well, actually, I moved on to people. Ingrid and Noah just watched. It was an old woman, and she looked to be pretty much on her deathbed. To be honest, she was staying in one of the shelters your mom’s been volunteering at, because she’d lost everything, every last thing, in the outbreak. She had no family, she had no home to return to. The clothes she wore were the only things she had left.
Yeah, I’ve seen your mom. No, Ellie, she hasn’t seen me. And yes, I’ll just answer the question I know you want to ask but are afraid to.
The old lady didn’t die. I left her body before I caused her any lasting harm. It was hard living inside her anyway, feeling her feelings layered in with mine. She felt hopeless. Every moment was colored by her despair. I’d learned from Noah’s experiment with the cow that a host didn’t have to die because of us. I just needed to see if we could take possession of people, too, or if we could only do it with animals.
When I felt like I knew what I was doing, I decided it was time for me to move forward with an idea that had been forming after I first possessed the cardinal. I said goodbye to Noah and Ingrid then, so I could go home. So I could find Couri. So I could find my sister. My sweet sister, who, it turns out, didn’t hate me at all, even though it felt like our parents were constantly pitting us against each other. And she said yes when I asked if she’d give me a space to keep on living. She said yes, Ellie, just like that. No hesitation. She just hugged me, and we put our foreheads together, and then we were one.
I’ve been making sure to leave her every now and then, so she can recover. I want to stay, after all, you know? It’s not how I want to stay, of course. It’s what I need to do. It’s what I have to do, if I’m going to survive. And it hurts all the same, even though Couri’s given me a place to continue living. It hurts because I’ve realized in all those years of hating her, I was wrong. It hurts because all of our fighting had been because of how our parents treated us, and even they didn’t realize they were doing that. It hurts because we’ll never get a chance to fix any of it now. That’s the thing that hurts the most, really. That our chance to make things better, to make things right between us all, has been taken away from us. I’ll never get a chance to become someone different, someone better, someone who wasn’t consumed by bitterness, like I might have been after graduating, after being able to leave the situation to find or make a different one to live in. All their memories of me will be of who I was before that day. Before I had a chance to change.
I don’t want Couri not to have that chance, either.
I’m feeling…weird, Ellie. Which is…which is…what’s the word? Why can’t I remember it?
Discombobulating?
Disconcerting?
Wait—something’s happening.
Couri? Please don’t hate me for this. I love you more than anything. Have I ever told you that? I’m sorry for putting you through this. But thank you. Thank you for giving me a few more days.
Ellie? Are you still there? I can’t see you. Everything is blue now, blue and beautiful above me. It feels like flying again.
I’m going there. I’ll see you there someday.
If, when it’s your time and you have the choice to make, if you’re not kept from leaving, don’t linger.
It was the computer software Mom bought me last year to help me do interviews with the track team when they went to compete in nationals. I was able to video chat with them and their coach, and record it for our online newspaper. I didn’t know what would happen if I switched it on to record Adrienne telling me her story—I didn’t know if it would record the same way my phone did—but thankfully it worked. Not just for Couri’s sake, but for Adrienne’s, too. I’d never seen her so angry, or so broken. I’d never seen her so willing to do whatever she had to, no matter what the cost, to save herself from her own pain. It was worse, in some ways, than seeing Becca unable to escape her mother, even after she’d died.
Becca and Rose had been right. Adrienne wasn’t herself anymore. Death had changed her. Death had turned her into someone I barely recognized. Someone desperate and clinging. That wasn’t the Adrienne I remembered. That wasn’t the girl who, despite the problems she had with her parents, always had a one-liner to make any sad or tense situation humorous. One of my best memories of Adrienne was when Becca had told us why her parents had thrown her older brother out of the house. After we’d hugged her and comforted her—after Becca was feeling better, having told us the truth—Adrienne had said, “Hey, look on the bright side. At least they got rid of your competition.” She’d smirked, inviting the rest of us to laugh at the reference to her own problems. And we did manage to laugh. To laugh through our tears. That was why seeing her as desperate and hurt as she was after dying shook me so completely. I realized now how much she must have been hurting when she was alive, too, but she’d
kept us all at a distance from her own pain through joking about it. Adrienne’s humor had always been self-deprecating, but it was never mean. Even when she complained about her mom and dad fawning over her genius little sister, she’d eventually do this thing where she’d lift her hands and arms into a position in which she pretended to play an invisible flute, and then, after putting them down, she’d say, “Sorry, but I can’t play the violin for shit.”
After the black mist seeped out of Couri’s open mouth, collecting and re-forming into the Adrienne I remembered, Adrienne looked up and saw blue all above her finally, and rose up, leaving this world. I found my fingers hovering over the keyboard, frozen, refusing to move, no matter how much I willed them to. Eventually, they started to tremble on their own, and I was able to turn off the recorder.
On my screen, Couri slumped back in the desk chair Adrienne had propped her up in, her head nodding to one side. I worried that I might have done something I didn’t intend to. By freeing Adrienne’s spirit, had I somehow hurt Couri? That’s why I was shaking, really. It wasn’t just because of the way Adrienne had changed, though that would have been enough to disturb me. It was because, in that last moment before her exit, as Couri appeared like a lifeless doll in her desk chair, hair fallen over her face, I wondered if I had killed her.
“Couri,” I managed to say, but it came out as a whisper. After another moment or two, I said her name again, louder this time. “Couri,” I said, “are you there? Are you okay?”
When she continued to just sit there, unmoving, mouth hanging open, I felt my breath catch in my throat.
Then suddenly a groan made its way out of her, despite her lips barely moving.
“Couri,” I shouted, “wake up! You have to wake up!”
A second later, she groaned again, so I kept saying her name, trying to encourage her, trying to will some part of my own spirit into her, to give her some of my own energy, the way Adrienne had described taking Couri’s space while she possessed her. I knew it wasn’t possible to do that, but I was desperate for impossible things to happen.