Hereafter

by Kate Brian

Clearly this was a topic of some frustration to him as well. Only he’d been dealing with it for a very long time. I turned away from him and stepped over to the window. With one finger, I moved the curtain an inch to the side, looking out at my house, our house, the last house my sister, my father, and I would ever live in together, and my chest felt full. My eyes prickled and I gulped in a breath.

  “Are you okay?”

  I felt the warmth of Tristan’s body as he stepped up behind me, the tickle of his breath on my neck. Instantly, my heart began to pound.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, sending a shiver down my spine. “I didn’t mean to snap.”

  I turned my head ever so slightly to the side. My breathing was shallow, my pulse skipping with him so near. “It’s okay.”

  “I try not to question everything, because I know that what we’re doing here matters,” he said, his voice low.

  I turned to face him, so fast that my braid brushed his bicep and our knees touched. I pressed myself back into the window, flattening the curtain behind me, but he didn’t even flinch.

  “How?” I asked hopefully, looking into his eyes. “How do you know?”

  His eyes roamed my face, flicking from my lips to my cheeks to my eyes to my hair. “We’re maintaining the balance of the universe,” he said. “There’s nothing that matters more.”

  His eyelashes fluttered and he stared down at my mouth. My lips tingled and my fingers itched to reach out and grab his hand, his waist, his arm. I recalled the feeling of his thumb tracing my cheek last night, the way he’d held me close at the cove, how he’d looked into my eyes yesterday when he told me how strong I was. How beautiful. How true.

  In a rush of bravery, I stood on my toes and pressed my lips against his. For a split second, everything was perfect. His soft lips, the heady scent of sea and salt in the room, the sound of the waves crashing outside the open window. But then Tristan abruptly pulled away. He flattened the back of his hand against his lips, his eyes wide. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized he hadn’t kissed me back.

  “I’m…I’m sorry,” I stammered, flustered. “I didn’t—”

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said, finally dropping his hand, an unreadable expression on his face. “I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression, Rory. I never meant to—”

  This wasn’t happening. This was not happening. I slid along the window, moving away from him, mortified. The things he’d said…all the touching, the stares, the obvious tension between us…how could I have misread him so completely?

  But clearly that was exactly what I’d done. Of course I had. I’d only ever kissed one guy before and he had most definitely kissed me first. Besides, Tristan was perfect. He was the Golden Boy. The guy everyone looked up to, the guy every other guy wanted to be, and probably the guy every girl wanted to be with. I bet he’d kissed hundreds of girls over the endless years of his existence. Maybe even thousands. I was just the latest pathetic, recently deceased loser to throw herself at him. And now I was going to have to live with this humiliation—this skin-searing humiliation—forever.

  As he stared at me, I realized he was wishing he could be anywhere but here. I knew the feeling.

  “Forget it,” I said quickly. “This never happened, okay? Let’s just pretend it never happened.”

  I turned my back on him before he could see me break down for the second time in two days and stumbled toward the door, leaving Tristan and whatever was left of my pride behind.

  I tripped onto the sidewalk in front of my house, blinking back tears, and a few yellow leaves floated down from the magnolia tree in our yard before being caught up on the ocean breeze. As I shoved open the gate, I could feel him watching me from the gray house. Always, always watching me.

  A wave of despair threatened to overtake me as I pictured the darkness of a forever without him.

  Focus, Rory. Focus.

  “Hey, beautiful.”

  I flinched at the familiar voice. Joaquin. Fantastic. Just what I needed. He sidled up behind me and walked right through the gate as if invited.

  “I’m not in the mood right now, Joaquin,” I said, speed-walking toward the porch.

  “Not in the mood for what? I just came by to—” Joaquin suddenly stopped and slapped at his neck. “Ow!”

  “What?” I said, whirling on him.

  His hand trembled as he gazed at his palm. Curled up in the center was a small, very dead, hornet.

  “Are you okay?” I asked dutifully.

  Joaquin didn’t answer. He cupped the back of his neck for a second with his other hand and glanced around, as if waiting for the punch line. But there was no one but him, me, and the birds chirping in the boughs of the magnolia tree shading the walkway. When he looked down at the hornet again, his trembling grew violent.

  “What? Is it bad?” I asked, alarmed now. “Are you allergic?”

  “No,” Joaquin said. “I just—”

  He shook his head, and instead of flicking the tiny corpse to the ground, he shoved it into his pocket.

  Joaquin shifted his weight and squinted out of one eye. “Where were we?”

  “I think I was about to go inside and slam the door in your face,” I said, stomping up the porch steps, which creaked and sagged beneath my feet.

  “Okay, but just wait for one second,” he implored, coming after me.

  I threw up my hands. “Why?”

  Behind him, the curtains on the upstairs window across the street fluttered closed. My throat closed, and I crossed my arms tightly over my chest.

  Joaquin took a step closer. “Look, I just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing today. Sometimes the second day is even harder than the first.”

  “How do you think I’m doing?” I asked, glancing behind me at the door. I just wanted to get inside before Tristan came out. There was no way I could handle seeing him again just then.

  Joaquin touched his sting and winced. “At the moment I’d say…livid?”

  “Do you have any idea how hard this is?” I ranted, yanking a geranium bloom from the nearest window box. “I spent all yesterday listening to my sister talk about finding her next hookup, and all I could think was You’re dead and you have no idea. She’s never going to graduate from high school or get that tattoo she’s always wanted or save up for that damned leather jacket she’s been talking about since last Christmas. She’s never going to do anything, and I know it and I can’t tell her. Do you have any clue how awful this feels?”

  “Wait a minute. Darcy wants to hook up with someone else?” Joaquin asked, screwing up his face in consternation. “Is it Fisher?”

  My jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me? That’s all you took from what I just said?”

  “All right, all right, calm down.” Joaquin reached for me. “You’ve crushed the poor flower.”

  I looked down at the pink petals strewn all over my feet and released the head of the geranium from my sweaty grasp. Then I saw his fingers on my skin and yanked my arm back, angling myself away from him.

  “Don’t even try that Lifer mind trick on me. I’m not letting you control me.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it.” Joaquin crossed his arms over his chest and smiled in an amused way.

  “What?” I said, tossing the flower to the ground. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I like this attitude,” he said. “I thought you were a Goody Two-shoes, but I’m digging this whole defiant thing you’ve got going right now.”

  Defiant? He thought I was being defiant? More like I was turning into an emotional basket case. Little did he know my current manic state stemmed from a broken heart, nothing more. I glanced back at the gray house, but it was quiet.

  “Me, I full-on lost it for at least a week,” Joaquin said, leaning back against the porch railing. “When I first got here, they placed me with Ursula in that pink gingerbread house over on Sunset.”

  “Wait.” I
shook my head. “Placed you? And who’s Ursula?”

  “Oh, you know Ursula. The waitress at the general store? The one with the white hair? She’s supposed to be my grandmother. We live together.”

  I thought of the cheerful woman I’d seen behind the counter last week. “Supposed to be your grandmother?” I echoed.

  Joaquin shrugged. “Yeah. All of us who died when we were young were placed with adults when we got here so our living situations would look normal to visitors,” he explained. “Like Tristan and Krista living with the mayor…”

  “Huh?” I shook my head as I tried to keep up.

  Joaquin sighed and sat back on the railing now, settling in. “The mayor isn’t their real mother. Krista and Tristan aren’t even related. You know that, right? She only got here last year, and he’s been here forever.”

  I blinked. Krista and Tristan looked so much alike they were practically twins. How could they not be related? The sun suddenly felt much hotter than it had a moment ago.

  “Anyway,” Joaquin continued, “when I first got here, I spent way too much time at Ursula’s huddled under a flowered bedspread that smelled like mothballs and gardenias, wailing like a baby. To this day, if I even walk past a gardenia bush, I dry-heave.”

  “Can I ask you something?” I said, my heart fluttering nervously as I traced a groove in the side of the porch swing with my fingertip.

  He looked me in the eye, crossing his arms over his stomach. “You want to know how I died.”

  His gaze was unflinching. For the first time, I noticed the gold and green flecks peppering the deep brown in his eyes. I held my breath. “Is that a bad thing to ask?”

  “No. Everyone asks eventually.” He leaned back. “I committed suicide. After I killed my mother and sister.”

  I froze. “You…what?”

  Joaquin nodded, his jaw set. “It was 1916. I was kind of a drunken asshole, and my dad had just gotten one of those newfangled automobiles,” he said sarcastically.

  “Wait a minute, 1916?” I blurted out. “You’ve been here for—”

  “Yeah, I know. I look good for my age,” he teased. “So anyway, me and my friends went out joyriding on far too much whiskey, and on the way home I was driving, if you could even call it that, and there was an overturned grocery cart in the road, and I didn’t see it till the last second. And when I swerved…I swerved right into my family. They were coming back from evening services, and I…killed them. I mean, not my dad. He wasn’t there, but…”

  He looked away and briefly touched the side of his hand to his nose.

  “Anyway, my father stopped talking to me after that, and I stopped doing pretty much anything,” Joaquin went on, his tone matter-of-fact. He leaned back and toyed with his leather bracelet, moving it up and down on his arm, though it only moved about an inch. “I couldn’t sleep without seeing their faces, without hearing my little sister scream.… So one night I went up to the attic with a length of rope and—”

  He made a little hanging motion with his hand and stuck out his tongue. I grimaced and looked away, disgusted.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  “Don’t do what?” he asked.

  “Make a joke of it. It’s not funny.”

  “I know it’s not funny,” he said fiercely. “Believe me, I know. I thought by hanging myself I was escaping it, but instead, I landed myself here, and here I’ve been, for almost a hundred years, and every day I still see their faces. I can still hear her scream.”

  I looked down at the floorboards beneath my feet, my bottom lip trembling. He’d just confirmed my worst nightmare. Being here forever meant never forgetting. It meant never escaping. It meant I was going to feel this stupid, this humiliated, this small, for all eternity.

  I could feel a black hole start to open up within me. This was not good. This was very not good.

  The door of the gray house creaked open, and Tristan stepped out. He ducked his head, being careful not to look in my direction, not to even acknowledge me, then turned and hurried off down the street.

  My eyes welled with tears. “I have to go,” I told Joaquin, standing up and shoving open the door.

  “Rory, wait,” Joaquin said, scrambling to his feet.

  But I just slammed the door behind me and sank to the floor.

  Yesterday, forever had felt like a possibility, like a promise. But now I knew it was the exact opposite. Forever was its own death sentence.

  All afternoon I’ve watched her sit on her porch, sighing out her heartbreak. One day and she’s already figured it out: Forever isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  I’d take her with me if I could, but she’s actually what I pretend to be: good. She would never agree to my plan.

  But I see it happening already, the cracks in the perfect facade. The sting is just the beginning. And I’ll do what I’ve always done: smile, nod, and fool them all.

  No one will ever suspect a thing.

  The Jeep pitched and dived as it climbed the rocky hill toward nowhere. All I could see in front of me were the sky and stars, and I clung to the roll bar, just hoping that Bea was as adept behind the wheel as she seemed to think she was. Next to me on the bench backseat, Krista smiled with her head tipped back, as if enjoying the sensation of her hair being nearly ripped from her scalp. To her right, Fisher stared straight ahead, his mirrored sunglasses on to guard against the wind. Joaquin and Bea occasionally spoke to each other in the front seat, but with all the whooshing air in my ears, and the frantic tripping of my heart, I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  I had no idea where we were going. All I knew was it had taken Joaquin half an hour to wheedle me into the car, swearing left and right that whatever we were about to do was going to make me feel better about everything. It wasn’t until he mentioned that Tristan wouldn’t be there—he was working the closing shift at the Thirsty Swan—that I’d finally agreed to come.

  “Just look at the stars!” Krista said, splaying out her arms.

  “Yeah. They’re…great,” I replied flatly.

  Up ahead, the ground seemed to just end, like we were coming to some sort of a drop-off.

  “Um, Bea!” I shouted, leaning forward. “Maybe you should stop.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s fine,” she called back, glancing over her shoulder at me.

  “But you’re heading for a cliff!” I yelled, watching the edge of the world rushing toward me at an alarming speed.

  “Don’t worry about it!” Fisher said with a smile.

  My heart was in my throat. What was so cool about this? Were they going to drive me off a cliff just to prove I couldn’t die?

  “I am worried about it!” I cried, frustrated by their calm. “I’m sorry if I’m not used to being a Lifer yet, but I just got here and I don’t want to—”

  Bea suddenly applied the brake, and we skidded forward. I closed my eyes as the Jeep turned sideways, the back wheels swinging toward the precipice. I heard the dirt and rocks spray out over the edge and clenched my fists, waiting to feel the ground drop out from underneath me. Dreading the weightlessness. And then, we stopped.

  “We’re here!”

  “Everybody out!”

  The Jeep bobbed as the others climbed out and jumped down onto the rocks. As my breathing began to slow, I could hear the waves crashing somewhere down below. Ever so slowly, I opened one eye, then the other. The stars winked overhead. I was still alive. Relatively speaking.

  “What is the matter with you people?” I screeched, standing up on the seat. Instantly, the world swooped beneath me. The tire under my feet was aligned perfectly with the edge of the cliff and the water was miles below me. One wrong move and I would tip over the edge. Slowly, I sat down again, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. To my right, Bea and Fisher were stripping off their outer layers and walking to the far edge of the cliff, laughing and chatting along the way. Kevin parked his sleek black car nearby, and he, Lauren, and Cori clambered out, all of them
shedding clothes along the way. There was no sign of Tristan. Or Nadia, for that matter.

  Joaquin and Krista stood on the other side of the Jeep.

  “Sorry. Bea’s our resident speed freak,” Krista said, tying her hair into a ponytail.

  Joaquin stepped closer. “I’ll help you down.”

  I slid across the bench and stood up shakily. Joaquin reached out and clasped my waist with his hands. I jumped down, assuming he’d back up, but he didn’t, and we grazed hips. I looked up into his brown eyes. He was still holding on to me.

  “Well,” he said. “Maybe you’re not such a goody-goody.”

  I blushed and stepped back. “What’re we doing here?”

  “Come see!” Krista said excitedly.

  The others were all gathered at the very edge of the cliff. I walked toward them on quivering knees, clinging to the front of my sweatshirt with both hands. The fierce wind whipped my hair against my face. In the distance I could see the bridge, the fog swirling lazily around its legs. I stood behind the others on my toes and looked down.

  All I saw was water. Water and foam and spray and rocks.

  “It’s a cliff,” I said flatly.

  “Yep.” Shirtless, Fisher stepped backward toward the edge, tossing his sunglasses onto a pile of clothes. “And it’s perfect for this.”

  My eyes widened. “Don’t!”

  But it was too late. Fisher had stepped off the edge. He let out a loud, merry shout as he fell. It seemed like five minutes passed before he finally hit the water. He was so far below us I didn’t even hear the sound of the splash, but I saw the white water spray up around him.

  For a long moment, no one said a word. I was sure I was never going to see Fisher again. No one, dead or alive, could survive a drop like that. But then, suddenly, the water broke and his head emerged. He let out a whoop and the crowd cheered. My shoulders slumped in relief as Fisher swam toward some low rocks and scrambled up onto them.

  “That was awesome!” Joaquin shouted.

  Fisher cupped his hands around his mouth, and a moment later I heard the faintest call. “Who’s next?”