“If I believed in life after death, I wouldn’t have tried to die.” Ava sits cross-legged in the booth with the toes of her black Vans tucked into her knee-pits, like some jaded skate punk yogi. Her eyes are Bombay Sapphire blue, just like I remember. “That was the whole point, right? To stop the game?”

“Right.” I nod. “Of course. I’m right there with you, or I was. But that’s this game, the one we’re stuck in. Who’s to say there couldn’t be a whole different game on the other side, as different from living as baseball is from backgammon?”

“Backgammon?”

“Or whatever. You know, like a hard reset.”

“A hard reset sounds like reincarnation,” Ava frowns. “I can’t believe you’re even considering the question. I thought you hated that New Age bull—”

The waitress swoops in; Ava bites back the curse at the tip of her tongue. I realize haven’t even glanced at the menu. Two booths down, someone’s savoring a steaming grilled-cheese-and-bacon sandwich that I covet with my entire being. But Ava orders a half-sized Waldorf salad, no dressing. I order the same—dressing, yes, but on the side—and break open the yeasty compromise of a fresh-baked pretzel roll.

“Thought you were starving,” I say.

Ava’s fingernails are broken and unpainted, the skin around them raw hot pink. “I’m on kind of a raw vegan kick.”

“Damn. I wish I could pull that off.”

She shrugs. “I mean. It takes literally no effort to not eat something.” I chew for a moment, processing this concept. It makes me feel even more inadequate. “I’m trying to minimize footprint on the world,” she adds. “Especially seeing as I’m supposed to be dead.”

“Yeah, well, so am I. But these pretzel rolls? Amazing.”

 

---

 

I met Ava in treatment, back in ’08. It was harder to track people down then, before everyone and their grandma had a Facebook, right as MySpace was nose-diving into obsolescence. It was easy to know someone for six days of residential lockdown, bonding over decaf and soggy scrambled eggs, and then lose track of them completely. Looking back, I’m really glad I lived. Because what I really wanted was to disappear, and dying in college does just the opposite. There are headlines, vigils, odd post facto friendships. She was in my dorm, my singing group, my Psych section. They might have named a tree after me, or a fountain, or a dining hall entrée, in which case I’d have to die all over again of sheer embarrassment.

Ava wasn’t in school, and for that I envied her. Not just for that. For all of it. The right eyes, the right hair, the right bone structure. The right scars, like declarations of independence. We may have tried and failed to stop the game in the exact same town on the exact same day, but between the two of us, she definitely wore it better.

 

---

 

The salads arrive: walnuts, minced apple, plump red grapes, little celery choppings like quotation marks. I attempt a zig-zag drizzle of dressing, but it plops out in awkward globs. Ava doesn’t notice. She’s pushing lettuce around with her fork, looking at my tattoos.

“Nice ink, by the way,” she says.

“Thanks.” I glance at my left arm like I don’t have it memorized. “It’s a work in progress.”

“We’re all just works in progress,” Ava drawls, with familiar nuclear snark. An old joke I’d long forgotten, until she clicked it back into place: one of our counselors, whom I cruelly code-named Neckmole, would sprinkle syrupy reminders that we were all just works in progress into every conversation. Ava did a killer Neckmole impression. Uncanny. And to impress her (meaning Ava, not Neckmole), I’d pointed out that the only genuine progress humans make is our constant slide into inevitable decay. Progress is fancy growth, and growth is fancy aging, and aging is just dying in slow motion. Everyone’s a corpse in progress.

At the time, I deemed this wildly profound. Of course, the counselor (whose real name I’ve thankfully forgotten) only wanted to encourage us to be gentle to ourselves. I don’t think blasting my left arm full of rainbow colored pigment was what she had in mind, but there are worse things to put in your arms. Call it progress.

Ava’s arms are inkless, closer to bone. But they tell stories too. I’m not sure I want to hear them all.

“Have you been painting?” I ask.

“A little. Not enough. Got a job though. Down at Comic Cartel?”

“Oh, fun!”

Ava skewers a grape with the prong of her fork. “I mean, it’s retail, you know? There’s kind of a ceiling on fun.”

“This is true. First job I got when I left school the second time was stocking shelves at Bath and Body Works. Didn’t take them long to realize they didn’t want me on the sales floor, but they did have me work a register Black Friday. To this day l can’t go in there.”

“Why would you? It smells like the Sugar Plum Fairy OD’d in there. Just walking past it makes my nose bleed.”

I picture the Sugar Plum Fairy with a needle in her arm, stuck in an eternal game of backgammon. Ava crunches a celery sliver in her teeth. “What about now, what do you do?” she asks.

“I’m a tutor. SATs.”

Ava just cringes.

“It’s honestly not all that bad. It’s no Comic Cartel though.”

“Bet the money’s better.”

“Probably.”

“So lunch is on you, I take it?”

I nearly choke on a sprig of radicchio. “Sure. Yeah. Totally.”

“Christ, I’m kidding. What, you think this is a date?”

Of course I don’t. The truth is, she’s not half as pretty as I remembered. Either the decade has been hard on her, or my tastes have simply changed. Her features are almost too refined, as if someone were sculpting them out of marble and accidentally gouged a little too much out. If you ignore the gin bottle eyes, which is extremely hard to do, she seems, if anything, a little plain.

“I’m engaged,” I remind her.

“Exactly. I saw that. Slow your roll, Harvard. I can pay for my own half salad.”

“Come on, don’t call me that.”

She smiles—and I stand corrected. She’s drop dead gorgeous. “I’m just messing with you,” she says.

 

---

 

I barely remember anything from treatment but the shapes of rooms and the parade of troubled faces. The beach-brown, bleach-blonde moms, stumbling out fried from ECT like Frankenstein’s Barbies. The shy kid with the beanie who played James Taylor songs on the piano every afternoon. Big Charles with his knee socks and MIT cap, his little half-moon glasses flat side down. The fleshless woman with a face the color of toilet water who as far as I know never cleared Level One. And Ava. We’d file along the wall by the window, waiting for Prozac, Seroquel, lithium, birth control, multivitamins. We slept two to a room on cracking mattresses. We couldn’t have laptops because the power cords, apparently, were a suicide risk. I didn’t even own a smart phone yet.

I hardly remember any of the treatment groups. Ava and I would trade snide looks back and forth as sad walls of words crumbled steadily around us. I recall sitting in circle in a sunlit room, scribbling manga in the margins of grainy xeroxed worksheets, while a teenager named Desirée talked about squeezing ice cubes so she wouldn’t cut her wrists. Sitting on a courtyard bench with a boy who made me laugh, and learning how to breathe. Sitting in something called Self Group, where a stocky, balding doctor talked about a place inside us called the Dead Zone, which I was pretty sure was a Stephen King book. Towards the end of my inpatient stint, while my semi-rehabbed mind was pining for a razor so I could scrape six days of stubble from my shins, I found myself staring idly through the tall glass doors at four daffodils that sprouted overnight.

But in a world without razors, or laptop power cords, there can’t possibly have been glass doors. Memory lies.

Somehow we’re 30 now. Somehow we lived, and not everyone did. I’ll probably never know what became of Big Charles, or Desirée, or the James Taylor kid. I have a pretty good guess about some of the others. But guesses are worthless. No one guessed that my younger brother, the prom king, who never woke my parents up at 3 a.m. with calls from the police station, whose Pinterest-perfect wedding photos filled my parents’ shelves, who had earned his number-one spot on my Step Four resentment inventory for being so goddamn well adjusted, would jump, at 27, from the Golden Gate Bridge.

That’s why I was asking Ava about the afterlife. It’s kind of why I resolved to reach out in the first place, after sitting on her contact info for the better part of a year. I wanted to know why she’d made it and my brother didn’t. I wanted to know what it was like, if she’d felt anything, during those six minutes she’d spent being clinically dead. I wanted to know whether the plastic angel I found washed up on that California beach was just dumb luck, just another classic case of humans slapping meaning onto inanimate garbage. My whole throat burned to ask him why. I of all people should have understood it, and I did, but then I didn’t. I understood it for me, for Ava. Not for him.

But now that Ava’s sitting there across from me, in the scarred and over-chiseled flesh, I can’t bring myself to share my brother’s suicide. It feels dangerous, in a way only raw truth can. Whatever strings of hope are holding her together in that poisoned lotus pose, I’m terrified to touch them. If she asks me how my family is, then I’ll tell the story. Because she’d never ask that. Because we’d rather trade quips about dead fairies and Black Fridays, new tattoos and raw vegan kicks. Because if we’re both just works in progress, I’m still not sure who’s further along. It all depends on where we think we’re going.

“Wanna walk down to the river?” I ask.

“Sure. Good idea.” She unfolds her legs and rises with a stilted, stop-motion grace. Outside the streets hum with late September traffic and intermittent wind. A few bright clouds skirt the sun. It’s a short walk from the café to the sloping green bank of the Charles and the thin dirt path that runs along its edge. Our sneakers cake with mud from yesterday’s rain. Canada geese pepper the far bank. People whir past us on bicycles, sweeping over bridges into Boston. A lone rowboat glides downriver.

Then there’s an abandoned-looking playground, its rusting equipment standing sparse and still, like skeletal horses on some postapocalyptic plain. “Let’s swing for a bit,” Ava says. The thought would never have occurred to me.

There is one swing for each of us, two cracking tongues of tar-black rubber that squeal and groan as we shift our weight. I grip the thick chains, the metal staining my palms burnt orange. Their sour smell transports me back in time, to any number of schoolyards, backyards, public parks. I kick my legs skyward, the white tips of my Chucks aimed high like tiny missiles. The metal whines and protests as I’m lifted. My stomach lags behind me on the drop. Ava sails past me, aerodynamically perfect. She is hollow-boned, a bird, a ghost; I am denser, meaty, tethered to the earth. But by now I’ve seduced momentum. The earth and sky tug at us both. The world whips by my temples like I’m made of wind.

For a flickering instant, I imagine jumping. I picture blind leaps and miracle wings. I picture my brother in a baby safety swing, his wormy toddler fingers finding gaps in the chains. I picture Ava’s watercolor veins, and the river below us, and all that river’s carried out to sea.

Minutes merge. Back and forth, Ava and I cleave the air, charting twin semicircles that will never touch. For a little while, our arcs align. We rise and fall in parallel, bodies in flight, suspended high above our shadows. Then the sunlight shifts and the wind picks up, and the pauses between Ava’s swing creaks start to lengthen. I follow her lead, allowing gravity to nurse me back to center, dragging my sneakers in the sand.

“I liked that,” she says, faraway eyes reflecting river blue. “I liked that.” Then she hides a yawn in the crook of her elbow, glancing back up the embankment towards the road. “I’ve got to get going now.”

“This was really fun,” I say, trying not to make it come out sad. I don’t expect a hug, but that’s what I get. I hug her back, feeling ribs under my fingers like a cage of blown glass.

“I have to go,” she says again. Her voice is small and brittle in the wind. “It was really good to see you.”

“Yeah, you too. Anytime, you know? I’ll be around. At least I hope I will.”

“I hope so too,” she says.

Then our eyes meet, and we both burst out laughing.

Eren Harris (They/Them) was raised in California and schooled in New England, where they spent their twenties playing Behavioral Health Bingo. Their writing has been published in Two Hawks Quarterly and under a prior name in Salon, Selfish, YourTango, AfterParty Magazine, and others. Eren is currently working on their first novel, Siren’s Night. They live in Los Angeles with their husband and two cats.