Page 53 of Aftertaste

His phone buzzed again.

“Maura? Hey.”

The aftertaste vanished as soon as he picked up.

!!!!

YOU SCOUR THEFood Hall searching for your Aftertaste, eating everything you can remember.

You try birthday cake from every year you were alive. The chicken soup your mother made before she left. Your sister’s soggy breakfast tacos. Your dad’s trademark microwave dinners, still frozen in the middle.

You eat school lunches, and your Grandma Perry’s pies, and Aunt Sarah’s ambrosia, which you can’t stand but Maura loves.

Each dish is a memory, a way to relive something you shared. You eat things that make you feel angry and sad and happy and loved. Scared. Lucky. Curious. Calm. None of them is it, but it still feels like progress. Like in some small way, you’re getting back control. There’s a purpose to your days now. A mission. A goal.

It feels good, despite the Hunger. You feel better.

And then, without warning, Maura shows up in the Hall.

One minute you’re eating pizza from Game Zone—the arcade you used to go to together after school, two bucks for a slice the size of your head—and the next she’s there, beside you, just standing in the Afterlife, the very person you were trying to see before she died.

You blink at her, your pizza growing cold. A kernel of fear blisters—pop!—inside you. If she’s here, then any moment now you won’t be.

The Hanger will come for you. The emptiness. The pain.

She asks if you’re okay, and you shake your head. Of course you’re not.

Then you just start talking, telling her what you’d been planning to say—that you’re hurting, that you need help, that she has to let you go. But before you can finish, she’s gone again.

Poof.

You don’t understand; it doesn’t make sense. She couldn’t be in the Food Hall, not unless she were Dead. But now she’s gone, which would mean she’s… still Living? Had she somehow, in her grief, found a way to visit here? To die, and then return? And had she done it to help you? To save you? Would she do it again?

It shouldn’t be possible, but then, Maura never did play by rules.

You hold on to it, tight, the hope of seeing her again. To the memory of your sister, the person you loved most in the whole world. You can’t let it go.

You wonder if this is how she felt, holding on to you.

ANOTHER ROUND

KOSTYA MET MAURAan hour later, at an address she texted him in Alphabet City.

“I was thinking,” she said instead ofhi, “you should call him back and demand a do-over. Musicman, I mean.”

“Uh, hey. Hi. Nice to see you, too.”

“I’m serious!”

“Look, you didn’t meet Viktor. I just… It’s over. It’s done.”

“Nothing’s done until you’re dead, and even that might be negotiable. Convince him to try your food!”

“Can we talk about something else? Like why we’re in StuyTown?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “You sounded really down. I’m cheering you up.”

“Here?”

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