Page 149 of A Dead Girl's Guide to Living
When she pulled away to shower, I stayed in bed for an extra five minutes, just to get the feeling back in my legs and remember how to breathe.
She knew what she was doing. That wasn’t new information. What churned around in my mind that day was my own lack of experience for whatever came next. How did I talk to her about that? What if she thought it was weird? What if I disappointed her somehow?
I groaned internally. The one thing I thought I was never going to have to worry about, and here it was, staring me down and laughing.
I was taken back to the conversation I’d had with Liv outside the toilets at the drive-in, and I swallowed, unable to believe that something I thought would never be a problem was, in fact, a problem.
I allowed myself a sideways glance in her direction, noting the faint crease between her brows, her eyes far away and distant. She hadn’t spoken much since we started walking the crater, only pointing out a particularly odd-looking cloud or snapping a selfie of us grinning in front of the rim.
We’d managed to get another tourist to snap our Polaroid—Dove’s arm slung around my shoulder, the pit yawning behind us as we grinned down the lens. I filmed some content for my followers, but even that felt like going through the motions. My mind was more on Dove’s unusual silence.
I wasn’t used to it.
What if she was second-guessing us? Surely not—not after how she kissed me that morning. No. Then what was it? I peeked at her again, her lips now pressed into a thin line.
“Are you okay?” The words tumbled past my lips before I could stop them. “Are you spiraling? Because that’smyjob.”
A grin cracked across her face, and she looked at me.
“Ellis, are you making jokes?” she teased, squeezing my hand.
I rolled my eyes at her, fighting the smile tugging at my own lips.
I liked how she said my name.
“I’m fine,” she said with a sigh, looking down into the pit of the crater where Liv spun in endless circles, rising into the sky and dropping back to earth, over and over again. “I’m worried the reading last night went too far—that it was too much for her. She hasn’t spoken to me at all this morning. She won’t even look at me.”
“You know Liv,” I murmured. “She’ll bounce back. You struck a nerve last night, that much was obvious.”
“Do you think she really doesn’t remember how she died?” Dove asked after a beat of silence. She paused in her walk, and I stopped beside her.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted, biting my lip. “I’ve kind of been tossing that around since she said she couldn’t remember. She—she gets this look sometimes, like when a memory is too close. Or when she talks about her friend, Bri. It’s like she tenses up. And she has those random bouts of silence.” I rubbed the back of my neck, the sun beating down on my shoulders.
“Right?” Dove said, nodding. “I feel more like… like she’s holding onto something so horrible, and she’s bound it up so tightly that it might just break her if she lets it out—if she acknowledges it.”
The wind picked up around us, whipping my hair and stirring more desert dust.
“Do you think she’s afraid of the truth?” I asked, pressing my sunglasses closer to my face.
Dove was quiet, her jaw tense as she looked down at Liv again.
“I think she’s more afraid it was her fault,” she murmured. “Whatever happened. She’s so… I can feel her guilt. It eats at her.”
Her words landed like a stone in my stomach.
I hadn’t believed in ghosts before Liv. Had zero belief in a magical afterlife. Didn’t fall for fate or second chances or miracles, even if I was allegedly the product of one. I never gave much thought to the dead having unfinished business. I’d resigned myself to dying so many times that I always made sure to never have unfinished business.
But looking down at Liv, still spinning in circles below the crater’s edge, challenged everything I thought I believed. And I believed in her. I believed in her pain and her desperation to make sense of her abrupt ending. I wasn’t sure when, exactly, it had hit me, but somewhere along this trip, I realized I wanted her to get every bit of peace she could.
She deserved it. I wouldn’t be here without her.
“I think I’m going to scatter some of Margaret here,” Dove said suddenly, the shift in topic so abrupt I blinked twice and shook my head slightly.
“What?”
“Well, here’s as good a place as any,” she said with a shrug. “Margaret would have loved it. It’s probably the coolest spot on this leg of Arizona to scatter her.”
She dug around in her jacket pocket, pulling out her carefully portioned sandwich bag of her grandmother. I’d seen her scatter pieces of Margaret so many times now that it shouldn’t have been alarming, and yet it still knocked me off my feet a little bit every time.
