the problem with mortality

i'm not alone

Golden Boy didn't die, sadly. Okay that sounded awful. Of course I want him to live, but maybe if he died, he'd be in the same situation I am. Yes, I'm a terrible person. I realize that.

But even so, he didn't die. I went to see him in the hospital because I'm a creepy stalker, even in death.

He was asleep in the hospital bed when I finally found his room. I couldn't exactly ask the nurse where he was. There were flowers and balloons scattered around everywhere, almost spilling into the hallway. His mom, dad, and two younger sisters were sitting in chairs around his bed, talking quietly or on their phones. It was definitely a full house.

I don't stay very long. As I'm walking down the hallway, trying to find the exit, a beeping sound comes from one of the rooms and a few doctors start booking it towards the source. I follow them and arrive to find a boy I'd seen before in the bed.

I'm pretty sure his name is James Miller. He went to my school. Nice enough but kind of quiet, not shy but withdrawn. He must've been in the other car.

The solitary note is deafening. I remember waking up, seeing my own body and that same note drowning out the sound of my mother's tears, of my own tears. 

I see him standing beside me, staring at his body. He looks confused, then he turns to look at me and something clicks inside his brain. 

"You're dead." He says. 

I nod.

"Am I dead?" He asks. 

"I think so."

He turns and looks back at his body as the doctors shock him one last time.  And then he's gone and the deafening sound returns to a steady beeping rhythm. 

It's lonely, being dead. I have to find ways to fill my time without being able to touch anything or travel at a speed faster than I can run. And I can't run for very long. I walk to my best friend Molly's house and slip in the door when she does. I spend a lot of my time here, mostly because I don't want to see my own house, but also because she talks to me. She doesn't know I'm here, but she went to a therapist after I died and he told her to talk to me like I was sitting right next to her. Since then, I catch up on all of the gossip about school and my old friends through her. 

She sits on her bed and unlocks her phone. Her screensaver is still a picture of the two of us. I remember we took it the night of homecoming. We're sitting in the middle of the street wearing baggy t-shirts and running shorts because our group of friends saw no reason in spending hours of our day doing our hair and makeup just to be suffocated by a sweaty mob when we could be applying face masks and running through the woods. In the picture we're in the process of putting our arms around each other and she's laughing at something I said. I wish I could remember what I said that made her laugh. There's a car coming down the street behind us but we're oblivious. We should've been run over that day, it would've made more sense. Then maybe we could be in this mess together instead of me being alone in this in-between state, listening to her tell me how lonely she is without me. 

James returns to school a few weeks later. No one really cares, though. Everyone is enthralled with Golden Boy's return, even though he got out of the situation with nothing but a concussion. James hobbles in on crutches with braces on his wrist and his neck. You can tell by the way he moves, some serious damage has been done to the side of his abdomen. He keeps his head down in the hallway. He hobbles straight towards me, looking at the ground and I expect him to keep walking. But he stops right in front of me, his eyes drag up my legs and meet my eyes.

"Lark" He says.

That's my name, by the way. Lark Rusey.