My sister had been trying to kill me since we were little.
When we were five, Mara ground a drinking glass into glittering crumbs and tipped them into my milk. She sat across the kitchen table with her feet swinging above the floor, so quiet that Mom told her she was being good for once.
I swallowed twice before my throat lit up.
The glass hit the tile with a sharp crack. Milk spread in a white fan through the shards. I folded to the floor, choking and crying, while Mara leaned over the table to watch. When Dad came running, she clapped.
Not because she hated me.
She wanted to know what would happen.
At ten, I woke after midnight and found her sitting on the edge of my bed with a paring knife across her knees. Moonlight flashed along the blade each time the curtain moved.
“Mara?”
She tilted her head.
“If you died,” she asked, “how long would it hurt?”
After that, my parents nearly separated us for good. Child psychiatrists used careful terms: conduct disorder, callous-unemotional traits, severe deficits in empathy. Adults whispered less careful words when they thought we couldn’t hear.
Monster was one of them.
I was the one who begged my parents not to send her away.
I held Mara in the front hall while Dad loaded a suitcase into the car. She stood rigid in my arms, like a cat tolerating contact only because it hadn’t decided whether scratching was worth the trouble.
“Try to be better,” I told her. “If you get better, I’ll always stay with you.”
Mara said nothing.
I assumed she forgot.
Years later, I learned that some promises vanish from the mouth that makes them and live forever inside the person who hears them.
The night I died, Mara was still the first person I thought of.
I woke in an alley behind Grayhaven’s old riverfront warehouses with cold passing through me. That was the first absurdity: I felt chilled to the bone after I no longer had bones to chill.
Six men stood around a girl near the brick wall. Rainwater shivered in potholes. Gravel grated beneath their shoes whenever one of them shifted.
One man was swearing. Another kicked the body.
The man with the silver ring crouched and pressed two fingers to the girl’s throat.
“I told you not to go that far.”
“She breathing?” someone asked.
“Hell if I know.”
It took me several seconds to recognize the ripped blue dress.
I had put it on that evening.
The girl’s hair was stuck to blood along her cheek. One shoe was missing. There was an old thumb-shaped bruise on her left wrist, the one I had hidden beneath sleeves for weeks.
I looked down at my own hand.
Transparent.
No pulse. No breath. No trick of closing my eyes and waking in my own bed.
I was dead.
The man with the ring jerked upright. “Get her out of here. Where’s the camera?”
Another man grabbed a small video camera from a crate. “Tori said keep the footage.”
The first man wheeled on him. “You want all of us buried with her? Turn it off.”
Tori Hale.
The name struck something loose in me: a hallway at Grayhaven High, laughter behind my back, the restroom door held shut, a phone raised in my face. Then darkness. Then pieces I could not put in order.
I lunged toward my body.
Something yanked me backward.
No hand touched me. The force came from the center of my chest, a line pulled tight between whatever I had become and the corpse on the pavement. I tried again.
Three steps.
Four.
On the fifth, the alley bent like heat over asphalt.
I slammed back beside myself.
Dying had not freed me. It had chained me to my own death.
“Bag her.”
Burlap rasped over concrete.
I knelt while they lifted my arm, rolled me, shoved my body into the sack. I screamed at them until I realized screaming was another useless habit the dead could keep.
No one heard.
Then, impossibly, I saw our living room.
Not clearly. It flickered over the alley as if two reflections had been laid on the same pane of glass.
Mara sat on the couch with the television on and the volume muted. She wasn’t watching it. Her phone was pressed to her ear.
My voicemail picked up.
She called again.
And again.
Seventeen missed calls glowed on the screen.
Mara didn’t throw the phone. She didn’t smash anything. She sat so still that the stillness felt worse than rage.
On the eighteenth call, she opened another app.
A red dot appeared on a map.
I knew what it was.
Six months earlier, I had found a coin-sized GPS tracker stitched into the lining of my backpack.
“You’re tracking me?”
Mara had been eating an apple. She didn’t deny it.
“So I know where you are.”
“That’s called tracking.”
“That’s what I said.”
I made her remove it. Made her promise not to do it again.
She said, “Fine.”
My mistake had been embarrassingly simple.
I assumed there was only one.
The red dot on Mara’s phone sat near the abandoned warehouses by the river.
She pulled on a jacket and left.
In the alley, the men had dragged my body toward a battered SUV. Somewhere beyond the buildings came the clatter of a loose metal gate, then approaching footsteps.
“Damn it. Someone’s coming.”
“Leave it.”
“What about her?”
“No time.”
Doors slammed. The engine growled and receded through the industrial blocks.
They left me in the sack against the wall.
Minutes later, footsteps entered the alley.
Slow. Even. Unhurried.
Mara followed the tracker to a stretch of wet pavement where my rabbit keychain lay in a puddle. She picked it up, rolled it between two fingers, then looked down.
A dark trail led deeper between the warehouses.
She followed it.
I stood beside the sack and, for the first time since realizing I was dead, wished she would turn around.
For years I had imagined what Mara would do if I died. Maybe she would be curious. Maybe she would study my body the way she had studied the milk on the kitchen floor, waiting to see what came next.
I had never considered that I might be afraid of the answer.
Mara stopped in front of the sack. The rabbit keychain was still in her hand. She did not call my name. She did not shake. She knelt, took hold of the drawstring, and pulled.
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