and all turns to silver glass

Getting shot feels like getting skewered with a curling iron. I'm freaking the fuck out, this is how I go down, Mom is going to see pictures of me bleeding out on the bathroom floor in the news and that's, you know, totally uncool. Hang on Chloe, at least kick this asshole in the nuts before you tap out—but then the endorphins or whatever shit kicked in, and things start going grey. And fuzzy. And it's not so bad anymore, right? Everything is out of focus, I'm glowing, the world is just light. Thank god for brain chemicals, because at least I'm dying high. God knows I wouldn't want to go out sober.

And then, she's here. Or I'm there, I guess. Rachel.

I can't see for shit, just grey everywhere, but I know it's her. We're in the junkyard, scribbling on the wall, we're getting tangled together in her dorm room, we're slamming our brains out to some underground DJ in a dive bar in California. But we're not, we're also nowhere and floating, everything's just fog.

Death is weird.

"Chloe? Oh god, Chloe." Her voice is loud. Direct front and center, right through me. There's trumpets in her voice. Fuck. I've missed her.

"Rachel, you fucker. You're—oh god, you're dead? Does this mean that you died?" We're locking pinkies and looking up at the sky in my truck bed. She's laughing and braiding my hair while some shitty folk artist croons through her stereo. Joyce is calling us down to dinner.

Maybe it's our life flashing before my eyes? Or maybe I'm dreaming. They're memories, but in the afterlife that shit gets literal, I guess. I don't know.

"Yeah, I'm—I'm gone." A laugh. "Well, not gone gone. I've been in the ground for weeks. I'm so sorry. That bitch had one fucking job. She should have looked out for you. I should have given it to Joyce, not her. Almost did, but Joyce is older and I was worried that she'd burn herself out. Stupid."

We're putting out our cigarette butts on a cheap gas station map, blotting out Arcadia Bay with scorch marks, laughing. We're smashing down the planks covering a blown out window, I'm swearing because I spilled some of the fifth.

She's grabs on to my wrist—I guess I have a wrist now instead of being a disembodied voice in the fog, and she has a hand—her grip burns. The bathroom materializes back into view out of the mist. There's a warm light spilling out from behind the stalls—Rachel drags me to it (over my body, but I don't want to look down at that).

There's a girl curled up on the floor behind the bathroom stalls, face hidden in her arms. She's sobbing. I have to squint through the fog to make her out. It looks like the light's coiled around her forearm, almost like a bracelet? I don't get a good look at it before Rachel tears it free, rolls it into a ball, and swallows it whole. Just, shoves her face in her hands and has at it. Uh.

"Umm, Rachel? Who's a bitch for what? Give Joyce what? What is that?"

She wipes her mouth with the back of her arm, her face still turned away from me. "Doesn't fucking matter now, does it? Fuck, Chloe, I'm so sorry."

"Rach, Rach, turn around and look at me."

She does.

Her eyes were hazel back when—back before my life completely hit the shitter. Dark green, mostly, flecked with bits of brown. Now they don't even look—there's no whites to them at all. They're almost all black, all pupil, from one corner straight to the other, with a thin ring the color of a light beer around the edges. They look too huge for her face.

I want to say, she's so beautiful, and she is. Mostly. She looks ready to kill something, her face scrunched up like it always is when she's at her most pissed off. I haven't seen her look like that since one of those Otter fucks shoved me into a locker and called me a retard.

I hesitate, but pull her into a hug, anyway. I know she's not pissed at me.

It's everything I've wanted for a long fucking time now. We're kissing behind the dorms, it's 4am and she's giggling and I'm fumbling with the clasp of her stupid bra, I'm burying my nose in her hair in the morning sun in my room. I'd almost forgotten what she smelled like. Bright, rich, cut with a bit of citrus from her shampoo. Perfect.

She pulls back, and we're blotting out Arcadia Bay with cigarette burns again. Her new eyes are freaky as shit, granted. But I'm knuckle deep in her in the family shower trying to listen for a car pulling up in the driveway over the sounds she's making, she's digging into my back, I'm—

"Good news though, I am flattening this town. Just turning it all to glass."

"What?"

Scorch marks on cheap paper. Rachel side eyeing a homeless woman in the back of the diner and hissing, bitch. We're throwing bottles off the edge of a cliff, they're smacking white rings out of the water below.

She grins. "I'm calling in the big guns. I'm going to need to sacrifice some animals, which isn't good, but I've basically got it all set in place. Fuck this shithole of a town for everything it's done to me. To us." She tugs on my shirt and I feel something like movement. The bathroom fades to grey again.

I don't say anything, just stare.

Rachel raises an eyebrow. "Problem? Chloe, you hate this place as much as I do. You just got shot, for Christ's sakes."

"I don't want to kill anyone."

Rachel's putting her phone in her pocket too fast while I'm looking over her shoulder. I'm slamming the door behind me, her on the other side, crying. She's pulling herself out of my arms and whispering, I don't want to talk about it right now.

"You don't want to kill anyone." Her voice is monotone. "What the fuck, Chloe. These people are monsters, worse than monsters. If we had just—" She's holding my hands and crying, I'm pressing a towel to her wrist, a shard from the bathroom mirror winking crimson on the floor—"If we had just gone to L.A. together and got out of this shithole, maybe everything would have been, you know, okay—"

"Probably. But we didn't. And now we're here. You can't change that anymore."

She looks like she wants to say something, but she doesn't. I'm texting her at 4 A.M., sorry. She's throwing rocks at my window, waving from below. She's mumbling and brushing her hair behind her ear.

"I, just." I take a moment to try and collect myself. Chloe and Rachel, together again. Fuck. "If I'm dead, I just want to see my dad again, Rachel. My life sucked anyway since he left. It's all over now, you know? I don't even—I don't even want to think about Arcadia Bay anymore. I just want to talk to my dad—"

She hugs me, this time. "Oh, Chloe. Okay. Okay. Let's figure that out. I honestly haven't found any other humans. I think I'm—I think we're sort of between? I don't know. I never really cared about this shit when I was alive, I was more into, uh. Animal stuff. I've been so stupid."

There's a shadow behind the mists, over her shoulder. The fog parts, and—enter my truck, looking as tough and beat up as ever. Resting on nothing, surrounded by nothing. Well, what the fuck do you know. "Being dead is some freaky shit."

Rachel pulls back. "I mean, hella yes, but what's up?" She cranes her neck, looking around.

I pull away from Rachel and walk over. Yup, that's my truck alright. Same scratches from the time I hit that pole. And the dent from that cement parking stop thingy. And that other dent from the stupid tree.

"Chloe?" Rachel's voice goes high pitched, too loud. "Chloe? What are you doing?"

"Checking this shit out, how crazy is this?" I scrounge around for my keys in my pockets. "Maybe my mom buried me with it. God knows she hated this thing, kept trying to get me to trade it in. Hello, Sheila!"

"Sheila. Your car? What—what are you checking out? You can see your car?"

I get inside her fine, and she still reeks like old cigarettes. She starts, too, without even stuttering. "Nice." The mist dissipates all around, giving way to a dirt road, pine trees, and a deep black, starry sky.

"Holy fuck, Chloe? Chloe, what are you doing?

I pop my head out the window. "Umm, starting my car. Can you not see this?"

"I haven't been able to see anything since I died, really, just sort of sense it. You're—you're casting something, I think? There's a lot of energy getting pulled in. I—I don't know what you're doing, but it's, it's big—holy shit—"

"Rachel, come over here."

She pivots in place. "Come where? My body is rotting, Chloe, I can't move, if I was alive I would portal the hell out of this reality, all I can do is just lie here and decompose while listening to every fucking idiotic thought every asshole has in this shitty town. I have been trying, you have no idea how hard I've been trying but I can't move, I just have to deal while the maggots—"

I get out of the car and walk over to her, grab her hand. She starts swearing, oh shit oh fuck oh god and honestly it sounds like she's getting eaten out. It's kind of funny. "Don't you laugh at me, Price. Fuck. Oh my god. What are you doing?"

"I'm walking you to the car."

"That's crazy. There's—there's something opening up, can you see it? This is some huge shit. You're incredible."

"But of course." I open the door for her, put my hands on her waist, try and push her up a bit into the door. She stumbles into the passenger seat, ass up, and I check to make sure all her extremities are in the clear before I slam the door shut.

When I get back into the driver's seat she looks like she's adjusted, even buckled in. She's touching the dashboard like it's made of gold. "Holy shit, it's your truck." Rachel whips her head up to stare at me. The freaky ass eyes are gone. We're meeting for the first time, under the streetlight outside a shitty bar, and I'm getting struck speechless just looking at the sillouhette her body cuts against the brick. Rachel reaches out and cups my cheek in her palm, twists a strand of my hair in her fingers. "Look at you, your hair's growing out."

I turn and kiss her fingertips. "Want to go for a drive?"

"My hero and her valiant steed. Okay. Let's get the fuck out of this clusterfuck of a town."

"You got it, princess." I shift into gear, press down on the gas and we start rolling through the woods. It's quiet all around, except for the grumbling engine.

Rachel rests her head on my shoulder, hooks her arm into mine, and my stomach just keeps on flipping. "Does this look like the cliffside trail to you? The one that starts behind the diner?"

"Hard to tell in the dark." I squint into the bits of the night that I can make out, lit bright silver in my headlights. Shadow-columns from the trees, cracks in the bark. No animals. We pass a faded signpost. "There's the marker for the hiking trail, so yeah. Is that okay? Should we turn around? The interstate's the other way."

"No, I think it's good. This will take us up to the lighthouse. That place is loud, I haven't been able to tune it out since I died. Sometimes I think I could even hear it while I was alive. The thing is a fucking beacon."

I stay quiet, navigating tight turns on a steep road, mostly. She rolls down the windows and the wind roars into the cabin. "There's things I never—I never told you. Things I, I really should've."

"Like, you having some mad superpowers apparently. Shit!" I slam my hand on the steering wheel. "We could have had so much fun. You can drop magic nukes on shit? We never would have needed to go to class again. Or was that something you got after you died? You mentioned portals—"

"That's not what I'm talking about Chloe, I—"

"I bet it was because of Tobanga." That word really rolls off the tongue, so I say it again for the fun of it. "Tobanga. You could've hooked me up with the voodoo, girl! You got the powah."

"Chloe, seriously." She laces her fingers with mine and squeezes my hand. "I'm not talking about that, that has nothing to do with you. There was some—something else."

The trees start to fall away. We're chugging up the last hill. The lighthouse is coming into view—or it would be. There's a solid pillar of white where the lighthouse should be cutting against the night sky, an obelisk where the lighthouse should be. A door or a pillar? It's so bright, it's hard to tell.

"I, uh." Her breathing catches. "I—"

"How did you die?"

"Chloe, I need to tell you—"

"Honestly Rachel," I say, and we're drawing closer and closer now, the white rectangle looming over us. It is a door, and there's light spilling out of it into the cabin of the car, into my eyes. She's glowing in it. "I kind of don't want to know about whatever fucked up shit you want to confess. I don't want to deal with some gut wrenching emotional drama on top of being dead. But I do—I do want to know what happened to you. I lost a lot of sleep over that, so."

She's quiet, for a minute. "Murdered. Nathan. He overdosed me. I think. I was honestly passed out the whole time. I don't really remember."

I slam on the brakes. "Oh, fuck that asshole. Let's kill him."

She smirks, a little, but it doesn't reach her eyes. "You don't even know the half of the twisted shit his family is up to. I'm still on board with the flattening Arcadia thing, you know. I've got to sacrifice a few animals to really seal the deal, like I was saying, but then—goodbye, Shithole, Oregon. Are you sure you want me to go quietly into the good night?"

"If I want someone to be safe—can you make the flattening-thing not hurt them? My mom's pretty awesome, you know."

Her smirk fades. "No. I—I was trying to get you out of there before the storm hit because of that, actually. I can't really directly interfere."

I'm not proud to say it, but I do think about it for a minute while the engine idles. "No. It's not worth it. You still good with this?"

"Ugh, fine. As long as you're driving." I put my foot back on the gas, and she whispers, "It is nice having it all be over, I guess."

The light from where the pillar of white where the lighthouse should be spills over us. It's warm, too, even with the cool wind streaming through the cab. The road leads straight into it and we're edging closer, closer, almost there.

Her grip tightens to the point of pain, and her voice cracks when she whispers, "Chloe, what if—what if we don't see your dad? Or, anything? What if it's just—nothing?"

"At least we'll be in it together. Nothing isn't so bad."

"Okay." She breathes out, doing that hippie dippie deep breathing shit she's always going on about. Finding her center. "Okay."

The hood of the car rolls into the light. It's gone, impossible to see through the whiteness, but we're still rolling forward. Light takes the windshield, too.

"It's going to be okay, I love you," I say, heart racing—