It was quiet at the beach. Luke had never known it this quiet.

Of course, in another life—his life, to be exact—he had never sat alone in the dark like this, gazing out at the moonlight rippling upon the water. Now, here, in this new—life?—he was struck by the strange beauty of a nocturnal shoreline completely washed of all brightness and color. His living memories of the beach were so full of sunshine and music and laughter. From his vantage point perched among the sand dunes on this clear night, the landscape seemed to him softer now somehow, and lonelier.

Or maybe he was softer and lonelier.

A chocolate-colored lab trotted soundlessly along the water's edge, pulling eagerly at its leash and forcing its owner to hurry along behind. Luke watched, amused, as the dog suddenly stopped and sniffed the sand with urgency, some scent having caught its fancy. The animal then gave a yelp and frantically started digging into the sand, which sent great wet clumps of it hurtling through the air and splatting all over its owner's nylon windbreaker.

The man holding onto the animal's leash began to splutter and spit as the gritty spray hit his mouth. "Ruthie, no!" he cried out, but the dog paid him no heed. "Bad girl!"

Luke laughed.

The sound of it was caught up in the salty breeze, and Luke watched as the dog froze, one paw raised in mid-air, and jerked its head in his direction.

Almost as if it heard him.

But, that was impossible, right?

The man made little tuts of exasperation as he brushed the sand from his jacket. "Come on, Ruthie," the man said finally. He wheeled around to face the direction from which he and the dog had come. "Time to go home."

Ruthie, not being a bad girl at all, but a rather good one, obediently loped along behind. But before she melted back into the darkness, she turned once to bark over her shoulder, her eyes roving the sand dunes for someone she could not see, but seemed to sense all the same.

"Bye, Ruthie," Luke whispered.

And then he was alone.

Which was fine, okay? That's why he'd come to the beach in the first place. He had wanted to go somewhere quiet where he could think. That had ruled out the garage, where he'd left Reggie and Alex sprawled across the couch in a heated debate ranking their top ten albums of all time. And it ruled out his parents' house, because it was painful enough going back there even in the daylight. And it ruled out Julie's room, only because she had kicked him out an hour earlier when he kept pulling her attention away from her science homework by rummaging through her closet.

He wasn't even trying to be nosy. He just genuinely liked Julie's style.

"What are you doing?" she had asked at one point, looking up from her laptop to see him carefully holding one of her hats an inch or so above his ears.

"Every time I try to put this on, it falls straight through me."

She had shaken her head, bemused. "Then maybe you shouldn't be trying it on. Are you done distracting me yet? I really do have homework."

He flashed her his most disarming grin. "Come on. You know I'd look fedorable in this hat."

When Julie had merely stared at him in response, he had felt that grin begin to slip a little under the terrible weight of the awkwardness that he always felt around Julie when his jokes did not land as intended.

Which was often.

"Be-because," he stammered, "it's a fedora. Get it? Fedora...adorable...fedorable?" Wilting in the light of Julie's intense gaze, his voice had faltered until the last word came out with the uncertain lilt of a question.

Luke, you absolute idiot.

To his relief, he could see a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. "You did not just stand there and deliver the worst pun ever created. Not here. Not in my room, where you aren't even supposed to be."

"Then let's go somewhere else."

He had blurted it without thinking (not unusual), but for one (very unusual) moment, the air between them became electrified. And when Julie hadn't immediately said no, Luke's heart had swollen to bursting with the half-buried longings he spent most of his time convincing himself he did not possess.

Please say 'yes'.

He loved writing music with Julie and the band more than he had ever loved anything. But even though music had been the driving force of his being for as long as he could remember, there was a Luke who existed beyond the chords and lyrics.

And he was starting to feel like he wanted to share that part of himself with Julie, too.

Finally, she had broken the growing tension by throwing up her hands in exasperation and yelling, "I'm going to flunk out of high school if you don't get out!" She had then playfully chucked her sneaker in his direction as emphasis, only to glare at him when he laughed as it sailed right through his shoulder and knocked over the earring stand on her dresser.

He had poofed out immediately after that, before he got himself into serious trouble.

So he came to the beach.

To think.

It was a strange thing, this falling out of time. He still could not wrap his mind around the fact that all the worries and cares that, in his mind, felt so fresh, so raw, were now twenty-five years buried and gone.

In the early days of the band's post-death...life (what else to call it?), and shortly after they had realized they had the ability to interact with the objects around them, they had spent a couple of late nights prowling through various empty stores. They weren't trying to steal anything; they simply wanted to get a sense of what was out there now that twenty-five years had passed since they last walked out into the world. One of their first visits had been to a corner bookshop, because Alex had reasoned that there was no better place to find information than a bookshop (Luke, not having much experience with bookshops, had been content to take Alex's word for it). Once the boys had poofed themselves into the middle of the empty store, each made a beeline for the magazine display against the back wall, where they had spent what felt like hours leafing through copies of Time and Newsweek in an effort to catch up on current events. The whole episode quickly struck Luke as pointless, and before long he found himself skimming through articles for mere seconds before flipping to the next one. What did it matter if streaming was killing music sales when he didn't know what streaming was? What was a coin, and why did so many people have so many strong opinions about it? Was every movie now a Marvel movie-and what did that even mean?

Just as Luke was feeling more confused and frustrated than ever, Alex had brought an end to the venture by setting off the store's security alarm. One minute, all three were perusing the periodicals, and the next, Alex was ripping a copy of Entertainment Weekly out of Reggie's hands and hurling it across the store, where it smashed into a display of wall calendars and toppled them to the floor, triggering the alarm. All three boys had frozen in terror before Alex had taken off running straight through the back wall and into the small empty lot behind the store, leaving Luke and Reggie with nothing to do but follow him.

After briefly cowering behind a dumpster as a police car sped by, sirens blaring (it was hard to get used to being invisible, okay?), Reggie had turned to Alex, indignant. "Nice going, Alex. You could have gotten us arrested!"

"What're they gonna do, Reg?" asked Alex dryly. "Handcuff us? Haul us down to the station and fingerprint us? We don't have fingers!"

Reggie's cheeks had flushed a sheepish red. "Oh, right. Still." He turned to squint at Alex. "You didn't have to throw my magazine. What happened?"

Alex dug his hands into his pockets, looking uncomfortable. "Um...there was a bug on it."

"A bug?"

"Yeah. A big one. Huge. Huge bug."

Luke had raised a skeptical eyebrow, only to see Alex shoot him a warning look that clearly meant Not now.

Alex's statement had a visible effect on Reggie, who shuddered and blew out a shaky breath. "Thanks, man," he said, completely guileless and sincere in the way only Reggie could be. "You know how much I hate bugs. You guys remember the Centipede Incident?"

Alex and Luke had both nodded gravely. Of course they remembered the Centipede Incident. Luke had nearly lost a finger in the Centipede Incident.

It was only later that Alex had admitted the truth to Luke. "I'd just gone through that magazine," he confessed. "There was this long article about the new Star Wars movies, with photos and everything. I didn't want him to see it and find out how much he missed."

"Movies?" Luke had asked, emphasizing the plural s. "Weren't there already three of them? How many more did they make?"

"I don't know, man." Alex had shaken his head, his voice solemn. "Like...a lot."

Those early nighttime outings had included trips to department stores and electronics stores and—obviously—music stores (where Luke had fallen in love with a pearly white and black Fender Stratocaster that it literally pained him to leave). In each one, the boys had been struck by the simultaneous sensations that everything was both comfortingly familiar and completely alien.

"If these are smart TVs," Reggie had mused one night as they stood in front of a display of enormous flat screens, much thinner and wider than any televisions they had ever known, "does that mean we grew up with dumb tvs?"

Alex had sighed. "Only when you were watching them, Reggie."

Soon overwhelmed with the enormity of all they did not know, the boys had given up on their exploratory crash course and decided to let Julie act as both their teacher and translator in all things current. Whenever they had questions, she answered them. She had even given them a brief lesson on how to look up information on her laptop, and ever since then, Reggie took great pleasure in inserting random facts into conversation with a smug, "You know how I know that? I Googled it."

It wasn't long after their return to Earth that Luke began to wonder if perhaps a night in his old bedroom might make him feel a bit more like his old self—the Luke who had lived and breathed and been tethered to solid ground. That hadn't worked, either, he was soon to discover. Yes, his room was still there. So were the matching maple bed, desk, and chest of drawers he'd known since childhood. Only now, instead of his faded blue plaid quilt atop the bed, there was a green paisley comforter. The Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Green Day posters that had once hung in pride-of-place on the walls had been traded out for a gold-framed set of prints depicting serene country landscapes. His desk, which had once been littered with scribbled on loose-leaf papers, scattered guitar picks, empty bags of Doritos, and the odd capo and broken string, was now the resting place of his mother's mammoth sewing machine.

His room, it turned out, was no longer his.

Luke had stayed there for one night, anyway, and been amazed at how familiar everything began to feel once he finally lay down on his bed in the dark. The moonlight that poured through the window and across the floor had fallen in the same patterns he remembered from the past. The sound of tires from the occasional passing car met his ears with the same faintly serpentine hiss. The bathroom pipes still gurgled behind the wall, and the numbers on his bedside alarm clock still bathed the edge of his pillow in brilliant neon blue light. In those moments, lying in the quiet dark of the room where he had spent so many childhood hours, it had been easy to imagine that it had all been nothing but a dream. He had never run away, never broken his mother's heart, never died in pursuit of a dream that had slipped from his grasp the very moment he had nearly seized hold of it.

But the illusion had been shattered at three a.m. when his bedroom door popped open and his mother had shuffled in on slippered feet. She had lingered at the window for a moment, her face blank in the moonlight, then spun around to make her way to the bed, where Luke had been forced to scramble out of the way to avoid her sitting through him. He had no idea how long she sat there, staring at nothing, while he had sat there, staring at her. The first blush of grey dawn was illuminating the window by the time Luke's father, without his glasses and his hair sleep-mussed, had joined her.

"Emily," his father had said quietly.

His mother did not take her gaze from the window. "Did you know the door was shut when I came in here?" she asked. "I don't remember closing it, and I came to bed after you." She looked down at her hands. "Luke always slept with the door closed."

"Emily," said his father again, even more gently.

"I can't help it, Mitch, and I can't explain it." His mother had finally turned to face her husband, her face raw with unhealed grief. "Don't you feel him with us? Don't you feel like he's here?"

Luke's father had sat down beside her, sending Luke scuttling to the corner of the bed against the wall, and draped an arm across his wife's shoulders with a heavy sigh. "He's our son, honey. He's always here with us."

Luke was crying by then. Without even truly meaning to, he had poofed himself away from the painful scene and back into the empty garage. With Reggie and Alex out doing whatever it is they did when they, too, needed time to unwind, to think, and to grieve the lives they no longer had, Luke was relieved not to have to explain his swollen eyes and blotchy face. Relieved, and yet shattered by an aching loneliness.

That's when he had spotted Julie's hoodie tossed across the back of the chair where she had left it that evening after practice. Without thinking, he had gathered it to his chest and inhaled deeply of its scent, then curled himself into a ball on his old couch, buried his face in the sweet and floral fragrance of Julie clinging to the fabric, and sobbed his heart out.

Since that terrible night, he had returned to his former home multiple times to check in on his parents, but had purposefully done so only in the relative safety of daylight. Never again, he had vowed, would he go back at a time when the soft shadows of the night so easily blurred the line between the then and the now.

So, for tonight, that left the beach.

The beach, where there was nothing from his past or present to distract him from the thoughts tumbling through his mind.

Our unfinished business.

The knot of fear that had twisted inside of him when Willie told them of Caleb's plan, its consequences, and their only possible solution would not ease. Was this it? A brief life and a brief death, followed by an even briefer half-life and then nothing? A great, dark, unknowable nothing? Either that or give up his freedom, his dreams—Julie? Could a miserable existence made of something truly be worse than nothing?

But...Julie.

Did he want to exist in a world where he didn't spend his evenings sitting by her side—pen in hand, pick in mouth—scribbling down lyrics and chords into the song journal that lay as open as his heart between them?

He had warned Alex and Reggie explicitly not to tell Julie about their conversation with Willie. In spite of everything, even the danger to himself, that had been his very first instinct: protect Julie. The last loss she had suffered had stolen the joy of her music for over a year. What would this loss do? How long would her voice remain silent and her fingers remain frozen on the piano keys this time?

The possibility of Julie abandoning her music cut him as deeply as the fear of nothingness.

Maybe...maybe he could face the oblivion, Luke thought, as long as he knew Julie would be somewhere out there beyond the veil, singing to him.

He knew they would have to tell her, and even more than that, he knew he would have to tell her.

He groaned aloud as another jolt rocked his body and sent him doubling over onto the sand in pain.

He would have to tell her soon.