Anna Yang

“What do you think you’ll wear when you die?” 

You are on her couch taking turns playing Paper Mario, the fifth one, on the Wii U in silence. You didn’t know the game would soon be considered one of the worst in the series when you bought it, only that it was her birthday, September something, and you didn’t know what else she would like at Walmart. 

“Like, at the funeral?” 

It’s the second-last day of summer. Two days before seventh grade. You never told her, but you went to sleep every night for a month with a note under your pillow asking some sort of god out there to put you and her in the same class. A euphoria neither of you have felt since kindergarten. Sure, maybe you forgot about it after the second night, but it’s the thought that counts. 

“Yeah.” 

You do your best not to pick at the flakes hanging on for dear life on her peeling leather couch. It sinks under your weight and is beginning to stick to your thighs as you sweat. You always thought this thing was ugly, so brown and frumpy, but it never stopped you when she invited you over. 

“I don’t know.” Her yellowing standing fan whirs to your far left, creaking occasionally. It fell face-first when you bumped into it about an hour ago during One Direction’s “Kiss You” in Just Dance 2014. “I guess whatever my mom puts me in.” 

Silence returns like a blanket fort draped across your collective shoulders; Atlas and the world. You read the game dialogue on her TV screen, black text on a white and sage green background edited to look like card stock. The game audio is low so it doesn’t wake her baby

sister from her midday nap in the other room or disturb her slightly-older baby sister as she practices the piano in the basement. You can’t concentrate. You stare at her in your periphery praying she won’t get the same idea. 

“I hope she doesn’t put me in a dress,” she says at last. 

In retrospect, you can laugh. But right now, your face, like hers, is solemn. “Me too.” Neither of you are going to die anytime soon. You may as well still have blood in your palm lines from your time in the womb, though if you look down, you’ll see it’s caked-in and burnt, like dirt from a marsh bed or the same black forest cake you’ve had on every birthday since you turned five. Regardless, you think about it: what does death feel like? What does death look like? Do people really see God? Does God care when you die? Or has God been waiting since you were born to see you again on His terms, in His realm? 

What would you do if She died? 

“It’s your turn.” She places the bulky, glossy-black console in your lap. And here, right now, death feels impossibly out of reach: when you grip the Wii U in your two hands, you can still feel the warmth of hers embedded in the plastic. 

Two years later, you are sitting next to her on the bus back from your ninth-grade music camp retreat. Your shoulders do not brush. Your earbuds with the fraying cables and RGB veins are yours alone, and you don’t ask if she wants to change that. You don’t even look at her. Not even in your periphery. But when you glance out the window, your attention splinters between the red-orange leaves, the dying oak bark, and the reflection of her in the glass. Everything blurs at the speed of 80 km/h. The window becomes a portal into a parallel universe. One where you didn’t spend the entire weekend flirting with a boy whose face you won’t remember by senior year, whose face you barely remember now as you trace the mountain range of her profile, from the slope of her nose to the valley of her cupid’s bow to her downturned lips. You should say something. That’s what the smallest voice in your head advises. But the louder, uglier voice argues, “Fuck that.” It wins, of course. It will win today, tonight, and for the rest of your teen years until you learn the difference between winning a battle and losing the war. Your head makes a dull thud against glass as you close your eyes. You don’t know, couldn’t have known, that this means you would never fall asleep on each other’s shoulders ever again. If you open your eyes and glance at her reflection one last time, you might still remember the frames of her glasses or the colour of her band t-shirt. It’s not a dress. But you still wonder if her mom picked it for her.