I had loved so desperately when I was alive couldn’t reach me once I was dead. I did not exist.
“Tell him that. . . when I told him I hoped that I went before him, this wasn’t what I meant.” For the first time in my afterlife, I felt truly numb.
Paul Michael told Greg, and he laughed again for a moment. His laugh broke into a cry. He buried his face in his hands.
“Tell her that I gave her a corsage for her funeral – her favorite,” he said. I whispered the name along with him. “Blue orchids.” He had gotten me the same ones for prom. I had told him once that I loved blue orchids because with light blue in the center and dark purple on the outer petals, I thought the flowers looked like hyperspace. He got them for me for every dance after that, whether I was wearing a blue dress or not.
“Tell him that he was the last person I thought of before I died,” I said. He wasn’t. But it seemed like what he needed to hear.
The night I died, my sister was the only person on my mind. In fact, I concentrated on her so entirely that I had imagined I saw her looking up at me as I was pulled into the sky, before I was enveloped in the whiteness of the afterlife.
Paul Michael relayed the message and Greg took a long, rattling breath.
“I’ve missed you. You were…you were…” His voice broke, the way it only does when using past tense for a loved one.
“You are…you are…” I whispered back to the hollow boy.
If I still had a heart, it would have been racing. I wondered if I would dissolve right here, fade back into the white world. Disappointment would be the cause of my second death. I waited, and listened to the sound of Greg crying around me. The spirits didn’t seem ready to take me yet.