If I Die

physician.

“You wanna ride with me, or meet me in the parking lot?” I asked, plucking my key ring from his finger. Obviously, it’d be faster for him to just blink himself there, but he didn’t yet have the strength—or maybe the skill— to materialize that far away with a passenger, so I’d have to drive myself.

Tod crossed his arms over his uniform shirt, a blue polo with a stylized pizza embroidered on the left side of his chest. “I haven’t said I’ll do it yet.”

I frowned, one hand on the doorknob, trying to decide whether or not he was joking. “What if I said this is my dying wish? You know, one last request?”

“Your last request is to break into a psychiatric hospital?”

I shrugged. “I’m kind of operating under the assumption that I get one last request from everyone who gives a damn that I’m dying.” I shoved my hands into my pockets and stared straight at his eyes, demanding the truth from them in a sudden surge of reckless courage. “Do you fall into that category?”

“Don’t play that game, Kaylee. You already know the answer to that.” There was just the slightest twist of emotion in his blue eyes, and my pulse spiked when his voice went deep, like his response meant more than the sum of the individual words.

“Then will you help me?”

“You know the answer to that, too,” he said, and I smiled in relief, then almost laughed out loud over the absurdity of that. You’d have to be crazy to break into a psychiatric hospital.

I held the front door for him, then locked it behind us, and when I looked up, Tod was already sitting in my passenger seat waiting for me, with all four doors locked. “You know, you’d make a great thief,” I said, sliding into the driver’s seat next to him.

“I’m a man of many talents.”

“Thanks for doing this,” I said as I backed down the driveway.

“I was bored at work anyway.” He shrugged as I shifted into Drive and took off toward the highway.

After several miles of me watching the road and him watching me, I finally huffed in exasperation. “What?”

“What’d you want from Nash, Kaylee?”

“Huh?” I glanced at Tod and found his irises holding steady in spite of clear tension in the line of his jaw.

“Your last request from my little brother. What did you ask him to do for you?”

My grip tightened around the steering wheel, and I could feel my face flush. “That’s none of your business, Tod.”

In my peripheral vision, he nodded stiffly. “That’s what I thought.”

“What, no lecture about how I’m too young, or I’m not ready?” Or I shouldn’t be with Nash in the first place?

“I’ve already said what I have to say about you and my brother.” Tod stared out his window, and it irritated me that I couldn’t see his face. “If that’s really what you want, go for it. I just thought…”

“What? You thought what?” I demanded, further irritated by his tone—which I couldn’t quite interpret.

Finally he turned to face me again, and my focus shifted back and forth between him and the barely past- rush-hour traffic. “I just thought… I thought you’d have something better to do with these last few days than spend them in bed with your boyfriend.”

I couldn’t think beyond the sting of his words, each like a needle puncturing my heart. Or maybe my pride. But then my surprise—and yeah, a tiny hint of shame—morphed into anger, sharp and clear. “Did you die a virgin, Tod?” I demanded.

He rolled his eyes. “No.”

“Then where the hell do you get off telling me I should?”

He sighed and leaned his chair back a little as I passed a slow-moving station wagon. “That’s not what I’m saying. If you wanna sleep with Nash, then sleep with Nash. You wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.”

Anger made my heart beat harder. “Why are you so sure it’d be a mistake?”

“Because I know you! You’ve waited this long because it’s important to you and you want it to mean something. And if it’s with Nash, I think you’ll regret it later, when you realize the two of you don’t belong together.”

His insight scared me, and for a second, I couldn’t think beyond the shock of hearing some of my own thoughts coming from his mouth, albeit colored with his usual anti-Nash perspective. Then the reality of what he’d said kicked in and fear-fueled anger flared in me like living flames.

“There isn’t going to be a later, Tod! These next three days? That’s my life. That’s all I get. I’m not going to live to regret anything.”

“So—just to be clear—you’re doing it for the novelty of the act? Not because you love him or because it means something—just so you can say you’ve done it?”

Yes.

“No!” I shook my head, trying to jostle my conflicting thoughts into some semblance of order. “You’re such a hypocrite! Did your first time mean something? Did a choir of angels set the mood with an a cappella fanfare celebrating your union?” I demanded, and Tod just stared at me, his expression caught somewhere between surprise and regret. “Why do you even care if I sleep with Nash?”

Why did I care that he cared?

He turned to stare out his window again. “I just assumed you’d have something a little more meaningful on your last to-do list.”

And that’s when I realized he had no idea why we were breaking into Lakeside. “Not that it’s any of your business, but this little field trip we’re on has a purpose. I’m hoping a psych patient named Farrah Combs can give me the information I need to get rid of the incubus posing as my math teacher so that he can’t seduce and either kill or impregnate my best friend after I’m dead. Is that noble enough for you?”

Tod blinked. Then he blinked again, clearly stunned. “Yeah, actually. That’s more like what I thought you’d be doing.”

“Well, don’t read too much into it. I’m not a saint, and I don’t want to be. I just want to be normal. I want to have fights with my dad, and secrets with my best friend, and sex with my boyfriend. But most of all, I want to not be dead in a few days. I’m not done living! And I can’t fit everything else I want to do into the next ninety-six hours, and no matter how many dying wishes I make, that’s not going to change. And I hate it!”

Tod laughed, and my teeth ground together as I swerved smoothly onto the exit ramp. “Why the hell is that funny?”

“It’s not. It’s just a relief to hear you sounding less than rational and perfectly accepting of your own death. For a while it looked like you were going to ‘go gentle into that good night,’ or whatever. And that’s not you, Kaylee.”

I glanced at him, brows raised in surprise. Tod rarely ever said what I expected to hear, but poetry was new, even for him. “You like it better when I ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light?’”

“I like it when you ‘rage, rage’ against anything. It makes you look fierce and… alive.” The blues in his eyes started to swirl. “And if you tell anyone I quoted Dylan Thomas, I’ll… Well, I won’t have to do anything, because no one will believe you.”

The light ahead turned red, and I slowed to a stop in the left turn lane, then laid one hand over my heart and gave him a cheesy, wide-eyed double-blink. “I will take your secret to my grave.”

“I wish you didn’t have to.”

“Yeah, me, too.” My chest ached just thinking about it.

The light changed and I turned left, then pulled into the parking lot on the right. Lakeside was attached to Arlington Memorial, the hospital where Tod worked as a reaper—unbeknownst to the living—and his mother worked as a third-shift triage nurse, but it was a separate building, with a separate entrance and better security.

I parked in the last row and killed the engine, then sat there staring at the building for a minute, trying to calm the flutter of panic the sight of it raised in my stomach, even though I had no memory of being taken in. I’d just woken up inside, all alone, strapped to a bed in a featureless white room.