If I Die

but it keeps pushing me, and I keep sliding, and there isn’t much more space before I’ll just…fall off the edge.” By the end, I was sobbing, and squeezing her so tight she probably couldn’t breathe, but she kept holding on.

“Okay, take a breath, Kaylee,” she said at last, when my sobs finally began to fade. I let go of her to wipe my face with a dried-stiff paper napkin from her dashboard. “First of all, you should have told me. But in light of the circumstances, I’m gonna let that one slide. And second…what the hell are you even doing here? Why aren’t you skydiving, or mountain climbing, or on a plane to some fabulous city you’ve never seen before. Your dad would totally make that happen, if you asked him. Why would you want to spend your last two days on earth at school?”

I blinked and wiped my face on my sleeve. “Em, I have to get rid of Beck.”

“No you don’t! Let Nash and Sabine handle it. Tod and Alec can help. Or hell, tell your dad and let him do it!”

“I’m telling my dad tonight—I would have already, but he’s been so stressed out trying to find a way to exchange my date, which isn’t going to happen. But I seriously doubt Tod and Nash are going to be working together on anything in the near future. And even if they were, none of them know what to do any better than I do. I need to know this is handled before I die, Emma. Especially after what I just saw in there.” I nodded toward the school building. “Do you honestly think you could have told him no?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “The problem is that I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to.”

“And that’s why I have to do this. I want to know that you’re going to be safe before…you know.”

Emma looked at me for a second, then sighed. “You have to let it go. Let someone else handle it this time. You can’t save everyone, Kay. You can’t control everything.”

“You sound like Nash,” I said, and as his name faded from my tongue, another wave of guilt crashed over me. Em must have seen it on my face.

“How did he take it? About Tod, I mean.”

“Not well, but that’s my fault. He hates me, and I can’t blame him, and now I’m the reason he hates his own brother. And Nash thinks Tod’s using me to hurt him because he’s jealous that Nash is still alive.”

Emma shook her head. “I don’t blame him for being upset, but that’s not it. Tod’s been pining over you for months. Frankly, I’m impressed that you held out for so long.”

“You knew there was…pining?”

Emma actually smiled, and that felt good, after all the tears. “We all knew, Kaylee. Hell, I bet even your dad knew. I didn’t think Tod would ever say anything, though, because of Nash.”

“He didn’t. I mean, he told me Nash and I were wrong for each other, and he’s been hanging around a lot since Nash went into recovery, but he’s always been a flirt, so I didn’t really think anything about it until a couple of days ago. Then I saw him feed my reaper to Avari, and it just kind of…clicked. He did that for me.”

“He did what? What exactly does that mean, feeding someone to Avari?”

“The reaper who was supposed to end my life on Thursday—his name was Thane, and he was kind of stalking me. So Tod found him, beat him up, hauled him into the Netherworld, and gave him to Avari. He just…fed my reaper to a hellion. He could have gotten in serious trouble, Em. He still could. But he did it anyway.”

I glanced at Emma to find her watching me, her gaze half out of focus, but intense, like she was hanging on every word. “I can’t get a guy to sit through an entire movie before he starts groping me, and Tod killed someone for you. And you’re not even a couple. Are you?”

I exhaled deeply in frustration, trying to make sense out of the tangled knot my thoughts had become. “I don’t know, Em. What would be the point? I’m not even going to be here in two days, but Nash will, and they’ll still be brothers, and he hates Tod now as it is. How much worse is that going to be if this turns out to be more than just a couple of kisses?” The echoes of which I could still feel. Was it possible to be haunted by a kiss?

“I don’t know,” Em said. “I’m sure Nash is upset, and pissed off, and I don’t blame him. But these aren’t exactly normal circumstances. Maybe if you told him what you just told me, he’d understand. Eventually.”

But I had my doubts.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. We’d hurt Nash from both sides—as his brother and his girlfriend. It wouldn’t be fair of us to make that worse, just for two days of something that could never go any further. Would Tod even want to? Did he want to be with me badly enough to hurt his brother? Did I want him to? Should I want him, too?

“Okay you’re obviously overthinking this,” Emma said. “So just answer this one question. If Nash didn’t care —if it truly wouldn’t bother him to see you with his brother—what would you do?”

“But he does care…”

“That’s not the point. Just for the next minute—for the sake of argument—pretend there is no Nash,” she said, and I nodded slowly, trying to imagine something so impossible. “Now, since there’s nobody to get hurt, no matter what you decide, what do you want to do?”

I closed my eyes, and in my head, I saw a set of bright blue ones staring back at me. “I want to kiss Tod again.”

16

I followed Emma back to her house, and we spent the next two hours overanalyzing my ill-fated love life and ignoring her older sister’s unsolicited advice about that ill-fated love life—which she understood very little of. We didn’t talk about my impending death. In fact, we avoided the subject at all costs, by mutual, unspoken agreement.

Emma seemed to understand what I would have had to explain to anyone else—that I wanted just a couple of hours of normal with my best friend, before I returned to the maelstrom of bizarre the rest of my life had become. What little life I had left, anyway.

But when it was time for me to go, I accidently left my keys in her room, and when I went back for them, Emma was crying, facedown on her bed. Hard enough that she heard neither my footsteps, nor the rattle of my keys as I slid them into my pocket. My heart broke for us both as I snuck out again, so she wouldn’t know I’d seen.

Five minutes later, I opened my front door to find a huge bowl of popcorn on the coffee table, and I could tell from the scent and the way some of the kernels were shriveled that they were drizzled with real butter.

“Hey.” My dad stepped into the living room from the kitchen with two tall, clear glasses, topped in thick cream-colored foam.

“Is that what I think it is?” I pushed the door shut and dropped my keys into the empty candy dish, then took the glass he handed me. “Coke floats?” He used to make them when I was little—that was one of the few memories I had from before my mother died.

“None other. And I’ve got sour worms and Milk Duds for dessert.”

“So this is dinner?” I dropped onto the couch and grabbed a handful of greasy popcorn.

“Unless you want pizza.” My dad plopped onto the couch next to me and stuck a bendy straw into my float. “I happen to know the local delivery boy can be here in thirty seconds or less.”

I laughed, because that’s what he wanted to hear, but the mention of Tod made my heart ache, with a confusing combination of excitement and guilt. “No, this is fine. This is great.”

“Good.” He set his glass on the end table and picked up the remote control. “It looks like the movies recorded, but I’ll be damned if I know how to make them play.”

I swallowed my first mouthful of Coke and melted ice cream, then took the remote from him and pulled up the guide menu. “You know, you’re going to have to learn to do this for yourself, at some point. I’m not going to be around to program the DVR forever…”

I meant it as a joke, but my dad looked like I’d just stabbed him in the heart. Repeatedly.

“Sorry. Just kidding.” I shoved another handful of popcorn in my mouth to keep from making it worse.

“It’s okay,” my dad said, though it was clearly anything but. “However, I reserve the right to wallow in denial