【by Grace Fangmann】

Oh, me and the dead girl.

Me and the dead girl look at ourselves in the rearview mirror of the old silver Highlander
on the car ride home. This guy is taking me downtown to show me the lake at night. Flashes of
silver bouncing from scalding sapphire light along the highway, cars zip zipping by, and the
whine of wheels on road. He took me out to smoke again, because that’s a good excuse. He just
told me something crazy. He just told me he loves me. His thoughts are full of dead girl. Me and
the dead girl with our brown pairs of eyes bloodshot and slimy like pockets of glass in the
groaning hull of a submarine. Me and the dead girl blinking away the scum of wayward sealife,
strips of seaweed and old barnacles, a forgotten fishing net and the schools of rainbows it was
meant to catch, the algae and grime of spending years and years underwater. Me and the dead
girl look at ourselves in the rearview mirror. Me and the dead girl have the same eyes after all—
didn’t he tell us that?—we have the same eyes like pools of rotting timber, crawling with yellow
flecks of termites and glinting with dew. Me and the dead girl have the same eyes. Me and the
dead girl can’t stop watching each other in the rearview mirror over the dashboard; it needs to be
dusted, needs to be refinished, needs a little love. It’s an old car. A good car for smoking. Me and
the dead girl trace each other’s lash lines through the speckled mirror. Me and the dead girl
shiver in the steam that clouds the windshield and rests on our shining foreheads like a screen,
like a mist, like proof that we are dead, me and the dead girl.

Here, me: a danger to herself, definitely not to others. The dead girl: no longer a danger
to herself. Oh. I wonder what it’s like, being dead like that. She’s trying to tell me. Smoking
feels a little bit like dying, or at least dying in the way I can take; so I’ll keep smoking with him
whenever he invites me.

Me and the dead girl hold hands through the rearview mirror. Me and the dead girl inhale
exhale inhale exhale breaths of marijuana smoke that comes out green, that smells like that one
skunk that got into my grandfather’s barn and scared the foxes away, smells like the colour green
itself, like the woods in the springtime after a nice rain. I watch her lips and mine as we dribble
out the smoke and take another hit, soft lips like upside-down rose petals, freckle on the right
side of the upper one and cracked and bleeding on the bottom. Don’t get blood on the joint, don’t
kiss it too hard, don’t tear the paper with your teeth, don’t get too used to the sensation of using,
don’t do any of these things that could betray the fact that you were here. Don’t leave a trace,
dead girl, don’t leave a single goddamn thing.

I give the dead girl another apology with our eyes; I wriggle my eyebrows and watch
teardrops bounce in unison in the corners of my eye sockets. Both the dead girl and I—sorry—
me and the dead girl—we wish we could suck them back in like a milkshake through a straw.
Tears tears tears would ruin my makeup and ruin my night—the dead girl gets this. How dare we
ruin the night! We can’t stop watching one another. I watch because I don’t know her yet. She
watches because she knows me too well.

This is as close as we’ll get, me and the dead girl. She’s been dead a long time. I’ve
thought a lot about being dead like that and here she is, that dead girl, having been dead for a
comparative eternity with those same drowned, rotted eyes like mine and the lips that don’t know
how to talk anymore. Maybe it’s the joint’s fault. Or maybe it’s mine. When the dead girl died, I
stole her voice. I stole her, I stole her half-decayed way of looking at the world, I stole her silver
Highlander, I stole her rose-petal lips, I stole her joint and smoke and steam clogging the
windows, I stole her boy, I stole the way that he loved her. Me and the dead girl. I don’t hate her
but I hate that we are the same. I hate that the mirror is the only place I can see her. But—the
dead girl chose to be dead and I chose to be living, although that choice matters less when we’re
both trapped in the rearview mirror in this shitty car that smells like weed and boy sweat and
crumbs. It matters less when we’re both trapped in the mind of the man driving this thing. He’s
got one hand wrapped around the steering wheel and the other flung out the open window. Me
and the dead girl keep watching each other so I don’t have to watch him—if I turn around and
look I’ll vomit. I’ll see those sorry blue eyes like a dog’s, I’ll see that mouth screwed up in a
mask. Me and the dead girl should pity him.

Me and the dead girl do pity him. He’s had a rough go of it, with his mom divorced and
his dad in jail, but he’s a nice Polish boy (a real gentleman) and he has (the most perfect
manners) or so I’ve heard it said for what feels like a thousand times and I wish I could love him.
Me and the dead girl both know this: she loved him and I cannot, and now she is dead, and now I
am still living, and now he has no one to love him and too much love to give. Me and the dead
girl both also know: pity is a horrible poison when disguised as love. I will pity him and his sad
dog’s eyes, I will watch the rain patter against them like the stained glass windows at St.
Michael’s. I will watch him cower and crumble thanks to that beast that’s destroyed him from
the inside out. I will pity him. I will watch him. But right now, I am watching the dead girl.

Oh, me and the dead girl.

But even though I pity this man I can’t forgive him. This dead girl that he introduced me
to—she frightens me. He told me about her. He was the one who forced us to consider each other
in the rearview mirror, caught in an eternal internal battle, where we watch the waves crash
across our faces and force the sandy seafloor into perfect furrows, where we watch new leaves
fall and decay across years of leaves that have fallen and decayed. The dead girl is long dead. I
am alive, and I hope I am alive for long—but after all, I have been introduced to the dead girl. It
is his fault. The man who’s driving this thing—the joint he gave me is shaking in my fingers. My
tongue rasps against the back of my teeth like sandpaper over stone. Where’s some water? I’m
thirsty, I need water—but the only real water is the water leaking from me and the dead girl’s
eyes, that water we wish we could just suck back up anyway.

He wants me to love him. He’s demanding that I love him. He’s taking me and shaking
me and (attempting to) placate me, but I can’t—because even though everyone says he’s so
wonderful—everyone says he deserves at least one good thing—I can’t be his one good thing
because I don’t feel like there is one good thing about me. “I want to save you.” Save me, or save
me from being dead like that? Dead like the dead girl he still loves?

The skyline flickers outside as if it can’t decide whether or not it’s real. I wonder how
they found her. Was it hard? Was it long and chaotic, a scene of broken fingernails and claw
marks down her throat? Was it long and drawn-out, a silent gloved hand strangling all life,
deadly and precise in its quietude? Or was it fast? Was she, to the outsider, simply asleep? Those
long-lashed eyes we know so well closed against her olive cheeks, rose petals slightly ajar. Not a
trickling of blood, not a scarlet glimmer. Me and the dead girl, we must have died together, but I
don’t know the answers to any of these questions, and I hope for her sake it was easy. I guess
that is how I know I am not the dead girl yet.

Her eyes—oh, God, her eyes—mine are becoming empty and flat with the urge to rip
them out of my head, the prison of my skull, this body and this boy and this seat she used to sit
in. My hip bones press against the seatbelt; the seatbelt carves a valley through my chest. His
words are driving my ribcage apart again.

“You have her eyes, you say the same things she used to, it scares me. I couldn’t save
her. She killed herself, she left me, I hate her but I love her so much, still, she’s long dead, I need
her, I need you. You have her eyes, you say the same things she used to.” I wish I didn’t. I don’t
want to be that girl he used to love, me and the dead girl, we have to be different, right? We have
to—but I see her death in my eyes, the eyes in our shared reflection—I don’t want to die—no
matter, my future has been dictated to me, and he’s saying our future is the same, me and the
dead girl.

I am a danger to myself. A danger to myself—even he can see it.
Me and the dead girl, the man driving the car. He’s pushed us together, we exist because
he says so. We watch each other because he saw our eyes as two moons of the same planet, two
saplings born of the same parent tree, two burnished pennies someone dropped in the subway
together. Without him I wouldn’t have known her. Without him there would be no me and the
dead girl; there would just be me. Me and the dead girl watch the waves roll across our face.

Oh, me and the dead girl!

That lake outside is shining. The skyline walks on the water.

I won’t let this be the end of me, not when I want to live. I want to LIVE and I want to be
well, which is a very different way of looking at things compared to when I first stepped into this
car. The dead girl is whispering in my ear—it’s not a pretty picture, is it? I want to live. I
WANT TO BE WELL! I will save my own damn self. The dead girl is whispering wake up! and
I flick the joint down.

“Can you take me home?”

He looks at me, drowning. The rain is pattering. He nods.

Me and the dead girl. I don’t want to know what it’s like, being dead like that.