Here's what I know about death: you're supposed to remember it. Every awful detail. The exact angle of wrongness, the sounds that shouldn't exist, the moment when a person just—stops being a person.
I remember all of it.
Maya's hair catching the parking lot lights—those caramel highlights she'd just gotten, the ones that cost too much but made her feel pretty. Her face doing this confused thing, like she'd forgotten to lock her car or turn off the stove. Something small and fixable. The silver sedan coming too fast for a campus lot, way too fast, and I opened my mouth to yell but nothing came out because some part of me already knew.
The impact sounded soft. That's the part that fucks with me. It should have been loud, violent, movie-dramatic. Instead it was just—soft. Like dropping something heavy on carpet.
I ran to her. Counted my breaths because otherwise I'd have screamed and never stopped. In for four, out for six, in for four, out for six. Her eyes were still open. Still brown. Still looked like Maya's eyes except they weren't, not anymore, because whatever made them Maya's had just left and I was looking at the empty space it left behind.
I called 911. My voice came out mechanical, detached, like I was reading from a script. White female, approximately twenty-one, not breathing, no pulse, massive head trauma. Words I didn't know I knew.
Then there's this gap. Like someone took scissors to my memory and cut out fifteen minutes. When I try to reach back into that space, there's just—nothing. Static. The feeling of missing something important.
When the ambulance arrived, Maya was gone.
Not dead-gone. Just gone. No body, no blood, nothing to prove she'd ever been lying there with her eyes open and empty. Just me on my knees on dry concrete, screaming into a phone about a dead girl who'd disappeared.
The EMTs were kind about it. Patient. Rodriguez—that's what her name tag said—kept asking what I'd taken. Molly? Acid? She said it gentle, like she was asking about the weather. No judgment, she just needed to know what she was working with.
"Nothing," I told her, and I wanted to sound more convincing but my voice kept breaking. "I didn't—I'm not—"
Except how do you finish that? I'm not crazy? Except maybe I am. I'm not lying? Except I might be, to myself.
Campus police came next. Officer Webb, who looked tired in that specific way cops get when they've spent too many years dealing with drunk twenty-year-olds. He asked me to describe what happened. I tried. Watched his face go from concerned to skeptical to something worse.
Pity.
"Miss Vega," he said, too gentle, and I hated that tone. "Maya Torres is in her dorm room. I just spoke to her RA. She's been there all evening, studying."
The ground tilted. Actually tilted, not metaphorically, and I grabbed the ambulance to stay upright.
"She was here. I watched—" Die. I watched her die. But saying it would seal it, would make me the crazy girl who hallucinates deaths, and some part of me wasn't ready for that yet.
They took me to the hospital anyway. Standard procedure for whatever I was having—a break, an episode, a complete separation from reality. Dr. Patterson met me in the ER, younger than I expected, with coffee stains on his coat that somehow made me trust him less. He ran through the checklist: sleeping, stress, family history, drugs?
No, no, no, no.
"Sometimes," he said, in that same too-gentle voice everyone was using, "extreme stress creates very vivid experiences. Especially if we're worried about someone. Have you been worried about Maya?"
"She texted me two hours ago," I said, trying to sound rational, grounded. "Asked if I wanted coffee. I said no because thesis. She said maybe tomorrow. That was it. I wasn't worried. I wasn't even thinking about her until I saw her in that parking lot."
Dead. The word stuck behind my teeth.
He gave me a prescription I wouldn't fill, a referral I wouldn't use, a pamphlet I left on the chair. They released me at 2 AM with gentle suggestions about stress management and getting more sleep.
I walked back to campus instead of calling a ride, needing the cold October air, needing to feel my feet on solid ground. Left foot, right foot. Breath in for four, out for six. Real things. Provable things.
I texted Maya: You okay?
She answered right away: Yeah babe, why? You need something?
Not: Are YOU okay? Not: Holy shit the police called asking if I was dead. Just normal Maya, warm and casual and completely alive.
Can I call you?
It's 2 AM, I'm literally in bed. Tomorrow?
I stood under a streetlight trying to figure out what question wouldn't make me sound insane. Came up empty.
Were you in the north parking lot tonight?
Three dots. Gone. Back again.
No? I told you I was studying. Iris, are you good? You're being weird.
I wasn't good. I was the opposite of whatever good was. But I typed: Yeah, sorry. Tired. Talk tomorrow.
My apartment smelled like old coffee when I got back. I lay down on the floor because my bed felt wrong—too soft, too easy, like I didn't deserve comfort after watching someone die. Or after hallucinating it. Or after whatever the fuck just happened.
Sleep came thin and full of wrong sounds. Wet sounds. The soft thud of impact. Silence that felt too loud.
I woke up at 6 AM sitting in my closet with my back against the wall. No memory of getting there. Still wearing yesterday's clothes—black jeans, white button-down, the blazer I'd worn to the library. I'd been trying to look serious while writing about Sartre and bad faith. The irony was so obvious it hurt.
My phone was in my hand. New text from a number I didn't recognize:
You're not crazy. Meet me at the Perkins Philosophy Building, room 304, 9 AM. Come alone. Don't tell anyone. This is the only warning you'll get.
And below it:
She did die. You're just the only one who remembers.