Treehouse Blues

I was roughly awoken when a woman screamed near me. I groaned, rolling to the side, my eyes blinking open.

Where in Hades was I?

Everyone around me was wearing black, and there were pictures of me everywhere, ebony hair and gold eyes and all, and a coffin-

Oh, my god. I had fallen right into my own funeral.

I forced myself upright, fighting a wave of nausea. I looked down at myself, clothed the same way I was when I died, then up. The faces around me were all familiar.

There was Aunt Louise, holding a bouquet of white lilies, my favorite flower, Ashley, wearing a fashionable black dress, Uncle Jack, looking uncomfortable in a tuxedo. My Mum, Selene, her face tear-stained and red-eyed, in that jacket of hers that I loved. My Dad, John, his own face red as well, in that god-awful sweater with the cat pun.

And Alectrona. She was the one it hurt to look at the most. She was staring at me like I had fallen out of outer space, her eyes wide, wearing a black sweater with blue jeans and boots, her multi-colored hair a disaster. On her wrist was the partner to the bracelet I was wearing, a gold and blue waterfall braid that I had clumsily made in sixth grade.

“Alec,” I smiled weakly.

“Oh, my god,” she whispered. She moved forward to hug me, but I stepped back.

“Don’t,” I warned. “You’ll lose life.”

Perhaps not the best way to put it, but I had just come back after all.

“This isn’t Mario!” she argued.

“Alectrona,” her mother, Eris, said, “don’t.”

“You were dead!” she yelled. “Dead! Shot in the stomach. You can’t be alive, you’re dead.”

It hit me that this was my best friend, the person whom I could tell everything to, and she was screaming at me. Screaming about how I wasn’t alive.

And there was what she didn’t know. How I just needed to finish some things, that was the only reason I came back. Would ever come back. Because I was dead, and the dead never fully come back.

“I need to go,” I muttered. I repeated it louder. “I need to go.”

“Go?” Mum said, slightly hysterically.

“I’ll, um, see you around,” I whispered. Then I turned tail and ran.

⚷☽♀

I sprinted to my house, which was fifteen blocks away. The town I was in was exactly the same. The same houses, same people, same cars.

Same treehouse that I had climbed under my fence to get to. Alec lived right next to me, and she was given as much free rein in there as I was.

Right then it was full of magazines and a sleeping bag was in the corner. I saw a piece of newspaper tacked to the old cork board we used for pictures. It was next to a recent photo of her and me, with Alec holding up the camera as I dodged away, both of us smiling like idiots.

I took the tack out of the clipping and read what the newspaper said.

Asteria Stelcadente, 17, was shot yesterday afternoon when an unknown assailant shot her in the stomach. A young mother found her when walking with her children and called 911. Unfortunately, paramedics were not able to save Stelcadente, and she died on-scene before they could arrive. Police urge any who may have information to come forward. A fundraiser for the Stelcadente family has been made, and any are welcome to help. -Anastasia Lisell

My blood went cold and I replaced the clipping on the board. The photo they had chosen of me was the one taken at school pictures in August.

“Thought I might find you here,” someone said behind me. I whipped around to see Alectrona, who was leaning against the door with her hip jutted out. Despite the fact that it was still cold, she had taken off the sweater to reveal a pitch-black camisole.

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Maybe it’s because you’re sentimental, maybe it’s because I know you,” she answered.

“Or used to, anyway.”She picked up an issue of National Geographic and set it aside with a sigh. “So why did you come back?”

“What do you mean?” I stammered.

She fixed me with those ever-changing eyes of hers, the ones that turned grey in stormy weather and looked fiery in the summer’s mornings. The ones that could look orange in the right light and yellow in others. “You know precisely what I mean, Ria. Why did you come back from the dead?”

“Because I have things to do,” I replied.

“Yeah, yeah, unfinished business,” she snarked, and suddenly we were laughing. Laughing like it was before January 19, and I was truly, truly alive and everything was fine.

“I’ll help you,” she said after we had wiped our tears away.

“What?”

“I’ll help you with your unfinished business,” she told me with the stubbornness of a bull.

“Alec, I have like five thousand things to do,” I said incredulously. “You can’t.”

“As the person you’ve been best friends with since fifth grade with, and as the person who has known every crush of yours, I insist.”

Not every crush, my thoughts whispered.

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Fine,” I acquiced. “First thing is to make an apology.”