Content Warning: Suicidal Ideation

“That’s a good one,” Aja said, pointing at my phone screen.

For the past ten minutes, she and I had been browsing through her Instagram profile in my bed to pick what she called her Postmortem Pride. “You know,” she’d said, “something people will remember me by. The news coverage. The memorial shrine. You name it.” She said she wanted to go with a bang, which—I think—was why she made me stop at the picture in which her breasts looked best: in a pink summery bra, heavily retouched around the corners for emphasis. Her waist was bent at a crooked angle, her body an animal poised for the wild. I imagined that her hair smelled like pine trees and saltwater.

The first time Aja told me she fantasized often about her future deaths, I laughed. She had a habit of saying the most abrupt things for attention, so I’d learned to make nothing of them. We spent our days swiping lingerie off shops downtown and daring each other to eat cans of expired food. We loved watching back-to-back movies starring actors in both their first and their final roles, marveling at their obliviousness to impending death. Aja would say things like, “The Mansons will slice her up right after this one,” eyes deadpan, “with her unborn son.” Evil was a particular subject of interest for Aja; more so, evil performed by the hands of man. The fall we met, the TV stations were buzzing with news of serial child killings, probably the work of another California lunatic. At school, Aja and I would take turns guessing the time and place of the killer’s next victim, giving the other kids death stares in the hallways to intimidate them. We would paint their names on the lockers with red nail polish to provoke our teachers and further elicit fear in everyone. We would lurk in wait to get pictures of their reactions, which we made fun of back in the privacy of my bedroom.

Aja wondered a lot about getting killed by someone other than God, about what it meant to be snatched from the grasp of something as serious as life. “Is it possible to be dead and not dead at the same time?” she’d once said, filing her nails at my desk. “You know, like a ghost that refuses to go invisible.” She tried to imagine what her mother and brother and friends would say about her at her funeral, and how it might vary depending on the way she died (“Would they like me better if I died a peaceful death?”) She wrote eulogies for her own deaths—plural—on Saturdays, and dumped them the next day after Mass. She made me promise to plant wisterias on her grave in the same way St. Josephine did before she got betrayed by one of her closest friends. I didn’t know how much of that was true, but I reassured her that I would never turn my back on her, that I would be there for her at all costs, regardless of how she went. To pledge my allegiance to her, I cut myself along my longest palm line with one of the broken shards we’d found in the graveyard and marked her forehead with my blood.

One day, after watching the ceiling fan whirl by for what felt like a small eternity in my bed, Aja declared she should not live anymore. Her eyes were fixed on the spinning blades, her face serene as that of a monk who finally figured it all out. The decision seemed to have come to her without fuss, light and easy as the West Coast rain, as if she were picking one shirt over the other. I knew these urges visited her from time to time, more so on Wednesdays and Fridays, in the aftermath of our Bible class, which bored us to death. Now that we had become best friends, I didn’t inquire or object. I played along like any cool teammate would, fascinated, like always, by her morbid intricacies. In no time, she changed the profile picture on all her social media accounts to the one we’d picked as her Postmortem Pride, with a caption that read Live your best life, die your best death. She showed up at school wearing the bra from the picture, which had the caption in embroidered pink letters across her chest. We sometimes visited the graveyard at night to pick the best burial spot for her. Walking down the gravelly pathways flanked by unattended gravestones and leafless trees was like stepping into someone’s afterlife fantasy, most definitely not mine, nor Aja’s apparently. I let her have her moment while she drifted around in search of her eternal bed.

Not long after this, she instructed me with how she wanted to die—the time, the location, the full recipe. She wanted me to climb on top of her when she least expected it, preferably when we were hanging out in my bed—better if she was asleep or half so—and choke her with my bare hands, my thumbs pressing against the two cherries in her neck tattoo. It was a concept we were both familiar with from some of the movies we watched together, including Wild Things, in which two best friends went at each other’s throats, only not in the literal sense as was expected of me. We practiced in my bedroom every day after school. Over and over again until I had the pressure and timing right. Sometimes, we took turns in order to understand what it meant to be on the other side of the equation, and Aja would choke me with all her strength. It was as if she had some unfinished business with me, or she was trying to resolve, with me, an unfinished business she had with someone else. But I didn’t yelp, no matter how hard she went at it; I didn’t complain—if anything, I took pride in not coughing. And when I started to have difficulty breathing, I averted the worst by playing dead. Only when I fluttered my eyelids and protruded my tongue would she loosen her grip on my throat, standing over me on the bed like a victorious queen.

When Aja wasn’t around, I would lock myself in my room and open her Instagram profile in the privacy of my bed. I thought I looked despicable in all my pictures with her, regardless of my outfit or makeup, dormant as a knob and void of color. Although my hanging out with her nonstop for the past three months had begun to do something for my self-confidence, I still did not understand what a person as cool and interesting as Aja might have found in me. And despite our closeness, I feared being the kind of girl about whom she might say, upon learning of my death, “Good riddance.” I felt like her shadow most of the time, or like a plaything at her disposal. What I didn’t tell her (and maybe even myself) was that I got wet every time I pinned her down in bed, feeling my liquified desire trickle down my thighs until I blushed in the cheeks. It was an embarrassment in every way I could think of, but the kind that made me want her more and more, not unlike an addict. I burned with an itch to absorb everything about her, swallow her whole. I wanted to drink in her blood.

The day of Aja’s ending came and she was nowhere to be found. I tried her number several times, but she didn’t pick up. I asked around about her at school, but no one could remember when they last saw or spoke with her. I went to the graveyard. I called out her name until time became one thing and I another. The trees shimmered and the dried leaves rustled in the light wind. No one replied. I began to suspect I may have been the victim of some sort of a prank.

I imagined her making fun of me with someone else at that moment, pictured the shapes her face would take in mockery. When I got back home at night, I called her house from the landline. It was her mother who answered, telling me Aja hadn’t come home last night. I hung up before saying thanks or goodbye. I played out our last few days in my mind to make sure I hadn’t overlooked some detail that would help me make sense of her sudden disappearance. I wondered if I’d offended her in some way without my realizing it, but nothing came to my mind that would have made me culpable.

The days blended into one dull week without Aja in it. I thought about her nonstop, wondering what she might be doing out there. I wondered whether she had chickened out or gone through with the plan without me. At times, my mind drifted to the child killer who was still at large, but I tried to soothe myself with how strong a girl Aja was, how seemingly unaffected she was by brutality. When I wasn’t worrying about her, I felt enraged at her in some bleak, inexplicable way. I still tried her number every day, but it had started to go straight to voicemail. Her social media profiles remained active yet eventless. The vice principal invited her mother to school at some point to discuss, but she was equally clueless about Aja’s pursuing absence. Every other day someone asked me if I’d heard from her, but I couldn’t produce anything worthwhile. Everyone suspected I was involved with her disappearance somehow, which made me feel resentful toward Aja, and more resentful still for feeling resentful, a feeling I would have never thought I could feel for her.

Every day at home, I went back to her Postmortem Pride with the hope of finding some sort of clue. The expression on her face seemed to proffer a different sentiment each time I opened the picture, from mischievous to naive to sinister, like a Rorschach test. Her picture would be the last thing I saw before going to sleep, and the first after I woke up. Some nights, she would catch me in my dreams, each time in a different mood and outfit. In one dream she held my hand and dragged me to the graveyard so we could lie down for what seemed like a picnic. In another she just stood there and watched me as if I were some nocturnal beast. I awoke drenched in sweat every morning. And wet.