Page 6 of Meet Me in Another Life

“Thora?” Santi climbs back up to her. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“Nothing. I just—I thought I saw—” She trails off. She knows exactly what she saw. Her nightmares come to life: endless versions of herself spiraling out from every decision she makes, all but one of them lost forever.

“What?”

She meets Santi’s worried gaze. “God,” she says mockingly.

Santi shakes his head, smiling. “I guess we are pretty high up.”

By the time Thora reaches the ground, her limbs are shaking. “I can’t believe we just did that.”

Santi is grinning. “I can.”

“As we’ve established, you’ll believe anything.” Something’s missing. Thora’s hands go to her neck. “Fuck! I left my scarf up there.”

Santi is already stepping back through the gap. “I’ll get it.”

“No! Don’t worry. It was—a cheap thing, it doesn’t matter.” Her father knitted it as a good luck present for her new start. Thora thinks of how they parted: the angry words they threw at each other after he couldn’t resist criticizing her choices one last time. She straightens her shoulders. She didn’t want the scarf anyway. Better to think of it as her flag, planted at the top of the city she’s claiming for her own.

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.” He looks over his shoulder. “You walking back to Lindenthal?”

Thora weighs up her options before she answers. She doesn’t want this conversation to end. But on the long walk home, there are so many ways it could go wrong: she might insult him again, or he might expect her to kiss him goodbye. Better to walk away while something’s still perfect. “No, I—left my friend Lily in the club,” she improvises. “I should go and check on her. See if she’s okay.”

“All right.” He hesitates. “Can I get your number?”

“Sure.”

He watches for her missed call on his screen. Then he steps back, like he doesn’t know how to end this. “Well. Good night.”

“Good night,” she says.

They walk away in opposite directions. Thora doesn’t look back.

She puts off calling him. She’s worried he’ll think she wants something romantic, and she’s almost sure she’s not interested in him that way. She has a crush on Jules, a girl in her dormitory, and is starting to think it might be reciprocated. The last thing she needs is a misunderstanding with a boy as intense and unpredictable as Santi. Still, she looks up at the glowing lights on her ceiling and thinks about the snap of magnets, the mutual orbit of binary stars. She wishes ardently that there was a way in this world for a girl to tell a boy she wants to be his best friend. She would take any form—a boy his age, an old woman, a brain in a vat—anything to guarantee that he would get past the surface and engage with the truth of her.

Weeks later, she’s mulling it over when she walks past a noticeboard in the dormitory and sees his face, surrounded by flowers.

She stops short. Three words on the wall, stark as graffiti. REST IN PEACE. The picture and the words are two incompatible languages shoved into a sentence.

Jules stops next to her. “Did you hear? It’s awful. They found him under the clock tower in the old town. People are saying he jumped.”

“He didn’t jump.” Thora sees it more vividly than she can bear: her scarf, billowing out from the top of the tower. Santi climbing, eyes lifted past it to the stars. So sure of himself, of his one God-guided path through the world, that the possibility of falling would never have entered his mind.

She wanted to win the argument. She didn’t want this, thedarkest proof of her victory: she has had an impact on his life, the worst and most permanent of all. She flashes back to her hands slipping, almost falling. Why does this feel like an exchange? As if Santi has taken her death, fallen in her place?

She quakes with anger at the person she was a few weeks ago.Better to walk away while something’s still perfect.What kind of idiot thinks like that? Who chooses perfection that doesn’t exist over messiness and complication that does?

“Did you know him?” Jules asks.

She opens her mouth.No one ever really knows anyone, she wants to say, like his ghost is at her lips. “Yes,” she says instead. Because the whole of him is inside her, prismed through that one night at the top of the tower: Santi, who wanted to reach the stars so he could see the face of God.

Jules hugs her, leaning her head on Thora’s shoulder. Jules is only seventeen, a year younger than the rest of her class, but there is something about her that makes Thora feel looked-after, safe. Relaxing into her embrace, Thora sees the future as clearly as if Santi’s ghost were speaking her fate into her ear. She will go to the bar with Jules for a consolatory drink. They will talk, and later they will kiss. She will go back to Jules’s room, three doors down from her own. It will be everything she wanted, but for a long time, she will be too numb with grief to feel it.

The next morning, she leaves Jules’s room without waking her. She goes down to the hall where Santi’s memorial has collected flowers and cards. She reads the messages, looking for any that understood him.Miss you, man. You were a good guy. God bless.Each one could have been written by a machine. The desperate loneliness of it hits her: to die in the first few weeks of university,when all someone knows of you is that you smiled at them in the library, or bought them a drink at the bar. But she knows him better.

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