It was a cloudy and muggy day when Maren found her sisters’ body.
She remembers the rocks piercing her small feet, growing damp as she nears the water, short curls brushing her cheeks as the wind blows her forward.
They found a group of girls in Wyoming with their tents scattered through the trees, walking distance from a lake. Tilly knew one of them from her brief time in college and from then, there was little room for mistrust. They cut up their clothes for Maren, kissed prayers into her hair as they braided it. She convinced Tilly to cut it short soon after, she didn’t like how they touched it.
Her friend studied environmental science, she learned, she had a boyfriend, she got baptized at eighteen in the hopes something would change. When Tilly said to her, so softly in the way she used to with their mom when she wasn’t supposed to hear, that this wasn’t the first time she saved her life, Maren looked at the stars and thought about nights of yelling and a quilted blanket over her body, eyes forced close.
It was almost July and Tilly looked like an angel, the moon casting her in an unhuman glow, her braids fanned out around her. She does this often, she thought, the water calms her. Maren once found her in the middle of fall floating in the dirty pool in their backyard after the yelling stopped. She smelled rain and chlorine when she curled into her side hours later after a bad dream.
Her body was already numb as she swam to her.
After a blink, hands were pulling her out and her mind flipped like a coin. She looked pale and calm, the former reminding her of when it all began, when she took the eight hour drive back to them when the news got more serious. She looked like she didn’t go outside all semester. This Tilly didn’t look like her, the running and running gave her so much sun, her dark skin looked the most alive when the world died.
The makeshift pyre was already built before her body stopped dripping, as if it was a ritual to prepare for death before it came.
Maren looked over the fire into eyes so hauntingly reflecting it. Apparently she couldn’t save her for a third time. Her mind already decided with the new knowledge that she should’ve been able to, on her territory. Instead, she made her friends sister watch as flames consumed her body.
With Tilly’s bag at her feet, she tears her eyes away to look through it. After digging and digging, the crumpled paper nearly rips through her fingers, and she lifts it out of the bag. She wasn’t present when it was written, Maren in her warm bed, the babysitter loudly watching TV downstairs, the worn pencil she knew, written in a hospital across town.
Things to do before I die
Her finger follows the numbers as the heat dries her body.
1. Get my degree to prove mom wrong
2. Teach Maren to drive
3. Work at NASA
Her name peppers the list, and she can notice when the list grows more recent as the writing gets thicker.
14. Visit all 50 states
15. Find a safe quarantine zone
Within the borders of Wyoming, they hit 36 states. It was never a strong goal for Tilly, she knew it was written for her. She wondered where she will go next. Blood seeps into the rocks as she counts the missing states. Her sister knows the highways, which paths are quicker and more silent. The girls glow warmer as the sun rises.
23. Save Maren
The writing is smudged, the lines underneath the words empty besides the ink. She must’ve shoved it in her bag right after writing it, and Maren thinks about all of the times she woke up to the crinkling of paper and the zip of her bag.
Maren would leave later that day, her bag heavy with the weight of the lives of two people. The friend that lived would run out after her, the burning eyes from hours before reduced to pity and Maren would feel resentment grow so large within her that it felt foreign, and it would be the first of many times she would welcome the feeling.
She would spend weeks after making her own kind of list, a list that details this girl head to toe, a detail for the end of the day to give her hope that she would recognize her if need be, if their paths were to cross again.
She would think, much later, that it might’ve been the wrong girl to keep the memory of, that late at night when she traces the summer triangle and pictures long braids and glacial rivers, she can’t exactly remember which side the dimple was on, what feature everyone would say they shared as they grew up. Maren would grow up and find mirrors she can see herself in and try to look for Tilly, only for the reflection to stay the same.
But at that moment, she watched her sister burn and remembered how much she hated summer.
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