EVAN. EDIE. REESE. NATHAN. I repeated their names before I fell asleep. repeated them as a chant and as a lullaby over and over until they were punctuated sounds without meaning. I wandered the stretch of beach below our house until my feet felt raw in my shoes. I dumped my damp, sand-crusted Converse on the wooden deck outside my room each morning. My feet were red with blistering, the skin rubbed pink from the sand caught between my foot and the canvas. This was my life now, as the one who survived; I was the only ghost haunting the living. That was what I had discovered when I awoke from that night- a ghost isn't the dead haunting the living, it's the living who are left behind by the dead. So now you know that everyone dies. You just don't know who, and I just don't understand why...
