Remembering those—and that there won’t be more with Jenna—puts a lump in my throat. I swallow around it.

“Resurrection,” I say, breaking the silence.

“Huh?” Alex says.

I can’t see Nolan’s face—we’re lying with our heads side by side and our bodies stretched out to opposite ends of the bench—but his cheek lifts against mine.

“The thing she hates in books,” he says.

“Why?”

“It’s…” I stop, collecting my thoughts before they scatter to the stars. “I used to not mind it, but now the idea of somebody dying and being brought back just makes me angry that I wasn’t born into a world that can do that. It’s so far outside of my experience with death, I can’t even entertain it anymore.”

They’re quiet for so long, I wonder if I’ve broken the mood. Wally slinks over to curl up on my feet and rest his huge head on my kneecaps. He looks at me with large brown eyes that seem to understand the tangle of emotions in my chest. I rub behind his ears and wish on a star that if I am ever sent to a place where animals are magically bound to human companions, I’ll get a dog like Wally. Accident prone and all.

In my head, I take a photo of me standing triumphantly on a hill, hands on hips, feet parted, my fearless horse-sized dog at my side, his head tilted up into the wind and tongue lolling. Disaster Duo, I call it. It’s up to the viewer to choose whether they are fixing disasters or causing them.

“Death sucks,” Alex whispers.

“Everything sucks,” Nolan answers. I laugh low in my throat at our inside joke, and Nolan trails his fingertips across my lips like he might catch it.

We spend the evening outstretched like this, unmoored from the shore and sensible conversation. We talk about death and how it sucks and where do we go when it happens. (Nolan: Heaven. Alex: Not sure. Me: Somewhere else, but not nowhere.) Alex shares his favorite memories of summers with the Endsley kids, most of which involved filched ice cream and forts made out of books. (They once got in trouble for the forts because they damaged an entire shipment of brand-new hardbacks that, after, had to be sold at a discount.) Nolan tells me about how he and Alex spent the first month after Nolan bought his family’s summer home painting over the green walls with light gray paint, managing to mess it up so badly that Nolan had to hire professionals to redo everything.