They were holding hands and walking down the street. A giddy part of Ayanna was thinking, This is the first time I’ve ever walked down the street holding his hand. Another part of her was melancholy, wondering if on some level, the attraction between them was because they sensed each other’s grief, the connection she felt to him might only be based on their shared sorrow, and now that they had been real with each other, nothing between them would ever be truly fun or sexy or all the things she also wanted from her first adult relationship. His hand was warm, his fingernails were short, and his fingers were so much bigger than her own. She felt how nice it was to have a hand gripping hers with care. How even something as small as this could give her an insight into him. Before they walked into the party, Felix stopped Ayanna and kissed her again.

This time, a real one, the kind of kiss she could tell Jane about and not feel as if she were betraying something private and fragile between her and Felix. Ayanna knew Jane would say something like “The affairs of straight people do not concern me,” but would then ask for more details. It wasn’t only the feeling of kissing someone Ayanna had been longing for on and off for the past six weeks, it was the feeling of being so intimate with someone who felt truly important to her. There was a sense that no matter what happened, whether things became serious between them or they forged a new friendship that reckoned with this night, here was an experience with someone whom she would always consider tenderly. It was a choice Ayanna wanted to always make in her romantic life, to only feel for those willing to be vulnerable.

The music cut and the lights went out. People screamed in a this-is-fun way and then realized as the darkness persisted, it was not done for the purpose of sexy shenanigans. Ayanna and Felix walked into the house, Felix said he knew where the breaker was. A man’s voice was yelling, “Liana, Liana, once a cheater, always a cheater. Liana.” It smelled terrible. Rotting meat again, spilled beer, and the smell of too many people sweating and cheap Halloween makeup chemicals.

If she were dealing with a still-living man acting like this, Ayanna knew she would not acknowledge him, tell all her friends what he was doing and what he looked like, and ask them to keep him from her. She would go to the campus center around sexual violence and ask them for help in figuring out how to make herself completely locked down and invisible on the internet. It seemed impossible to do these things to a ghost.