To my surprise, she wasn’t horrified. She actually smirked a little. ‘Where’d you find those?’

‘Oh. You know. The internet.’

‘Do you think that’s healthy?’ she asked.

Oh, I adored her. She didn’t ask why I did it, because she already knew. That you need to see it to understand, need to really see it – but no. No. Of course it wasn’t healthy, but I wasn’t sure I could admit it. ‘I don’t know.’

She didn’t say anything else, so I kept talking.

‘I’m so scared,’ I said, ‘that all of this, that this is it, this is all there is, and I’m worried all of this isn’t even that good in the first place.’

‘Well, like, listen. The way I see it … it’s, like, I think we’re lucky to even be here at all. To be, like, conscious? I think it’s crazy. And the only reason you’re bummed out about dying is because you’re conscious in the first place. And a certain amount of conscious. Like, birds don’t fly around worried they’re gonna die one day.’

‘So maybe I wish I wasn’t able to think of that at all. Maybe this is stupid. Right? Like maybe I don’t even want to have lived.’

‘Whitaker. That’s the most, like, universally contested viewpoint of all time. Better to have loved and lost, and all that. Well. Better to have lived and lost. Like, look how beautiful this is.’ She said it with conviction, but her face sort of folded in on itself. ‘Look how lucky you are to be here at all.’ I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was saying that to herself more than she was saying it to me.

I was looking. I told her so. I was looking, and all I could see were the cracks, Dad’s blood rolling and clotting in the water, everything I’d ever seen and everything I’d never get to see coalescing into something ugly and awful and I hated it, I hated it, it was horrible, it was dying, it was rusting and falling apart – the branches broke, shattered like glass, dropped into the river, everything collapsed, everything, everything, everything, everything dead, everything dead, goodbye, Earth! The sun crashes into Pleasant Hills and we all burn. Goodbye, me! ‘I don’t want it.’

‘No. Look.’

‘I am.’

‘Look.’

So I did. I looked at her. Square in the face.

And there was something else.

Just past all the rot, something glittered, bounced off in fractals of light; the river shimmered.

It was her, all lights, all glowing in the bitter cold, her cheeks and nose rouged and her chapped lips and the dark spots on her jeans where the snow had soaked through.

It occurred to me: I was using her. I knew I was. ‘Why are you sad?’ I asked her.