“Do you think the dead ever try to communicate with us?” she asked suddenly. “From, you know, wherever they go next?”
Troll Doll cocked her head and laughed.
“Okay, this is some really weird pillow talk, yah.”
“But do you?” Lucky insisted.
Troll Doll rolled onto her back and giggled.
“I was totally into Wicca at school. We would do Ouija boards and try to speak to Princess Diana and stuff.”
“Did it ever work?”
Troll Doll scoffed.
“Of course not! We’d attempt levitation too. You know…” She affected an exaggerated stage whisper. “Light as a feather, stiff as a board, cold as ice, quiet as a barn owl…All that nonsense. Anyway, why are you asking? You’re not secretly all witchy woo, are you?”
Lucky frowned slightly.
“So, you don’t believe we go somewhere then? After we die?”
Troll Doll propped herself up on her elbow and looked at her.
“If we did, wouldn’t we know about it by now?” she said. “I can’t believe people can still justify believing in heaven and hell. It’s so…provincial.”
If Lucky believed in anything resembling heaven, it was this: a square of chlorine-blue water in a wide, green field, her sisters lying beside her, heat stunned as lizards beneath a ripe, hot sun. It was their first real family holiday; after much begging and wheedling on their part, they had convinced their parents to rent a place upstate for a week in August. The house itself was dark and damp, but they didn’t care; they spent all day by that bright square of incandescent blue. There were no trees to shade them, no umbrellas, and the old plastic deck chairs were terrifyingly temperamental, so their parents retreated to the porch or left for day trips around the area, leaving the four of them to enjoy the pool alone.
Each morning they filled a cooler with cans of Coke, potato chips, and ice pops, subsisting on these all day until the sun smeared along the horizon in a final frenzy of pink and gold and they were forced inside. They read voraciously, trading heat-curled paperbacks, bickering lightly over who got what next, who had dampened the pages beyond repair. After a little while, the heat would get to be too much and one of them would throw down her book and slide into the water, the others following behind like a gaggle of seals slipping from a rock.
Avery had taught them all to swim, but Nicky was the best swimmer of them all; she could swim three lengths of the pool without coming up for breath. Sometimes she would be underwater so long Lucky would grow nervous, watching her from the water’s edge, but she always reappeared again, flinging fat beads of water like diamonds from her hair, gasping for breath. They’d stay in the water doing handstands and having tea parties along the slippery floor of the shallow end until they’d cooled off, then emerge to flop back onto the hot limestone perimeter, returning to soporific silence. They spent whole days that way, the sun baking them brown, as all around them the grass buzzed with bees, dragonflies, and cicadas, a thousand unknown forms of life.
It’s hot as heaven, said Nicky, lazily swiping a hand through the air.
You mean hell, said Avery. Hot as hell.
Nicky glided her finger through the air as if she could unpick the stitches of the day and let it spill open.
No, heaven is hot, she said. Like this.
—
Lucky stared up at the ceiling above her and Troll Doll as a passing car’s headlights striped it with light.
“Hot as heaven,” she murmured.
“What?” asked Troll Doll.
Lucky blinked and sat up. She had not meant to speak. Troll Doll gave a shrill laugh.
“Are you already high?” she asked. “Is that why you’re getting all existential on me?”
Lucky swallowed thickly.
“Yeah, that’s it,” she said. “Ignore me.”
Troll Doll’s eyes brightened suddenly.
“You sure you don’t want me to go down on you?” she asked.
Lucky shook her head.
“Sleep,” she said. “That’s what I want.”
Troll Doll rested her head back on her chest with a little sigh. Lucky lay there with the weight of it pinning her to the mattress and stared above her. She could feel tears pricking her eyes as she pulled hard from the pen. She kept her gaze fixed on the air above her head for a long time, listening to Troll Doll’s shallow snores until, thankfully, sleep pulled her under too.
—
Lucky was awakened by a flash of light in the darkness. She looked up to see Troll Doll standing over her with her phone.
“What are you doing?” Lucky croaked.
Her voice was hoarse, her mouth brutally dry from the weed.
“Whoops, I didn’t realize the flash was on.” Troll Doll giggled. “Sorry.”
“You were taking my picture?”
“You just looked so angelic sleeping like that. This is basically art.”
