Years ago, the morning after a spring rain had blanketed their city for most of the night, Sarika and her older sister Haruka stepped outside. The air felt cool on Sarika’s face; hints of blue poked through the otherwise gray sky. Similarly, sunlight appeared in shifting patches on the gravel and dirt as they explored a winding trail behind their house. The trail took them through rolling hills, leafless tree trunks and branches crowding together on either side, but the huge swath of land they now walked through had all been cleared to make way for large metallic pylons. Sarika looked up as she walked, her eyes wide at the sight of the wires connecting each pylon; she tilted her head, following their path, until they disappeared into the horizon.

“Look at this,” Haruka said, kneeling next to a wet patch of soil.

Sarika squatted down next to her. She looked closely and saw a tiny hint of green trying to make its way out of the dirt.

“It’s that time of year again,” Haruka supposed. “Just think about it. Look at this little guy go. He’ll shoot straight up, a thin patch of green, then he’ll unfurl and that’s where the leaves come from.”

She stood up and looked down the trail. “There’s probably millions of plants rejuvenating right now, just on this trail. Now imagine the whole world doing that. Every year, a whole sea of green covers the land. Then it all goes away at the end of the year. But that’s just life. You gotta say goodbye sometimes. Because there’ll be a whole new sea again next year.”

Sarika scratched her head. At her young age, it was hard to imagine a wider world. Instead, she focused on Haruka. She was currently looking off into the distance, where the land met the sky, her hair swept up by a light breeze. Haruka was old enough to be out with friends right now, but she instead took her younger sister outside to see the landscape all around them. She saw things Sarika couldn’t see, understood things Sarika couldn’t, yet she always made sure Sarika was there alongside her.

Anyway, she was dead now.

Sarika woke with a start. She rubbed her eyes and realized she had just been dreaming of an old memory. She shivered from a cold breeze; the heat wave had ended, the Indian summer was over, and autumn was making its presence known. She slowly lifted her head off her desk and supposed she must’ve fallen asleep while working on her notes.

That wasn’t good. With her notebooks gone, Sarika had resolved to rewrite them from scratch. But those notebooks held years of research in them, all intricately locked in a pattern that proved difficult for Sarika to exactly remember.

But she had to remember. Remember and write, those were the only objectives in her mind. Sleep, eating, living - none of those mattered. All that mattered was restoring her research.

But it was no good. Sarika found where she had left off before falling asleep and frowned; she was still stuck at a dead end. Scrawled all over the page - scrawled all over every page in that notebook - were patterns of 0s and 1s. The writing in the first page looked neat; by now, it devolved into chicken-scratch writing, messily and sloppily thrown onto the page, the writer holding the pen not exactly in the right state of mind.

The door opened, startling Sarika. In walked Ruta, who looked tired and overwhelmed.

Ruta dropped her backpack on the floor and looked over Sarika. “You look tired and overwhelmed.”

Sarika shrugged. “Could say the same to you.”

Ruta sighed. “I think I’ve gone a little too far with this peanut thing.”

----------------------------------------

Sarika had been in an inconsolable melancholy the past few days, so distant and downcast and frantic, that none of Ruta’s attempts to break through to her worked. At an utter loss, she decided to spend an evening with the Peanut Table. Maybe a fresh perspective and some time away would enable her to better help her best friend.

With temperatures dropping to the low fifties, that could mean only one thing - flannel time! Dressed in her maroon-brown flannel, Ruta led the Peanut Table down the winding roads around the dorms, black longboards beneath their feet. Who knew all of them had that activity in common? They had gone two whole months unaware of that - it only took a few conversations to discover that fact now.

The autumn breeze blew gently on Ruta’s brown hair as she boarded across the paved asphalt. Her flannel trailed behind her as she lowered her center of the gravity, and with an exhilarating exhale, spun the longboard beneath her. It rotated three-hundred sixty degrees, arriving back in its original position.

The feeling of freedom, the weightlessness of it all, the surging excitement - Ruta stood up tall, gliding below caramel-colored oak trees, her new friends following behind her.

The distant sight of the window to their dorm room made Ruta frown. She knew Sarika would be locked away inside of it at the moment, writing down everything and anything that came to her mind in an attempt to recreate her life’s work. Poor Sarika. The six friends boarding outside the dorms - that’s life right there.

“You alright?” Heart asked, rolling up beside Ruta.

Ruta sighed. “Yeah. I’m just worried about a friend.”

“Anything we can do to help?” Earth asked, his big frame looking graceful on his board.

Ruta shook her head. “Thanks, guys. But she’s in a rough place right now.”

“We were in a rough place before you found us!” Heart exclaimed. “And now look at everyone!”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The Peanut Table all nodded in agreement.

“I asked to come hang out with us, but she didn't want to,” Ruta explained. She gave one last look up at the window. “I hope she figures it out.”

Whether that meant figuring out the death equation or realizing that the pursuit of death was actually killing her, Ruta wasn’t sure. With a heavy sigh, she continued boarding, the six of them moving past the doors, arriving back on the avenues of a sidewalk.

A few blocks later, they arrived in a park with a good-looking lawn and playground equipment. Ruta brought her board to a stop (with dramatic flair, of course), then took up a seat on one of the swings. Heart and Fire sat on either side of her, with Wind, Water, and Earth pushing them in time.

“You know, Ruta, we really have to thank you,” Wind said, his voice nasally yet full of gratitude. “I used to just kill small animals by my lonesome until the other day. But now, I have you guys!”

An inconvenient honking of a car horn drowned out that first part. But everyone heard the second part and agreed.

“I used to think my peanut allergy threw up a barrier around me,” Heart admitted. “But then I realized that, when other people are inside the boundary with you…is it really such a barrier after all?”

“Not at all!” Ruta confirmed, but then grew a little quiet. The whole thing was a lie, after all. To be fair, it wasn’t a lie if you believed it. But the scientific evidence of Ruta being able to eat peanuts right at this moment sort of put a damper on believing it.

But if others believed it, then was it really a lie? It brought everyone together. And it got Ruta away from Edith.

The memory of all the blonde girl’s taunting made Ruta shiver. But, as Water pushed her higher and higher on the swing, Ruta cracked a wide smile. The world was her oyster; no longer was she bound by a high school hierarchy! Take that for data!

Ruta reached the peak of her swing, the entire park visible below her feet. She felt enormous, her small frame casting a large, friendly shadow on everyone she came across. That’s when Ruta felt truly happy.

“And it’s all thanks to you, Ruta,” Heart said. “That’s why, if it’s not so much trouble to you, we’d like you to speak at a peanut allergy convention tomorrow night!”

On the way back down, Ruta dragged her feet across the grass to slow herself to a stop. “A convention?”

Earth nodded, eating from a bag of potato chips. “The local county organizes one every year. It’s a way for us to connect with others and build a sense of community.”

“It’s been really lackluster though,” Wind admitted. “Everybody just sticks to themselves, convinced that sitting at a peanut allergy table means they must sit at their own table in this great game we call life. That’s where you’d be a huge help.”

“Me?” Ruta repeated.

“You didn’t let your allergy keep you down,” Fire encouraged. “You broke down the imagined barriers and helped us break our own. We’d really appreciate it if you could do that for the whole county.”

Ruta tugged at her collar. “What would I have to do?”

“You’d just need to give a speech there,” Water said, soda bottle in hand. “Talk about your life story and how you overcame a life of allergies. When they hear that, that’ll get the crowd thinking.”

“And then once the crowd’s thinking, we’ll get the crowd talking,” Heart continued. “And just like that, we’ll bring together peanut allergy tables all over the county. All of us united. The boundaries imposed by our allergies broken down, just like that.”

“Would you do it, Ruta?” Fire asked. Ruta glanced over at the girl; red hair usually meant a fiery personality and speech (at least according to all the media Ruta consumed) but at the moment, Fire looked incredibly vulnerable. Fire caught Ruta’s glance and looked away, as if ashamed of asking for something so much out of the girl who had already done so much for them.

Ruta looked up at the sky, orange slowly stretching across it.

How could she say no to helping people out?

----------------------------------------

“How could I have said yes?!” Ruta exclaimed in despair in the dorm room. She rubbed her face. “Now I have to lie to an entire county about my alleged peanut allergy. There’ll be news crews there, Sarika, news crews! Important people, like mayors and supermarket managers!”

Ruta collapsed onto her bed. She rubbed her face into the sheets, but realized her theatrics hadn’t earned a single response out of Sarika. She glanced over and saw Sarika’s hand moving wildly, the pencil marks on the notebook actually making audible, angry noises.

“Sarika,” Ruta said. She pushed herself off the bed. “I know my problems pale compared to yours, but I think you really need to step away from that.”

Sarika ignored her, the pencil noises only picking up in intensity.

“Sarika…this isn’t healthy.”

Sarika threw the pencil down and glared at Ruta. “I told you earlier,” she said, her voice far too calm for the look on her face. “You’re you, and I’m me. I don’t need your concern. I only need my own concern, and I’m not particularly concerned.”

“You’re not eating or sleeping-”

“Again, I’m not eating or sleeping. Not you.”

Ruta took a step forward. “I care about you Sarika, and I’m sure others do too-”

Sarika stood up and advanced on Ruta. She was a head taller and the aura of her calm fury dominated the room. “I don’t need anybody to care. I only need myself and my sister. Anyone else doesn’t matter. You’re you and I’m me. That’s an insurmountable gap. But that’s just life. But when you actually find someone who can cross that gap, like my sister, then you’d do anything for that person. Even bring them back from the dead. You don’t get a connection like that again.”

“But Sarika,” Ruta protested, now stepping backwards. “We’re best friends! And dormmates! We can cross that gap right now! And you care about others, too. Don’t deny it. When I first proposed my allergy scheme, you were genuinely concerned about me. You wanted me to feel better. That’s how I feel about you right now.”

When Sarika kept quiet, Ruta sighed. “You’re so focused on overcoming death that you’re forgetting to live. It’s as if you’re pursuing death just as much as you’re trying to overcome it.”

Sarika simmered. “Either option will reunite my sister and I.”

Ruta had one last card to play. “But would she really want that?”

Sarika had no answer to that except to look away. “Get out.”

“What?”

“Get out.”

Ruta raised a hand. “But…this is my room, too-”

One look from Sarika shut her up.

With a sigh, Ruta put her loafers back on. “So this is the part where we argue and get driven apart. I’ll just go for a walk. I’ll be back because, you know, my bed’s here, but I think I’ll go to school on my own tomorrow. And I got the peanut allergy convention tomorrow night, so I’ll see you some time later, I guess.”

Sarika kept quiet as Ruta shut the door behind her.