In a few months, Aspen turns seventeen. She feels years older than this: nobody she meets believes her to be a teenager. Ciel says she's aged due to trauma. Some days, she feels even older than he is. He picks her up early in the morning, when Sage is still asleep. Aspen never was very good at explaining herself, and Sage never asks questions.

She missed Ciel. "You look like shit," she says, throwing her feet up on his dashboard: the thing he hates most about passengers. Aspen's parents practically begged her to come over; they have news for her, they say. Aspen could go the rest of her life without speaking to her parents, and this wouldn't bother her.

There's a kid's drawing in Ciel's glove box. Aspen cares too little about his personal life to ask about it.

"Is that the best you can do?" Anika's calling. Like Aspen, Ciel never answers her calls. When Sage gets up, they'll probably wonder where Aspen has gone. "You look like you couldn't decide between a clown look or a corpse look, so you just chose both."

Going home after months of no contact is intimidating. Aspen wouldn't have returned home at all if Ciel hadn't talked her into it. He isn't witty or eloquent. He thinks of comebacks hours after arguments, and somehow, they always cut deep. "What do you think Mom's news is?" Anika will hate Aspen's piercing, and her outfit. Aspen's father always stands up for his wife, as if she has some deep, unhealed wound making her miserable. Some people just like to be miserable.

Ciel always drives with the windows open. He still smokes the same cigarettes. "Knowing Mom, it's something no one will even care about." He looks unkempt and unshaven, and several gray hairs poke out of his beard. "Have you talked to her lately?"

It's weird to think about the fact that parents were kids once, too. Before she was a bitch, Anika was a little girl who didn't know what to do with herself. It's a long drive home, and Aspen is restless. Leaving the house feels dangerous. "I don't talk to anyone."

Ciel taps a cigarette against the window, so that ash falls onto the ground. He always smells like smoke. Aspen didn't miss this about him. "Whose house were you at, anyway? You always pick places so far away from home." People hate driving Aspen around. Ronnie hated it, too.

She removes her feet from the dash, feeling defiant. "Sage's." The night before, Sage played a new song they wrote, and it replayed in Aspen's head until she fell asleep.

"Juno's braindead," Anika said, forever ago, "Your dad and I gave the hospital permission to turn off her life support."

"Juno's not dead," said Ivo, the eternal cynic, "and you're a complete moron if you think she is."

"Who's Sage?"

Ciel tries too hard to pretend he's interested in Aspen's life. When she lived with him, they hardly spoke at all. Ciel doesn't care about her personal life, and she doesn't care about his. That's just the way it always was. Besides, it's not really any of his business.

"My friend."

"Since when do you have friends?"

Aspen grumbles. "Shut up."

Many people think teenagers have nothing to regret. They're careless and selfish, and don't care about anything that matters. The truth is, sometimes Aspen cares so much about something, there's no room left to care about anything else. Maybe life is too short to have regrets. If Aspen ever saw her sister again, she wouldn't know where to begin.

Anika's house never felt like home. It seems different than usual, and smells of something burning. Feeling unwelcome, Aspen jabs her elbow into Ciel's stomach. "It smells like Juno's baking." They're kind of bittersweet, memories. Being home feels uneasy. Being home feels like Aspen doesn't belong here at all. "Get it? Because it smells like smoke, and Juno burned everything she ever tried to bake."

Ciel says his girlfriend is moving in soon. Calypso's room has been cleaned and emptied, and nobody talks about her anymore. Ciel's girlfriend is an awkward and gloomy person, always wearing the same color or pattern. She doesn't speak to Aspen much. She doesn't speak to anyone.

"I got it."

Aspen gets told that she looks a lot like her brother. Juno never got told this. Aspen used to have a dream of moving far away and getting a job in the cosplay industry. Everyone knows dreams don't come true. In general, it's not embarrassing to get emotional. Aspen would rather jump off a bridge than let her family see her crying.

"Is it pathetic that I'm sad right now?"

Before going inside, Ciel finishes a cigarette, and Aspen stands downwind. She wishes Sage lived closer. When it comes to his siblings, Ciel never was the most supportive. He scrolls on his phone, not looking at Aspen, which feels invalidating. "Do you hear that?"

It's far too hot. "What?"

"I swear I can hear Juno." Ciel never disposes of cigarettes properly. Even away from home, he leaves them scattered across yards and parking lots. "I'm just tired." He shrugs, scuffing the ground with his shoes before standing to open the door.

The last time Aspen spoke to her sister, she apologized for revealing secrets that weren't hers to tell. It's probably true what Ciel says: family is forever, so you either have to learn to live with them or get used to being alone. It wasn't always scary to be alone. At night, Aspen still sometimes sees Ronnie's eyes blank and staring up at her.

Anika's living room is tidy and eccentric. All her knick-knacks are collectibles, she says. There's a small, blank envelope on the kitchen table. There's a pair of sneakers on the rug that look just like Juno's.

"Where's your brother?"

Anika's hair is longer than it was the last time Aspen saw her. She smiles at Aspen in a way that's meant to make her feel welcome, but puts her on edge instead. Parents always think they know their children better than anyone. Aspen hasn't spoken to her parents about her personal life since she was ten years old.

You can tell me anything, you know. I'm your mother. I'm always on your side.

This is what they all say. When a little girl gets scolded for everything she says or does, she eventually stops initiating conversations at all.

"Outside."

God, I can see her in everything. Just once, I want to look out my window and not be reminded of my dead sister.

When Juno and Aspen were kids, they made a secret language and kept it inside a journal no one else could read. Anika said it was rude to speak to each other this way, because nobody could understand them, and she never quite figured out that this was the point. Aspen's mother spoke about her to others in a language she didn't know. Disrespect is only ever okay if it's on your own terms.

"Why do you look so sad?"

Aspen has never seen a ghost before. Everyone says they don't exist: our brains play tricks on us, and we hear things that don't exist, or a trick of the light makes it look like something is there. Growing up, it was always an unspoken agreement that ghosts weren't real. You don't get a second chance at life. You have to do it perfectly the first time.

Juno sits on the floor, cross-legged, gazing at Aspen as if it's perfectly normal for a dead girl to appear in the middle of her family's living room. Ciel, coming back inside after a smoke, looks at Juno for a very long time.

"What the fuck."

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When she was young, Aspen had her mouth washed out with soap for saying the word hell. Juno's not a ghost. There was never a funeral after she died.

Anika doesn't cry. When she sits next to her husband on the couch, her face is red and wet.

"What the fuck, Mom." Ciel chain smokes when he's stressed. Anika says nothing about his language, or about the cigarette he smokes inside her house. He's not a confrontational man. He looks at his mother as if willing her to start on fire. Aspen wonders, if she touched the fingers, if her fingers would go right through it.

I saw her die.

Juno should be twenty one years old. She looks like her father, and wears a pink bow on her bald head. "I saw her die," says Anika, looking tense. She's not a good actress. If Aspen didn't know any better, she'd think her mother had been crying. "I was at the hospital, standing beside her bed when she flat-lined." She's a normally outspoken woman. She looks at Juno like a child looking at a stranger. Aspen's family loves their secrets. Aspen loves secrets, too.

People look like they're covered in plastic. Juno holds something in her hands. She hasn't said a word since Aspen arrived. She hardly moves at all. Ciel stands inside the door, still wearing his shoes. When Juno smiles at him, he doesn't smile back.

"You're a bullshitter."

He doesn't sound like himself. Aspen's siblings have entire lives she doesn't know about. "You've always been a bullshitter, haven't you?" It's like watching a movie play out. There's no way to turn it off, or change the plot, or take part. "It's true what Ivo said, isn't it? You didn't have a funeral for Juno because you knew she wasn't dead."

There will never be enough time. Even answered questions don’t leave Aspen satisfied. People share stories the way they want to share stories, even if it’s not the truth. If everyone is a liar, then there’s nothing worth believing. Maybe it’s true. Maybe there’s nobody in the world to trust except yourself. For Aspen, the hardest person to trust is herself.

Juno scowls. Aspen spent a hundred nights wishing she could see her sister again.

“Why are you so angry, Ciel? Mom and Dad thought I was dead, too.” This is the first time Juno has spoken. She sounds like herself. Even though there’s enough space on the furniture, she sits on the floor. “Everyone did.” There’s a drawing on her cheek made of marker. “Even I did.”

The air feels cold and harsh. It feels like the calluses on Ronnie’s knuckles brushing on Aspen’s face. You can try your best to move on from a person, but they always have a way of sneaking up on you in the moments you think you’re healed.

“You don’t have to take her side, you know. No responsible parent thinks their daughter is dead when she’s not.”

“I remember dying.”

Juno doesn’t know it, but she’s the only one who hasn’t watched someone die. She talks loudly, and then softly, “I remember dying. And I remember waking up, thinking I was in some kind of afterlife. It was noisy, and everyone was dressed in white-”

“So what, then?” Ciel shouts, making Juno jump. “You were dead, and then you weren’t. Then what? You ran away to fake your own death? Or maybe you wanted to fake your death the whole time, but couldn’t handle the guilt.”

It’s beginning to rain. The girls played a game when they were young, trying to determine who could make a puddle splash the furthest. Aspen always won. Life happens too quickly. You wake up one morning and your childhood is over, and it never comes back.

When she feels nervous, Juno scratches her face. She’s done this since childhood. Today, she scratches so hard, she leaves a red mark. Aspen was always the one to pick fights. Ciel was always the one to mediate them.

Aspen’s father sits up straight, looking gray. “Don’t talk to your sister that way. She’s been through something traumatic, and she needs our support.” It’s about Juno now. Maybe she’s still dying. Maybe she’s not here at all.

It probably wasn’t supposed to go like this. Ciel stands in the doorway, an unlit cigarette between his teeth, sounding like he’s tasting something sour. “Did you know that Aspen has PTSD from her ex-boyfriend? She wakes up in the middle of the night from a nightmare and just stares into space, rocking back and forth until the sun comes up. You didn’t know that, did you? You don’t care. All you ever cared about was Juno.” Nobody should care. Aspen didn’t come here to talk about her. This isn’t Ciel. He won’t speak about when he became angry, but it oozes out of him like a waterfall. It’s true. No one will ever talk about it.

It’s quiet. Juno wants to speak, but doesn’t. Aspen stands, shuffling her feet on the carpet after they turn to brick. She isn’t a girl who hugs, or cries, or feels sentimental. When Ciel opens the door to step outside, she takes him by the wrist. “I love you.”

Funerals are for the living. Dead people don’t need closure.

Ciel always lets Aspen hug him. It’s not as if she does it all the time. Though he softens a bit, it takes effort to keep his voice steady. “Congratulations. You got back a kid you didn’t even deserve, You have no idea how good your lives are.”

Juno looks sadly at Aspen. There’s so much to say, and no time at all. When the door shuts, Aspen sits.

“If you weren’t dead, then where were you?”

Aspen should be angry. She should feel betrayed, or relieved. It’s fucked up to admit, but things feel strange. When someone dies, you mourn for a while, and then you get used to the fact that they won’t be around anymore. There became a new normal outside of Juno, and it took nearly a year to find. And now it’s gone, like everything else Aspen used to believe in. Everybody lies. Some people are better at it than others.

It doesn’t make sense: Juno, sitting with her legs crossed on the living room floor, like the past year never happened, like life never changed at all. She looks at her parents, who suddenly seem very old. “I was in a coma. And, when I woke up, I was on the other side of the world, and everyone was saying I’d been there all along.” Juno was never the type of person to tell lies. This is her best quality, but it seems pointless now. Ciel sits in the car, unlikely to come back inside. Aspen’s hands feel very heavy.

The last thing Ronnie ever said to Aspen was that he loved her. He said this with blood in his mouth, the words gargling between his teeth and rattling in her ears for weeks afterwards. She could never stay mad at him. She’d forgiven him before he was even dead.

“How did you get to the other side of the world? What does that even mean?”

According to Aspen’s parents, she was never good at understanding the way the world worked. You’re naive, they’d say, each time she made a mistake, you’re too young to understand adult issues. Aspen isn’t stupid. Everybody else is.

The envelope in Juno’s hands is crinkled and silver; her fingers leave an indent from gripping so hard. She stares at her mother, moving her mouth, making no sound until she stands, stiff, to lean against the wall. “Your sister was never jealous of you.” She speaks with the weariness of an old woman. She seems aged. Maybe, when she died, something changed her. “Verena was never jealous of you, Mom. She was angry.”

Aspen wonders what she holds in her hands. There’s a twisted part of her that wishes Juno was still dead.

Anika sits very close to her husband. Her face is no longer wet, but she acts hurt, even though she has no reason to be. “What are you holding in that envelope?” There’s more, surely, that she wants to say. For as long as she can remember, Aspen’s parents never held their tongues.

Aspen wonders this, too. Juno doesn’t seem all that willing to share.

“She took me.”

Juno squints, watching out the window as a car drives by. She doesn’t look sick anymore. She doesn’t look like Juno, either. “Verena took me. I was in a coma. Verena used your name and picture to get the hospital to transfer me, and she let you believe I was dead.”

There’s little that Anika shares about her siblings. It’s strange to think of her as a little girl, begging for attention from her parents, or feeling scared after having a bad dream. It always seems like our parents are born as adults, and have no lives before they have children. Anika left home at an early age, and she never talks about why.

Verena was always jealous of me, Anika says, like it’s something to be proud of. I’m smarter than her, and that’s why I never struggled to support my family the way she did.

In a way, it was never about smarts at all. Aspen never wondered where her mother would have ended up if not for her husband. Mark, a university professor in his seventies, was a well-established man long before meeting Anika. Though she claims to have contributed to Mark’s finances, it really has nothing to do with her at all.

The woman stands, Mark’s hand on hers. Outside the house, Ciel talks on the phone.

“What’s in the envelope, Juno?”

“It’s a journal entry.” When Anika grasps at it, Juno moves away. She looks at Aspen in a way she hasn’t in a while; the look of an older sibling with a secret. “Pim wrote it. You never wanted Ivo to see it.” Something odd is happening. Anika looks, strangely, almost human.

Juno is taller than her, but not by much. It must be hard to act tough and strict all the time. Some people should never become parents. Aspen sometimes wonders how many possible paths her life could have taken, just by chance.

Anika sits, the harsh look on her face crumbling. Maybe, like others, Anika has trauma she never talks about. “Pim always was a great writer,” she says, letting her hands drop into her lap. “He could have made something of himself.”

“He loved you.” Juno isn’t the same soft-spoken woman she used to be. She stands tall and speaks bluntly, even when her mother looks upset. “He loved Ivo, too, but you never wanted him to know it. You feel responsible for his addiction. You think it’s your fault what happened.”

Mark stands, glancing at Juno sharply. “That’s enough.”

“But it’s too hard to blame yourself, and you couldn’t bear feeling guilty.” Juno’s kind of cool now. She doesn’t let anyone get a word in edgewise. “So you blamed Ivo instead, because it felt better to make Pim’s death someone else’s fault. He told you that he was struggling, and you never believed him”.

“That’s enough!”

It never used to be intimidating when Aspen’s father raised his voice. When he does it now, a wave of panic floods her, and everything goes blurry. Anika scurries upstairs, refusing to look back. With a disapproving look at Juno, Mark follows her.