(song: "Again" - Noah Cyrus)

"Logan, come here and blow out your candles."

     I open my eyes and see the ceiling of my living room.

     How did I get here? And who is calling me?

     My arms push the rest of my weight up until I can see over the couch. My grandmother stands in the candle leaning over a 3-tier confetti birthday cake loaded with multi-colored candles. She looks just the way she did before she got sick. Her hair is in loose silver waves around her shoulders and she wears her favorite navy cardigan and khakis. She smiles with a warm tenderness that breaks down my mental walls.

     "Grams?" I ask in disbelief.

     She beckons me with a wave. "Come on, the candles are going to melt."

     Who cares about candles? I dash towards her at full speed until I'm able to hug her. She chuckles and pats down my hair. It makes me feel like I'm a little kid again.

     "I missed you so much," I tell her and it's a total understatement.

     Grams ruffles my hair this time and gives me a few finger jags against my rib cage. "You have to make a wish before you can blow them out."

     "I wish you were alive," the words quickly leave my lips, and then the reality sets in.

     My grandmother is dead. She's been dead for several years. If she is here and I am here, does that mean. . . I'm dead too?

     Grams isn't bothered the least bit, she continues to be the calm and nurturing woman she always was. "Make a real wish and then get back to her. She needs you."

     "What?"

     She tilts her head and her eyes see right through me. "You need to be more honest, Honey. Honest with yourself. You don't love Kaylee, do you?"

     I've never been able to lie to those eyes.

     "I like her a lot. I'm attracted to her."

     "But you don't love her," she clarifies.

     "No. I love that she makes me feel like I'm worth loving." I put a small amount of distance between Grams and myself.  "Grams since you left, I've felt so low. Dad is gone all the time and without you, Mom changed. She became distant and now with Aunt Jude sick like you were sick, I don't think she'll be the same."

     "Humans aren't animals," she says. Her arms gently turn me towards the counter. "We look at the stars and space and question our existence. We look for reasons, meaning and purpose. We seek either an afterlife or an acceptance of oblivion. We feel in deep and complicated ways. We can even fall in love and not even know it . . ."

     I look back at the birthday cake. The candles are almost melted down to the icing. The layer is spread thin, just the way I like it. I've never been a frosting kind of kid. I try to think of a wish deep inside me.

     What do I really want?

     "I wish . . . that I'll be able to keep my promise to Serena. I really do want everything to be okay. I want there to be more tri-weekly movie nights and comparing the styles of directors. Because for the first time, since you died, there's someone who I feel really understands me. And I guess I want to fight for that."

     Grams smiles and points at the flames.

     I take a deep breath and I blow them out.

I hear a car engine going at full speed. Gravel rocks bang loudly against the metal doors and it takes a second for me to take in my surroundings.

     Car ceiling, backseat, not dead.

     If I'm in the backseat, then that means . . . Serena is driving? But Serena can't drive.

     "Serena?" I ask with a dry voice.

     Serena releases a few short bursts of screams, twisting the wheel to avoid hitting things. Her face is full of tears, but they're not of sadness. "Oh my god, Logan! Never do that to me again. I was so scared that you were dead."

     I rub the back of my head and try to sit up. It feels like a migraine. "Last thing I remember, I was on the ground, and either I got shot or a meteor hit me."

     "Neither of those things happened. The meteor did hit close by and there was a lot of fire and debris. You got hit by a rock, so did that crazy guy. I dragged you into the car and tried my best to get us away from there."

     "You rescued me?" I poke my head between the driver's seat and the passenger seat. "I'm sorry for making you go through that."

     "You're apologizing for saving my life twice?" She looks back to smile at me. "And look, another promise kept, you helped me learn how to drive. You really know how to impress a girl."

     I know she's joking, but something feels different. No, it's me that's different. I suddenly have an acute awareness that Serena is really important to me. She isn't just my best-friends girlfriend, or my girlfriends best-friend.

     "It wasn't a mistake," I say.

     "Getting hit in the head by a rock wasn't a mistake?" she asks puzzled.

     "I wasn't trying to save Kaylee. Your skin feels completely different from hers. Even if I was panicked and stressed, I know the difference between your hand and hers."

     She's silent. She keeps her eyes on the dirt road stretched out in front of her and I can feel her emotionally shrinking away from me.

     I don't care, I have to be honest.

     "I didn't save the wrong girl, Serena. You say humans are impulsive, you're right. I was impulsively trying to save someone that I care about. I couldn't save my grandmother from cancer, but I can save you."

     She inhales and tightly holds her teeth together. "Stop, Logan."

     "I know this is not the time or place to say all this stuff with the sky falling apart and society descending into chaos, but I don't want to stop our movie nights and I don't want to invite Peter or Kaylee to them."

     "STOP!" she pleads. "Just stop talking!"

     I climb over the middle and into the passenger seat so we're sitting together instead of apart. Serena blinks hard to fight off angry tears and her brows knit with frustration. She's so guarded and she has every right to be. Just because I admitted this to her doesn't change the fact that we're involved with other people.

     "I'm going to break up with Kaylee. I'm sure she's already mad at me—"

     "Kaylee and Peter could be DEAD!" She shouts. Her hands grip tighter to the wheel and her shoulders tremble. "And the last thing they saw before they probably died was their best friends betraying them. So good for us that we didn't make a mistake in being traitors."

     "You didn't betray them, it was all me."

     "No, Logan. It wasn't all you. You didn't drag me away, I walked away with you." She tries to wipe at the tears on her cheeks and acts like she's mad at them. "After the call with your dad, I saw the look on your face and I knew something bad happened. I thought you grabbed me by mistake, and I said to myself 'it doesn't matter that he thinks I'm Kaylee, wherever he's going, I want to go there too'. It wasn't an impulse. I could have stopped walking down the hallway, or turned around and gone back into the library. I could have slapped your face and ran to Peter or Kaylee. I didn't, because I was scared of staying there if you weren't there."

     Our gazes meet again and this time it's different. Her brown eyes are electric and fierce. They're so . . . incredibly beautiful—she is incredibly beautiful.

     "Maybe if I had been the new girl, who didn't know Kaylee, things would have turned out differently. But what we did was selfish and wrong and the only way my conscience can be clear about it is if we don't try to feel anything beyond the friendship we've had. If they're dead, I'd never forgive myself. So, please Logan, stop talking."

     "Okay," I concede. "No talking."

     And so we don't talk. Serena pulls over and I claim the drivers seat again. We remain in total silence until we near Provo. There we're finally able to get off private roads and onto back roads again. Our food rations are okay for now, but we only have one more canister of gas left. We'd been able to refill them before the incident in Salt lake city, but now—after seeing part of the city on fire—the nation has to be on high alert. I didn't even want to think about what must be happening in the big cities that we're trying our best to avoid.

     "We're behind schedule, aren't we?" Is the first thing Serena says to me in two hours.

     I nod. "Yeah, between sleeping in too long and taking all those private roads we're really behind."

     "That's not good. How are we going to refill the cans?" She looks apprehensive like she already knows what I'm going to say.

     "Along the main highways, there's a lot of abandoned cars. Maybe I can siphon gas from them."

     "That's such a big risk, Logan."

     "So is not making it to Texas. Look behind us, the meteor shower is worse in the north than the south, and every day it feels like it's traveling further down. We have to make it to Texas tonight at any cost. You can drive now, we can take turns sleeping if we have to, but first we'll need gas."

     She tips down her head and sighs. "I'm not going to let you risk your life by yourself. If you need to siphon gas I'm going to be with you."

     I force out a smile and know better than to refuse her. "Okay, together then."

     Serena chews at her lower lip adorably. Her left arm rests on the space between us and her fingers hold onto the top of a water bottle resting in the cup holder. I reach for the water, not because I need it, but because I need an excuse to touch her.

     Our hands connect and she doesn't pull away. Now that I can recall it, she's never pulled back from being close to me. From the first day we met, even as strangers sitting in a movie theater, we were comfortable with each other.

     The tip of my index finger brushes hers. The side of her middle finger tries to interlock with mine. Digit-by-digit we move from the bottle to holding hands—really holding hands. Not in a kind or friendly way, but in an intimate and needing sort of way.

     I don't want to let her hand go—ever.