Dying Is The Easy Part

Chapter Sixteen: January 26th

Quinn did, in fact, not spend the rest of their life kissing Luis Ortíz.

They didn't see him the day after. Or the day after that. Or the day after that until, suddenly, almost a week had passed.

It wasn't that Quinn was avoiding him. It was just that they didn't know what to do with this new thing between them, if it even was a thing at all. If it hadn't been for the damp clothes hanging over their chair the next morning and the scratchiness of their throat from the cold night air, they would have believed the kiss in the lake to be a very vivid dream.

Once it had set in that it wasn't, Quinn couldn't stop their heartbeat from stuttering every time they remembered. It was becoming a real problem; they would be sitting in a boring lecture, and suddenly they'd flash back to the way Luis had pulled them in by their waist, and they had to spend the next five minutes trying not to scream.

They simply couldn't face Luis in this state, especially not when they had no idea where he stood after all of this. He had texted them a few times—the last message had been a late-night selfie of him triumphantly holding the book on Chinese folklore. It looked like he'd taken it in bed, his hair mussed and his smile a little sleepy, wearing those goddamn glasses and a faded Jennifer's Body t-shirt. It had been three days and Quinn still hadn't recovered.

To take their mind off of things, they'd reverted to spending their evenings in the art building, listening to Vincent telling Hannah stories and talking until their eyelids felt too heavy to keep open.

That night, all the ghosts were present. Quinn was sitting cross-legged on one of the desks, their phone in their lap as around them, the others squabbled over who got to choose the next song. Over the last few hours, they had listened to a delightfully chaotic mix, from the Ramones (Joy performed a mean air guitar solo), over Bootylicious by Destiny's Child (Caleb and Josie danced in their little pajamas as if their afterlife depended on it) to My Funny Valentine by Frank Sinatra (Jun and Joy had swayed together while Vincent had spun a giggling Hannah through the aisle between the desks). Quinn didn't mind being their human aux and gladly indulged them, adding every new song to a playlist they'd made called Ghost Jams.

Presently, Jun was standing in front of them, looking at them with big puppy eyes as he asked, "Can you put on the Ghostbusters song?"

Quinn added it to the queue. "Was that movie already out while you were still alive?"

Jun almost looked a little offended. "It came out, like, three years before I d-worded. I watched it in the cinema with this girl from my school." He chuckled to himself. "I think she was trying to make a move on me all throughout the movie, but I was so absorbed I didn't even notice."

"She couldn't have been that interesting then," came Joy's snarky comment.

Jun turned to her with a grin, snaking an arm around her waist. "Jealous, baby? I can take you to the movies if you want. We still have a few days."

Joy gave an unimpressed snort, but didn't pull away. "Depends. Got any ghost snacks?"

"Uhm, hello?" Jun gestured down at himself. "Me. I'm the ghost snack."

Quinn stifled a chuckle. Out of all the ghosts, Jun was the one who had picked up the most modern slang. Two days earlier, he had quoted an old vine, making Quinn laugh so hard they'd choked on a sip of water while Vincent had watched in mild concern. By now, they were convinced that Jun would have most definitely run a meme page had he had access to the internet, and a popular one at that.

Ghostbusters started playing before Joy could reply. Quinn tuned the noise around them out as they unlocked their phone screen and opened the WeChat app. Two days earlier, they'd finally worked up the courage to message the number their mother had sent them, and since then, they'd been obsessively checking for replies. Worrying their bottom lip between their teeth, they skimmed their text again. They'd debated whether they should try to write it in Pinyin, but had given up after a few tries. Now, it read: