The Dead Boy's Guide To Second Chances

4. liminal

TWO MONTHS AND TWENTY DAYS AFTER THE DEATH OF OLIVER SALLOW

What makes a tragedy tragic?

Oliver has always thought that it's the preventability of it all. The lover kills himself in vain over a girl with a heart still beating. A soldier smothers his faithful wife over a misplaced handkerchief. A boy drives his motorcycle into a tree because he forgot to put in his contacts.

It's been almost three months now since that night. Three months of seminars and flyers and the world's most macabre round of icebreakers in which they each stated their manner of death in place of fun facts. Three months of pointedly not looking into Finn O'Connell's file. Three months of living in the HALO headquarters.

They're lodged in a Victorian mansion atop the White Cliffs of Dover that is visible and accessible only to Angels and In-Betweeners like him. Oliver thinks there are worse places to stay. When he can't sleep, he listens to the soft whooshing of the waves as they crash against chalk. When he feels like he's going to buzz out of his skin, he walks to the very edge of the cliffs and sits down, long legs dangling above the drop, tempting a death that has already claimed him.

It's poetic in a way. (To Oliver, most things are; months of A-Level English Lit have conditioned him into trying to find a meaning even where there is none.) Like Oliver's existence, the cliffs are liminal. They mark the boundary between Britain and continental Europe; the land and the sea; the transition between the known and the unknown.

On the guided tour along the premises that Dana took Oliver and the other recruits on during his first week, she pointed out the lighthouse perched in St. Margaret's Bay. "Back in the day, it was used to help ships safely reach the coast," she told them. "I want you to think of yourselves like lighthouses. Bright and tall and steadfast."

She said more—things about their responsibility and about being beacons of light for their assignees—but Oliver wasn't listening anymore. Instead, he stared down at the wild slate-grey waters and thought about the copy of King Lear on his bedside table back at the Walkers' house.

He still thinks about it every time he's here. So, apparently, does Dana.

"There is a cliff, whose high and bending head looks fearfully in the confined deep," she quotes in a deep pitch as she comes up behind him.

"Bring me to the very brim of it, and I'll repair the misery thou dost bear," finishes Oliver. He watches her sit down next to him with a faint smile. "Did you memorize that line just for me? I'm touched."

"I knew you'd like that," Dana laughs. She gives him a quick once-over, taking in the way his black coat billows behind him in the wind, his long hair whipping around his face as he looks out at the sea. "Every time I find you out here, I think I've landed in a Caspar David Friedrich painting."

"First Shakespeare, now the German Romantic movement?" Oliver fans himself with one hand. "Keep talking and this will get proper romantic indeed."

Dana laughs again, a bright sound that gets carried off by a gust almost as soon as it leaves her mouth. It's an obvious joke for several reasons. One: the fact that Dana is a lesbian and Oliver very much gay. Two: the tiny problem of him being hopelessly hung-up on his ex-boyfriend. Three: the whole being dead thing, he supposes.

"I have to butter you up for what I'm about to say next," Dana says.

Abruptly, Oliver's smile falls. His eyes drop down to her lap, where she's holding Finn's file. On the cover, there's Operation HALO's guideline, ANGEL. It's an acronym that Oliver had to learn by heart within his first week here.