Page 47 of Unalive On Air

“Surely the whole point of unfinished business is like a burning need to achieve something that you failed to do in life?” He asks it like a question, and I have to agree with him, but honestly, I have no idea.

“I would expect so.”

“So, surely if I had any unfinished business, I’d already know what it was? Wouldn’t I be like, ‘Oh, I must avenge my father’ or something?” Again, he’s asking me as though I have answers.

I so badly want to be the one to provide them. “Have you tried speaking to Camille? For someone who hasn’t even been dead a year, they seem to know a lot about ghosts,” I suggest instead.

“Camille’s also team ‘unfinished business is bullshit,’ but . . .” Trystan rocks the tip of his flip-flop over a rogue shell on the hut floor. It doesn’t move exactly, but it does gently seesaw before coming to a standstill again. “I’ve been like half wondering for a while if . . . Jeanie’s onto something. That . . . ‘moving on’ wouldn’t be so bad . . .”

His words slowly sink in. I open my mouth to speak. Close it. “You want me to figure out who killed you in the hopes that you’ll . . . float off to the after-afterlife?”

Trystan can’t look me in the eye. He sucks that perfectly plump bottom lip of his into his mouth and rolls it under his incisors. “Honestly? . . . Maybe. I know I said last night that being dead wasn’t all that bad, but . . .”

“No, I get it,” I say, tamping down the weird new ache throbbing inside my chest. “You were just trying to reassure me.”

I think about him greeting the youngsters at the hut yesterday evening, and about the life he left behind, the surf competitions that stopped happening here out of respect for his death, the family that no longer visits, and I understand.

Fuck, I’d feel the same. Thirty years of being imprisoned in a building you can barely interact with. Thirty years with those other ghosts. Granted Pixie, Jeanie, and Camille seem okay, but I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to pretend I like the others for an eternity.

Trystan looks me directly in the eyes. I want him to say, “Just kidding! Actually, being dead is a total lark. Let’s be ghost besties forever.” Instead, he bows his head and says, “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been unalive for so long, and I’m so tired. It’s not all bad, I promise. You’ll enjoy it—well, some of it . . . for a while, but you understand?”

“I do.” Unfortunately, I’m very well-versed in the sensation of unending hopelessness. That feeling of being trapped by your own thoughts and the knowledge that really, genuinely, there is only one way out.

Is it suicidal ideation if he’s already dead? Or is it simply a common wish of the afterlife to “move on?” Will that make me a—sort of—murderer or just a friend helping another friend?

My head hurts.

“Please don’t tell the others,” he says.

“I won’t.”

And I guess it’s not up to me. If Trystan wants off this ride, Trystan wants off. Who am I to deny him that? Did I not spend a huge chunk of my youth campaigning for my grandmother’s autonomy over her death? What’s the difference?

It feels crap, though. I feel crappy. I’ve only just entered the ghostdom, and the one person I thought could actually turn out to be a friend is essentially using me to end his own afterlife.

Maybe “using me” is the wrong choice of words, but I honestly felt like we had, or could have, some kind of connection.

Probably best to solve the murders as quickly as I can, then. That way I don’t risk developing any emotional attachments that I might later come to regret. I’ve been rejected my fair share in life, in increasingly more creative ways, but literally evanescing to get away from me takes the biscuit.

Man, I miss biscuits.

“Okay, let’s do this,” I say, clapping my hands together to blast away the doom clouds building inside my thoughts. “Let’s solve your murder. You can, of course, change your mind at any time, okay? Just let me know.”

“Thank you. I will do.” Trystan places his hand on my shoulder.

I shuck it and step away.

“Where do you want to start?” he asks.

“Franny Driscoll. She’s high on my list of potential suspects. She seems to have been present, or nearby, at every one of these deaths. She discovered your body in the trophy room, as well as Pixie’s and Stove’s, and was the first to uncover Jeanie’s disappearance. It’s become a reoccurring pattern.” I accidentally slip into my radio presenter voice. “And you know what I say about reoccurring patterns?”

Trystan’s eyes light up. “It might as well be a flashing neon arrow,” he says, quoting from my show.

“And then, I don’t know if there’s any way to observe Angel, but I’d like to pay them a visit.”

“Angel’s funeral home is just outside my boundaries. In fact, I think only Jeanie’s and Peter’s boundaries stretch out that wide. I’ve never met him, but I have only heard bad things.”

“Oh, really?” I say, my intrigue finally overriding this weird sense of premature loss. “And Angel’s a he?” I hadn’t known. “Is Angel his Christian name?”