“So you—you’re not Bloody Mary?”
“I mean, not in the historical sense, no. But my name isMary. Well, Rosemary, actually, but I guess the afterlife isn’t super specific. My theory is that the Bloody Mary game can summon anyone named Mary who’s recently died, which is how I ended up filling in the role for now. Like a mall Santa.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Who were you, then?”
I spend the summer between junior and senior year with Rosemary.
In life, Rosemary was a senior at a small arts high school in a suburb of Chicago. She had two parents and two brothers and a dog named Chiquitita, after the ABBA song, and she got her driver’s license a year late because she kept hitting curbs during the driving test. She loved painting and comic books and every Laffy Taffy flavor except banana, and she was in the process of choosing a college based on which campus neighbored the best restaurants. She misses food a lot.
When I google her name and the accident, there’s an article about her being found unresponsive by a construction worker and rushed to the hospital, but I close it before I finish reading. I don’t look her up again. She never watched me pee, so I owe her some privacy, too.
I make myself bowls of cereal and bring them up to my bathroom and describe to her the tooth-aching sweetness of Lucky Charms marshmallows. I dig out an ancient Mad Libsbook from behind my bookshelf, and we do the whole thing, one page a day, and she laughs so hard blood comes out of her nose, which is gross but also kind of cute. I get my dad to install a pull-up bar in the bathroom doorway so I can work out while she tells me about French impressionism. I teach her dances from TikTok, and she draws gruesome little pictures of flowers on the mirror with her fingertip and makes me guess what they are, which is impossible, because the only color she can use is internal-organ red.
She still drips a lot. She’s not really in charge of the dripping. I’ve asked.
At some point around July, I have no choice but to accept that my first and only best friend is the blood-soaked corpse who lives in my bathroom mirror. And also that I might have a crush on her.
When I finally get my own driver’s license, I take myself to the mall with all the cash I’ve been saving up in my sock drawer and buy myself three new button-ups and bring them home to try on for Rosemary. They’re a size or two too big, and when I tuck them into my jeans, I have that feeling again. I look like myself. She applauds in a shower of hemoglobin, and it feels so good that I practice wearing my new clothes with her every day, building up my nerve for when school starts again.
It’s strange, the way she’s forced me to spend so much more time with my own reflection than I ever have. It was easy, at first, to avoid her, because I’d spent most of my life avoiding the mirror, but now I’m always looking atRosemary, which means I’m always looking at myself. I start finding new things to like—the extra inch I’ve grown since last year, the way my biceps have started filling out, the short tufts of ginger hair I trim from the nape of my neck every few weeks.
Most of all, I like the way my reflection looks next to her. I like the contrast between my summer tan from long runs through the neighborhood and her gray-green-gold funereal pallor. I like how I’m taller than her, so if I wanted to and it was physically possible and she weren’t literally covered in human entrails, I could gently lean my temple against the crown of her head. I like that she looks like a girl, and that next to her, I don’t.
I like how I feel when I look at her, and she makes me like how I feel when I look at me.
One night, I climb up onto the counter and curl into a ball on my side, lying horizontal with most of my butt in the sink. The edge of the porcelain digs into my rib cage, but it’s nice to look at Rosemary and feel something physical for once, an insistent press into my side.
I don’t really understand how it’s possible, but she matches me, laying her cheek against the bottom edge of the mirror. We stay there, face-to-face, inches apart. When I breathe out, it fogs the glass in short blooms, and I swear I can see the shadow of it flood her face each time, like the mirror is just a window with a lost girl on the other side.
“I wish I could touch you,” I whisper.
She wraps one bloody hand around her own arm and squeezes.
“Do what I do,” she says.
I touch my own shoulder with my hand, and then I follow her movements. She traces her hand down to her elbow, her forearm, her wrist, and I do the same. She slides her palm up the side of her own neck, leaving a fresh, wet streak of blood over the dried patches on her skin, and I touch my own warm pulse.
She touches her cheek, and I touch mine. If I close my eyes, it could be her hand, her fingertips brushing my ear.
Slowly, she stretches her red fingers out and presses them against her side of the glass. I match my hand to hers, and even though the glass is ice-cold, I know the viscera smeared on the other side is the same temperature as my body heat. Somewhere, for the moment that our hands meet, she’s alive.
“Can I kiss you?” she asks me.
“Yeah,” I say.
Her breath doesn’t cloud the glass like mine did when she leans close to it, so I can see every detail of her face. I can see each of her eyelashes and the places where they’re clotted together, every fleck of red on her throat, the soft corners of her smirk.
When I put my lips to the glass, my first kiss tastes like iron and something else, something sweet.
Maybe Laffy Taffy.
I should be happy for Rosemary when I wake up a month into senior year and she’s gone. She shouldn’t have to be trapped in a mirror for all of her afterlife, no matter how much I’ve liked having her there.
After a month, I give up wondering if she’s ever coming back.
