Even After Death, We Will Be Together

May 13

A sunny day. The kind of day when the school corridors fill with yellow light, reflecting off every surface. Once, that would have been nothing more than a small detail, an insignificant part of the surroundings. But now there were thirteen months left until we finished school, and after that I would never see or feel a moment like this again.

It seemed like everything would go on forever, but time had other plans. She was supposed to sit across the desk from me. Valya. Her name sounded so soft when spoken, never sharp, with the “l” making it even gentler. When she walked into the classroom, everything seemed to freeze. Her eyes darted around, searching for somewhere to sit, moving through the room at the speed of sound. Looking at her, everything else faded into the background. Reality split into two sides: us and everyone else.

She walked over to me and said the words that started everything:

“Hi. Can I sit here?” She held out her hand, and I nodded.

Her palm was warm, her voice calm, like a stone falling into water. It always seemed calm, even when someone picked that stone up and threw it away. The stone remained a stone.

Then biology class began, and if I remembered correctly, she liked the subject. We sat next to each other, and everything around us, at least for me, stopped mattering.

There were only a couple of variables necessary for happiness: her and life. Then something happened that I could never have expected. She started explaining the topics we were studying. I was terrible at the subject. Every time her voice said something about viruses or cells, I nodded along. Such a tiny thing, and dopamine still flooded my brain. She liked explaining things. Whenever she spoke and saw me nodding, a smile immediately appeared on her face.

The lesson was coming to an end. Today was the day we had to hand in our notebooks. Seeing that I had barely written anything down, she helped me, quickly drawing a cell diagram and writing down a few terms with their definitions. Her handwriting looked completely different from mine, so it wouldn’t have been hard to figure out who had been scribbling in my notebook, if anyone had bothered to investigate.

All day, thoughts about life kept interrupting everything except her.

May 14

The next day passed through a haze of gray. Even though the days before we met had been almost identical to this one, everything somehow felt different now. The squeak of chalk against the blackboard had become more irritating, and the food tasted bland. Had I really become so dependent on her mood? If she felt bad, I felt bad too. But she was actually unwell. What did that make me?

“Hi,” one of my classmates said, patting me on the shoulder while I sat in the assembly hall. “Why so miserable? Upset because Valya’s sick? Seriously? Forget about her, man. Look at her, she doesn’t talk to anyone. Just another quiet girl. And I’ll tell you something else, there are rumors about her that she…”

I silently watched his lips move, listening to what were probably lies about her. I didn’t understand why they spoke badly about her or disliked her so much.

She had gotten sick the day before. It had happened so suddenly. She had looked energetic and shown no signs of being ill. The days passed in a fog. Sunlight stopped making me happy. We talked through text messages. She had the flu. I offered to bring her something, but she refused, saying she was contagious.

I told a few friends about us. They had known about my feelings for her for a long time and mostly didn’t care. Some had disliked her from the beginning, some had talked to her and decided she was a bad person, and others had judged her based on a few things she had done.

May 21

At biology class, exactly 168 hours later, our notebooks were handed back. Her stylish notebook fell beside me, which gave me the perfect excuse to return it to her.

As soon as the bell rang for the last class, I changed my shoes and ran to see her, stopping at the gas station owned by an elderly couple to buy her favorite, intensely green, heavily carbonated drink.

“Hello, sweetheart. The usual?” the old woman behind the counter asked.

“No. I’m taking care of a girl. I came to get her favorite drink.”

She melted instantly at my words and started telling me how she had met her husband, who was at the doctor’s that day.

“It was the fifties. He came to me on a three-wheeled Jupiter, and we went riding around the city. All the girls were jealous that I’d caught such a handsome man. He spoiled me with all sorts of Soviet sweets, and then, as I remember it, we went up to a slope. I recommend you two go there sometime. We kissed there. It was magical,” she said, adjusting something on the shelf.

“Wow. Well, we’re still friends. We haven’t decided where we’re going yet.” I blushed as I said it.

“Oh, that’s how it always starts. First you’re friends, and then you’re married.” She stopped halfway through the sentence, realizing what she had just said.

Her words made me blush even harder.

“What’s her name?”

“Valya. She has… blonde hair, you know?”

“I know her. She sat with me many times when she was little. She was a fussy girl back then. Haven’t seen her in a long time. I suppose she’s busy,” the old woman said, looking back into her memories.

I nodded, left a large bill without waiting for the change, and ran to Valya’s courtyard.

She came outside looking completely different. Sweaty from the heat, exhausted, and sick.

She took the bottle, and the cold plastic touched her hot palm for a moment.

“You’re crazy,” Valya rasped. But despite the illness, that stubbornness I had been so afraid of losing had returned to her eyes. “I told you. I’m contagious.”

We sat on the bench beside the entrance. Sunlight poured into the courtyard, drawing patterns through the branches of the trees, but the view felt strangely empty. A sick person I loved was sitting beside me.

She opened the bottle. The fizz sounded like an explosion from some famous comet striking the Earth, just as sudden as it was inevitable.

She took a sip, squeezed her eyes shut at the bubbles, and suddenly said, “I’m lying here with the flu, and I could still be doing so much right now. Well, I could have been.”

“The wind’s blowing, you’re sitting here with me, drinking a cold drink I brought you while you’re sick with the flu... why?” I asked, pointing out her illness and looking at her bottle.

“Well, why do you think?” She gave a short laugh. “I rarely go outside, and at least now I have an excuse. Thanks for the notebook, by the way. How is school? Do they miss me?” Valya asked between coughs, taking another couple of sips.

“Everything’s the same as usual. Noise, chaos, exam prep. Some people play tennis, some wander around the school, others sit and talk. Basically, everyone’s making use of these fleeting moments of childhood,” I said with a short laugh.

“Do you ever think about how we’re only sixteen? Our whole lives are ahead of us, but after the exams we’ll all leave this place and never see each other again?” she said, sipping her drink, sniffling and coughing. A tear even rolled down her pink right cheek.

“I’ve never thought about it.” I lied. She was already feeling awful, and thinking about things like that would only make her life feel heavier. “We’ve still got plenty of time. A year and a half until the exams. Relax.”

“Yeah, haha. You’re right.” She smiled again and took another sip.

We stayed there for another ten minutes or so, talking about all kinds of things: the dancing she loved, martial arts, biology. Every subject she brought up felt like a new discovery in my world. They added something to the way I saw her. Every word she said did.

I walked her back to her apartment, we hugged, and I went home. Three weeks of talking, and we were already friends. Maybe something more.

At home, a message appeared on my phone:

Come again tomorrow, after school. I’ll be waiting.

Her text.

May 24

A few days later, she looked a little better. I bought her favorite drink again, and once we sat down on our favorite bench, we started talking.

“Listen, we’ve only known each other for three weeks, but I already like you.” She smiled warmly and gave a short laugh before taking a couple of sips. “But I know absolutely nothing about you. I don’t know why I sat down next to you that day. Maybe it was fate?” She smiled and laughed softly.

Her cough had become less frequent. I smiled at her words and said, “You still haven’t told me what kind of dancing you like or what martial art you practice.” I changed the subject because I had nothing to tell her. Nothing at all.

“Haha, right. I forgot, sorry. I do karate, and I dance hip-hop.” Smiling, she began explaining why she had chosen those things. “I just love life. Movement.”

“I only know the waltz. That’s it.”

“Well, dancing has different styles, and those styles have different dances. You know two styles, but people can dance them in completely different ways,” she said, switching on her personal Wikipedia, which I actually enjoyed listening to.

I caught every word and stored it in my memory.

“Wait,” I interrupted when she started explaining the difference between social and stage dancing. “So if I stand up right now and start waving my legs around, does that count as a style, or is it just me embarrassing myself?”

Valya laughed, and her laugh was almost completely clear now, without the rasp from the flu.

“That would count as your personal style.” She lightly nudged me with her shoulder. “But seriously... are you actually remembering all of this? Why do you need to know about hip-hop if you’ve only danced the waltz in your imagination?”

“You explain everything so interestingly that there’s no other way. It just sticks.”

We fell silent. The only sounds were birds singing and the distant hum of cars. The sunlight caught the edge of her jacket, and everything around us became a second world. In the first, there were only the two of us. Her and me.

“You really like the way I explain things?” she asked, this time without that little laugh before the question.

“Yes.”

Her expression changed. It became so...

“Cute.”

“What?”

“You seem...” I started, my voice trembling.

“Look, a plane.” She interrupted me. “Do you think I’m cute?”

I nodded, smiling, and she rested her head on my shoulder. We sat like that for a couple of minutes before remembering that her illness was contagious. But no infection could scatter this feeling, this moment.

“You... I like you,” I said.

“I like you too.”

Those words were sincere, real, and wanted.

“All right, go home already.” She reluctantly lifted her head from my shoulder, and I felt the spot where it had rested grow cold almost immediately.

“Otherwise tomorrow you’ll be lying in bed with a thermometer, drinking your green soda by yourself.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow.”

May 25

It was the kind of morning that made me wish I could wake up on this exact day forever, die at night and be reborn into it again. It was a wonderful time.

I was late for class. When I entered the room, I saw her sitting at our usual desk, waiting for me.

“Hi!” We greeted each other with our signature handshake, and I dropped into the seat beside her. “How are you? Fully recovered?”

“Yes. It’s so sweet of you to ask about my health.” She smiled again.

The teacher was droning on about mitosis and meiosis, but to me his voice was nothing more than background noise. I looked at Valya. She was no longer pale. Under the classroom lights, her skin looked almost golden.

“Hey, what would you name your pet?” Valya asked, lowering her voice so the teacher wouldn’t hear.

“I don’t know. What about you?”

“Mitosik or Meiosik.”

“Haha, after the ways cells divide?”

“Oh, you remembered that from when I explained it to you.”

“I told you. I remember everything.”

What we had between us had become lighter than a feather, so calm and without any hidden thoughts. Just warm.

She moved her notebook toward me. In the margins, beside a neat diagram, she had drawn a tiny person wearing a cap and holding a purple bottle.

“That’s you,” she giggled. “My personal soda supplier.”

“Listen.” Valya suddenly stopped smiling and looked seriously at the cell diagram. “You said you only knew the waltz. That’s... well, it’s slow. Classical.”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “They taught us at some school event back in middle school. One-two-three, one-two-three. Boring.”

Valya narrowed her eyes mischievously and moved a little closer, close enough for me to smell her shampoo. Something floral, completely different from the medicinal smell she’d had around the apartment entrance.

“I’ll teach you how to groove. Hip-hop is different. You don’t have to count the steps. You have to feel the beat. Want to try after class? The assembly hall is usually open, or we can just go behind the school where the asphalt is flat.”

I nodded, and a spark lit up in her eyes.

Classes ended. We went to the principal to ask if we could use the hall for a few minutes, but we were refused, so we headed to her apartment. The asphalt where we’d been sitting was flat enough, so we got to work.

“Okay, move like this. Now like this. Haha.”

Every movement I made looked ridiculous. People watched us from their windows, hearing music from the speaker and observing our little lesson.

“Stop looking around!” Valya clapped her hands, pulling my attention back to her. “Let them watch. They’re just jealous.”

She stepped closer and, shouting over the bass, began showing me a sequence of arm movements. Her jacket came open, her hair became messy, and in that moment she seemed to embody some kind of force.

“Repeat after me. Down, lock, turn. Come on!”

I tried. This time my knee didn’t crack, and my arm moved exactly where it was supposed to. Valya froze for a second, then shouted excitedly:

“Did you see that?! That was awesome!”

Her genuine happiness over my tiny success was worth having the whole city watching us. In that moment I realized I didn’t care about the windows. The only thing that mattered was that the spark in her eyes had become even brighter.

We practiced different movements for several hours.

“It’s getting late. We should stop,” she said, sitting down on our favorite bench, exhausted and damp with sweat.

I dropped onto the asphalt, exhaled every bit of air from my lungs, closed my eyes, and relaxed.

“Going to sleep already? We’ve still got a ton to do.” She laughed after saying it, making it clear that she was joking.

I smiled, and when she saw it, she continued.

“Exams tomorrow. Get up, you overslept!” Those stupid and completely sincere jokes felt real.

I got up and sat beside her.

“Remember when you asked if we’d eventually go our separate ways?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

I hadn’t known what to answer back then, so I changed the subject.

“You know, I think we’ll be together forever. I’m sure of it. We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us. We’ll make so many plans together. When summer comes, we’ll dance in the mornings and watch anime and movies in the evenings.”

She smiled wider with every word, her eyes glowing. Before I could finish, she hugged me tightly, and I felt all her warmth, all the positive energy coming from her, from her very soul.

“Promise me that even after we die, we’ll still be together?” Valya asked, looking at me with that piercing gaze.

“I promise.”

“What do you promise?”

“Wait, you already sa—”

She pressed her index finger to my lips.

“Think about it,” she said with a grin.

“I promise that even after we die, we’ll still be together.”

She smiled, and her expression never changed for the rest of that day.

I followed her example.