Reaper House: Freshman Year, First Semester by Jennifer KL Wolf

“Put her back.”

“I can’t. Not this time. It’s too late.”

I don’t know whose voices these are. There’s no shape to them — no faces, no bodies, nothing my eyes can find to land on. Just two voices, arguing about me, somewhere I can’t locate and can’t leave.

That’s where this actually starts, though it takes me a minute to catch up to it. Let me back up.

I am seventeen years old, and I am watching a paramedic press both hands against my chest, and I am not in my chest anymore.

That’s the part nobody tells you. That there’s a gap. One second I’m gripping the wheel and the world is tilting sideways in a smear of headlights, and the next I’m hovering just above the wreckage, close enough to touch, looking down at a girl in a marching band hoodie with blood in her hair, and the girl is me, and I am not there.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey, I’m right here.”

Nobody looks up.

There are three of them working on me — on her — hands moving fast, someone counting out loud, someone else pressing something against my mouth. My mom’s hoodie is still zipped all the way up, the way I had it when I left the house. That detail shouldn’t matter this much. It’s the only thing about her that still looks right.

“I can hear you,” I tell the paramedic closest to my head. He’s got a buzz cut and a wedding ring and he is saying words like no pulse and charging into a radio clipped to his shoulder, and none of those words are for me, they’re about me, and there’s a difference, and I am starting to understand the difference in a way I don’t want to.

I try to touch his shoulder. My hand goes through him like he’s smoke and I’m the one who isn’t real.

Twenty minutes ago I was arguing with Dani about whether Mr. Castellano was going to assign summer reading homework on the first actual day of school, which felt like the single most unfair thing that could happen to a person, and now I am hovering over my own open eyes and they are not blinking and there is a siren getting louder and I am screaming that I’m fine, I’m right here, would somebody please just look at me —

My phone lights up again against the cracked windshield. MOM — 3 MISSED CALLS, the screen says, and under it a text preview lights up too: Gwen, you almost home? Nobody in that ambulance thinks to answer either one.

The paramedic sits back on his heels.

He says a time. 7:42.

He says it the way you’d read out a number on a form, and someone else writes it down, and I understand before I want to that the number is when I stopped, and that from this point forward everyone standing on that road is going to keep living and I am not going to be one of the people who does that anymore.

My phone is still going off in the wreckage of my bag. Dani, probably. Or my mom, checking if I’m almost home.

I try to scream again and nothing comes out that anyone can hear, and the world does something I don’t have a word for — it doesn’t go dark, it doesn’t go bright, it just stops being available to me, like a door swinging shut on a room I was never invited back into.

There is no road anymore. There is no siren.

There is a hallway.

It’s long, and it’s built out of something that isn’t quite stone and isn’t quite glass, dark and faintly reflective, so that when I look down I can see myself walking — not floating, walking, my sneakers striking the floor and making actual sound, and the sound is the single most comforting thing I have ever heard.

I’m still wearing the hoodie. The zipper’s broken now, snagged open at the collar like something caught it on the way through, and I don’t remember that happening. It wasn’t broken when I left the house. It wasn’t broken twenty minutes ago, gripping the wheel, arguing about summer reading. Whatever’s wrong with it happened somewhere between the road and here, in the part I didn’t get to see.

The hallway doesn’t end so much as it opens, the way a throat opens into a room, and I step through it into a space too big to belong to any building I’ve ever stood in. Ceilings that don’t resolve into a shape. Light that doesn’t come from anywhere I can point to. Doors — dozens of them, hundreds, set into walls that curve out of sight in both directions, each one a different material, different height, different age, like someone built an entire university out of doors salvaged from a thousand other buildings and never bothered matching them.

There are other kids here.

Not many, not at first. A boy about my age leaning against a wall made of what looks like bone, arms crossed, watching everything with an expression like he’s already bored of it. A girl sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed, lips moving, counting something only she can hear. None of them look surprised to be here. None of them look like they just watched a paramedic call a time of death over their own body, the way I’m pretty sure I still do.

Someone in a long gray coat approaches carrying a clipboard, and the clipboard is the single most normal object I have seen since I left my body on the pavement, and for one absurd second I almost laugh.

“Name,” they say. Not unkind. Just tired, like they’ve said it eleven thousand times today, and I am number eleven thousand and one.

“Guinevere.” I don’t offer the short version. Gwen is for people who’ve earned it, and nobody here has earned anything yet.

They run a finger down a list, frown, run it down again. Flip a page. Flip it back.

“That’s not possible,” they murmur, mostly to themselves. Their voice is flat, certain — the voice of someone who has never once been wrong about this before — and it makes the back of my neck go cold in a place that shouldn’t be able to feel cold anymore.

And there it is again. That same certainty I heard in the second voice, back before any of this had a hallway or a clipboard attached to it. I can’t. Not this time. It’s too late. I still don’t know whose voice that was. But I’m starting to think it knew this exact moment was coming before I did.

They flip the clipboard around so I can see it.

There’s a line near the bottom of the page, under a heading that says LIVES COMPLETED.

The number typed next to my name is 47.

I stare at it. I look up at them. I look back down at the number like it might rearrange itself into something that makes sense if I just wait long enough.

“That has to be a typo,” I say.

The person in the gray coat doesn’t answer. They’re already turning, already lifting a hand toward someone across the hall — another coat, another clipboard, someone with more authority than they have — and their voice, when it comes, isn’t loud, but it cuts through every other sound in that enormous room like a struck bell.

“I need someone to explain to me,” they say, “how a seventeen-year-old girl has died forty-seven times.”

Every head in the hallway turns toward me at once.

And that’s when a boy in a black coat — the only person in the entire cavernous room who doesn’t look surprised — pushes off the wall he’s been leaning against, crosses the floor in six unhurried steps, and plants himself directly between me and every single person now staring.

“She’s mine,” he says.

Nobody argues.

I have never seen any of these people before in my life. I don’t know his name. I don’t know where I am, or what I am, or how I have apparently died forty-six more times than anyone bothered mentioning to me while I was busy being seventeen and arguing about summer reading.

But the boy in the black coat looks down at me like he’s been waiting a very long time for this exact moment, and he says, quiet enough that only I can hear it:

“Welcome back.”

Finding your place.

Episode 1

Jennifer KL Wolf

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