She wakes up wishing whoever killed her did it properly.

Her head aches. More accurately, the back of her head aches. The wound above her heart pulses under the bandage she’s taped over it, and the hand Jaslene lifts above her head shakes as she reaches for her phone.

6:51 it reads. Either she slept through her 6:30 alarm, or she forgot to set it.

Jaslene groans and drops her phone back onto her bedside table, then rolls over to curl up and quietly suffer her pain.

Being dead is supposed to be painless. At the very least, that’s what the world’s been promising her since her grandfather died when she was seven years old and barely knew any Filipino. She wishes she knew who to fight for lying to her about that, but the thought of moving makes her want to scream, so Jaslene settles for curling up even more and whimpering.

Forget period cramps, dead pains sucked way worse.

“Peapod, you awake?” Jaslene’s dad gently cracks open the door to peek in, the steps in when Jaslene only groans in response. “Hey, Jazzy, you feeling okay?”

“My stomach and head hurts. If I move I’ll probably puke.”

He backs up a step and smiles at her glare. “Alright,” he says, “I’ll call you in sick and leave some meds for you, okay? Call me or mom if you need anything.”

Jaslene barely nods, but it’s enough for her dad to pull the covers over her, hand her the elephant pillow pet she always cuddles with when she’s sick, and leaves quietly.

The wound on her chest pulses and aches; no, it’s her heart, breaking over the love her family holds that’ll shatter the moment they have to bury her. She wants to cry at the thought, but squeezes her pillow pet harder and tries to fall back asleep.

---

Aya hates calling. So having her leaving a voicemail has alarm bells ringing in Jaslene’s head before she’s properly awake.

She forces herself to sit up and rub the sleep out of her eyes. A curious hand brushing the back of her aching head comes back red with blood, but all it does is get a grimace before it’s ignored for the more important fact that Aya called her.

The message it timestamped at 10:43. It’s 12:08. Added to the string of text notifications waiting for her attention, Jaslene feels sick with worry as she plays the message and holds her phone up to her ear.

“Hey, Jaslene. I’ve been texting you for a while but you haven’t even read any of my messages and you didn’t show up for school, so I’m really worried. I’m guessing your sick, so I’ll be by after soccer with any makeup work for you. Just, um, let me know if you’re okay? Just hit up the group squad so we can all calm down. I’ll see you later.”

There’s a moment of silence, then the static-y sound of a sigh before the message ends. Jaslene echoes the sigh and runs a hand through her hair, a small part of her thankful that Aya didn’t tell her to let them know if she’s still alive. All the death jokes they make are going to bite her in the ass, she already knows.

Her hand drifts back to the source of her headache and idly tugs at the bloodstained hair as she opens the group chat at starts composing a message.

>Hey guys, i’m super sick. Not sure if i’ll be back tomorrow, but i’ll be good soon.

                                                                                                             Jazzy frog, 12:13pm

>WE WERE SO WORRIED but also get well soon we love u <3

                                                                                                                  gay egg, 12:17pm

>guess the funerals off guys

                                                                                                         Sports drink, 12:17pm

>damn, i was looking forward to that. we were gonna play africa by toto

                                                                                                                  bigfoot, 12:18pm

>I’ll bring u a sick mask so we can match >;3

                                                                                                 living anime, 12:19pm

Despite the general pain and misery Jaslene was drowning in, she couldn’t help but laugh at her friends messages, and their dumb chat names. The thought of losing them all, or rather, all of them losing her, lingered at the edge of her thoughts, but Jaslene pushed it away, forcing herself out of bed to start functioning again.

The house is empty. It’s not surprising, considering it’s the middle of a Tuesday.

It’s the perfect time for her to look for the place where she woke up and try to piece together the events of the night. She needs to know how she died, and where she died in order to bury her body and move on. It’s the way ghosts moved on, Jaslene remembers, as they always did in her mother’s stories. It’s basic mythology everyone knows: the dead will linger until they are properly put to rest.

Jaslene swallows down the pills her dad left for her, then heads to the bathroom for a quick shower. The water turns pink with blood, so she hurries out to reapply the bandages. She’s already figured out what to do from yesterday: slam on the biggest bandages they own, then wrap everything in sports tape to keep it in place.

It goes fine until blood rolls down the back of her neck.

She shivers, then fights through the sudden nausea as she wipes it away. The handheld mirror they keep in one of the drawers is small, but it’s enough for Jaslene to see most of the back of her head when she holds it up.

At first glance, everything seems fine. It takes a minute of shifting through her short curls before she finds the the small bump, covered in blood as dark as her hair.

Things start sliding into place: someone hurt her. Someone knocked her out, then killed her. Did they kill her while she was unconscious, or did they wait until she woke up?

Jaslene feels a little grateful that she doesn’t remember the details of her murder, but hates that she has to seek out these answers to properly die. Why did she have to be stuck as a living ghost after she’s been murdered? And why should she have to investigate her own death? That’s just rude. She’s a high school senior, she knows how to nap during a test and still pass, not how to figure out where someone died. The whole situation is awful.

It sucks ass, as Tomàs would say.

Still, Jaslene stucks in a breath then puts a smaller bandage over it. She pulls a cap over it once she’s dressed so none of the bandages can be seen, then slips on her shoes to go explore the neighborhood and hopefully find her corpse.

Game on, she thinks, and then she’s gone.