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“Maybe Margaret has an ideal candidate in mind for the Natural Causes department. When I was up there for lunch a while back, they were complaining about being short-staffed.”

“And you’re thinking Carter?”

“He’s the only one who has a steady work history and no criminal record,” said Jack. “No offense, Eli.”

This garnered no response from the Eli in question beyond the subtle twitch of the muscles in his jaw.

“I’m thinking we get Carter into his office and see what he can find,” Jack finished triumphantly, letting his brilliance hang in the air until it was inevitably swept away by the adulation of his friends. Dale was already offering an enthusiastic head nod, but as the silence stretched, no one else seemed particularly eager to fill it. Was it his new voice? It didn’t have quite the gravitas of his old one, sure, but there was something to be said for a bit of rasp, even despite the nasal quality that came with it. Or maybe it was hard to see authority in someone a full toddler shorter than anyone else in the group. He decided to chalk it up to pure and simple ageism in the end, which he’d have to take up with them at some point. After all, he’d be very old for the rest of the foreseeable future, and it felt pertinent to stick up for his newfound community.

Carter arrived a short while later, arms full of Chinese takeout bags from the order Jack had placed online. The You Agains filled the plush high-backed chairs around the glass dining table Jack had never seen fit to use before now, and beneath a geometric chandelier, Eli and Greer laid out an array of biodegradable containers stuffed with glistening meats and noodles in various shades of brown. It made for quite the leap from their days of eating instant ramen in Eli and Greer’s basement while Jack cooked up the kind of schemes that promised something with a side of fries on their future table.

Jack forked a wedge of beef onto his swirl of chow mein and looked over the You Agains from the head of the table. Carter had a steady job, Greer a family, and Eli was back in his apartment with a mission to stay out of jail. Even Dale, who joined the others at the table despite no longer having a body that needed sustenance, had made it work with Savannah for going on seven years when he died. It was a strange thing, seeing them all together again, just as they always had been and nothing like they once were. Jack couldn’t quite understand it, the way the kids he’d known had grown into adults with responsibilities to worry about and less enthusiasm than was warranted for their old way of life. He couldn’t help but wonder if Jules would have been the same: grown into something familiar yet barely recognizable. If only she’d had the chance. If only Jack…He pushed the thought aside, just as he always had. Just as he always had to.

But as Eli and Carter fought over the last egg roll, and Greer gave Jack an eye roll before stealing it for herself, he knew deep down in the soul that was all that remained of him that nothing had really changed, not where it mattered. Not among those he had left.

By the end of the meal, Carter had come around to the new plan and the others were too full of fried foods to maintain any level of grownup decorum, the high ceilings ricocheting old inside jokes and laughter back to them in tones that had been locked away in a time capsule until now. Jack cleared the table by himself, unwilling to let the others move from their trance and lose the moment. When he sat back down, Eli pelted him with a plastic-wrapped fortune cookie. The rest of the group had theirs open in front of them, little paper rectangles scattered across the glass table like confetti.

“Wait, will the fortune be for Jack or for Margaret?” Greer half teased.

“Depends whether or not he likes it,” said Carter.

“I should probably get two,” Jack shot back.

“You can have mine,” said Dale, sliding a hand through the cookie placed in front of his seat. “I never really liked them anyway.”

“Open the damn thing,” said Eli.

Jack cracked open the cookie and unfurled the little paper inside.

That which we hold on to most tightly will ultimately hold us back.

Jack looked down at the weathered body enabling his continued life, a lump forming in the throat that wasn’t his. Fortune cookies had always seemed as believable to him as horoscopes and haunted houses. But, in a sense, he was little more than a ghost haunting someone else’s body. And he was definitely a Capricorn. Being dead made the concept of believability a lot more fluid. Still, he’d never been one to listen too intently to baked goods, and he wasn’t about to start now. Jack folded the paper and stuffed it into his bra.

“Well?” Greer prompted.

“Something about living life to the fullest,” said Jack.

“Trade you for a ‘bad news is on its way,’ ” said Carter.

“Do they mean for you specifically, or in general?” Greer asked. “Because I just uninstalled my news app.”

“No idea,” said Carter. “But my lucky numbers are 32, 27, 11, 5, 8, and 18, so it all probably balances out.”

“Thank god for that,” said Eli.

“Nothing to worry about, then,” Dale said on a chuckle.

Jack patted the breast harboring his own fortune. “No, nothing to worry about.”

25

Jack wanted nothing more than to make the call to Mr. Flores as soon as he arrived at work that morning, but unfortunately work had other plans. The first file on his desk stated a collection time of 9:47 a.m., which meant he’d barely had time to sit down before he was back in the car and heading across town. Morning murders were something of a rarity. Before noon, there wasn’t usually enough alcohol or pent-up rage to inspire violence, but every so often, someone would be just unlucky enough to get on the wrong side of somebody who hadn’t yet had their first coffee of the day, and then blood was shed.

In this case, it was shed from a fifty-four-year-old man named Hank who had a habit of telling his wife of thirty years where she could go and with whom. That morning he’d apparently forbade her from going out to garden in a tank top despite the heat, and the straw that broke the camel’s back became a shovel to the head.

When Jack pulled up, Hank’s wife was calmly weeding her hydrangeas in the deadly tank top, humming contentedly to herself and blissfully unaware of her husband’s disembodied soul screaming something unintelligible at her from the driveway where his corpse lay, tucked just out of view of the sidewalk by the couple’s SUV. Jack had to shout to be heard over Hank’s ranting, but when he finally got the spirit’s attention, it was another battle to get him to the car. The gender of Jack’s borrowed body didn’t help much. Apparently this guy didn’t enjoy taking direction from a woman, and for a very brief moment, Jack let himself wonder whether that wasn’t the reason his friends had responded so indifferently to his plan the night before. But he quickly dismissed it when he remembered all the times Greer or Jules had taken the helm unquestioned. No, this was clearly a Hank problem, and Jack decided he didn’t like it much.

Sure, Jack had seen this kind of bullshit impact his female friends, but even in his time as Margaret, he hadn’t fully experienced just how obnoxious it could be before this guy came along.