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“That’s two whole days. Why would you want to rush toward that day if you don’t know it’s going to be any better than this one? A lot can happen in forty-eight hours. Two days ago, my dog was alive. He was chasing a ball and chewing on Angel’s favorite Italian loafers. Good times.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in forty-eight hours,” I admitted. “I don’t think ahead like that. I just do birthday resolutions and try to live up to them.” The operative word being ‘live.’ Every year for the past three years I’d asked for the same wish: to be cancer free. This year was the year, I had decided. Seventeen would be the magic number, the perfect age, when my life would change for the better.
He brushed the sweat off his brow. “And what is your Sweet Eighteen resolution?”
To be kissed by a boy.
No, a man.
By you.
I smiled. “The three l’s—to live, love, and laugh.”
A quizzical expression appeared on his face. “Who exactly might you be, Miss Live, Love, and Laugh?”
Right now, I want to be your Persephone.
“I’m Katya. My mom brought me here to see your boss.” A brow lifted in question. “Kristoff Romanov,” I reminded him.
His lips thinned. “He doesn’t like the name Romanov.”
I shrugged. “Then maybe he should change it instead of being a big baby about it.” There were worse things in life than not liking your given name. Like cancer, chemo, and an itchy wig.
Was that a hint of a smile I saw on his face?
“What if that name defines who he is?”
I wasn’t sure why he was asking a complete stranger about this, but something told me he was in a soul-searching mode thanks to the untimely death of his dog. I got that reaction from people a lot. Usually it was when someone discovered I was sick. For some reason it made a person think about their own mortality or life choices. As if being confronted with the fact that I was dying pushed them to make it all about them. The worst were the people who believed they ‘helped’ me when they went on and on about how everyone should seize the day. Like I didn’t already know. But for some reason, I didn’t believe this guy was one of those people. I think he knew all too well how precious life could be. The man was burying his dog in the middle of the night in the backyard. And he’d looked spitting mad during the process.
“Look, I’m only seventeen, but even I know a name is just a name. It’s about what you do with your life, right?”
“Wise words, Miss Three L’s.”
I didn’t sense that he was mocking me, so I let it go. I chin-jerked at the grave. “You must’ve cared about him a lot.”
“Care? I suppose I did, as much as a man with a heart as black as night can care about another.”
It didn’t sound like he was joking. Where in the hell—or should I say Hades—had my mother brought me?
Medvedenko: Why do you wear black all the time?
Masha: I’m in mourning for my life, I’m unhappy.
— Anton Chekhov
Happiness is overrated, so is life.
— Kristoff Romanov
4
KRISTOFF
I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. Someone stood a few feet behind me. I turned to see it was a teenage girl.
She’d taken one look at me and compared me to the god of the underworld, the ruler of the dead. I had been called out by a slip of a girl. A girl who sounded like she was in a rush to grow up. Little did she know that the older you got, the more joy life sucked out of you, and the deader you became inside. She had one thing right though. Cerberus actually had meant something to me. I’d brought that mutt all the way from Russia, where I’d found him on a street corner fending off a pack of rats. I was going to butcher those fucking Jamaicans.
Her innocent, pain-filled eyes gazed straight into my tarnished soul, and something odd happened. A sliver of light shone through me, reaching my insides for a speck of time.
