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your real name? Mike? Steve?”
    â€œIt’s Krishna.”
    So his parents were spiritual seekers too. Of course. Everyone around here was twenty years ago.
    As he drives, he asks me about myself, and I tell him about things I haven’t said aloud to anyone else. About my family, my dead sister, my stupid relationships with guys, my job, and my graduating last December. It all just comes out of my mouth. He listens, taking in all that shit without judging it, which feels good. I can’t remember the last time anyone listened to me like that.
    Definitely not a guy.
    By the time I’m finished talking, we’ve made it out of town and are on the winding road that heads toward the coast. I can hardly believe myself, confessing my life story to a stranger. But there’s something about this guy, something so open and free of bullshit, that I feel as if complete honesty is the only option.
    It doesn’t make much sense, but nothing about Krishna does. He catches me off guard in a way I’ve never experienced before.
    He starts telling me all about himself, how he was a heroin addict and a drummer until he found Buddha or whatever. He tells me about his family back in a small logging town in Washington, how he has two older brothers, but he hasn’t seen them in years because they think he’s a freak for becoming a monk.
    This logging-town childhood doesn’t mesh with his having a name like Krishna, but I don’t bring it up.
    â€œDo you miss them?” I ask, not sure why I even care.
    â€œSometimes, but I know the part of them I miss, I can find anytime I recall our childhood together.”
    Oh, yeah. Right on, Mr. Hallmark cards. “So you’re like a real monk? Does that mean you don’t have sex?”
    He smiles like he’s remembering something. “Yep. I’m celibate.”
    â€œFor how long?” All my hopes about me and Krishna naked start to fizzle out, and I didn’t even realize I was hoping.
    â€œForever.”
    â€œAre you a virgin?”
    â€œNo, I gave up sex a year ago to help myself stay focused on my spiritual development.”
    Oh, whew. “So was it hard to stop having sex?”
    He smiles. “Sometimes. I’ve been immersed in meditation for a good part of the past year. Bodily urges interrupt sometimes, but meditation takes me back to where I need to be. I think of meditating as the question and the answer.”
    I say nothing, disappointed. I’m not used to this.
    We arrive at the meditation center and get out of the car to follow a winding path up to its front entrance. It’s a low, brown-wood-shingle building of the kind people like my parents think is groovy. Big windows, big trees. Krishna holds the door open for me, and I feel for a moment as if I might float up off the ground and into the sky.

Nine
    Sarah
    This doesn’t seem like heaven or hell, I suppose. More and more I think I am stuck in some in-between place, a nowhere land.
    It’s strange how time folds in on itself now, free from the artificial, linear labels we impose on it. I have no sense of whether moments, days, or weeks have passed. I can only get a frame of reference by watching my family. I see my mother, Lena, going to her therapist, so I know it’s Tuesday. I hear her say it’s been three weeks since my death, so I know time drifts on without me.
    And still, lingering like a whisper, like a ghost, there is always Brandon.
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    Three days before I died, I went with Lena to my grandmother’s house in Tiberon. Her understated mansion was built to blend into the hills and trees that surround it. Walls of windows look out on San Francisco Bay and the city across it wearing a cloak of fog.
    My grandmother is an heiress to a Dutch shipping company, and thanks to her my parents (who used to not believe in things like health insurance) were able to pay for my medical bills for so many years. On this day, we’d come