Free Roadkill (LiveWire) by Daisy White

her internet passwords on a random sheet of paper, or just got her computer to remember them. She called him an old fogey.
    I could have guessed her password anyway; live4eva. She used it all the time, and my fingertips tingle with pain as I access her messages. Will I ever get used to the fact she isn’t here anymore? I remember our only serious conversation about death suddenly, and with total clarity.
    For my seventeenth birthday Rose organised a ‘surprise’ party at Alton Towers. She was cross I wouldn’t ride the rollercoasters, but pleased I liked her present; a wooden artists easel, real hair brushes, and box after box of jewel coloured oil paints, stubby pastels, orderly rows of pencils…
    “Wow Rose, this must have cost a fortune!” I hugged her. We were sitting on her lacy bedspread, surrounded by wrapping paper. Rose’s room was always pretty and girly, at total odds with who she was.
    “Nah, forget it. Most of it was on sale!”
    Rose was always dead generous, and it turned out she’d paid for my gifts from her ever growing stash of modelling cash. She was sombre for a moment, gazing over my head, where Dad smiled from the wall.
    “Dad would have loved you being seventeen,” she said eventually.
    “He would have loved the rollercoaster!” I said a touch enviously, stroking the box of paints reverently, itching to pick up a brush.
    Rose brushed her dark hair out and started to plait it, quick and deft. She flicked me a look, “Sorry I said you were a wimp. I didn’t mean it.”
    “S’ok. Rose are you scared of anything?” It’s a childish question and for a moment I thought she’d dismiss it with her usual cryptic humour, then, after another long look at Dad, she stared right back at me, aquamarine eyes glittering with unusual depth.
    “Dying,” she said softly, “I’m scared as hell that there is nothing there when we die. You don’t go anywhere, you can’t feel anything. It totally freaks me out.
    I was puzzled, “What do you mean?”
    She shifted positions, cross- legged now, like a Buddha, “Like with dad. Me and Carly did this séance you know.”
    “You didn’t!” I was goggle eyed at this unexpected side to my sister, and couldn’t suppress a giggle.
    She gave a wry smile, “I know, it was mad right? But I wanted to check he was okay. That some part of him was still out there somewhere……To reassure myself there was something out there I guess.”
    “Did it work?”
    “No!” she forced a laugh, “We ended up drinking tequila shots instead, and going to that dodgy nightclub that lets anyone in without ID. You know, Peers Street?” She shuddered “Cheesy eighties music.”
    For a moment we were silent, then Rose’s phone beeped and she snapped back to reality, crackling with her usual electric energy. She tapped out a number, blue fingernails flying;
    “Ash? We got it! What? Okay, see you in five.”
    “Caz, I got the funding for the ultra race! Gotta go. Love you!” She hugged me and hurtled from the room, a whirlwind of life and fire, leaving me to sit like a frail little ghost on her pink bed.
    “Love you Rose.”
    I glanced up at Dad, then reached blindly for one of my new pencils and started to sketch. Two little girls, a rollercoaster in the sky…
    It was one of the best things I’ve ever done, and I stuck it in my St Martin’s Portfolio, which is at the back of my wardrobe. And if I don’t get a move on there it will stay while I head off to do a science degree. Mum and I need to have another little Talk, and this one’ll be on me.
    Anyway, I drag myself back to the present and check on Rose’s messages. As I suspected, there is nothing about her death, and her mates on the LiveWire forum are asking if she’s up for this dare, or that dare. I guess it’s not like any of them would have seen the piece in the paper; a small paragraph in the local rag about a promising teenage model killed in a hit and run. Not a whiff of scandal so I don’t think