Legally Invalid Will

    The cheap plastic fountain pen scrawled on the paper. It was a satisfying sound, Ryan thought. Would anyone be able to tell what he was writing if they heard it?

       He snickered and kept writing.

       It was funny, really, how liberating it is to know exactly when you'd die, which Ryan has since around seven years old. To think that it's been almost nine years already…

       "What're you doing?" An obtrusively wobbly voice asked. "Oooh—Are you finally writing that wizened autobiography you've always wanted?"

       "Shut up, Will." Ryan rolled his eyes and suppressed a smile, shifting on where he was curled with a clipboard on the couch. He paused his typing to look at his best friend. Translucent as always, Will sprawled out on the rest of the couch in his tattered flannel and old jeans, both of which are slightly bloodied. It's been almost nine years since Will died. Almost nine years since Ryan maybe accidentally summoned Will's soul from his grave with a cursed candle or some other supernatural whatnot. (So Ryan-the-seven-year-old couldn't remember all that clearly! Sue him!) Ryan's grown from the scrawny seven-year-old into an also-scrawny teenager; Will still doesn't look a day over eighteen. "And no, that autobiography will have to wait, I'm afraid."

       "Are you writing your will?" Will probed in his normal, non-wobbly, and (unfortunately) eternally pubescent voice. He averted his eyes. "I'm sorry. You don't have to answer that."

       "No it's fine! And yeah, I am writing my technically legally invalid will." Ryan nudged Will's icy, ghostly shin with his socked toe. "Stop acting like you're the one who's gonna murder me! Besides, I don't mind dying if it means I'll get to spend the afterlife with my best bro." Pause. "And messing with my cousins' sanities," he added thoughtfully.

       Despite what people might assume, Ryan always thought it was pretty nice to have a cool, eighteen year old best friend whom only he could see. Will did, after all, teach him swears before informing Ryan of his, ahem, "Expiration Date"—which had made Ryan cool among his young, naïve classmates (and landed Ryan into a not-so-nice situation where he had to explain the reason behind his admittedly overzealous use of some colorful words to his parents). So that made up for that. It's not like it was Will's fault that he just happened to be dragged out of his peaceful rest with a random date burned into his head that he somehow knew to be Ryan's date of death. Seven-year-old-Ryan has had years to come to terms with this new information, and he grew up to be an unusually cheerful kid regardless, having no more problems making friends than anyone else and doing reasonably well in school. In all honesty, Ryan has had more fun with Will than probably any of his other friends, and it was kind of nice to have a big brother sort of figure, albeit an undead one. He never told anyone about Will, but that was pretty much a given if he didn't want to end up with a psychiatrist.

       "Hey Will," Ryan called. Will looked up, brows still slightly furrowed. "Chill. I can hear you overthinking this whole death thing from all the way over here."

       "But what if you could have lived longer if I hadn't come?" Will fidgeted in frustration. "I mean, I probably shouldn't have just blurted out that kind of information to a seven-year-old who'd literally just met a ghost. I don't know, man. Maybe the death date thing's just a scam from the lord almighty or something. I really don't want you worrying about this stuff when you should be going out and having parties and thinking about college and getting old…"

       "Dude, shut up. Let me write my will, okay? I told you I'd be fine. And won't you be able go to heaven when I die too? I mean, I'm the only reason you're still tethered to the living world, right? Heaven sounds pretty fun if you ask me. Who'd want to get old enough to worry about student loans and rent anyway?" Ryan joked, hoping to introduce some levity to the conversation. Will chuckled with a tinge of bitter incredulity.

       "Why aren't you upset about this?" Will shook his head. "You're going to die in, what, a week, and you're not upset over this? Why?"

       "Because I think I'd be fine, really." In truth, Ryan had been plenty upset, crying when Will was off doing whatever ghostly thing he did elsewhere and being extra nice to his parents and whatnot, but Will didn’t need to know that. Sure, Ryan wanted a nice life and future, but he'll survive knowing that he'd had a nice childhood—well, he won't, but he's had it a lot better than the vast majority of other children in the world. He knows to be grateful. It's fine, really. They both knew that it'd be futile to fight the divine forces and Ryan's inevitable fate. "My parents are gonna be plenty upset for me anyway. I'm going to tell them about you in my will, y'know? I don't know if they'll believe me, but they do deserve to know."

       They stayed silent for a while in the warm, summer living room. The parents were at work and wouldn't be back anytime soon.

       "Does it hurt?" Ryan blurted out.

       "What?"

       "I mean, does dying hurt a lot?"

       Will thought for a moment.

       "Depends on how you die, I guess. Mine wasn't as bad as that one time I got food poisoning, but that could just be because the car killed me almost instantaneously."

       Ryan nodded. He didn't know whether he was glad for the answer or sorry for Will's stomach. He looked down at what he had on the paper.

       "What are you smiling about?" Will asked. Ryan was surprised to find that he was, indeed, smiling.

       "Just," Ryan chuckled. "I thought it was pretty ironic that you, Will, have never written a will."

       Will rolled his eyes.

       "I didn't have much stuff anyways."

       Ryan reveled in the sunlight that kissed the nape of his neck through the window-pane and looked up from the paper at his pensive friend. Will had always been more thoughtful than he was—possibly attributed to the fact that he was dead—, but Ryan could almost always cheer him up. It was a little weird—more than a little weird—, how they first met, but they had grown to be near inseparable, causing a number of sticky situations where people could find Ryan conversing with what seemed, to them, to be thin air. If he remembered correctly, Will had been quite distant at first, only succumbing to Ryan's adorable toddler puppy eyes after a month or so. Since then, they had come across a couple of other ghosts, but none of them had lingered as Will had. (Or were summoned by a seven-year-old with a cursed candle.) As confusing and new as this sort of situation was to both of them, they had eventually fallen into a routine where Will would go wherever Ryan went and be whatever Ryan needed him—a friend, an (objectively cold and dead) shoulder to cry on, a fellow nerd, a protector, a naggy parent figure, a bully-puncher-ghost and so much more. Ryan was grateful, and ended his (legally invalid) will on such a note. He put on a genuine smile.

       "Yup! I'm done!" He announced with an air of nonchalance. "Want to go get some food and bubble tea?"

       "I don't need to eat. Or drink."

       "But you like to."

       "…"

       Will gave in, standing (floating?) up and shuffling to Ryan's side. He ruffled Ryan's hair.

       Ryan was going to miss this—his life, family, friends…Even school. He's going to miss the urgent need to breathe after sprinting a hundred meters and the pain of getting up in the mornings. But he knows there's something he won't ever need to miss.

       Ryan looped his arm around Will's, well aware of how ridiculous he would look to passerby. He looked up in time to see his friend's lips pull up into a smile. Ryan smirked back.

       "I'm going to make you pay for my tea once we get to heaven."