When i was death, p.1
When I Was Death, page 1
Also by Alexis Henderson
Adult Novels
An Academy for Liars
House of Hunger
The Year of the Witching
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
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Copyright © 2026 by Alexis Henderson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Henderson, Alexis author
Title: When I was death / Alexis Henderson.
Description: New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2026] |
Summary: Haunted by her sister’s mysterious death, Roslyn joins a mysterious caravan of girls with whom her sister spent her last summer and who she discovers serve Death by reaping souls, forcing Roslyn to choose between finding closure or making a deadly bargain herself.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025035090 (print) | LCCN 2025035091 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593859476 hardcover | ISBN 9780593859483 epub
Subjects: CYAC: Death—Fiction | Grief—Fiction | Friendship—Fiction | LCGFT: Novels
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H4616 Wh 2026 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.H4616 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025035090
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025035091
First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2026
Hardcover ISBN 9780593859476
International Edition ISBN 9798217238521
Ebook ISBN 9780593859483
The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland, https://eu-contact.penguin.ie.
prhid_prh_7.4a_155277653_c0_r0
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_155277653_
For my sister
Chapter 1
The girls arrived on a bleak morning in May, eight months after my sister’s death. I first saw them through my bedroom window, three vehicles—a rust-eaten pickup truck, an old station wagon, and an Airstream RV—crawling down the street and around the bend of the cul-de-sac. There were three teenage girls sitting in the bed of the pickup truck, all of them staring at my house as though it were a landmark. I stared back, and I swore one of them—a pale girl with hair like fire—looked up at my window and smiled. But by the time I scrambled downstairs and burst through the front door, they were gone. I might’ve thought I’d dreamed them if not for the smell of diesel hanging like a ghost in the cool morning air.
A few hours later, I left my house and walked down the sorry little main street of my hometown in Michigan. But calling it a town at all is generous. Towns are comprised of people, and once emptied of them, they lose their respective designations and become something else. The something else is what I walked through that day. Cracked streets licked with heat waves, a thin trickle of traffic passing by. The dusty storefronts of antique shops and jewelry stores that never had any customers. The remnants of a place that barely existed.
I scanned the streets, half hoping to spot the girls who had driven past my house that morning, but they seemed to have disappeared without a trace.
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
It was a two-mile walk from my house to Conny’s Coney Dogs, the twenty-four-hour diner where I worked as a waitress. The diner’s owner and namesake, Conny—a tall, grave woman who smelled perpetually of patchouli and pot smoke—had hired me, probably out of pity, because I’d never waited a table in my life. By that time, the whole town knew about my sister and had closed ranks around my family the way small towns are supposed to when something tragic and terrible happens to one of their own.
But Conny had offered something others hadn’t: distraction. In the long months that followed my sister’s death, she taught me the rhythms of the diner—how to flirt tips from begrudging patrons who had next to nothing in their pockets, how to anticipate their needs with no more than a passing glance. In the grimy staff bathroom, I gathered my curls into a fat braid, scrubbed at my armpits with hand soap and a soggy wad of paper towels (I’d slept through my alarm and hadn’t had the chance to shower) before changing into my uniform. It was a peach-pink dress—the color of a newborn baby’s flush—with snagged stockings and a paper-pale apron so small it didn’t cover much of anything. Once dressed, I pinned on my name tag just a few inches below my starched collar. It read Roslyn Volk in smudged Sharpie, because Conny liked it when her servers introduced themselves by their first and last names. Something about the importance of family, of knowing where a person was from and, in her words, exactly what stuff they were made of.
My sneakers squelched on the sticky tile floors as I carried steaming plates of pancakes and scrambled eggs, biscuits half submerged in gravy, and burnt triangles of toast to their respective tables. I refilled coffeepots and chatted with the regulars, trying my best to keep up with the breakfast rush.
On a staticky TV screen above the bar, the news was playing, though the sound was partly drowned out by the clamor of the kitchen—pots and pans clattering, slabs of bacon sizzling on the grill, cooks shouting orders above the din. The headline of the day was a string of violent storms that had washed across the Midwest the night before, spawning a series of tornadoes, one of which flattened a small town in Ohio, claiming the lives of more than a dozen people. It was the first bad storm of the year, and the meteorologist predicted more would follow.
There was a congressman on TV crying about the devastation when the girls entered the diner, the five of them streaming in single file.
One of the girls wore a long fur-collared coat despite the thickening heat. Another swept past in a heavy peasant skirt paired with a cropped and pilled flannel shirt. A third wore heavy boots and ripped men’s jeans that looked like they were fished from the bowels of a Salvation Army bin and attacked with a razor.
They were around my age, but they dressed the way sixth graders imagined themselves dressing at twenty, without the smothering supervision of their parents or the pressure of their peers. Their hair was wild, as if none of them owned a brush. And they were all pretty, but in the way that girls find each other pretty. Which is to say, unkempt and decidedly intimidating, like a boy’s idea of a dream girl gone ragged at the edges.
I hoped they wouldn’t sit in my section—groups of girls my age made me anxious—but the five of them did just that, occupying a small booth at the back of the diner, sitting crushed together hip-to-hip on the same side as if there wasn’t another empty bench right in front of them.
I recognized the redhead immediately. She was the same fire-haired girl who I thought might’ve smiled at me that morning when the caravan drove past the house. Her bony hands were covered in faded stick-and-poke tattoos that looked like doodles drawn with pen, and she had wedding rings on every finger. She wore hoop earrings so large I could’ve slid one halfway up my arm, and she was impeccably dressed in wide-cut patchwork jeans and a lace top that looked like vintage lingerie with its vaguely cone-shaped bra cups.
Sitting close beside the redhead was the youngest of the five—maybe thirteen, give or take a year. She fixed her brilliant blue eyes on me and smiled at my approach. She had downy blond hair and wore lipstick, cracked and smeared and bleeding at the edges of her mouth like she’d applied and reapplied it with a heavy hand several days prior. She slipped a vape pen from the pocket of her coat and held it like a cigarette, pinched between two knuckles.
One of the older girls—she had dark eyes and hair the color of sand, which hung down her back in long microbraids—leaned across t he table, snatched the vape pen from the blonde’s hand, and turned it off despite the younger girl’s protests.
None of them were locals, of that much I was certain. My graduating class would be comprised of fewer than a dozen students. I could rattle off their names, first and last, and some of their parents’ too. These girls were newcomers, which was strange for a small town devoid of tourism where things never really changed.
The young girl kept smiling at me, mouth wide and bloody from the lipstick. “I like your dress. I’ve been looking for one just like that for ages. Do they sell them here?”
“Um…afraid not, b-but thank you?” I fumbled with my pen and notepad and nearly dropped both. “What would you like to drink?”
“Pink lemonade,” said the girl. She kicked off her sandals, cork platforms with leather straps as thin as strings, and swapped them with the sneakers of the girl to her left. “They’re a better match. Don’t you think?”
“Um, yeah. We don’t have pink lemonade. Is regular lemonade okay? It’s house made.”
She bobbed her head. “Sounds good. You can just bring it by the pitcher, and we’d like coffee, or better yet, hot chocolate if you have it. And we’ll order the rest now too. Assuming you’re ready?”
I nodded down at my notepad, my pen poised. Together, they ordered what seemed like half the menu—several stacks of pancakes, French toast, hash browns smothered with cheese and onions, six sunny-side up eggs, a plate of bacon, two chili dogs from the lunch menu, a ham and cheese omelet, as well as fresh fruit in a to-go box.
“For Shiloh,” said a different, more sullen girl with a shifting gaze and the golden sliver of a nose ring pierced through her left nostril. Her hair was dark and cut in a ragged jaw-length bob, and her eyes were large and gray.
Conny, overhearing their lengthy order, got suspicious and made the girls pay for the meal up front. An older girl with blunt black bangs and blue eyeshadow lifted a large purse that looked like a carpetbag and set it on the table with a heavy thud that made the silverware jump and clatter. From it, she produced several fistfuls of wrinkled bills (I put them in the pocket of my apron to count later) and a small mason jar filled with silver change. She slid it to Conny with a smile. “Keep the change.”
Whenever I returned to their table, their conversation seemed to die into silence or abruptly change subjects. They were enviably self-contained and entirely unbothered despite the curious gazes of the other diners, particularly the male ones who watched them with rapt, too-sharp interest.
The girls weren’t naive or otherwise oblivious to the attention they received. Nor were they distant in the heavy-lidded, theatrical way girls often are when they’re trying to appear pointedly aloof. They were merely…impassive. Perhaps they were too consumed by their own conversation. At times, their discussion grew so intense it appeared they were arguing about something. The same name kept coming up repeatedly; I’d hear it—a hot, hissing whisper—as I passed their table: Shiloh. The one the fruit was for.
I watched them eat with furtive glances cast over my shoulder or from across the diner behind the bar. The redhead shoveled large forkfuls of French toast into her mouth as if this were the last meal she’d ever eat and she had only minutes left to finish it.
Beside her sat the girl with the braids. I was tempted to call her the pretty one, because even among the girls she stood out as particularly stunning. Her skin was deep and dewy, utterly flawless, though she didn’t look like she was wearing any concealer. She had full lips and high cheekbones that would’ve been the envy of any model. I stared as she popped the yolks of all six eggs on her plate—one after the other—with the tip of a steak knife and watched the yellow bleed into the white with dead eyes before licking the blade clean. The blonde emptied a small ramekin of maple syrup into the dregs of her coffee and drank the sludgy remnants in a single gulp.
“Slow down or you’ll choke,” said the older girl, the one with the powdery blue eyeshadow who’d paid for the food. When the youngest did, in fact, begin to choke just minutes later, the older girl patted her back until the coughing fit subsided.
It was a strange and intimate gesture, so maternal and natural that I wondered for a moment if the two were family. But they couldn’t have looked any less alike. Different races—one white, the other Asian. Different hair. Different demeanor. All five girls had a distinct way of being. I didn’t know how to describe it exactly, but it was both familiar and distinctly unusual.
They had a kind of confidence that came easily to them. The redhead kicked her feet out into the aisle that ran between tables, oblivious to the way she was taking up space. Bold in a way that boys are usually, and even then, only the most self-assured among them. The varsity athletes or that one overeager theater kid who lands all the lead roles in school plays.
After the girls finished their feast, I brought them a copy of the receipt. I doubted they’d want it. They’d refused to accept their change and seemed to have no care for cost, but I wanted another excuse to return to their table—curiosity surmounting my initial anxiety—to examine them up close one more time. “Can I interest you in something else? Maybe some dessert?”
“I’ll take a hot fudge sundae,” said the girl with the long braids. “No peanuts, with extra whip and maraschino cherries if you have them. And can you box it up so we can take it for the road?”
I nodded and was leaving to make it when the youngest of the group, the little blond girl, called me back. “Do you like to swim?”
“Sure,” I said. “I guess so.”
The young one nodded to the blue-eyeshadow girl, whom I took to be the leader of this strange flock. She reached into the other girl’s carpetbag purse, found a pen, and scrawled an address on the back of the receipt I’d supplied them with, then folded it and put it into the pocket of my apron without asking whether or not I wanted it.
“Tonight.” She slipped out of the booth. “Show up anytime after nine.”
I made the sundae as the girls wolfed down their final bites of food. When I delivered it to the booth, they were already on their feet, laughing and talking among themselves.
“See you tonight,” said the blonde. And then they were gone into the white brilliance of the day.
Chapter 2
I was a person once. I had friends and hobbies and a boyfriend, crowned homecoming king, who liked me enough to text me every morning and night. Back then, I was on the track team, and my coach thought I was good enough to get a scholarship at the kind of college that would maybe make my parents want to brag to their friends. I posted online semiregularly: selfies with the camera blurred out of focus, the smears of sunsets, my sister’s face behind a rain-streaked window, a black squirrel rummaging through the contents of a dumpster. I’d write these long captions because I liked the thrill of stashing little pieces of myself in those posts. I guess some part of me believed that my life as I lived it was worth witnessing through a screen.
But even back then, when I was still a person, Adeline was something else. Something more. I was fairly well liked, approaching popular, even. But Adeline, one year my senior, was adored. Not just by her friends and our family, but by people she had never even spoken to. Everything that made me different and weird in the eyes of my classmates—like the fact that we were the only two biracial students at our small-town private school (our dad white and our mom Black)—just made Adeline all the more alluring. It helped that she was beautiful, and not in a pedestrian way. She was tall and bronze skinned like our mom but with our dad’s blond hair and hazel eyes. Heads swiveled when she came down the hall at school, people turning to look no matter how many times they’d seen her before.
She didn’t need an algorithm forcing her to the tops of people’s feeds to get attention. Wherever she went, people watched and listened, and she never once had to ask for it.
But it wasn’t just beauty that drew people to Adeline, it was something more. Adeline was capricious in a way that kept people on their toes. Her emotions were sharp and intense. Her happiness, at its height, was like the sun glaring sharply off a blanket of freshly fallen snow, and I’d find myself squinting at the sight of her smile. But when Adeline was sad—and she was often sad—the storms of her deep depressions swallowed her up, and me along with her. I told myself that this was because we were so close, but my emotions never affected Adeline the way hers did me. When Adeline was happy, I was happy. When she was sad, I was sad. And when she died, I became nothing at all.
