The Sunglasses Stay On in Purgatory

The sky above me is the exact shade of an Instagram filter — Valencia, maybe, or one of the ones people use to look alive even when they’re not. It’s always golden hour here, soft and endless, like someone pressed pause right before the sun could kiss the skyline. There’s no sun, not really. No source. Just light, suspended in every direction, casting buttery reflections across the water.

The pool glimmers like memory — too smooth, too clean, the kind of surface that doesn’t ripple unless something wants to be seen.

I’m lying on a lounge chair in a swimsuit I don’t remember owning, and there’s a pink drink sweating beside me, condensation glittering like it was placed there by a very hydrated ghost. My towel is embroidered in cursive:

Missy Matchstick

Cute. Morbid. Accurate.

I sit up slowly. No hangover, no soreness, just that deep-seated ache you get when you’ve slept too long in a place you weren’t meant to stay.

Around the pool, they’re all lounging. Too glamorous. Too still. Everyone wears sunglasses — even though the sky doesn’t burn. Oversized, reflective, designer. No one looks directly at anyone else. It’s like they’re all actors between takes, afraid the eye contact might make the mask slip.

A woman with a tan like old money and a glass of champagne balanced perfectly in her hand slinks toward me. Her bikini sparkles like it’s been dusted in powdered regret.

“Relax, babe,” she says, plopping onto the next chair with the weightlessness of someone who no longer has bones — or boundaries. “You’re in between things.”

Her voice is silk over static. When she smiles, her lipstick doesn’t smudge. She reaches for my drink and takes a sip without asking.

“I’m not thirsty,” I lie.

She nods like she already knew. “No one is. Not at first.”

I glance toward the lifeguard tower, where a woman sits high above the rest of us. She wears all white, untouchably clean, like she was dry-cleaned before death. Her sunglasses are matte black, face unreadable, posture statuesque. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t blink. She’s watching us — but I get the feeling she’s watching me. No one else seems to notice her. Or maybe they’ve stopped caring.

I look back at the pool. It’s glassy. Perfect. But there’s something just beneath it — something flickering. Like a light. Or a warning.

“Where am I?” I ask, but my voice sounds far away.

Champagne Girl exhales like she’s been holding that question forever.

“Poolside,” she says. “Right before the truth hits.”

She leans back. Sips. Laughs softly.

“Best to keep your sunglasses on.”

The pool shifts colors as I walk. Not from the sun — it has no source — but from something deeper. Emotion, maybe. Memory. Whatever this place feeds on. Right now it’s a pale coral, almost sweet, tinged with something bitter underneath. I trail my fingers through it. The water stings, just slightly. Like static. Like being touched by something you forgot you lost.

Champagne Girl follows me like a shadow in heels, draped in a silk cover-up that never wrinkles, never shifts in the breeze.

“I don’t believe in labels,” she says. “Addict, alcoholic, whatever. I just liked the bubbles.”

Her glass is always full. I never see it refilled. She sips like it’s the first drink of the night, not the thousandth. The pool flushes pink when she laughs, like it’s been watching her this whole time and still thinks she’s funny.

“If I was the problem,” she says again, louder this time, “I wouldn’t be so fun, right?”

Her Dior sunglasses are thick, like armor. Her pupils swim behind them, too wide, too black. She smells like champagne and perfume and desperation dressed up as confidence.

She points at the juice bar.

“They spike the drinks here,” she says with a wink. “Not with alcohol — no, babe. With memories. Little sips of the stuff you don’t wanna remember. Some people get off on that.” She leans in close. “Not me though. I’m done with all that.”

Her smile is too wide.

“Totally done.”

The pool ripples — dark red, like Merlot — then returns to coral. She turns and twirls away like a dancer pretending she wasn’t just sobbing in the dressing room. Champagne Girl doesn’t walk. She performs.

A bassline starts humming from the far end of the deck. Low, slow, narcotic. Everyone’s shoulders loosen. A couple girls start swaying like they’re on molly at a rooftop rave.

That’s when I see her.

Ashley. DJ. Narcissist. Knife in her smile.

She stands behind a sleek silver DJ booth, fader in one hand, joint in the other. Her crop top reads BAD VIBES ONLY and her sunglasses are heart-shaped like a bad joke. Every time someone gets too close to something real, she turns the track into a burst of static — piercing, bone-deep, silencing.

I feel her watching me even before she speaks.

“You’ve got main character syndrome,” she calls out, too loud, too amused. “We all do here.”

I freeze. The pool ripples acid green beneath my feet.

She lights her joint from the neon flame of a tiki torch.

“This place is only hell if you remember too much,” she says, dragging the words out like syrup. “Keep it chill. Keep it curated.”

She leans into the mic. Her voice becomes the music.

“The water doesn’t lie, but it does glamorize.”

Then she smirks. “I keep the party going.”

Someone starts crying in a chair nearby. The music skips. Ashley slams the fader. STATIC. The sound makes the pool flash white, like a camera flash. The crying stops. The girl stares blankly forward, sunglasses back on.

Ashley winks at me. Her teeth are perfect and sharp here. Like she was made to chew through feelings and spit them back as lies.

I keep moving.

By the juice bar, I see two figures. At first I think it’s a trick of the light — but no, they’re real.

The Mirror Twins. Identical. Terrifying. Ethereal.

They wear matching bikinis, matching ponytails, matching hollowed-out cheekbones. Their sunglasses are silver, impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Their voices are whispers, so synchronized they make your skin itch.

“You’re safest when you’re shrinking,” one of them says.

“But not too much,” says the other.

They never drink. They swirl the straws in their smoothies like stirring up storms they’ll never touch. One speaks. The other flinches. One laughs. The other fades. Every word spoken seems to drain mass from one of them, and feed it into the other. The pool reflects their bodies inverted — two versions of hunger battling for dominance.

“You remember what it felt like,” they say together.

“Not being enough. Then being too much.”

I nod. I don’t mean to. My throat tightens.

“We’re all mirrors here,” they say. “Just decide which side of yourself you’re gonna haunt.”

They vanish into a cabana without drinking. The pool ripples pale lavender, then cold blue.

And then I see her. Olivia. She’s lying back on a neon-pink donut raft, drifting in lazy circles. Aviators. Wet hair. Freckles across her nose like stars someone scattered carelessly across the sky.

She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t move. But when the pool brushes against her, it turns a shade I haven’t seen yet — deep ocean teal, like the color of a bruise on a heart.

I step closer to the edge.

I don’t say her name.

I don’t have to.

She turns her head slightly, just enough for me to see her mouth move.

“Don’t touch the past,” she whispers. “It bites.”

Her voice is soft and broken-glass delicate. Like she still loves the person who hurt her. Like she might be the one who did the hurting. I want to ask her a thousand things. But she floats farther away.

The pool turns transparent, and for a moment, I swear I see the bottom —

Photos. Letters. A Polaroid of her laughing. A voice text I never listened to.

Then: static. A ripple. It’s gone.

Olivia never cries. But her sunglasses are fogged from the inside.

Ashley turns the volume back up. It’s a slow, glitchy remix of a song I loved once — loved someone to. The bass drops in slow motion, like a heartbeat you almost forgot how to feel. Everyone pretends it’s fine. They always do. People don’t look at her. Not directly. They smile too brightly when she passes, like hostages in a burning mansion.

I ask Champagne Girl quietly, “Why does no one stand up to her?”

She shrugs and drains her drink. “Because she did something real. Not like us. Not like me.”

There’s a pause.

Then: “Besides, she thinks she’s the victim. And that’s the scariest kind of killer, babe. The ones who think they’re the ones who were wronged.”

She winks at me, but her mascara’s running. No one told her.

A ripple of laughter cuts through the thick air — sharp, twin-pitched. The Mirror Twins have joined us again. One perches on the edge of a chair, spine perfectly straight. The other sits curled in herself, eyes darting like prey. They’re watching Champagne Girl with too much intensity. She shifts uncomfortably, glass tilted toward her lips like a shield.

“You sparkle so loud,” one twin says, cocking her head.

The other adds: “It’s almost like you don’t want to be seen.”

Champagne Girl blinks, confused.

“I sparkle because I’m fabulous, thank you,” she chirps, trying to stay in character. “That’s what people liked about me.”

The twins don’t flinch. They move closer. Like a glitch in the simulation.

“Did they like you?” asks one.

“Or did they like the version of you that forgot to cry?”

The air turns cold, even in the filtered gold of the sky. The pool flutters bruised purple.

Champagne Girl stands abruptly, drink shaking.

“God, can’t a girl enjoy her afterlife without being psychoanalyzed by matching specters?”

The twins smile at each other — too wide, too knowing.

“Only if she stops pretending she didn’t die lonely.”

Champagne Girl leaves. Fast. The drink is left behind. The twins pick it up and take turns dipping their straws in — never sipping. Just stirring.

I find Olivia again. She’s floating near the edge of the pool now, head tilted back, sunglasses sliding down her nose like a secret. Her skin glows in the golden light, and for a moment, I forget where we are. I forget everything.

“Do I have tan lines?” she asks me.

She always used to ask that. That was her thing. Here, her voice cracks on the word tan. It’s almost imperceptible.

“Do I?” she repeats.

I reach out instinctively, touching her shoulder. There’s a line. The faintest hint of sun-on-skin.

“You do,” I whisper. “Right here.”

She nods, like that confirms something she’s too afraid to say aloud. That her body still remembers. That some part of her still believes she was real. She looks at me and I can feel it — how badly she wants to ask something else. Something huge. Something she’s terrified will unmake her.

Instead, she closes her eyes. “I miss the pain,” she says. “At least it meant something happened.”

Ashley’s music cuts out suddenly. Static. Long and loud. A girl near the pool had started sobbing. Not crying — sobbing. Shaking. Her glasses had fallen off. Her eyes were visible.

And that’s the rule here: you don’t show your eyes.

Not unless you’re ready to leave. Or break.

Ashley looks down from her booth like a judge on a high platform, and bam — static. The girl goes quiet. Like she’d never made a sound.

Everyone glances at Ashley, afraid. No one says a word. Even the Mirror Twins look away. She’s a murderer. We all know it. Some story about drugs, about trauma, about ignorance. How could anyone doubt her? She was young. She knew how to cry. Knew just how to weaponize her own demons to her advantage.

Here, she doesn’t even pretend anymore.

She is the static.

She is the distraction.

The music comes back on — a cover of Mad World slowed to molasses — and people start moving again, like the fear never happened.

Olivia’s raft spins gently in a circle. She opens one eye.

“You feel it too, don’t you?” she murmurs.

“What?”

“That this place isn’t real. Not the way they want it to be.”

Her voice trembles like a held breath. She tugs her sunglasses down just a little, exposing eyes I remember too well — green, sharp, and soft at the same time.

“They tell us it’s paradise because they don’t want us to notice the grief leaking out the sides.”

And just like that, the pool turns clear again. A photo floats to the surface, waterlogged but familiar. It’s Olivia, grinning in the sun, hugging a sunflower and pretending not to be heartbroken. She sees it too. Doesn’t move. I reach for it. Ashley’s music spikes. STATIC. The photo sinks before my fingers reach it.

I’ve been avoiding her the whole time. The lifeguard. She hasn’t moved once. Her skin looks airbrushed. Her ponytail is always perfect. The fabric of her white one-piece doesn’t wrinkle. Doesn’t sweat. Doesn’t shift in the wind. And yet… she radiates something terrifying. Stillness.

She watches everything. The Champagne Girl’s breakdowns, the Mirror Twins’ shrinking game, Ashley’s static tantrums, Olivia’s quiet orbit. She watches me. Like she’s been waiting for this moment since before I knew I was dead.

I find myself standing at the foot of her chair. I didn’t walk here. I must’ve floated. The pool is indigo now. The color of unsaid things.

She finally turns her head. Our eyes meet. And in an instant, it’s like being hit with every truth I’ve ever swallowed. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t have to.

Because she’s me. Older, maybe. Or younger. Or just… more whole. The version of me that never lied to herself. And I remember.

The party. The rooftop. The way they tried to stop me. The way I smiled like I was already gone. The way no one really looked at me — because I had gotten too good at not being seen. I had a drink in my hand. A pink one. Just like now. I had a smile on my face. And a scream in my lungs.

I stepped back.

And the world didn’t stop me.

The lifeguard stands. It’s the first time I’ve seen her move. She walks down the stairs slowly. No sound. No shadow. When she reaches me, we’re the same height. She removes her sunglasses. Her eyes are blinding — not with light, but with knowing. I try to ask her a question, but my voice won’t come. She puts a finger to my lips, not to silence me, but to soften me.

You already know, she doesn’t say.

You were always going to break. But you were also always going to bloom.

Her hand slides into mine. It’s warm. Real.

She leads me to a small silver locker tucked behind a lifeguard stand. It has my name on it.

Missy Matchstick. Just like the towel.

Inside: a pair of cracked sunglasses. They shimmer. Like the truth is trying to break through the fractures. I put them on. And the world shatters.

I see Olivia on the floor, phone in hand, calling and calling her ex girlfriend.

I see Champagne Girl in rehab, crying into her salad.

I see Ashley in court, blaming everyone but herself.

I see the voicemail they left. “Please don’t do anything tonight. I love you. We love you. Call me.”

I see myself, curled on the floor of a bathroom stall, laughing at something that hurt too much to name.

I see every version of me that didn’t make it.

And the one who did.

When I take the glasses off, the pool is no longer golden. It’s silver. Reflective. And in the water, I see not just me — but all of them. Their faces behind their sunglasses. Their real expressions. They’re not glamorous. They’re broken. They’re trying. They’re still here. And so am I.

The lifeguard is gone. The chair is empty. But the pool is glowing. Like it’s ready for something new. I climb the steps. The whistle is already in my hand. I sit. And I see everything.

The sky doesn’t change. Still golden. Still perfect. But I know better now. It’s not daylight. It’s delay. Golden hour is just grief trying to look cute.

The pool resets itself slowly, like a browser clearing its cache. The static quiets. The music fades into something softer — strings maybe, or wind chimes from a Melrose boutique no one shops at but everyone Instagrams.

From my seat in the lifeguard chair, everything looks different.

The Mirror Twins are at the juice bar again, but one of them speaks a little louder now, and the other doesn’t flinch.

Champagne Girl is in a cabana mirror, removing her lashes with trembling fingers. The glass shows her reflection unfiltered — for the first time.

Ashley’s booth is empty. Olivia is gone.

But I swear I hear a laugh echo from the pool’s deep end. The kind of laugh that’s only real when you’re not trying to impress anyone.

A breeze kicks up. My towel flutters below me like a flag.

And then —

She arrives.

The new girl. Her lounge chair appears out of nowhere, just like mine did. She’s got smeared eyeliner, a cracked phone case, a coffee stain on her hoodie that says LGBTQ+ Community Center of WeHo. She sits up slowly. Confused. Blinking. Her drink is already in her hand — a glittery iced matcha that smells faintly like eucalyptus and regret.

Her towel reads: Saydee

She doesn’t say anything. Just looks around. And everyone? They act like they’ve seen her before. Like she’s not new. Like she’s always been here. But I know the difference now. I know the look of someone who still thinks this is a vacation. Someone who hasn’t figured out that you don’t get tan lines in limbo.

She reaches for her sunglasses, sitting beside her like an invitation. I don’t stop her. But I do lean forward, elbows on knees, one hand gripping the whistle at my neck like a rosary made of grief.

I watch her.

Not with judgment.

Not with fear.

But with love.

The kind of love that only comes from surviving yourself.

She looks up at me. I give her a nod. And say nothing. Because she’s not ready yet. But one day — if she’s lucky — she will be.