Excerpt:

The first time I died, it was autumn.

It was a car accident. It was quite mundane, really, especially after what happened later. My boyfriend and I were having a good-natured argument about the movie we had just seen, and he was driving too fast in the dark, on the slick, leaf-covered back road leading to my parents’ house, not paying attention. He went through a stop sign and a truck hit us broadside, smashing into the passenger’s side door at nearly fifty miles an hour. We spun around six times. Four other cars hit us, sending us rolling like a pinball, back and forth across the road. Another truck hit us and sent us flying into the air. We flipped four times, and finally came to a rest upside down in a ditch on the other side of the road. The whole thing happened in less than ten seconds.

Of course, I do not remember most of this. I was unconscious almost as soon as the truck initially hit us, having taken the brunt of the impact on my side. But I woke up, briefly, before the ambulances arrived and the EMTs pulled Quinn, broken and battered but miraculously, wonderfully alive, from the driver’s seat, to find myself hanging by my seatbelt harness in the open air. I had flown through the broken windshield. I was now hanging, suspended over top of the hood of the Acura, strangling in the seatbelt, covered in blood. I could not see or feel anything—not Quinn, beside me, and not my legs, which were pulverized, nor my arms, not even the wind on my broken, ruined face.

But I could smell the leaves. The wonderful, crisp, musty smell of fallen leaves, so fun to jump into when you’re small, and such a hassle to clean up when you get older. Such beautiful colors and shapes, each one different. It was an odd smell, a nostalgic, seasonal smell, like s’mores and bonfires before a big football game, or a reminder that Thanksgiving at Grandma’s house was just around the corner.

Strangely, none of those things mattered. I was not even afraid. I was blind, and paralyzed, but I was not in pain. Nothing mattered at all. Not the boy beside me, who I thought I loved, nor my parents, not even the grad school applications I had waiting at home. Nothing. My head was blissfully, wonderfully empty, almost light. I was carefree, buoyant. I felt myself beginning to drift into sleep. I was so tired, so very weary. I was ready.

Then something terrible happened. I woke up.