I’m not sure what made me eat his ashes that night, standing under the amber bulbs of The Cyclone. Aged punk rockers waited to board the quivering wooden rollercoaster in tribute to Ric, who had finally drank himself to death. I was mad at them for being drunk, but I too was wasted.

I swiped a fingerful of his remains while no one was looking and laid it on my tongue like acid. I wanted to keep a part of him for myself, to integrate his corpse into my living body. I would regret it the following nights when I awoke to his voice in my ear, saw him standing at the foot of my bed. I shouldn’t have tripped Ric. He’d always promised to haunt me.

Ten years prior, when I’d first met him, our beloved mutual friend delivered a clear message.

“Do not date Ric!” Robert yelled from the springy couch seat of my ‘77 Cutlass Supreme. “This will end badly.”

He must have known that it was too late. That summer home from college, I stumbled into the sunrise many nights with Ric, frolicking down sticky humid streets of my Kentucky hometown. At work, he baked me a pizza topped with pepperonis in the shape of a “G,” the first letter of my name. I drove him home over parkway hills, blasting hip hop as the couch seat bounced us and the hot pizza into the air.

He was the kind of beautiful that earned phone numbers scribbled on restaurant checks — the funniest storyteller in every room. He made me laugh til I cried, beam with pride when he swooned over my writing, sprint through green fields to kick soccer balls into each other’s goals. I felt gorgeous next to his lean muscled frame, his hand running through his dyed black hair, his arm draped over my shoulder.

When it came time for me to drive back to New England, he convinced me that he could live in my dorm room without disrupting my studies or housemates.

“I’ll just be a little kitten in your room, making dinner when you get home from class.”

Instead, he was a smelly guy in a house of women, crushing beer cans and watching hours of TV from my bed. He begged me for money to order pizza and promised he would get a job soon.

I did somehow keep up with my studies, clawing my way out of our cocoon to attend class. On the weekends, we hopped the fence at Six Flags to ride rollercoasters through crisp autumn nights, giggle at the Halloween music and fog machines, dance with costumed performers. I discovered deep tranquility in the chaos of rollercoasters, closing my eyes and breathing long and deep as the car took me where it wanted to go.

Ric was an expert at play, and drew me out from my anxious scramble to keep up at a prestigious school. I had landed a surprising scholarship, and felt out of place, steps behind my classmates who’d attended prep schools while I’d dropped out of high school. I’d barely survived the pressure of my first year, and returning with Ric kept me tethered to a familiar and unruly version of myself.

“What do you care about all these uptight pricks and their opinions?” he said. “I mean look at them. Never trust a man in khakis. He deserves to get his lunch money stolen.”

“Right? But seriously, I have to go to the library tonight to finish this paper. It’s supposed to be twenty pages long, and I’ve never written anything over three! I’m kinda freaking out.”

“Well, at least you have better style than these chumps.”

“That’s how they should grade us.” I tried to laugh but my chest was too tight.

We stole our groceries, pushing a cart through the aisles to fill it up, then slowly draining it down our pants and beneath our hoodies. When the cart was empty again, we would walk out to the car, shuffling with ice cream bars in our pant legs and frozen pizzas pressed against the curve of our backs.

Eventually, he landed a job cooking at an Indian restaurant in town and bought weekly lottery tickets with the kitchen crew. While I learned to compose verbose literary critiques, he tattooed C.R.E.A.M. in Old English across his belly.

My housemates soured on Ric for good the night police walked into our apartment. Ric loved to empty a sleeve of white bread, coat the slices with mayo and mustard, then pack them into the bag and carry a socked tube of beers to our movie night. Two officers found us in a common living room, eating our stack of condiment sandwiches and watching “The Simpsons.”

They handcuffed his wrists behind his back and paraded him across the parking lot as students stepped onto their porches. Flashing police lights were a remarkable anomaly on this campus. I followed them to the jail, which looked more like a barn and also served as the fire department.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to get him from court in the morning,” the clerk said, as I watched Ric pace behind the desk in a plexiglass cube. The cinder blocks were spotless buttery yellow. I later learned that he was the only inmate and for breakfast they bought him whatever he wanted from McDonald’s.

In my courtroom pew the following day, I watched officers shuffle him down the aisle with both wrists and ankles shackled. Apparently, he had been caught stealing DVD’s and he’d run, becoming a thrilling flight risk for bored cops.

“I’m very sorry for what I did, your honor. It’s just that I can’t afford Christmas presents for my family.”

His performance won him a reduced sentence of community service. Meanwhile, I needed to find a new place to live next semester.

“What about Denmark?” he suggested.

This absurd fever dream sprouted a written proposal for an independent study, which bloomed into a purchase of two flights to Copenhagen and his promise to pay me back very soon. In the dark cabin over the Atlantic, with free mini-bottles of Champagne littered around our seats, we folded ourselves into the single-square-foot bathroom and initiated one another into the Mile High Club.

In the 800-year-old mansion which now housed a farm commune, we made the arched basement our stony home. We worked in the main kitchen feeding the 120 residents, and I spent mornings in our room chipping away at a novella for my thesis.

Ric got busy with his own project, filling half of our room with crates of bottled beer. Over months, one bottle at a time, he transmuted beer into piss, avoiding the chilly walk down a tiled hallway to a bathroom shared by the dozen basement neighbors. One night, he picked up the wrong bottle and took a long swig, then vomited into a half coconut we’d collected on a free day in town. He hid the whole mess under his piles of clothes and refused to tell me where it was. We exploded into a screaming fight, as he dashed between the doors blocking my exit.

“Oh, c’mon. You’re gonna cry?” he taunted, as I crumpled to the ground. “You don’t know what it’s like to be abused.”

In the Danish winter, the sky hung dark and wet over the day. Ric spent more time with his bottles and eventually a German woman from the woodshop. Their laughter echoed down our hallway, and I slumped against the wall in our bed, wrapped in a blanket, telling myself I should trust him, that we would find our way back to each other.

Our season on the farm ended, and we took the night train to Amsterdam. We teetered through bars, plunked coins into peep show windows and ate drugged brownies, but we couldn’t find the fun in it. After several days of street cart hamburgers and spoons lit over absinthe, we lurched toward the train station in the piercing light of morning.

“I’m not getting on this train,” he said.

“What? What do you mean? We’re going to Prague.”

“No, you’re going to Prague. I’m going home. This is where our paths diverge, or whatever.”

I stepped up into the compartment dazed and watched him recede on the platform, waving as tears soaked my face. I cried between the saints on the Charles Bridge, soaked in thermal baths in Budapest, sobbed in hostel beds until I lost my voice. Finally, I sat mute in a Vienna cathedral as a chorus bathed me in Mozart’s Requiem Mass.

When I returned to the states, I threw away the fractured novella and moved into a houseboat encased in ice to write a year’s worth of thesis in the final month. I drank too much bourbon and crooned to Patsy Cline until I squeezed out the last words and submitted them to my committee — the night before my deadline. I walked across the stage that spring with all the other graduates, amazed when the president handed me a diploma.

The sticky note I’d pressed to my phone said, “Do Not Call Ric,” yet I did call him. We spent another summer fighting and jumping out of moving cars, cuddling under a sleeping bag in the closet he’d rented, building a blanket fort over a heating vent in the winter. In a crowded bar, enraged by his taunting, I tossed a gin and tonic in his face. The fight abruptly ceased as he smiled at his dramatic achievement.

Finally, he moved to Denver. I didn’t follow him — until several years later. By then, we’d reconciled enough that he introduced me to his friend group and got me a job washing dishes in the kitchen where he cooked. I tattooed half my arm with a rollercoaster sleeve, reminding myself of that feeling when I could let go into the twists and drops.

We started new relationships. I attended his wedding, then met up for a drink after his divorce.

“I’m taking it easy, sticking to water,” he declared at the bar, though he slipped off to the bathroom every half hour. His skin had faded from pink to yellow, and a rash spread across his cheeks.

“Why do you keep taking your drink to the bathroom?” I asked.

“Because I’m very thirstyyyy,” he giggled. With each return, he slurred more.

One spring, he climbed stiffly out of an Uber to meet me for a burrito. He wore sunglasses and stepped gingerly toward my table, as if the pavement hurt his feet. Skin flaked like brittle paper and revealed open sores. I stared, searching for the right words. He watched me eat and sipped his horchata.

A month later in his hospital bed, he held out a plastic bag the size of a basketball, full of jelly beans for the friends gathered around him. He chuckled and quipped at the sitcoms on his television. I perched awkwardly on the corner of the mattress and watched him as he avoided my gaze.

When he hobbled to the bathroom, I saw blood ooze down the back of his leg. No nurse rushed in to stop it. In the hallway, they told me that despite dialysis, he would continue to grow yellow and confused.

Now, I think about his tattoos burning in his crematorium bed — all of his artistry destroyed. Perhaps the ash I ate contained one of these designs, or his deep brown eyes, or the fingers that illustrated playful graffiti characters.

I strapped myself into the red leather seats of the coaster with a single, floppy seatbelt I shared with Robert. Our friends filled the train, hollering with fists in the air as we left the station and dropped into a black abyss. Engulfed in darkness, the coaster coiled through the planked tunnel and I lost my breath as tears ran down my cheeks.

The Cyclone screamed over the track that night, whipping around bends with such fury I could not fathom how the cars clung to the rails. My teeth chattered in the wild vibration. I dug my nails into the painted wood and sucked in air through wet cheeks. This ride seemed longer than usual, careening out of the run-down amusement park and across a quiet field where tall weeds stood in the moonlight.

There was no escape, nothing to do but surrender, and I exhaled into the rolling hills. I whooped over the humps in chorus with the crowd and tried to smile at the tickles in my stomach. Like an acid trip that comes on too strong, I had to let it take me.

As the car cruised back into the station, the operator pulled his long lever and I released a clenched breath. Ric’s dust lingered on my tongue. But in the months to come, his voice faded from my sleeping ears, his form no longer hovered at the foot of my bed. I woke alone, disappointed to have slept in peace.

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Grace is a trans writer in Brooklyn, and an MFA student at The New School. The story “Eating My Ex” is their debut fiction publication in Doric Literary. Grace has published in Bust Magazine, and authored a cultural and political column for 4 years in the zine, BRAT. Grace is polishing a novel while biking around New York and MMA fighting. Grace hosts a morning writing club every weekday morning free for anyone to drop in and write. Learn more at www.gballardauthor.com.

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