I had no idea what she meant.
“We’re cool with it for now,” Simon said. “We can dig it. Not so keen on the rain, though. Kind of reminds me of London that last summer when me mum and I—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Nikki said. “Please use modern English. Or French. Or Hindi. Who cares? Just stop acting like you just got—”
“What Nikki is trying to say,” Jamie said, turning to face Nikki, “is that we all bring certain habits or cultural traits with us. It’s totally natural that we hang on to them for a while.”
“Try losing the kimono,” Simon muttered under his breath. “You grew up in California.”
“How about you lose your head,” Nikki shot back at him.
Simon shrugged. “Wouldn’t really matter.”
Nikki narrowed her eyes. “I’ll find a way to make it matter.”
Simon looked at the ground, which gave me the feeling Nikki could make good on her promise.
Naomi stepped forward. “Please, everyone. Henry is new here and this is his meeting. This is never easy, not for anyone.”
A quiet voice spoke from behind her. It took me a moment to realize it was Nikki.
“True,” she said, softly.
“But he has to know,” Simon said.
“Yes, he does.” Jamie looked at the others. “Everyone going?”
They all nodded.
Jamie turned to me. “Ready?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I had no idea what I was getting ready for but whatever it was didn’t sound like fun.
Naomi did her best to smile, but I could tell that her soul wasn’t butterflying. “We all get through it,” she said. “It’s basically the bee’s knees from there, okay?”
“I was just thinking,” Nikki said. “How about I catch up with all of you later?”
Jamie stared at her. “We should be there for him.”
Nikki glared back. “You know I hate this.”
“Everyone hates this. Not exactly happy stuff. Ready, everyone?”
I waited, thinking the others were supposed to respond. But I guess they didn’t have to since suddenly everything around me disappeared.
3
I’m Looking Through You
I don’t know about you, but being in church always made me think about being dead someday. Like I said before, death just wasn’t something I’d wanted to spend my time thinking about. Ironic, I know. Still, I guess that’s half the point of going to church, when you think about it. Church is where you learn that if you act good in life, death will be good to you. More or less. And then there’s the “death is part of life” thing. Everyone needs to learn about that too. Like when you were five and your parents told you that your dead goldfish, hamster (or possibly grandmother) was now in a better place. Church basically supports that whole idea. But death is not really part of life. Let’s face it, death means the end of life—at least, whatever life you were living at the time. What follows is a totally different deal. Take it from me. I know.
Either way, what I never imagined was being both dead and in church. But that’s exactly where I found myself. What made the situation even more confusing was that I still felt completely alive. It wasn’t like I could see through my hand or anything like that. I wasn’t transparent like in some cheesy movie. I even felt the floor beneath my feet. What I couldn’t wrap my brain around was how I’d managed to plant my feet on this particular floor without going anywhere first. One minute before I’d been standing outside in a cool gray place with a bunch of freaky kids and then, pop, here we now stood.
Oh, there was one other weird thing. Actually, really weird.
See, across the room, near the altar, in the coffin…
Right, you guessed it.
Me.
I didn’t look all that great either. My head rested on a purple satin pillow and my hands lay folded against my chest, which I know sounds okay, but you could see from a mile off that I wasn’t just taking a nap. I’ll spare you the morbid details but there was nothing to be done now about my skin with Clearasil. Even a zit wouldn’t be surviving on that face anymore.
Then I realized I’d only spent the one night being dead—okay, sure, “between lives”—and here I was at my funeral.
I turned to Jamie. “Am I seeing the future or something? This couldn’t be happening already.” I felt briefly hopeful, like this might be some sort of Ebenezer Scrooge opportunity. Maybe if I just said the right words—promised to be a better son, brother, student or something—I’d go back to my old life.
“Sorry,” Jamie said. “This is now. It’s just—”
“But it takes time to plan a funeral, right? Wouldn’t I have had to be gone for more like a week or something?”
Jamie nodded. “Close. Actually, you’ve been gone six days. Earth time.” He turned to look at me. “I know, it’s confusing at first. The whole time being different thing. Sometimes a day is a day and sometimes, well, it’s not. You needed to sleep. Most of us do at first. In your case, it looks like you slept for almost a week.”
“A week?” The most I’d ever managed before was sleeping until noon. Now that I thought about it, why would I need to sleep if I was dead? But then why did we sleep when we were alive? The last I heard, no one really understood why that was either.
“Like I said, almost a week,” Jamie said. “No biggie. Are you doing okay so far?”
“I guess. I’m not really sure.” Then something occurred to me and I pointed toward the coffin. “Do I…?” I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask.
Jamie shook his head. “You look fine. Actually, you can appear anyway you’d like. Really, it’s up to you.”
I was about to ask about that when suddenly the music started, the usual droning organ music you hear in church, but now it seemed even more depressing (something I’d imagined impossible). Behind the music, I heard people whispering as they waited for the service to start.
Then I saw my family.
They sat in the front pew, staring straight ahead. Tears ran down my mother’s face while my father kept his arm around her shoulders. John clenched his jaw the way he did when he didn’t want you to know he was in pain. Bethany kept taking deep breaths while dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. They looked terrible, exhausted, each of them pale with dark circles under bloodshot eyes.
In that moment, it became real to me. Maybe I was between lives, whatever that meant, but to them I was nothing but dead. Dead and gone. Our family was broken and I’d made it happen. I had to tell them I was okay, that I was right there next to them! I started toward them—ready to call out, to try anything to get their attention—but in that same instant, I suddenly realized something else. It felt like the world stopped.
The whispering—all those hushed words going on around me. I could hear them. All I had to do was look at someone to hear perfectly.
Behind my parents, I saw my father’s brother, Uncle Richard, sitting next to Aunt Anita. They must have flown down from New York just for my funeral.
“God, it’s such a shame,” he said. “Do you think it could be true?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d like to think it can’t be.”
Another row back, Uncle Mike whispered to Aunt Jenny. “The kid was messed up. All those black clothes, the earrings and the purple hair. You could see something like this coming.”
“This is not the time,” she said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Next to them, my cousin Jeff leaned in toward his sister, Lisa. “Henry was totally weird,” he whispered. “All depressed looking. Those are always the kids who do this kind of thing.”
“I know,” Lisa said. “When did he get on the bus to Emo town?”
I don’t know what was more confusing, the words I heard people saying or the fact that I could actually hear them. Neither seemed to make any sense. To be sure it wasn’t some sort of weird coincidence, I looked to the back of the church where two ushers stood by the entrance—two old guys I’d never
seen before.
“It’s really sad,” one guy said. “Only fourteen years old.”
“Probably something going on with him,” the other one said. “You have to feel bad for his family.”
Until that moment, I’d been hoping it was only Nikki and Jamie who’d thought I might have drowned myself on purpose. But obviously some people here were also convinced I’d committed suicide. How could they possibly think that about me? So, I’d dressed in black a lot. Streaked my hair purple for the heck of it. What kind of stereotype crap was this?
Then something horrible occurred to me. What did my family think?
Suddenly, it made sense why I’d been shown those scenes from my life. My parents had been worried about me before I died. They’d been wondering what was up with me and now they’d never be sure. As far as they knew, I could have been seriously depressed. They couldn’t know if there had been some dark secret dragging me down.
Somehow, I had to make sure they knew it was an accident. I waved my arms. I jumped up and down, my feet pounding the floor. “Mom, Dad, I’m right here! Bethany, John, it’s me! Look!”
But they couldn’t hear me. They couldn’t see me. To them, I was invisible, nonexistent. Not yet forgotten, but definitely gone.
I didn’t know yet that most people between lives can never manage to make themselves seen by the living. This talent, I later learned, is the rarest of all when it comes to interacting with those existing in the other realm.
I ran to where they were and stood directly in front of them. “Come on, guys! I’m not dead! Well, I mean, I am, but not like you think.” I pointed at the coffin. “I’m not there, that isn’t me!” I drummed my hands on the wooden rail in front of their pew. “I’m right here! Look!”
Given the noise I should have been making, I expected the entire church to be staring back at me. Nothing. The crowd sat waiting. My mother remained crying and my father had closed his eyes, his head dropping in sadness. John stared into the distance, his expression vacant.
But Bethany was looking right at me, her head cocked like she was listening.
I waved my arms frantically. “Bethany, can you hear me? Can you see me?”
Here’s why some poor souls keep trying for centuries even when they know it’s almost impossible to make contact with people on the other side. Because every so often someone can sense the “nonliving” person being there, despite everything they’ve been taught to believe about what’s real and what supposedly isn’t. Sometimes they might even hear something you say, and on even rarer occasions see you.
But I didn’t know any of that yet. All I knew was that Bethany squinted, her brow furrowed. She leaned forward and stared right at me. Or through me. I couldn’t tell. Still, she definitely seemed aware of me being there.
I started laughing, feeling happier than I’d ever imagined feeling again. “Bethany, you know I’m here! I can tell! Look, you need to tell Mom and—”
The pastor’s voice rang out across the room. “Dear family and friends. We have gathered here today to express our love and sympathy for the Connors family on this sad occasion.”
Everyone in the church brought their attention to the altar, including Bethany. A moment before, she’d been focused right on me and now she looked away as if nothing had happened.
I tried waving my arms again. “Bethany, wait! Come on, please look at me!”
But she didn’t and the pastor kept saying things I wasn’t ready to hear. Suddenly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped, thinking it might have been the hand of someone still living. Instead, I turned to see Jamie.
“They can’t see you,” he said. “I know it hurts, but they can’t. They can’t hear you either.”
“But my sister, she heard me. Or saw me. Something—I’m not sure.”
Jamie shook his head. “She couldn’t have. I’m sorry, but she can’t.”
I looked past him to make eye contact with the other three people who actually could see me—Nikki, Naomi and Simon, their sad expressions showing they knew what I was going through. Nikki kept her eyes on mine a few seconds longer than the others and it seemed like she was about to say something. But if something was on her mind, she kept it to herself. After a moment, she also looked away.
When I turned back to my family, they looked right through me. I might as well have been a ghost.
4
Ghosts in the Bathroom
After I finally accepted that the pastor would keep speaking and that people would keep crying no matter what I did, I asked the others if we could leave. I guess I must have learned whatever I’d been meant to from my funeral, since a moment later we stood on a sunny sidewalk next to a tree-lined street. No more towering fir trees touching the clouds, just the normal kind like you’d usually see in a neighborhood, all of them full and vibrantly green.
I blinked against the sunlight. “Where are we?”
“Exactly where we were before, mate,” Simon said. “Weird, huh?”
“Do you like it?” Naomi asked. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
I heard kids playing in the distance and the sound of dogs barking in backyards. Cars rolled past on the next block, music blaring to the afternoon. Was it my imagination or did I smell brownies baking?
“Sure, this seems nice,” I said. “Still not sure where we are, though.”
“This is our neighborhood,” Jamie said. “The one we agreed upon. It’s kind of a mix of different stuff, based on where we all last lived.”
“We even snuck a bit of England in there,” Simon said proudly. “The Victorian flats were my idea.”
At first, I wasn’t sure what Simon was talking about. The side of the street we faced was lined with the kind of houses you’d find in the suburbs pretty much anywhere. But when I turned around, I saw that the other side showed a row of apartment buildings. Not the bland rectangles with windows and balconies I usually thought about when I pictured apartments, but more ornate, almost historic looking. I hadn’t noticed before, but now I saw that there were also palm trees looming above the oaks and maples. I wondered what had happened to the gray, drizzling sky and the forest we’d left when we’d gone to my funeral.
Naomi somehow guessed what I was thinking. “Your place isn’t really gone,” she said. “I mean, you can still go there if you want to. It’s just not infested right now. No, that’s not it.” She turned to Jamie. “What’s the word Martha uses?”
“Manifesting,” Jamie said. “It’s kind of what I was getting at before. I know it seems weird, but you sort of created that around yourself. Was it someplace you used to know?”
I had no idea what they were talking about with the whole “manifesting” thing. Like I could somehow create my own personal rain forest. Could I? Obviously, this whole deal was going to take some getting used to. I shook my head. “Not exactly,” I said. “More like someplace I’d planned on seeing. In the Northwest.”
Jamie nodded. “Sure, that’s cool too. Either way, since it’s the place you came in with we decided to go with it for a while. Hope it helped, but it was kind of getting us down.”
When he said that, I remembered that I’d slept for almost a week. I was still trying to make sense of that, but it sounded like I’d somehow left them surrounded in gloom the whole time. No wonder they were sick of it.
I looked around again at the neighborhood. “Who lives in all these houses?”
“Depends,” Jamie said. “There’s also an awesome skate park down the street. We’ll have to break out the boards soon.”
An actual skate park? That did sound cool. In the past, I’d only skated on the streets of my neighborhood and a few times in some parking lots. For a second, I wondered about pads and helmets but then remembered we couldn’t possibly get hurt. Or could we? I wasn’t really sure.
“Ready to see our house?” Naomi said. “It’s pretty nifty.”
I looked from one side of the street to the other. “Sure, which one is it?”
“That�
�s it, there,” Simon said, pointing toward one of the Victorian apartment buildings behind me.
I turned to see a three-story building, painted in different shades of blue, ranging from turquoise at the bottom to nearly purple at the top, with white trim and green shutters. The place had a huge veranda with hanging plants, dining tables and Adirondack chairs that looked pretty comfy for lounging or maybe reading. Judging from the outside, definitely a nice place to live.
“We call it Halfway House,” Naomi said. “I think you’ll really like it.”
Halfway house? Confused, I looked at Jamie.
“Oh, that’s kind of a joke,” Jamie said. “Not that we have substance issues or anything like that—we’re just sort of recovering from whatever did or didn’t happen in our last life. Waiting and preparing, all that. Nikki came up with the name, now that I think about it.”
“You may not have substance issues,” Nikki said over her shoulder as she walked toward the house, “but you definitely have issues. Trust me.”
As soon as we were inside Halfway House, it only took a second to realize I’d never seen anything like it before. Not even close. For example, living room? No way. Who uses a living room? Try inside pool, with lounge chairs all around and “sunlight” shining down from above. This didn’t seem possible, but there it was all the same. Next to the pool was a snack bar window with a neon sign that said “Always Open.” I got only that far, then stopped and stood there taking it in.
“Come on,” Jamie said. “There’s more.”
They walked toward the next room and I followed.
“This is the game room,” Jamie said. “Check it out. Pretty sure we have it covered.”
Jamie wasn’t kidding—the place was fully loaded. Pool tables, ping-pong, air hockey. Two bowling lanes, full-sized. Pinball machines, Wii, PlayStation and Xbox. Not to mention a wall lined with arcade style video games. For a moment, I wondered how I’d get the money to play those but something told me it wouldn’t be a problem.
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