Layoverland
Page 1
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020
Copyright © 2020 by Penguin Random House LLC
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Noone, Gabby, author.
Title: Layoverland : a novel / by Gabby Noone.
Description: New York : Razorbill, 2020. | Audience: Ages 14+ |
Summary: When seventeen-year-old Beatrice arrives in Purgatory and is chosen to help others reach Heaven, the last thing she expects is to fall in love with Caleb, with whom she shares a tragic history.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019036469 | ISBN 9781984836120 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984836137 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Purgatory—Fiction. | Future life—Fiction. | Love—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.N64 Lay 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036469
Ebook ISBN 9781984836137
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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In loving memory of my friend Stephen Costello (1994–2016).
I hope there are no granite countertops in Heaven.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
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
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PROLOGUE
You know the kind of crying where you’re crying over one thing and then you think about a slightly less upsetting but still definitely upsetting thing and it makes you cry even more? And then you think about every bad thing that’s ever happened to you in your whole life and everything you think is unfair in the world? And it’s like you’re taking part in some Guinness World Record competition to see who can fit the most toppings on a single pizza and your face is the pizza and your tears are the toppings? The pepperoni of your mistakes, the black olives of not being pretty enough, the mushrooms of rejection, and, for good measure, a few chunks of pineapple to represent how bees are dying at an alarming rate and you have no idea how to stop it?
No?
Me neither.
I’m not usually someone who cries. I wasn’t familiar with this kind of crying until today, but it’s the kind of crying I’m doing as I drive around in my used Honda Civic. My car was manufactured in 1999, which is three years before I was born, four years before my little sister was born, and twenty years before today, when I accidentally ruined her life.
I mean, I don’t think her whole life will be ruined, but her life right now is ruined, and isn’t that really the same thing?
I’m too ashamed to make my way home and face her, but I’ve been crying so much that I’m afraid of showing my red puffy face anywhere in public. I don’t have a best friend’s house to seek refuge in because, to be honest, my sister was my best (and only) friend. So I’ve just been driving aimlessly around town for the last five hours.
The slightly less upsetting thing that’s making me cry even more is the realization that there aren’t enough songs about having a fight with your best friend. And there are possibly zero songs about having a fight with your best friend who also happens to be your sister. There are definitely zero songs about having a fight with your best friend who also happens to be your sister, because you’ve just ruined her life.
But after hours of driving around in circles in total silence, I decide I need to find something to listen to. Maybe music will make things better or, at least, drown out the sound of the ragged sobs that are somehow coming out of my own mouth and not that of some wild animal. At a stoplight I scroll through my phone and try to pick something, but nothing feels right. I look at the Top 50 Songs in America playlist. Every track is either about people who are having sex or wish they were having sex. I can’t believe that I’ve ruined my sister’s life and there isn’t even an appropriate soundtrack for me to feel bad about it over.
The light turns green. I stop scrolling.
“Hey, Siri,” I sob into my phone. “Play a song about missing your sister.”
I think talking to the virtual assistant feature on any phone or TV is so deeply idiotic, but I use it sometimes while I’m driving because the only thing more idiotic is being the teenage girl who actually gets in a car accident while looking down at her phone. I refuse to be a useful statistic for local nagging parents.
“Playing ‘Hey, Soul Sister’ by Train,” the robotic female voice says back to me.
“What? No! Play a song about missing your sister!”
“Playing ‘Hey, Soul Sister’ by Train,” it repeats.
The opening notes blare out of my phone speaker.
Heyyyy, hey huh ayyyy, hey huh ayyyy.
“Siri, shut this off!” I yell.
But the song keeps going. The singer says something about a girl’s lipstick stains on his head or something. It’s definitely a song about people who wish they were having sex and not about actual sisters.
“That doesn’t even make any sense!” I half yell-sob as I throw the phone onto the passenger seat.
But before I can ask Siri to change the song again, I see a silver SUV driving on the wrong side of the road, speeding straight toward me. I blink back my tears, hoping it’s a hallucination or just some kind of optical illusion created by the makeup pooling under my eyes. Just as I frantically try to hit the brakes, we collide. Then it all happens so fast, yet so, so slowly.
Our cars make an
awful squeaking, crunching noise, like someone dragging a million pairs of long acrylic nails over a chalkboard and crushing a million soda cans all at once. Then it’s like I can see my own body rise up into the air and my head smashing into the glass of the front window. For a quarter of a second, the other driver and I make panicked eye contact, then his head slumps forward. Somehow, though, the music from my phone keeps playing.
Heyyyyy hey huh heyyyyy.
With shards of glass covering my neck, and my spine cracking in multiple places, all I can think is: I’m going to be so pissed if I die while this song is playing.
1
When I try to open my eyes, I’m blinded by fluorescent white light. I feel a gust of cold air directly above my head, and a chill runs down my spine. A smell lingers in the air—a combination of bathroom cleaner and vegetable soup. I’m strapped upright into what feels like a hard yet lumpy bed. Beside me, I hear the sickly sound of someone gagging followed by the unmistakable plop of vomit.
All awful elements individually, but combined, my brain processes them as one thing: hospital.
Somehow it makes sense to me that I’m here, but the exact reason why I’m here sits at the farthest edges of my brain where I can’t quite grasp at it.
I’m squinting away from the light, attempting to go to sleep, when I feel the nudge of someone else’s elbow against mine. My eyes burst open again and I bolt upright.
I look down at the offending limb where it sits on an armrest to my right. My eyes wander up to its owner, a sunburned man with bleached-blond spiked hair who is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and currently hurling the contents of his stomach into a paper barf bag.
But hospital beds don’t have armrests, right? Why would they? One thing I know for certain is that patients aren’t meant to share hospital beds, especially when one of those patients is a Guy Fieri look-alike who seems like he’s coming back from a bad trip to Flavortown.
I look to my left. There’s another armrest and another elbow, this one as wrinkly as a dried apricot. Its owner is a sleeping white-haired old woman wearing a pastel nightgown, her hands clasped serenely on her lap.
I look behind me and realize I’m not strapped to a bed, but to a seat upholstered in battered orange vinyl. All around me, in front and behind, side to side, are more of these seats. And they’re full of people. We’re in a long, narrow room with low ceilings and walls made of plastic and tiny windows with a view of nothing but pitch-black darkness and . . . it hits me—I’m not in a hospital. I’m on an airplane.
“Where are we flying to?” I ask the man next to me, my voice sounding like it’s coming out of someone else’s mouth.
He looks up from his barf bag and stares at me like he’s also just noticed there are other people around him, then shrugs.
Suddenly a crackling noise projects out of an overhead speaker.
“We are now skrshskrsh,” a woman’s voice says. “Arriving skrshskrsh our destination skrshskrsh please skrshskrsh seated skrshskrsh . . .”
“Where?” yells a scattered chorus of other passengers.
I turn again to my neighbor.
“Did you catch that?”
He frantically shakes his head.
“Absolutely useless,” I mutter, rolling my eyes.
I’m about to desperately nudge the old woman to see if she knows what’s going on, but a jolt of turbulence forces me back against the seat. I clap my hands over my ears to muffle the grating sound of an engine revving up somewhere beneath my feet.
As if controlled by a light switch, the pitch-black darkness outside the tiny windows turns into daylight. There’s a loud popping noise like opening a can of refrigerated Pillsbury biscuit dough. With a thud, we touch down onto the tarmac. I’m no expert on aviation, but this can’t be normal. The one time I’ve been on an airplane, a disappointingly Disney World–less visit with my grandma in Florida, we circled the city of Orlando for twenty minutes before we landed.
“We have now skrshrshskrsh at our destination,” the voice booms from the speakers. “You may skrshskrsh the plane. Please line up skrshskrshskrsh orderly fashion skrshskrshskrsh collect all belongings skrshskrsh brought skrsh on your journey skrshskrshskrsh. We hope skrshskrsh have a wonderful time here at skrshskrsh. Goodbye!”
A door drops open in the middle section of the plane, letting in a burst of natural light. There are a few gasps, one or two screams, and the old woman next to me suddenly grunts awake, but mostly everyone looks over their seats in amazed silence at the open door.
I expect a flight attendant or someone to give us more directions—or rather, any directions—but nothing happens.
One man in an aisle seat wearing a business suit unlocks his seat belt and stands. Everyone cranes their necks to stare at him. He takes one big deep breath then walks out the door.
Others stare at one another, then toward the door, then at one another again. Slowly, they begin to stand and follow the man outside.
I undo my seat belt and feel around for my belongings, only to realize I haven’t brought any with me other than the clothes on my back: a fuzzy cropped black sweater and a pair of mom jeans—my least favorite pair of jeans. I’m never absolutely certain that they make me look cool and not like an actual frumpy mom, no matter how many times my sister reassures me they don’t.
It seems no one else brought anything either because when they open the overhead bins, they’re empty.
The guy to my right stands, dropping his barf bag onto the floor.
“Hey, don’t just leave that for someone else to clean up,” I protest.
He looks at me helplessly, like there’s truly no alternative but to dump his sopping wet bag of stomach acid and likely chunks of partially digested jalapeno poppers right in my path.
“What’s wrong with you? Just because you’re sick doesn’t mean you have a pass to treat this like your personal trash can. There are other people on this plane.”
Before I can berate him any more, he pushes his way into the aisle, not waiting his turn as people begin to exit in an orderly fashion.
Looking around at the rest of the passengers, I can’t figure out where we could possibly be going. No one seems to be dressed for the same kind of weather. There’s a woman in a heavy down parka. Another woman in a straight-up bathing suit. A handful of people wearing nightgowns like the old lady next to me. Everyone appears to be of different races, genders, and ages—well, actually, mostly everyone looks to be at least over fifty. There are a handful of younger people, but none as young as I am.
As I finally walk out of my row and into the aisle, I notice one teenage boy. Something about him strikes me as familiar, but I can’t pinpoint it. I stare at him for a second, but when he makes eye contact with me, I look away immediately, which is what I always do when I make eye contact with a boy I don’t know. It’s a mistake to ever let boys think you’re even remotely interested in their existence. He probably only looks familiar because he’s just wearing, oh, the most common (and most boring) boy outfit in the world: basketball shorts and black slide sandals with white socks. It’s just the uncanny valley of boyness that’s tripping me up.
I shuffle along to the door, then down a temporary flight of stairs onto the tarmac. The plane has let us off directly in front of a wide fenced path that leads only to a massive glass-and-concrete structure resembling a giant pair of wings. A thick layer of fog obscures the view behind the plane, but ahead of me, the sky is clear. Another plane takes off from the other side of the building and disappears into thin air.
Without thinking I gasp loudly at the sight, then look around to make sure no one heard me. You should never show signs of weakness around a new group of people, especially when you’re not entirely certain whether or not you’ve all just landed in the Bermuda Triangle, or even know where you’ve landed at all.
But it doesn’t matter. No one notices me gasping
because they’re too distracted by the enormous sign at the end of the path that says ARRIVALS hanging above a revolving door that must be able to fit at least twenty people at a time. The passengers ahead of me push and elbow their way in. Like pigs to a slaughter, I think, but there’s nowhere else to turn, so I reluctantly follow their lead.
Inside, it looks like everyone from the plane is already splitting off into survival alliances, but then I realize they’re actually flocking to different placards that read LAST NAMES A–C, LAST NAMES D–F, and so on. Yet right in the middle of all of them is one person holding up a giant sign that covers half their body. And on that sign is my name.
In glitter.
“Beatrice Fox?” a Valley Girl voice that sounds straight out of an eighties movie shouts from behind the sign to everyone who passes by. “Be-uh-trice Faaaahx?”
I stop in my tracks and swallow back another gasp. Everyone around me stares at the sign. I contemplate making a beeline for one of the other placards and just assuming a totally new identity from here on out, but my need for an answer as to where and how I’m here propels me to walk forward.
“Uh, hi,” I say.
The sign drops, revealing a girl who looks to be only a few years older than I am, with friendly eyes covered in pearlescent blue eye shadow and warm brown skin contoured with neon fuchsia blush. On top of her curly hair sits a pillbox hat that’s the same shade of orange as her dress. The same shade of orange as the gross seats on the airplane. A shade of orange that is suspiciously similar to the color of a prison uniform.
“That’s me,” I say, pointing to my name on the sign. Her face lights up immediately.
“Beatrice! Oh my god, I am so, so happy to see you!” she says, frantically dropping the glittered sign to the ground. She pulls me into a tight hug and my whole body stiffens.
“Um, you too. I think,” I say.
“Sorry, where are my manners? I’m Sadie.”
She pulls back from the hug and reaches out a white-gloved hand toward me. I give it a limp shake.
“I’m Beatrice, but I guess you already know that,” I say, eyeing the glittered sign on the floor. “I go by Bea, actually.”