by Gabby Noone
3
“So, I hope that was helpful for you!” Sadie says, freeing my arm from her grasp. “Do you still have questions?”
“No,” I say, giving her a death glare, literally. “I don’t have any. That was so, so helpful. I feel really satisfied with all the information I was just provided.”
“Good!”
“Of course I have questions! Are you insane? I just found out I’m dead via an infomercial!” I scream at her, jumping up from my chair.
“Beatrice,” Sadie says like she’s my mother. “Where are you going?”
“Anywhere!” I say, pushing through the line of people waiting to be measured for uniforms and toward the door.
“Todd, stop her!” Sadie calls.
“Meh,” he says, not looking up from the waist he’s measuring. “She won’t get very far without her passport.”
I open the door and run into the hall.
“Bea, did you hear that?” Sadie says, calling after me. “You won’t get very far without your passport!”
“I’m sure I’ll figure something out,” I call back, the door slamming shut.
I’m running away and down the hall, but then, almost without a sound, Sadie is suddenly next to me again.
“They won’t let you check into your hotel room without it,” she says calmly.
“I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“You won’t be allowed into the continental breakfast.”
“Oh god, how ever will I go on without some mini-muffins?” I say sarcastically, but the mere thought of food makes my already churning stomach feel worse.
At the end of the hall, I see a sign for a women’s restroom, push through its swinging door, and lock myself into one of three stalls.
“Fine,” Sadie says, her voice following me inside. “Your date of birth was June 1, 2002. Your date of death was December 12, 2019, 9:19 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Location of death? That’s easy! It was the intersection of Huntingdon Pike and Susquehanna Road, Northwood, Pennsyl—”
“What? How do you—” I call out.
“Cause of death: blunt-force trauma,” she continues. “Broken spine, and internal bleeding caused by car accident.”
Instinctively, I feel for my neck with my hands, then look for blood on my fingers. The car swerving into my lane, the awful song, my head crashing through the glass—it all comes back to me and, without thinking, a strangled scream comes out of my mouth.
I open the stall door. Sadie is standing on the other side, reading from an orange-covered passport like the one Todd was holding in the video.
“It’s all in here,” she says.
“Give me that,” I say, reaching out. She hands me the passport, her face serene.
On the inside cover, my name is printed in white block letters below a cropped photo of my face that I don’t remember having taken. Based on the orange background and my half-asleep expression, I realize it must’ve been taken when I was on the plane. I turn to the first page. Sadie’s right. There’s my life and death tidily summarized like it’s a daily weather report or something. Blunt-force trauma and internal bleeding look as commonplace as 10 percent chance of rain.
“If that’s what happened to me then . . . why aren’t I, like . . . more . . .”
“Mangled? Grossly deformed?” Sadie asks. “When people die and come here, they arrive in the physical shape they were right before their deaths. So if anyone dies in, like, some traumatic way, they don’t bleed all over everything forever.”
I look up over her shoulder into the mirror above the sink. I may not be bleeding, but I’m a mess.
My hair lies exactly the same as it did the night of the crash, oily at the roots and in desperate need of some dry shampoo. My pale white skin looks ghostly under the fluorescent lights. A ring of berry-colored lipstick lines my lips and faint black remnants of smudged eyeliner and mascara still linger on my cheeks.
I walk over to the sink, drop my passport onto the ground, and splash cold water in my face, but the makeup doesn’t budge. I take a squeeze of industrial pink hand soap out of the wall dispenser and rub it around my eyes. It stings, but still none of the dried-up mascara moves. I know waterproof makeup technology has improved over time, but I really doubt Maybelline makes products that last through several dimensions of space, time, and mortality.
I keep violently rubbing my eyes until they feel raw, but they look exactly the same.
“Hey, hey, calm down,” Sadie says, reaching out her hands. “Your makeup can’t move no matter how much you touch it. It’s like a tattoo.”
“Um . . . how?”
“Well,” she begins, twirling one of her curls around her finger, “from here on out you don’t age. Your hair won’t grow either. Everything about you, down to every detail, gets preserved like you’re a jar of pickles.”
“You mean to say the makeup I hastily applied while I was half asleep before school is now a permanent fixture on my face? Forever?” I ask, gripping the sink.
“Not forever. Only until you move on to Heaven.”
“Why does your makeup look so perfect then?” I say, pointing at her flawless blush and eye shadow in the mirror.
“Oh, I died while competing in a beauty pageant,” she says, like this is the most natural sentence in the world. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. My nail polish hasn’t chipped for decades. So convenient.”
She pulls a white glove off her left hand, revealing five perfectly oval, mauve-colored fingernails.
I look down at my own. They’re short, uneven, and covered in three-week-old specks of dark red polish that I’d been meaning to remove.
I grip the sink even harder. It’s the worst kind, like the ones they have at public parks with a faucet you have to press down that releases super-cold water for only, like, seven seconds.
“If I’m dead, then why do I feel like I’m gonna be sick?”
“Your internal organs aren’t aging, but they’re functioning. You still need to eat and go to the bathroom.”
I look at her in the mirror like she has to be kidding me.
“What?” Sadie presses. “You thought God would let us off that easy?”
“What’s the point of all this?” I ask. “Assuming God is real, like, what is he doing by putting people here?”
“Or she . . .” Sadie interjects. “God could be a woman!”
“No,” I say, shaking my head and pushing myself away from the sink. “Only a man could be stupid enough to create a place like this. I mean, it’s not that hard. People are good or bad. They have their whole lifetime to be judged. Just pick one and make up your mind already, sadist!”
I don’t believe in a lot of things, but I do believe most people are bad until they prove they’re not and, for most of my life, this has been a useful skill. I pride myself on my ability to accurately predict the worst in people. I can determine who the killer is within the first five minutes of any Law & Order episode. I can tell other girls when their boyfriend will cheat on them to the exact date, regardless of whether they ask me for that information or not. Most people are bad. When you accept this like I have, you’re rarely disappointed. Just majorly annoyed. All the time.
One time I was sent to my school’s psychologist after a teacher, probably my gym teacher who once gave me detention for calling PE “state-sanctioned violence,” tipped her off that I seemed “disturbed.” The psychologist told me my glass-half-empty outlook can probably be pinpointed to the fact that my mom was killed by a drunk driver when I was five. To which I was like, Well, yeah, duh. But I would cast an even wider net to include the fact that I’ve come of age in a world where a man with a meatloaf for a brain was elected President of the United States, the climate is transforming the polar caps into a water park, and the only way to make a decent living if you come from nothing like me is to be beautiful and hawk l
axative teas to your Instagram followers.
Really, my “all people are bad until proven not guilty” philosophy is a completely logical response to an increasingly awful society.
“Well, not everything is so black-and-white all the time,” Sadie explains, crossing her arms and leaning against the bathroom stall divider. “Lots of good people die with words left unsaid to people they loved. Apologies to people they hurt, either intentionally or by accident, that they never got around to giving. Loose ends they never got to tie up and make peace with before dying. General regrets in life. That kind of thing.”
“But doesn’t everyone have those things when they die?”
“Sure,” Sadie says. “But this is stuff that would weigh so much on people’s hearts, they’d never know peace without confronting it.”
I mull this over for a moment.
“So . . . it’s sort of like when people on reality shows go on and on about how they need ‘closure’?”
“Reality shows?” Sadie asks.
“You know . . .” I say, hesitant if I should reveal the depth of knowledge I have about my guilty pleasure of choice. “Real Housewives, The Bachelor . . .”
She squints at me.
“Like, Keeping Up with the Kardashians? Shows like that?”
“I don’t watch a lot of TV these days,” she explains apologetically. “I’m always working. And, as of tomorrow morning, you will be too! So we better go get you checked into your room. You’ll need a good night’s sleep!”
“Yeah, about that . . . I noticed Todd didn’t say anything about how much I would be getting paid as a member of his ‘elite team.’ I’m not really into performing unpaid labor for, like, eternity—”
“Beatrice!” Sadie snaps. “Money doesn’t even exist here. You’re getting paid in atonement. Do you not get it? You weren’t chosen to be on our team because you’re so much better than everyone else. You were chosen because you were almost sent to Hell. And you still could be . . . if you don’t cooperate.”
“What?”
“We’re not actually ‘elite.’ That’s just what Todd calls our team to make him feel better about himself. People like him and you and me . . . we were all really good at manipulating other people in our lives. We could spot everyone else’s weaknesses and insecurities and use them against them. I had it down to an art. I mean, I went from a likely runner-up to Miss Teen Tri-State Area all because I whispered to my top competitor that she had spinach stuck between her teeth right before she went onstage, when she didn’t even really.”
Sadie’s eyes go glassy and she stares off into the distance for a second.
“Anyway,” she continues. “The point is that instead of being damned, the powers that be decided we could atone by using our bad qualities for good. We help people look at their memories and we quickly spot their weaknesses so they can confront them and move on to Heaven.”
I lean against the bathroom stall and press my face to its cool metal door.
“But what if I don’t want to help people?”
“It’s not a question of what you want. Other people are counting on you. Including me! You’re my replacement. Once I’ve successfully trained you for the job, I finally get to leave.”
A low wailing noise comes from behind the bathroom door and then it opens. I jump at the sight of its source: an old woman in a tattered nightgown with long, matted gray hair down to her waist.
“Hi, Gladys!” Sadie says in a sudden saccharine-sweet voice, with a smile. “How are you?”
Gladys ignores her completely and shuffles her slipper-covered feet into one of the stalls, slamming the door behind her. Her wailing gets even louder. Sadie’s face falls and she glares toward the sound.
“Who’s that?” I whisper.
“She’s been having a layover longer than I’ve been here. Her lottery number has been called dozens of times, but she’s just . . . It’s like talking to a wall. I’ve been stuck with her twice. She gives you nothing and wastes a whole month of your time, only to be shot back into the lottery. No memories. No recall. She just walks the halls and cries. She’s, like, the void.”
“How long do I have to stay here?” I ask, my stomach churning each time Gladys moans.
“That depends on how many souls you have to help move on. It’s different for each of us, kinda like a prison sentence. The number should be in your passport.”
I pick it up from the ground and open it.
“Five thousand people? How long will that take me?”
“Well, the lottery draws one person for you to help each day, but you can get backlogged. And each session only lasts four hours. My average is 1.4 sessions per person. Of course, it went up significantly the times I got stuck with that one,” she says, nodding toward the stall.
“Some people take a few days, even weeks, before they finally come to a conclusion and are ready to go to Heaven. If someone can’t be helped within thirty sessions, they’re pushed back into the lottery and have to wait to be called on again. All the work you do in those cases still won’t count toward your quota.”
I do the mental math. Even if I help one person a day, it will still take almost fifteen years to complete my quota. I put my youthful head in my youthful hands, feeling the weight of my youthful skin.
“I’m gonna be. So. Old,” I cry.
“Don’t worry about that,” Sadie says, putting her hand on my shoulder. “You won’t age, remember? You’ll be seventeen forever. Just like I’m forever twenty-one.”
“Oh god,” I moan. “Like the store.”
“Like what?” Sadie asks.
“You know, Forever 21?”
She stares at me blankly.
“The store with extremely cheap and flammable crop tops?” I add, distracted from my existential dread for one half of a second.
“Is that like Contempo Casuals?”
I stare back at her just as blankly.
“Wait, what year did you die?”
“1989,” she says nonchalantly.
For some reason, this . . . this is what gets me. The next thing I know, I’m kneeling over the toilet, vomit and tears pouring out of my face in equal measure.
THE HOTEL LOBBY is enormous, but there’s nothing grand about it. Orange patterned carpet that’s falling apart in the highly foot-trafficked areas. Imitation wood paneling on the walls. People waiting to check in with one of the clerks behind the counter stand in a winding maze of a line separated by rope dividers. The sight of it makes my already exhausted body feel like it could collapse right onto the lint-covered floor.
“I need to lie down, Sadie,” I say, hunched over. “I won’t make it out alive if I have to wait in this line.”
“Mm, well, technically you won’t make it out alive if you don’t wait in this line. . . .”
I just stare up at her, hoping that my eyes are shooting daggers but knowing I’m too weak to accurately pull it off.
“Still too early for death jokes? Sorry! You’ll get there. Hold on,” Sadie says, eyeing the line. “I know someone who can help us.”
She leads me around the line and up to the side of the counter.
“Belinda!” she calls, leaning over the counter and waving, putting on a voice like the one she used when I first arrived and in the bathroom with Gladys. I can now confidently say after approximately one hour of knowing Sadie that this is her Fake Nice voice.
A middle-aged blond lady with a haircut that looks like it could walk right off her head and speak to a manager itself turns from the person she’s checking in and looks at us.
“Sadie!” she calls back in a voice possibly even faker than Sadie’s.
“Think you could fetch the room keys for my new friend here?”
“Sure thing,” she says, flashing a smile and exposing a pair of teeth with blotches of pink lipstick on them
.
“Let me just borrow your passport for a second, sweetie.”
I hand it to her and she goes off to rifle through a file cabinet.
“How’d she get this job?” I whisper to Sadie. “Why didn’t I just get assigned to manning some desk? Seems a lot more chill than whatever it is I’m about to do.”
“People who did a lot of good deeds but were extremely rude to service workers in their lifetimes get sentenced to all the operational jobs here.”
“So you mean . . . bad people,” I say. “You know, this whole airport concept is stupid and probably counts as cruel and unusual punishment and I’m really annoyed that I’m here, but it’s nice to know that some kind of karmic payback exists. I used to work as a barista after school at this coffee shop in a strip mall that—”
“What’s a barista?” Sadie interrupts.
“Oh my god, you are ancient. It’s, like, um, a person who make coffee drinks.”
“So you mean . . . a waitress.”
I roll my eyes.
“As I was saying, I got fired last month because I snapped at this lady who would always come in and order complicated drinks and would never tip or say thank you. I poured her nonfat latte with two-percent foam on her fake Louis Vuitton bag. It was amazing,” I say, smiling to myself.
“I’m sure it was,” Sadie says, nodding vaguely.
“Here you go!” Belinda says, returning with a key attached to a plastic fob. “Room 315.”
“You guys don’t use those room keys that look like credit cards?” I ask.
Both women just stare at me.
“Of course you don’t.”
“Thanks so much, Belinda!” Sadie says, smiling so hard that her cheeks must be cramping.
“Oh, anytime!”
“Oh, Belinda?” Sadie asks. “One more thing.”
“Anything, sweetie.”
“You’ve got some lipstick on your teeth,” Sadie says in a stage whisper, gesturing to her own front teeth with a finger.
Belinda’s eyes narrow.
