Spooky Little Girl (12 page)

“My service was at the finest church in San Diego,” she gushed. “You have to pass a board vote to get in. Sixty-seven cars in my procession. It was the fifth-highest attended funeral in the history of the church. I came in behind the president of the Junior League. Of course, there was an invitation list. Every seat was taken, although I was a bit disappointed there was no red carpet. It was a wonderful day, except that I heard one of the girls in my tennis class whisper to another that she heard I’d died in a liposuction accident! Can you believe such a preposterous thing? It’s absolutely ridiculous. She obviously never got a very good look at my ass. I completely survived my liposuction!”

“Well, there is no doubt you’ll be buried in the shallowest grave of them all, Mrs. Wootig,” Ruby said, and grinned.

“Oh, you bet I will,” Mrs. Wootig heartily agreed. “I’m sure my husband paid extra for that.”

“Mrs. Wootig, now that we’re getting to know one another a little better, what would you like for us to call you?” Ruby asked.

Mrs. Wootig looked like she was stumped. She furrowed her brow as much as her Botox would allow, and thought very, very carefully. For ten seconds. Thirty seconds. A full minute.

She finally looked up when genius struck, and she smiled at Ruby. “I would like to be called,” she began, “Countess.”

Ruby looked away for a moment and then reattached her gaze to the woman.

“But I’m afraid you’re not a countess,” Ruby explained. “You’re the mother of two sons of young adult age, one of whom locks himself in his room for substantial periods of time, listening to German death metal music and badly drawing flaming skeletons with
enormous breasts, and the older one was just thrown out of college for running a gambling ring on campus. Your husband bilks people out of their savings by claiming to remove mold from their houses, but is really just using a big vacuum, and that’s just one of his business scams. I don’t know many counts who pretend to clean up mold with a Hoover, I’m sorry to say.”

Mrs. Wootig sighed heavily and rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she conceded. “Mrs. Wootig, then.”

“Mr. Russell, how was your day?” Ruby prodded, attempting to move on.

“Well, I got to see a lot of old friends that I had lost touch with, and that sure was nice,” he replied, and somehow, Lucy thought, the Hawaiian print didn’t look quite so garish on him today. “There was a huge buffet at the reception, and everyone was just stuffed. It looked great. And listen to this, I have great news: The company I was going to see that day felt so bad about me dying on my business trip that we got the account! How’s that, huh? Isn’t that impressive? Yep. ‘Good ole Kirk.’ That’s what everybody said. ‘Bringin’ them in even after he’s croaked! He’ll do anything to land ’em!’ At the office, I heard there’s talk of naming the cafeteria after me!”

“Congratulations, Mr. Russell,” Ruby replied, and offered a petite round of applause, which everyone else eventually joined in on.

“Call me Kirk,” he said, his chunky face beaming. “Kirk Russell. No, Goldie Hawn is not my girlfriend! Don’t I wish? Ha, ha, ha!”

Bethanny’s hand went up next.

“I didn’t get a funeral because, well, pretty much every part of me is still missing, but I did get a DJ!” she interjected cheerfully. “I was so excited! They had a memorial service at my favorite club, and my boyfriend had an open bar, so everyone had a great time. Two people even had sex in the bathroom! That tells you right there it was a great party!”

Another small round of applause went out for Bethanny and her cocktail service.

“My family is doing well,” Chuck added. “They all met at our favorite hunting lodge, shot a moose, and had a big barbecue. I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m bragging, but it was the best funeral I’ve ever been to. My brother even brought a keg!”

The rest of the class nodded and murmured their congratulations.

“I’d like to share my experience,” Mr. Marks, with the shiny spandex ass, offered as he exuberantly raised his smallish girl hand. “As a result of my untimely execution by the side mirror of a planet-destroying Hummer, my cycling club staged a protest, it got on the news, and as a result, a bike lane just may be created from the point where my body rode off on the bike and finally fell over, to the point where they found my head. All they need to do is raise the funds for construction materials! My decapitation may not be irrelevant after all!”

Lucy looked at the beaming Mr. Marks, realizing that she was inexplicably irritated by the sheen of his toothpick Jazzercise legs in shorts eleven sizes too small, the fact that his ass was the size of a four-year-old’s, and that he was still wearing his helmet. She couldn’t help but sigh.

“Lucy?” Ruby asked quietly, leaving it open-ended.

Lucy said nothing for a moment, just sat and shook her head.

“People staged a protest for you, Mr. Marks,” she finally said. “How could you possibly think you were irrelevant? Kirk is getting a cafeteria named in his honor, the countess’s funeral had a guest list, Chuck’s Clan of the Cave Bear over there slaughtered and gorged on a sacrificial moose, Danny discovered he had weepy groupies, and Bethanny’s friends celebrated her by getting laid in a bathroom like they were at Studio 54 and had just snorted an eight ball with Bianca Jagger. I hope you all consider yourselves very
lucky, because at my funeral, guess what? Nobody showed. Not my friends, co-workers, or my very recent ex-fiancé. No one except my sister, my nephew, and cameo appearances by some strangers. Other than that, nobody came. No one could be bothered to come. You worried about being irrelevant, Mr. Marks, but I can tell you how it feels to have it confirmed.”

“Oh, Lucy,” Bethanny cried, throwing her bony pixie arms around her ghost friend’s neck. “I’m so sorry. I bet there’s a very good explanation for why your friends didn’t come. Maybe there was another funeral they had to go to that day. I bet there’s a good reason!”

“Maybe they got the days mixed up,” Mr. Marks said kindly. “That happened to my neighbor. The dates were printed wrong in the newspaper.”

“Maybe someone’s car broke down and they were all coming together,” Chuck offered.

“Who cares if no one came,” the countess remarked. “How did you look?”

“Another great surprise,” Lucy replied. “I would have to say I probably looked overdone. Or like an ashtray at a casino at the end of the night. I was roasted and packaged in a ‘parts is parts’ pot. All facets of me are now all mixed together, public and private. I’m a canister of human crumbs. I live in a jar like
I Dream of Jeannie
. Being cremated never even crossed my mind when I was alive. I had this vision of looking fantastic in my casket. Roses around my head, maybe holding some flowers, looking peaceful and lovely. I have to admit that I wanted very badly to leave an impression, you know?”

Ruby clucked her tongue and stepped down from the podium.

“That is a masterpiece of understatement,” she interrupted. “There certainly was an impression, Lucy. It was an impression
from a three-ton city bus that left a tire track across your face. We all know you did not win that fight, so the truth is that your sister probably had no choice. And, not to be tacky, but there is always the issue of funding, dear. An ashes to ashes send-off is a little more economical than finding you a pretty mausoleum or a marble headstone. And besides, how much should it really matter to you? You should know more than ever that it’s simply a symbol for the living. I know you are very upset about the attendance, but forget about who wasn’t there. People don’t get mad at you because you die, and decide to stop speaking to you.”

“But I had such high hopes and was so looking forward to it,” Lucy cried. “I mean, I’m only going to get one funeral, and I’m rather disappointed at how this one turned out.”

Ruby reiterated what she had told Lucy the day before when she’d walked out of the elevator doors at the funeral home to find her student upset.

“This experience is different for everyone,” the old woman said to the class. “Some people are elated, and some wind up distraught. I’m sorry this was the way it turned out for you, Lucy, but the important thing is to focus on the people who were there and not the people who were missing. I’ve had students who didn’t get a service at all, didn’t have one person they knew present when the time came, and no one said a word about them. It was just a body and a guy with a shovel. I’ve even heard of people who wound up in the trash, a little cardboard box with a bag of ashes inside. No vase, no
I Dream of Jeannie
, and no sister to take them home with her.”

Lucy knew it was true, the same way she knew it was true that by being dead, she might have been able to exact some revenge on both Nola and Martin for destroying her life as she knew it, and she’d just wanted to enjoy that. If there had been any way to make the bus feel guilty, she would have been happy to see that, too. But
that, in itself, was no reason to be upset about a funeral that didn’t quite live up to her expectations. Lucy saw that her anger was foolish, senseless, and a waste of her last moments with her sister, and she suddenly wished she had the chance to go back and attend her funeral all over again. She should have spent more time with Alice and Jared. Who knew when she was going to see either of them again.

“This exercise should have demonstrated to all of you that although you still do exist in this form, the way that you were has come to a conclusion and the door is now closed,” Ruby explained. “That was the point of yesterday. It’s a necessary understanding if we’re going to proceed with the next section of your Transition. If we’re all at that point, we can move forward. Now, did everyone get a chance to read through Section One of your binder?”

“I did,” Bethanny said immediately.

The men in the group all nodded affirmatively, Mrs. Wootig simply looked straight ahead as if she had heard nothing, and Lucy avoided Ruby’s eyes altogether.

“Lucy, what did you find most interesting about Chapter One, ‘Your New Spectral Self’?” Ruby asked.

“Oooooo,” Bethanny whimpered, shaking her hand in a frenetic motion.
“Can I answer? Can I answer? Can I answer?”

Ruby did not turn her gaze away from Lucy, and patiently waited for a reply.

To tell the truth, the last thing Lucy had wanted to do the night before was snuggle up in her motel bed with a nice binder full of stupid homework. She had had the worst day of her death, and by her calendar, it had only been her second one. The more she’d thought about it, the more angry she’d become. It was just another hoop to jump through to reach some unknown destination. It was bullshit, she’d decided, and she’d felt set up that she’d even had to go
back to her funeral at all. What purpose had it served, aside from humiliating her, as if her last days of life hadn’t been enough of that? She didn’t see the point of knowing that no one had bothered to show up to pay their respects, mainly because no one had had any respects to pay. That was obvious. “Thanks, Jilly,” she had said out loud. “Thanks, Warren. Thanks, Marianne, Nola, Dr. Meadows, and thank you most of all, Martin. Nice to see all of you.”
What a shining example of fairness he turned out to be. I’m glad I didn’t wind up with him
, Lucy had told herself.
I am so glad that I didn’t end up in that house stuck with him and all the pieces of his boring Martin life. No matter why he threw me out, I don’t care
, she’d continued.
He did me a favor
.

The more Lucy had thought about it, the more angry she’d become, pissed off, furious, forgotten, and stuck in a strange place and with people she had known a day. What other hoops was she going to have to jump through in this idiotic place? How many tricks would she have to perform? She’d never wanted any of this. She’d never had a choice. This just suddenly was. Well, she’d told herself, she did indeed have a choice. She had a choice whether or not to follow any more rules, and the answer was no. She was not going to read whatever ridiculous chapter in her binder, to hell with it. She wasn’t going to read it. Instead, she’d begun to cry, and as she’d sobbed on her drab little bed, she’d thankfully drifted off.

Ruby was still looking at Lucy, waiting for an answer. Lucy took a deep breath.

“I didn’t read it,” she admitted. “After I came back from my funeral, I just didn’t feel up to it. So I went to sleep.”

Ruby’s expression didn’t change, and she didn’t take her eyes off of Lucy.

“Everyone needs to be engaged in their education here,” the old woman said sternly. “If you don’t work hard in this class and reach your utmost potential to be successful in your assignment, you will
be roaming the earth for who knows how long. Everything you learn in this class will be put into practice once you return back to Earth and begin your assignments. Your success or failure there will determine if you move on to the infinite level. This is true whether you are completing unfinished business or your mission is to help the living in some way. If you don’t complete your assignment, if you don’t meet your objective, you will never move on and will remain exactly where you are for eternity. I am here to tell you that none of you want that. You need to move on to the next and ultimate level; it’s what you lived your whole lives for. The strength of the skills you develop here is of utmost importance. Any of you want to hang around for centuries, running around as hysterical harpies like Anne Boleyn or Bloody Mary, showing your bloody head to tourists or terrifying little girls at slumber parties because you simply couldn’t bring yourself to pay attention in class and learn how to spook effectively?”

Everyone in the class, including Lucy, shook their heads.

“I didn’t think so,” Ruby said, nodding in affirmation. “So let’s get started.”

Lucy learned, as she followed the lesson in Chapter One along with the rest of her classmates, that the spectral self she currently embodied was still only a temporary form used while embarking on her still-unknown assignment.

According to her handbook and Ruby, after her assignment was complete and she had reached her objective, a promised land of sorts awaited Lucy and her fellow Surprise Demised. Referred to in the manual as “The State,” their final destination was, at best, cryptically described as “a glorious retirement beyond the most elaborate imagination,” lending the inkling that it was a place well worth the wait.