The Everafter (6 page)

I
REMEMBER THIS HAIR CLIP
. I remember when I lost it, too….

age 13

We are (all ten of us) at my house. Somehow I’ve managed to convince my mother to allow us to have a slumber party here. We’ve been banished to the basement so our—as my mother condescendingly puts it—“girl giggle and gossip” won’t disturb everyone else for the night.

And we are planning to make it through the whole night without sleeping.

So far, so good. We’ve watched three DVDs, eaten four bags of Doritos and three pizzas, and plowed through several two-liters of Coke (caffeine buzz, anyone?). And we’re having a riot fainting. It’s the coolest feeling I’ve ever had. Tammy taught us how to do it (don’t ask me where she learned). First, we hyperventilate while bending over (gotta get all that blood to the head). Then we pull ourselves up quickly and Tammy presses in this one spot, right between the ribs, and—out we go.

The first time I did it, I fell backward onto the couch and lost my new hair clip. I love that hair clip, and I’m sure that it’s somewhere under the couch or between the cushions, even though I can’t find it. Still, even the loss of my favorite new hair clip isn’t enough to discourage me from fainting a few more times.

Or maybe even seven more. It’s such a great feeling. It’s as if
everything
in the world disappears. It’s like gliding on space for a few seconds. I feel both conscious and unconscious all at once, and wish I could stay that way. But eventually full consciousness seeps across the fabric of my mind, soaking everything in reality.

As I’m getting ready to faint the ninth time, Tammy says she doesn’t want me to do this anymore. She thinks it might not be very healthy. Is
anything
fun
ever
healthy?

Still, she might have a point. I don’t know why I suggest it, but since fainting appears to be coming to an end, I say,
“How about if we get out the Ouija board?”

Cindy groans. “C’mon, Maddy. It’s two o’clock in the morning. Can you pick a creepier time to do that?”

Amber punches her in the arm. “That’s the point, dummy.”

“I think it sounds like fun,” Sandra—ever the best friend—says. “Where is it?”

“I’ll get it,” I assure everyone. But I’m only halfway up the stairs before I get a major case of the creeps. I run back down. “I can’t do it,” I say. “It’s too creepy up there.”

Everyone laughs at me, but Sandra says, “I’ll go get it for you. Tell me where to look.”

“It’s in the family room closet with all the other games.”

Sandra glides up the stairs and disappears. A flash of jealousy streaks through me at the way her thin, graceful body seems to float up the stairs, her thick hair waving behind her. Not a single clunk or pound on the way up. Incredible. How does she do that gliding thing?

While Sandra’s gone, the rest of us talk about who’s going to go first and what questions we should ask the board. It takes Sandra longer than it should to come back, but she finally reappears. As she hands me the game, she says, “Sorry. I went to pull it out of the closet, and a few other games came with it. Made a bunch of noise. I had to pick the other games up, and your mom came
downstairs and yelled at me.”

I roll my eyes. I can tell we’re both thinking the same thing. My mom yelling at Sandra doesn’t even come close to the way Sandra’s mom yells at me. But I don’t say anything about that. Sandra’s totally embarrassed by the way her mother treats me.

Amber and Lacey set up the board. They’re going to go first, and they want—naturally—to ask for the answer to an important question plaguing the universe: Who is Amber going to go to prom with her senior year? D-O-U-G-P-RE-S-T-O-N the planchette spells on the board. Amber is outraged. Doug Preston has wanted to hook up with her for almost a year now, and she’s not interested.

“You pushed it,” Amber accuses Lacey. “You wanted it to say that!”

“I swear I didn’t,” Lacey counters.

Everyone else is laughing. “It’s not funny,” Amber protests. “It’s her turn to find out who she’s going to prom with her senior year!” She puts a serious and mysterious look on her face and demands that the board tell her the answer to this question.

S-C-O-T-T-T-U-R-N-E-R the planchette spells. Scott Turner is a total dork. No one is ever going to go to senior prom with him.

“Now
you’re
pushing it,” Lacey says.

“Ha, ha. It’s not so funny now, is it?”

“Okay, you two, let someone ask it a real question,” Sandra demands.

Cindy and Diane sit at the board, and Cindy asks, in the spookiest voice she can come up with, “Is there a spirit in the room with us?”

The planchette creeps its way over to the word
yes
. A quarter of an inch from the word, Diane screams and removes her fingers. Cindy forces the planchette off the board. “Ohmygod,” Diane says, “I swear I wasn’t moving that thing.”

“Me, either,” Cindy agrees.

“There’s really a spirit here in the room with us,” Diane says.

“Whooooaaaahhh.” Amber’s sarcasm rolls out along with the ghostly sound she makes.

Diane glares at her. “I mean it. You try asking the room if there’s a spirit here!”

“No, thanks.” Amber laughs. “I had my turn, and I already know how it works!”

“Oh, I’ll do it.” I sigh.

“I’ll help,” Tammy offers. “Will you pick up that whatever-it’s-called thingy?” she asks Cindy, nodding toward the planchette. “It’s by your feet.”

“I’m not touching that thing!”

“What
ever,” Tammy says, and leans over to grab it. “It’s just a game, you guys.”

She places the planchette back on the board and looks expectantly at me. “Who’s asking the questions?” she wants to know.

“I’ll do it,” I offer. The other girls gather around us, and I ask, half joking, “Is there a spirit in the room?”

Tammy and I hold our hands steady, trying to relax to see if the planchette will move on its own.

It does.

Really.

I truly don’t think Tammy’s doing anything to it, because her face is turning ghostly white. “Stop it,” she whispers to me.

“I’m not doing anything,” I tell her honestly.

As the planchette spells out I-S-E-E-Y-O-U, the other girls become deathly quiet. All jokes have ended.

My fingers are shaking. I don’t want to know the answer to my question, but I feel compelled to ask it anyway. “Who do you see?” Even my voice is shaking.

M-A-D-I-S-O-N.

It’s my turn to glare at Tammy. “You’re doing this, aren’t you?”

“No. I swear. I’m not.”

And I have to believe her, because her hands are shaking, too.

“Who are you?” I ask the room.

L-I-K-E-Y-O-U-I-A-M-D-E-A-D.

Cindy screams.

“Shhh!”
I yell at her. “Shut up. You’re not the one that’s getting told you’re dead, all right? So just shut up!”

“Why are you here?” Sandra asks the room.

Tammy stands up suddenly, knocking over the chair. Sandra takes her place at the table. “Put your fingers back on the planchette,” Sandra tells me. I don’t much want to—at this point, who would?—but I’ve taken orders from Sandra most of our lives.

I-A-M-S-O-R-R-Y.

Amber starts giggling. “Way to freak us out, Simpson. Could we be stupider? Why are we trying to scare ourselves to death?”

“Shh,”
Diane tells her.

“Who are you?” Sandra asks the room again.

T-A-M-M-Y.

The room is silent for a second, and then Tammy yells, “This is a bunch of crap! You guys are making fun of me, aren’t you? I’m outta here.”

She storms up the stairs.

I jump up to follow her. “Wait! Tammy! I’m not doing it. Honestly.”

She turns on the stairs and gives me a glare like nothing I’ve ever seen from anyone. In the last thirty seconds I have somehow become her enemy. “You can’t go anywhere, Tammy,” I say. “It’s the middle of the night. You
can’t walk home right now.”

“I’m leaving. I’ll call my mother from upstairs. She’ll come get me, even if it is the middle of the night. I’m not staying here with any of you guys. I hate you all.”

She turns again and goes the rest of the way up the stairs. I run aft—

G
RIEF THROBS THROUGH ME
.

Because this night is the end of my friendship with Tammy—at least as we knew it.

It’s pretty weird the way all these trips back are helping me remember most of my life. I remember now how after that night with the Ouija board we all managed to convince ourselves that there weren’t really any ghosts in the room. We got good at turning it into a joke.

But now I know there actually was a ghost in the room. Because I was there.

And now I know there was another ghost there, too.

Tammy.

There are things that bother me about this moment in my life. I return to it time and again to try to puzzle them out. I am careful every time I return to never look too hard for the hair clip. Returning to this moment provides me with the only true companionship I have in this new existence—the ghost of Tammy.

Ironic, huh? That night ended our friendship—at least our living one—but now it seems she’s my only companion.

True, she’s the only other
dead
person I’ve met. Apparently desperation makes the heart grow fonder.

I just wish she’d answer all the questions I have.

I want to ask her, how did you know I was there? I didn’t realize you were until you revealed yourself. What did you lose that allowed you to return to that moment? How did you die? And
when
did you die?

There might be a lot of my life I still don’t understand, but I have noticed that no item has ever taken me past the age of seventeen. That’s also where all the memories I’m now having seem to end. Conclusion? It doesn’t exactly require the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes to figure out I probably died around then. And even though that idea freaks me out, another realization freaks me out even more. If I can travel to any moment in my previous existence where I lost an object, then Tammy can, too. That means she could have lived long after me. Reached the ripe
old age of seventy-five. And then come back to that slumber party when we were thirteen just because she lost some stupid little object there.

It’s a creepy thought. Disturbing. More than anything else in this afterlife has been.

There’s another thing, too, that bothers me about this whole slumber party thing: Why—exactly—is Tammy’s ghost apologizing to mine?

age 16

It’s a terrible habit, this need I have to hold something familiar whenever I’m nervous. I’m sliding into Gabriel’s car on a warm spring afternoon. The sun has heated the car to a stifling, near-tropic temperature. Gabe’s whirring the windows down and turning on the air-conditioning.

Taking my keys out?
Bad idea,
I tell myself.
Don’t do it.

But I do. I search my purse to find the keys to my house. Anxiety overwhelms me. New situation, new guy, first time in his car. What do we say to each other? Will this be anything like the short conversations we’ve had from time to
time in the past two weeks? Courtesy of Sandra. After I turned down Gabe’s invitation to a party, she told him that I was totally interested in him and that he just needed to give me a little time. So, every few days, he’s been dropping by my locker between classes to chat.

Sandra thinks I ought to be on my knees thanking her, but I’m not feeling all that grateful to her at the moment. It’s because of her that Gabe came to my locker today and asked if I wanted a ride home. And it’s because I can’t stand to be harassed by her anymore that I’m in his car. Well, that and the way I’m fascinated by Gabe’s eyes when he looks at me. The green streaks flecking the blue seem to play hide-and-seek whenever the light changes.

I find my keys, pull them out of my purse, then clutch them firmly in my hand.

“I’ll get it cooled off in here pretty quickly,” Gabriel promises as he swivels one of the vents to blow straight at me.

Put those keys back,
I tell myself.
Put them back in your purse right now before you lose them.

Can he tell how hard I’m gripping them?

Gabe’s fingers begin to tap out a rhythm in double time against the steering wheel. I’d take that for nerves, except I know it’s not. He’s a snare drummer in the band’s drum line. Translating life into rhythm seems to be as much a part of Gabriel as breathing is for the rest of us mere mortals.
I recognize the cadence from football-season games. He deftly beats out a fight song as he battles the traffic getting out of the student parking lot.

Some guy driving a Honda Civic is taking too long to make a left-hand turn. When twelve feet of space opens up in the right-hand turn lane next to us, Gabe takes advantage of the split-second opportunity, swings into that lane, and makes a left from there. As the Honda honks at us, I say, “I didn’t know you were so…determined.”

He glances at me and smiles. “You should.”

Yeah. I guess I actually do. He hasn’t given up on me yet.

Then again, maybe he’s just confident. When he showed up at my locker after school and said, “How about a ride home?” I must have taken a little too long to reply, because he pulled my jacket off the peg, handed it to me, and closed my locker. “C’mon,” he said, and started off down the hall with the expectation I would follow. And I did. It was like I was attached to him by a string. He moved forward, I moved forward…all the way to his car.

Now he’s talking about school—not exactly complaining (he doesn’t really do that, I’ve noticed, about anything), but as close as he comes to it. He’s talking about how much homework he has and whether he thinks he can manage to get it all done on time.

“You always somehow do,” I remind him. “You have a perfect 4.0.”

I, on the other hand, do not. My grades are not
too
bad: My GPA is a 3.5. But the only subject I have a perfect 4.0 in is English. I’ve always been in accelerated English. It’s because words are just so much a part of me. I can’t seem to separate them from who I am or what I think.

I’ve just never been very excited, though, by any other subjects in school, so I don’t put a ton of effort into homework for them. As long as I’m getting at least Bs, I’m fine with that. I’ve never felt like I had to prove myself to anyone by getting perfect grades. Sandra, on the other hand, always has, so I can understand the mind-set. And I can tell Gabe has it.

“Okay,” he says. “I know when I’m being told to shut up.”

I look at him in surprise. Obviously, he doesn’t.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” I tell him. “I’m just trying to reassure you that you’ll get it all done.”

He glances at me in surprise and then returns his eyes to the road. We come up to a stoplight, where he looks at me more carefully. “Sorry. I guess I’m just used to people being all…I don’t know, competitive…about the grade thing, I mean.”

I do know what he means. There’s this little world in the upper echelons of the GPA ranking where everyone pretends to support one another, but actually they all see one another as a threat. Somehow, they think their A’s mean less
if other people earn them, too.

Not a game I play, but Sandra does. She feels like she has to make her mother’s life easier by being the perfect child. I wonder who Gabe is trying to prove himself to.

“Hey,” he says as the light turns green, “it’s a beautiful day. Wanna go sit by the river for a little while before we go home?”

Alone?!

“Uh, sure,” I say.

He grins at me and takes a right turn toward the park that sits along the banks of the Grand River.

It’s a short drive, and we talk about memories we have of coming to this park back when we were kids.

He pulls into a parking space, switches off the engine, and takes his keys from the ignition. That’s when I realize…I’m not holding
my
keys anymore.

He opens his door as if to get out of the car and then realizes that I’m looking frantically around me…seat, floor, area between the seat and the door. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Um, I, well, I was holding the keys to my house when we got in the car, but I don’t know what I did with them.” I hold up my empty hands.

“You mean you’ll be locked out of the house and at my mercy if we don’t find them?”

“Well, actually, yes.” I’m now dumping all the contents
of my purse onto the floor to see if I put the keys back in there without realizing it.
Wait,
I remind myself,
make sure you don’t dump out the tampon, too.
Everything else is on the floor in front of me. No keys. I start throwing makeup, pens, and my wallet back into my purse.

When my purse is sitting back in my lap, Gabe says, “Here, let me look under the seat for you.”

Suddenly his chest and shoulders are sprawled across my lap. I can feel his muscles moving as he shifts around on top of me, pulling my legs together, then moving them toward the driver’s side. He maneuvers his body farther over mine, drops his head below the seat, and starts searching under it. His chest is warm and solid against my thighs, and I can’t help wondering what it would feel like to have all of him lying on top of me this way, to…

He suddenly looks up and gives me this devilish grin that seems to ask, “Are we having fun yet?”

I can’t help it. I smile. The urge to tease him back surges through me, and before I even have a chance to think about what I’m saying, out pops, “While you’re down there, why don’t you check and see if my underwear is there, too?”

Shocked, his head whips up so suddenly that it hits the glove box. “Ouch!” he says. He balances himself on his hand and then starts to scoot back across me until he can sit up. He stares at me expectantly, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as I make him wait for the explanation.

“Seventh grade, remember? You and some of your friends dared Sandra and me to go skinny-dipping, and, while we were in the pool, you stole all our clothes.”

He grins. “Yeah, I remember. But we gave them back.”

“All except my underwear,” I agree. “They’ve been missing ever since.”

He laughs. “I swear I have no idea why they weren’t with your clothes when we gave them back. And you think I’ve had them all this time? No wonder you’re scared of me.”

“Scared of you! I’m not scared of you.”

“Terrified. You wouldn’t even look at me when I came to your locker that first time.”

“If I was a little uncomfortable around you, it wasn’t because of my underwear. It had more to do with what you saw at the wedding.”

He holds up his hands in a gesture of “Not my fault,” then says, “I didn’t see anything at the wedding. Honest.” He tries to keep a straight face as he says it, but there’s this mischievous quirk at the side of his mouth that gives him away. I give him an “Oh, yeah? Try again” look, and we both burst into laughter.

“Okay, so I saw something,” he admits.

We laugh again, and then I say, “When did you decide you wanted to ask me out?”

“I plead the Fifth.”

“Oh, come on,” I say. “Just tell me.”

A long moment of silence passes, but I figure I can wait him out. Finally, he kind of grins and says, “Oh, fine then. It was when we were walking up the aisle together. You tripped, and I had to sorta hold you up. That’s when I thought, ‘Hey, I wonder if this totally klutzy girl would go out with me.’”

“No way,” I say, laughing.

“Well, okay, not exactly. But it was kinda cute, y’know? I mean, the way you grabbed my arm. Then when I looked down at you, I noticed your chest had all these intriguing freckles. Guess I thought it’d be pretty cool to go out with them, and maybe even with you, too. I mean, it’s not like I had fun with you at the rehearsal dinner or anything,” he teases.

“Ohmygod. I can see why you wanted to plead the Fifth. You and Dana had just broken up and you were probably on the rebound, looking for freckled chests to pass the time with.”

“Um…no. I didn’t want to answer the question because I thought you’d be embarrassed about tripping on the way up the aisle. You know, that plus the whole dress-and-barfing-later thing?”

Intelligent? Me? Not so much.

Still…the rebound issue is a valid point. And I remind him of that.

“Maddy,” he tells me, “
I
broke up with Dana. She didn’t
break up with me. I’d been thinking about it for a while anyhow. And the last fight just seemed like, you know…the end. I’m not on the rebound from Dana. For me, our breakup was a slam dunk. I knew exactly what I was doing when I broke up with her, and it was what I wanted.”

This sounds great, but I’m still stuck on the fact that Gabe dated the same girl for
two years.
That’s practically like being married. Gabe probably knows everything there is about having a relationship, and I know…nothing.

Gabriel shifts in the seat and says, “You know, there’s a place we haven’t looked for your keys yet.”

“Where?”

“Right here.” Suddenly Gabe’s whole body is within inches of mine. He puts one arm on each side of me and reaches into the crack between the seat back and cushion, as if searching there for my keys…

But then we both seem to get distracted, and—who
cares
about keys?

He’s kissing me.

And it’s fantastic…The warmth of his lips against mine, the way our bodies are leaning into each other, the feel of his shoulder beneath my hand. I don’t know how long this goes on, but eventually Gabe breaks the kiss. My lips suddenly feel lonely as he leans back. He holds up his left hand and dangles my keys in front of my face. “Had a feeling these would be back there,” he says in a husky voice. There’s an edge of
triumph in it. Because of the keys? Or the kiss?

I don’t care.

“C’mon,” he says, and pulls away from me. Still holding my keys, he turns toward his open door, and just before I get my own door open, I hear him say, “No way.”

I turn back toward him. “What?”

He has one foot out of the car, but now he’s looking around, even digging in the crack behind his seat. “You won’t believe this, but now I can’t find
my
keys.”

I burst out laughing. I’ve lived my whole life in the Land of People Who Misplace Items, and finally I have company there. I know I shouldn’t take delight in Gabriel’s predicament…. I should feel empathy, having just had the same experience myself. But instead, I’m satisfied to finally know I’m not the only idiot who can lose a set of keys from her hand in less than three minutes.

“It’s not funny,” he says, but he’s also smiling.

I start helping him look for the keys…the floor on my side…the crack behind my seat (in case he lost his keys while looking for mine), under my seat…

“Aren’t you going to look under
my
seat?” he asks.

I stare into his eyes for a moment. The quirk at the side of his mouth is back. A challenge.

What the heck?
I think, and then I sprawl across his legs, reaching beneath his seat, my breasts pressed against his thighs.

“I don’t see—” I start to say, but Gabe is gently turning me over so I’m lying across his lap. He brushes the hair away from my face, leans down, and kisses me again. Then he loosely wraps the ends of my hair around his wrist. I turn my face into his hand and kiss his palm, feeling against my lips the lines that track across it. I wonder if my name is etched somewhere on his lifeline.

I turn my head back to make eye contact with Gabe. He’s smiling. He helps me sit back up. “No keys?” he asks.

“Not under there,” I say. “At least, not the ones we’re looking for right now.”

We look some more for his keys, and he finally locates them on the ground just outside his open door. He holds both sets of keys up to show me that we’ve succeeded in our quest to find them.

“Ready to see the river?” Gabe asks, dropping my keys into my—

Back in
Is,
I feel startled—and stalked.

By death.

Gabriel is dead.

Like me.

That moment when Gabriel couldn’t find his keys…at the time, I thought our affinity came from us both losing the same thing.

But that wasn’t the only experience we were sharing.
The tugging, binding, magnetizing pull of that moment…I have only felt it one other time on my journeys back to haunt my own life. It was during that slumber party where a ghostly Tammy was hanging out.

My ghost and Gabriel’s made some kind of spiritual contact, just as Tammy and I did at the slumber party. And the tragedy is that I didn’t realize it at the time, while the ghostly me was reliving those moments in the car.