This is Your Afterlife
Read This is Your Afterlife Online
Authors: Vanessa Barneveld
For my family.
Chapter One
“Who died?” I ask Mara and dump my bag on the wide desk we share with the rest of the editorial team.
The
Bugle
newsroom at Halverston High is uncharacteristically quiet. I've seen more life inside a mausoleum. No loud music. No clicking keyboards. No panicked voices yelling out for proofs. Even the air-conditioning unit spews its icy breath in respectful silence. Gray venetian blinds block out the hulking mountaintops and redwoods that make our town seem insignificant.
Halverston is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it kind of a place anyway. Especially now that it's been cut off from the world, so to speak. A new highway bypasses the town and leads directly to an outlet-shopping mecca in the valley. This place is dead, dead, dead. Maybe that's why Mara's looking so depressed.
She snaps her laptop closed with the force of a guillotine.
“Keira! What are you doing here?” she asks with the air of someone who wants to be left in peace. The feeling's mutual. I want the place to myself.
“Skipping lunch,” I say. My chair squeaks as I sit. “You look like hell.”
“Gee, thanks. I had a long night.” Mara's large eyes, the color of the evergreens bordering the school, are magnified even more behind her glasses. With her brown hair wound into a taut bun, she looks less like an editor-in-chief and more like a librarian. No, make that an undertaker. Her fair complexion is almost translucent. Purple orbs beneath her eyes characteristic of someone who's been robbed of REM sleep. I haven't seen her look this miserable since the local news anchorwoman quit mentoring the school paper last year.
Shaking my head, I say, “I offered to help you put the last issue to bed, but you wouldn't listen.”
I thought the edition was ready to go at lunchtime yesterday. Typical Mara. Can't help herself. Always tweaking every paragraph, every caption, every headline until there isn't one pixel out of place. Ever since the
Bugle
went from paper to electronic, she's been even worse, working right up till the deadline. Recently she floated the idea of making the paper a daily instead of a weekly. The girl's got a death wish.
I clear my throat. “I'm, uh, gonna use the color copier.”
“Mm-hm.” She waves, already lost in reading her screen.
I scrutinize my new venture's logo one more time. It's simpleâtwo interlocked “M”s to represent the words “Mystic Madam” inside a crystal ball. It's not a masterpiece, but then this flyer's never going to hang in the Louvre. Dan would've made it look much more professional if I'd asked him. But I'm sure he'd rather fly into the sun than help me out.
As I read, a faint odor wafts through the room. Sharp. Familiar. Brings back memories of lazy Sundays watching the sunset, wishing Mondays were nonexistent. My grandmother would lecture me about being stuck, about hanging on too tightly to one special time or place, because that would mean missing out on discovering more special moments.
“Mara, are you wearing lavender?”
She gets up and peers through the blinds. Wrinkling her nose, she says, “Isn't that an old-lady perfume?”
“Exactly,” I mutter. I must be imagining Grandie's favorite scent. Or maybe it's embedded in my purple sweater, the one she knitted last year. Mom and I lost Grandie two months ago. February twelfth. Technically, it was cancer. Actually, it was a crapload of morphine that she somehow got her hands on. She couldn't beat the disease, but she could outsmart it. That what she said in her suicide note. Every day without her seems to get harder. People who say the pain of loss eases with time should STFU.
“âMystic Madam's Tarot Tales. Learn your fate from eight till late,'” Mara intones close to my ear. The way she reads it, it makes my business sound like a brothel. “What's that all about?”
“Nothing.” I smooth the flyer against the copier glass and press
start.
Glancing up at her skeptical expression, I explain, “It's just this thing I'm doing to earn some extra cash.”
Mara frowns. “I didn't know you're psychic.”
“My grandmother was. I'm not. You don't need a direct line to the other side to interpret tarot cards. It just takes practice.” I straighten the warm pages as they amble out of the copier.
At the mere thought of Grandie, my throat constricts. I often wonder if she saw her illness on the cards. She taught me everything she knew about the occult, but the one thing she couldn't pass onto me was her second sight. Whenever we talked about my psychic myopia, she'd tell me glasses for the spiritually nearsighted were just around the corner. “I bet Google's working on them right now, Keira.”
I miss her jokes.
One thing she
did
leave me is an antique tarot deck that she named Sophia. Sometimes I hear Grandie's voice when I deal out the cards. It's only an echo, nothing but a memory playing in my head.
But I don't need any kind of supernatural power to sense Mara's not herself today. Cautiously, I say, “You seemed down when I walked in. You okay?”
“I'm tired!” Her voice rings out like a shotgun. Mara falls heavily into her chair and rubs her temples. Looking contrite, she says, “I didn't mean to lash out.”
“It's fine. I can back off.” I shrug. And print ten more copies. “But if you want to tell me what's on your mind...”
Her deep sigh is louder than the whirring of the copier. “Someone left a USB drive in my in-box a couple of days ago. Anonymously.”
My fingers hover over the copier keypad. I really shouldn't stretch the
Bugle's
resource budget by printing out more flyers. I gather my pages and join Mara at the desk. “What was on it, a computer virus?”
“Nothing like that.” Her mouth twists. “It was an article about Jimmy.”
She means Jimmy Hawkins. Who else? Dan's older brother. The Halverston Wolves' star quarterback. My social circle doesn't touch Jimmy's. Doesn't even overlap. He's a demigod in this school, in this town. Mr. Perfect. A walking cliché. Even more cliché is the fact that I once had a massive crush on him.
Jimmy's famous for having a distinct type when it comes to girls: blonde and perky. Invariably, that means cheerleaders or outgoing athletic types. He and Aimee Barton are practically joined at the lip. I am not Jimmy's type. I once tried to be, even going so far as to bleach my dark brown hair. After the forty-minute process, my hair resembled raw bacon. Now I have deep-space black tresses with a tinge of cobalt. Perfect for a budding tarot entrepreneur.
“Are you going to publish the article?” Anything about Jimmy is bound to get a lot of hits on the
Bugle
website. People can't get enough of him. Life must be tough for Dan, who at times is practically ignored when they're together. Then again, Dan doesn't pay much attention to what other people think.
Mara hesitates before replying, “No. It's...it's damaging. To him.”
“What do you mean? The only dirt you'd ever find on Jimmy would come from a football field.”
She gives me an appraising look before angling her laptop toward me. “I suppose I can trust you, but
do not
tell anyone what you see here.”
“I won't breathe a word.”
Mara narrows her eyes. “I'll hold you to that. I don't want this story getting any oxygen. It dies in this room, okay?”
“I
promise.
” What the hell could it be about? Steroid use? Cheating scandal? Maybe he'd gotten someone pregnantâsomeone other than his girlfriend.
Mara keeps one hand on the laptop, ready to seize it if I give any indication I might renege. My gaze falls on the article's title:
Career Over for Top Quarterback.
“Oh, no,” I murmur. The article claims college scouts have been lining up to see JimmyâUSC was close to drafting him in to the Trojans. But years of rough play have wreaked permanent damage on Jimmy's anterior cruciate ligament. His football prospects are in disarray.
This has got to be killing Jimmy. But is the article fact or fiction? If Jimmy is really injured, he's hiding it well. He swaggers down the school halls. Never limps.
“Who wrote this?” As a subeditor, I can identify our writers from the very first sentence of the work. This one's different. Crisp writing and full of impact. Whoever it is
should
be on the paper.
“No clue, but he or she seems to know a lot about Jimmy.”
That doesn't exactly narrow the field of suspects.
Everyone
in this town knows him, knows of him, or wants to get to know him. People wear T-shirts with his face printed on them, though I only wear mine as PJs. Jimmy attracts huge crowds at games because he's a touchdown machine. The guy has an uncanny knack for speeding past defensive lines, no matter how densely packed. An injury like that wouldn't just devastate himâit'd send our whole community into mourning.
“Does the story check out?”
Mara clears her throat. That pallor in her face is quickly replaced by a wine-colored tinge. “I heard Jimmy arguing with his dad a few weeks ago. They were talking about an operation.”
“How did you...? Oh. I forgot. You live right next door.” Lucky girl.
She nods solemnly. “Apart from that, I noticed something in the last two games he's played. He stayed on the bench during the last quarter.”
I had noticed, too. The girls around me were happy he stayed in one place long enough so they could admire his muscular back and tousled blond head.
“You can't print this,” I say. “There are no statements from Jimmy or the coach, for one thing.”
She starts to answer, but sound of the door flinging open interrupts. Three cheerleaders stand at the threshold, panting. All dressed up in blue-and-gold uniforms for their weekly mission to stir up teen spirit. Perfumes combine into an invisible, spicy-sweet stench that reaches deep into the newsroom. I notice one person's missing from the cheerleader swarmâAimee.
“Have you seen Jimmy Hawkins anywhere?” one of them, Jen, cries. Although pumped up, curiously, she doesn't look excited. More like upset. On the verge of tears.
“Um...” I blink at her like she's speaking Klingon.
Another cheerleader chokes, “He missed a meeting with a college scout, and his brother said he hasn't come home two nights running. It's not like him at all.”
Jimmy's missing? A two-hundred-and-twenty-pound quarterback is
missing
? Straightaway I think of Dan. I push back a familiar lump in my throat and focus on the girls.
“Have you seen him?” the third cheerleader, Becky Halloran, repeats. She's a junior like me.
“Not since school Monday,” I say slowly. It's now Wednesday. For Jimmy, going to school is a social occasion and he never skips a day. Ever.
I glance at Mara in alarm as the cheerleaders run down the hall. She looks as sick as I feel.
“Mara, you don't think the article had something to do wiâ” But before I can finish speaking, she sweeps up her belongings and bolts out the door.
* * *
It's nearly midnight, and my tarot hotline is running cold. Not one call. I've studied more than enough for tomorrow's modern history midterm. It made for a good distraction, and not just from the dismal start to my business venture.