18 Things (36 page)

Um, I mean, crap. That was one of Olga’s favorite words, a word I used a lot these days as I worked on my language.

It was all I thought about in Juvie. No, not sh—crap. Although maybe if I had said a few less ‘bad’ words, then maybe I wouldn’t have ended up here. But I seriously didn’t think the Big Man Upstairs cared so much about that stuff as he did people. Otherwise, he would’ve sent me straight to Hell like I probably deserved.

But, like I was saying, every morning I woke up after another weird dream that usually involved me yelling at Olga to hurry, like I was the white rabbit and she was Alice, and then my truth hit me again like a ton of bricks. I was dead, and I never once told Olga I loved her, was
in
love with her.

And now? Too late.

I didn’t know if she survived the freak boating accident on Lake Michigan that involved lightning and hypothermia and took my life, but even if she didn’t, she was in Heaven. I knew this because she was an angel even on Earth. But me? I was stuck in Juvie, one of the four realms of the Underworld, reserved for teenagers like me who were undecided about the whole God thing at the time of their unfortunate demise.

I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to shut out my agony. Here was another truth: there were tears after death, at least where I resided. Sean and Kyle would probably revoke my Man Card for admitting I cried, but I figured I had nothing to lose at this point. Okay, that was only half-true. I could still lose my soul.

Even if this part of the Underworld was temporary until judgment or whatever, there was a terrifying finality to it. I tried to focus on Godly things to get me through, but Olga filled my thoughts instead. Not always the PG version either.

Truth number three: I regret dying a virgin.

Most people thought I wasn’t one. In a twisted turn of feminine power events, this girl Denise, who I had dated for three weeks during the beginning of junior year—an all-time record high for me—claimed we slept together after we broke up. I didn’t dispute the rumor because One, we did get about as close as you can get to sleeping with someone without actually doing the deed, and Two, why would anyone deny something like that?

I climbed off my cot in the darkness and stood. It was always dark here, with very little light. I paced around, going stir crazy once again.

I can’t take this anymore.

My roommate yawned luxuriously, and I was thankful for the sound of something real. I threw my pillow at him.

“Wake up, Sunshine!” His real name was Bo, a seventeen-year-old like me. He died in a car crash, so cliché.

Bo reciprocated my gesture, and a pillow fight ensued. “I was having a
really
good dream, Conner.”

Truth: all good things must come to an end.

“Sorry,” I told him. “But breakfast waits for no man.”

The Underworld would be unbearable if I didn’t have some friends here, but one thing I had always been good at was making people love me. I just sucked at loving them back. Loving someone required faith, something I obviously never had; otherwise, I wouldn’t be in this predicament right now. But I did have faith in Olga. Her friendship was like a good rock ballad, something I used to sing myself to sleep with to keep the nightmares away.

Bo and I headed outside. I never imagined the Underworld while I walked among the living, but even if I did, it wouldn’t have come close to this. Juvie kinda felt like being shipped to a boarding school for rednecks. You might be a redneck if… your parents send you to a boarding school where you live in tents. Yep, there was a bunch of tents for us to stay in. When I first arrived and met Bo, I observed, “Man, this place is intense.”

Ha ha ha! In tents=intense. Well anyway, he laughed and that pretty much sealed the deal on our bromance.

Everybody had a roommate in Juvie, an accountability partner as Leo stated. Leo was our angel headmaster, in charge of the two thousand teens housed in Camp Fusion. Juvie was divided into many camps with one angel in charge of each. My home at Juvie was just one small fraction of this plane. And if you thought two thousand teens were a lot to handle for one angel, then you haven’t met Leo. Besides, there was a lot less opportunity for sinning here, so two thousand-thirteen- to-nineteen-year-olds camping together wasn’t such a big deal. Since we were still fully human, with um, human desires, Leo said the same commandments we should’ve followed on Earth applied here.

There wasn’t much else Leo explained to us though, only that we weren’t fit for Heaven or Hell, so we were in a holding cell of sorts. We’d forever remain the age we were when we died, had daily assigned chores, and still attended school. Although there wasn’t much separation of church and state here. In fact, most of our studies focused around religion.

Bo and I made our way past the community bathrooms on our left, the red barn with animals in it to the right, and then headed down the path lined with fields of wild flowers. The actual school sat on a pristine lake that was always the perfect temperature for swimming despite the absence of the sun to warm it. Old oaks and manicured hedges lined the sidewalk leading up to the school’s front entrance. Just inside, to the left of the foyer, was the cafeteria.

I opened the glass door and called, “Honey, I’m home,” like I owned the place, because that was how I rolled. A year ago, when I stepped into Camp Fusion High for the first time, my arms and legs felt like Jell-O. I was terrified at the uncertainty of what might go down in Juvie. Plenty of time had passed since then, and I’d regained my title as Most Popular. Oh, sure, I went through all the phases before finally acclimating myself to this new environment—shock, disbelief, bargaining, guilt, acceptance. Waking up in a place like this had been a complete mindfreak. I still hadn’t made it around to hope yet. Hope would be seeing Olga again, and that was never going to happen. I’d heard of heartbreak, but I never knew your heart could literally break into a tiny million pieces, repeatedly, with each remembrance that the one thing you lived for was gone forever.

Damn, this sucked. I still couldn’t believe I’d never told her. I thought about that lame question teachers used to ask us as an icebreaker on the first day of school: “If you only had one day to live, what would you do?” I’d always come up with some bullsh—crap answer. Seriously, Leo should create some sort of shock collar for me to break my cursing habit. Must be the sailor in me.

If I could just have one more chance, I knew exactly what I would do: tell Olga I was in love with her. Hell, if she walked through the cafeteria doors right now, I’d probably drop down on my knees and ask her to marry me. Forget about the no marriages rule in Juvie.

I wondered if she had a man now, if she survived. She had to survive though, right? I should’ve had a lifejacket on. I remembered bits and pieces of that day. Maybe my submission to all things reckless had angered God and that was why I died. Olga had tried to save me, and I remembered that, too. She probably thought she failed, but then again, if I would’ve died a few years later, I wouldn’t have been a teenager anymore and would’ve been sent straight to Hell, so in a twisted way, she
did
save me. I still wasn’t very comfortable with this God stuff, but Bo told me that was okay. He said if we could just trust we were all here for a moment and that was real and something had to cause all that—then that made a great first step.

I had a while to figure it out, I supposed. I sought out God in my studies—though we didn’t have teachers here; class was more like homeschooling ourselves. There were plenty of books…Olga would’ve been happy to know that. I was pretty sure her idea of Heaven included an unlimited supply of books and coffee.

So, I tried to figure out the God stuff. I mean, He was real, obviously. But Leo told me my job now was to get to know Him, and I had no idea how to do that. I mean, the Dude didn’t even visit! I just wished I would’ve had my, “Luke, I am your Father,” moment a little sooner in life. Then, if Olga was in Heaven, I would’ve been there with her. Pretty much, before I died, the only religion I knew had been Star Wars. I didn’t claim to be an expert on much, but nobody could deny my status as a Jedi Master when it came to all things created by George Lucas.

I figured if Darth Vader could overthrow the emperor at the last second and still be saved, then maybe that was what Juvie was all about. God wasn’t through with us yet. We all had a little bit of Luke and Vader in us; we just had to choose which one we were going to listen to the most.

Bo took a seat at the picnic table and poured himself a bowl of cereal. “What’s eating your brain? You’ve been quiet since we stepped in here.”

“Star Wars,” I answered through a mouthful of chocolate chip pancakes. Piles of food mysteriously appeared on the tables at mealtimes, but then they also magically disappeared after an hour, so you had to be quick.

“Dude, that horse is dead. Time to put the stick down.”

The orange juice I sipped squirted out of my nose a little as I let loose a laugh. “Look around, dude. Reality has absolutely no place in my world.”

I got sidetracked by the sight of Julia eyeballing me from across the table with those big baby blues of hers. She had the look of a girl who knew she was exceptionally beautiful and knew that you knew it, too.

“What?” I mumbled.

“You have bed head.”

Julia reached over and smoothed down my hair. We’d been going steady for four weeks now, my new record. Our courting was proof we weren’t trying to create a Utopian Society here by any means. So far, our relationship had been filled with happiness and disappointment, confusion and clarity, and all the other things, good and bad, that made dating interesting.

She leaned away from me, shaking her blonde-streaked brown hair as she plopped back down on the bench. Her yellow sundress gave her an angelic glow, but this one was no angel, which was what I liked about her. Julia was about as far away from Olga as I could get, so there weren’t many reminders about the girl I lost when we hung out together.

“You sleep well, handsome?” Her waggling eyebrows seemed to suggest to everyone else at the table that we fooled around last night before our midnight curfew.

“Sure,” I agreed, but my tone conveyed otherwise. Last night was the first time we advanced past kissing and rounded second base, so I should’ve had sweet dreams and all that. I didn’t know why, but I felt so guilty afterwards. Okay, so I lived in the Underworld and was much more aware of sinning or whatever. But that wasn’t really what bothered me. It felt like I cheated on Olga, which sounded crazy since I was never gonna be with her.

“Aw, what’s wrong?” Julia asked in her annoying, puppy dog voice.

“I dunno,” I answered, bringing my best analysis of the situation I was in to the table.

Julia shot me a dirty look, but Bo intervened and started telling her about the weird dream he had last night. We all had weird dreams here, and we told them in detail, almost like ghost stories around a campfire.

I got so lost in deep thought about my Olga dreams that my brain had to travel a few dimensions back to present when the food disappeared and Julia called my name.

She stood behind me now, wrapping me in a hug. It didn’t even come close to producing the warmth Olga’s arms had once held for me, but it was the best substitute I could find here.

Stretching my arms above my head like a cat, I stood and faced her. “You’re hot,” I said ruefully.

She laughed. She had a nice laugh.

“How do you view our relationship?” she asked.

The weight of our four-week courtship settled upon me at last. Here was Julia. In an otherwise miserable existence, she’d brought a little light to my life of late. But she wasn’t Olga. She was a carefree indulgence on my part. Did I hope my attraction would bloom into something more like love at some point? Sure, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

“I’m crushing on you, girl. You know this.”

My answer possessed a nugget of truth, but her eyes flashed for a second and I was pretty sure I pissed her off. Clearly, she viewed me as more already.

“It’s just that, like, it feels like there’s this invisible wall between us. Can we talk about the accident?”

“No,” I deadpanned.

“Conner, please. You’ve never opened up to me about it, and I think it would help us grow closer. I told you my death story.”

She talked about dying a lot. She was an artist and into painting all these watercolors depicting her drug overdose. In truth, I’d experience never-ending shame if I died from swallowing too many pills. What a stupid way to die.

“What’s there to dissect? I took my annual first spring sail on Lake Michigan with my best friend. Lightning struck me. I wasn’t wearing a life jacket, and the voltage and hypothermia formed a deadly combo, inducing cardiac arrest.”

Truth: just the thought of that day made my throat close up. I knew now how wide, high, and deep this galaxy was, but this conversation had a way of making me feel claustrophobic.

Julia eyeballed me again, probably trying to gauge my mood to see if she could push me, but all I gave her in return was a glassy stare.

“Why does it take so much effort to even make cracks in you? Why do you act this way? We’re here to heal. You can’t do that by bottling everything up.”

I felt my body bending away from her without actually moving. “Ugh, Julia. I don’t know. Maybe I can’t let myself move on because I don’t know what happened to Olga. Did she die too? Is she in Heaven? Did she survive the accident? Is she happy if I’m gone? Because honestly, even though people here constantly surround me, I feel alone and I don’t know why that is other than my best friend isn’t here with me. And that’s what keeps me up at night, all the dreams about her. But there’s also not a damn thing I can do about it, is there? Because nobody likes to give us real answers around here.”

There was a gleam in her eyes, like she understood. “Thank you. I just wanted you to acknowledge the elephant in the room. You’ve put Olga on this pedestal, and I’m never gonna live up to your hero. I’m tired of competing. You can’t date a memory, but you can date me.”