Beyond (Afterlife book 1) (8 page)

We heard a small shriek, and then Mai
landed in the bathroom as well. Her small figure made it easy for
her to go through, so she just floated past us.

“
Now we only have to wait
for Acacia,” Portia whispered.

Acacia was a much bigger girl like me. I’m
not on the skinny side either, not that I am fat. Like me, she had
a hard time going through things as well. So all we saw now was her
hand pushed through and then it was like the mirror was bubbling
underneath, as though she was trying to press through but made an
imprint of her body and face instead. We heard her yell from the
other side. It sounded like she was talking through a
pillow.

“
I can’t get through this thing.
It’s like the gateway is closed!”

Portia and Mai giggled and I have to admit
it looked rather funny. But I didn’t say anything.

“
Try again,” Portia
said.

So she did. Again we saw her face emerge and
this time she got her head through, but then she was stuck.

“
Try to press your hands
through,” Portia said. “Then we can pull you the rest of the
way.”

Acacia tried hard and groaned loudly.
Slowly her hands came through and Portia and I each grabbed
one.

“
On three …” Portia
said.

I nodded.

“
One … Two … Three…!”

We pulled all we could but our hands kept
slipping through hers. That was still something we needed to learn.
How to hold on to things. Not having a physical body wasn’t as easy
as it looked.

Finally we had to give up. We kept trying
but Acacia didn’t move one inch. So Portia told her to go back to
the cellar.

Acacia was disappointed and started
arguing.

“
Come on! It is not fair that
you get to go and have fun, and I don’t,” she said with the whining
voice of a five-year-old.

“
We can’t spend all night
trying to get you through this mirror, Acacia,” Portia said. “Wait
for us there. We will bring you next time.”

Acacia sighed deeply and then she wiggled
her way back through the mirror again.

“
One less to worry about,”
Portia said while opening the bathroom door slowly. It squeaked and
we all looked at each other. Then Portia signaled that we should
follow her.

Slowly we floated through a hallway and
found the stairs leading down to the living room. A man slept on
the couch, wearing a white shirt and black pants. His tie was
thrown on an armchair next to him. His black shoes were kicked off
on the floor. He slept with his mouth open and head leaning on the
back of the couch. He snored and his small moustache wiggled when
he breathed. The table in front of him was filled with empty beer
bottles. The big flat-screen TV showed an infomercial for fitness
equipment.

Portia and Mai giggled as they came close
to the man. Portia took a deep breath and blew air in his face. I
saw his hair move as if a draft had come through. Mai giggled again
and then she tickled the man by touching his face with her finger.
They circled around him and laughed.

Suddenly he moved.

He wiggled his nose and grumbled before he
turned over to the side. Portia and Mai were surprised and moved
back.

“
He’s too drunk to wake up,”
Portia said and floated away from the man on the couch.

“
Yeah, he’s boring,” Mai said.
“Let’s try something else.”

Portia glanced around in the living room
with that incredible smirk on her face.

“
Let’s make a mess,” she
said.

“
Yay,” Mai
said.

I looked at Abhik. He looked disappointed,
as though this wasn’t why he came here. I guess all he wanted was
to come back to the human world as a new person. Maybe it sounds
weird, but I think he wanted to see what it would be like to be in
the human world without feeling pain, just being there, being able
to move around as he wanted and wished, to do whatever he felt
like.

So while Portia and Acacia started to move
things around in the living room, giggling and snickering, I took
Abhik with me outside.

W
e found ourselves under the most
incredible starry sky. The full moon shone at our feet. We flew out
in the front yard, but then Abhik stopped. Slowly he placed his
feet on the grass. He looked at me and I understood. He wanted to
walk. So we did. For the first time since we learned how to fly, we
walked on our legs. It felt weird after months of flying
everywhere. It was a slow way to be moving around. But I could tell
that Abhik enjoyed it. He couldn’t stop smiling. In the backyard
sat an old swing set. Abhik took one look at it and then ran toward
it like a small child.

I ran after him and took the swing next to
him. Since we were nearly weightless, it wasn’t quite the same as I
remembered swinging in my childhood, but still Abhik seemed to
enjoy it. Afterwards he tried the monkey bars and then the
slide.

“
You know I didn’t get to do
this much when I was human?” he said. “It was too much for me. I
was so fragile and in too much pain.”

“
Well I am glad you get to do it
now,” I said.

“
Me too.”

We played like two small kids in the yard
for hours, although it felt like minutes. When we got back inside,
Portia and Mai had put their mark on the whole living room.
Pictures were hanging upside down, chairs had been placed
differently, and books were on the wrong shelves, one even on the
top of the ceiling fan. Portia had a big vase between her hands and
looked like she was going to break it.

“
Portia!” I said. “That’s
enough!”

She stuck out her tongue but put the vase
down.

Great, I thought. Nice and mature.

“
I wasn’t going to break it,
just put it somewhere else. We were only having a little fun,
that’s all,” she said. Don’t be such an old spinster.”

Who uses that kind of
words?
I
thought while laughing on the inside.

“
Well I don’t want to be
involved in it. Let’s go,” I said to Abhik.

But he didn’t come. He looked at me like a
defying child.

“
I want to try this,” he
said.

I rolled my eyes as he started pushing
pillows on the floor from the couch. He missed a few times when his
hands just went through it, but I could see on his face that he was
having fun.

The drunken man on the couch didn’t seem
to wake up, so I felt it was safe. They didn’t leave a big mess. It
was mostly just small things like tying the man’s tie around his
leg and taking his socks off and placing them on top of the TV. And
when he woke the next morning he would think that he had been very
drunk and had quite a party in the living room. Or at least his
wife would, we figured, as we left the living room and floated up
the stairs.

Everyone was giggling—even Abhik—and I
couldn’t help being a little amused myself.

But that was only until we reached the
bathroom door. As Portia opened it with that squeaking sound, we
heard another door being opened as well.

Chapter
9

The face in the doorway
immediately grew pale
, eyes wide open with a scared look—the one
spirits see a lot when they appear to humans. Spirits get used to
it eventually, but at this point I had never seen it before. I had
never had anyone afraid of me before and it sincerely scared the
crap out of me. We all got so scared of the guy who was staring at
us that we screamed and fell into each other trying to get to the
bathroom mirror.

“
Hurry, let’s get out of here,”
Portia yelled.

She pushed herself ahead of the rest of us
so she could get to the mirror first. Then she went through it. I
was last in line as the boy closed the door to the bathroom with a
shriek.

“
Hurry, hurry …” Abhik
said while Mai slid right through.

Then came Abhik and he had no problem
either. He went through and now it was my turn. I put my right arm
in front of me and pushed it through and as I did the bathroom door
opened slightly. A baseball bat was the first thing I saw and then
I panicked. Trying too hard to get through the mirror made it
impossible. My hand was stuck. Not only was I trapped in a human
house with a human, but I couldn’t move either.

Great
, I thought.

“
Who’s in there?” I heard the
boy yell while swinging the baseball bat in the air. Who was he
thinking he would scare off with that?

Then with a sudden bang the door opened
and he stood in the doorway with the baseball bat on his shoulder,
ready to swing it. I felt the others trying to pull my hand on the
other side, but I didn’t move an inch.

It’s all in your
mind
, I
thought.
Come on, have you learned nothing?

The boy stared at me from the doorway. His
eyes were still wide open. Then he took a swing at me. The bat
whistled through the air. Forgetting all about who I was, I covered
my head and … the bat went straight through me.

“
Now what do you know?” I
said quite impressed. I felt it go through me, but it didn’t hurt
at all.

The boy’s eyes became even wider and his
mouth opened. He dropped the bat on the floor. He looked at me like
he was paralyzed. His whole body shook and trembled. That was when
I saw it. There was something about him. I was certain I had seen
him somewhere before. Maybe I had known him before I
died?

“
Who are you?” I
asked.

Of course he didn’t answer. He was still
in too much of a shock. “You’re … You’re …” he
stuttered.

“
I am a spirit, yes.” It sounded
so weird in my own ears and I tried to imagine how it must have
sounded in his.

“
But … But …”

I tried to smile. “I’m kind of stuck, as
you can see.”

“
This must be some dream
or something,” he mumbled and tried to pinch his own
arm.

“
Nope, I am
real.”

He kept staring at me. “Where … where did
you come from?”

I sighed. “Well it’s kind of a long story.
See we come from this school … well … it is going to sound a little
strange, but it is the truth. We go to a school of … spirits. See,
I kind of … died some months ago and now I am … well …
this.”

The boy seemed less pale now and looked at
me with suspicion.

“
You’re really dead?”

I tried to smile again. Once he got the
color back in his cheeks he was kind of cute-looking and about my
age as well. I noticed he had a purple mark on his forehead, like
he had been in a bad fight.

“
Well … if you put it like
that, then yes. I am dead.”

“
So what are you doing
here? Shouldn’t you be with God in Heaven or something like
that?”

“
Well I sort of am. We do have
Angels at the school … but you see I need to go through this
training at the Academy to learn stuff. … It’s kind of
complicated.”

“
Have you seen
God?”

“
Not yet. But I hope to
one day.”

“
What is Heaven
like?”

“
I have no idea, honestly
… But the school is great. And being a spirit is really
cool.”

“
Are you an
Angel?”

“
No, that I am not. They are
kind of special … I think, that is, see I don’t really know that
much …”

“
But you are good, right?
You are not like an evil spirit haunting houses and stuff,
right?”

“
Well, no, not in theory… Not
normally. But … you see… we kind of did something to your living
room that wasn’t under the category of being nice, so … It’s really
very complicated.”

He looked at me even more suspiciously
now.

“
You don’t seem to know
much about anything, do you?”

“
Well I am
new…”

“
Why don’t you just go
back to where your friends went?”

“
Well, I’m kind of stuck in this
gateway … and I can’t seem to go either back or forth. So
…”

I felt so incredibly embarrassed. It was
like nothing I had ever gone through before. Seriously. It was
worse than the time I realized I had walked around at school all
day with toilet paper sticking out of my pants, or the time when I
finally got the courage to approach this guy I had liked for a long
time and I accidentally spit on him while I was talking.

“
So you are stuck here.” He said
with a smile, like he found it incredibly funny, which of course I
didn’t.

“
Yeah, that is kind of a
problem …”

“
Why?”

“
We’re not supposed to show
ourselves to humans before we graduate from the Academy. I’ll get
in big trouble if they find out.”

He looked at me. “Can’t spirits make
themselves invisible?”

I sighed. “Yes, they can.”

“
So why didn’t you just
make yourself invisible when you saw me?”