Beyond (Afterlife book 1) (9 page)

“
Well … the thing is… we haven’t
quite gotten to that part yet. That’s not until next
semester.”

The boy burst into laughter.

“
You’re funny,” he
said.

“
Yeah well, I might be,” I said.
There was a pause between us. Then I said, “Listen, I’m sorry about
the mess downstairs in your living room.”

He sighed. “Well, I guess my step-dad is
sleeping down there on the couch anyway. He usually does when he’s
drunk. So my mom will probably think he did it and clean it all up
before he wakes up. I’m sure it will be fine,” he said.

Another awkward silence followed.

“
How did you get that
purple mark?” I asked and pointed at his forehead with my free
hand.

He felt the big purple bump. “Oh this?” he
asked and seemed all of a sudden a little embarrassed, like he
didn’t want to talk to me about it. “It is nothing. I just fell
down the stairs.”

“
Oh, okay.” I thought it was a
strange answer.

“
So what do we do now?” he
asked.

“
I have to get out of this
mess,” I said and looked at my arm. I still couldn’t move it either
way.

“
Can I help?”

“
That’s kind of you, but I am
afraid not. See, the problem is all in my mind. I have a hard time
believing that I can actually go through things yet. Once I get it
and stop overthinking it, I will no longer have this
problem.”

The boy’s face lit up.

“
Maybe I
can
help you,” he said.

I looked at him quite surprised.

“
How?”

“
Well, my mother always
says to me that I overthink everything. That I worry too much about
things I shouldn’t. And when I do, she always tries to distract me
with something else.”

I had to admit that sounded like a good
plan.

“
Okay,” I said. “Can you
distract me then?”

He smiled and put a hand through his
sand-colored hair.

“
Sure. Give me a second,”
he turned around and started walking but then stopped. He looked at
me again.

“
By the way, my name is
Jason,” he said.

“
I’m Meghan.”

He was only gone for a few seconds but
that was enough time for me to worry that someone else in the house
would wake up and find me here. Also I had started wondering what
my friends were doing on the other side of the mirror. They had
gotten awfully quiet and since they had tried to pull my hand, they
didn’t seem to have tried anything else. Knowing them, I guessed
they had run and left me here.

“
I found the perfect
distraction,” I heard Jason’s voice say. He had come back to the
bathroom and was holding something in his hands. He showed me what
it was.

“
You have got to be
kidding!” I said. “A puzzle?”

He smiled again. I was about to burst into
laughter. I hadn’t made a puzzle since I was a kid. At first I
thought he was trying to make me laugh, but little by little I
realized that he was serious.

“
It is not any kind of puzzle;
it has eight thousand pieces. Believe me, it will work,” he said
and took off the top of the box. Then he tipped out the many pieces
on the white bathroom tiles. Then he took a big piece of cardboard
and placed it next to the pieces.

“
We’ll make it on the cardboard.
I always do,” he said and looked up at me with anticipation in his
brown eyes.

“
What? I can’t even reach
them. I am stuck, remember?”

“
You can tell me which
ones to pick and where to put them.”

I sighed. This had to be by far the
stupidest thing anyone had ever suggested to me. He turned the top
of the box and showed me the picture. It was very beautiful—a woman
and a man kissing in the window of her bedroom.

“
It’s Romeo and Juliet,” I
said. “The eternal story of two who can never have each
other.”

Jason looked at the box. “I guess you’re
right. My mom gave it to me. It’s good for me to have something to
do, she says. So I won’t think too much.”

“
What do you worry
about?”

He gave me a curled smile.

“
Nothing … and everything,
I guess.”

I sighed. “Listen. This will take forever
to make, and I really have to get back soon.”

I didn’t want to break Jason’s heart, but
a puzzle wasn’t really me and especially not now, when I was this
stressed out and in kind of a panicky mode.

He looked up at me while showing me a
corner piece. “I found the first one,” he said and looked at the
picture on the box. “It looks like this goes in the right upper
corner.”

He placed the piece on the cardboard.
“There,” he said and smiled like he had finished the whole eight
thousand pieces.

I couldn’t help smiling. “Only seven
thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine to go,” I said.

He didn’t seem to mind my reluctance. He
just kept going and soon some of Juliet’s face had grown out of the
pieces. I kept pulling my arm but the more I did, the more it
seemed to be stuck. I was really getting tired of this situation,
but didn’t know what to do. So I stared at Jason who was eagerly
building the puzzle on the floor in front of me. Now I saw him
searching for a piece of Romeo’s hat. As his fingers went through
the pile of pieces I saw the red hat with the green feather. Jason
didn’t seem to have seen it and just kept looking.

“
There,” I said and
pointed with my free hand. “His hat. It was right there on your
right.”

Jason searched and picked out the piece.
Then he looked at me with a smile.

“
That’s the one I was missing.
Thanks,” he said, placing Romeo’s hat and completing the
head.

I couldn’t help being fascinated by his
passion for this puzzle and soon I was just as much into it as he
was. I looked for the pieces and directed him to them and in the
next couple of hours we made big progress. And I actually had fun.
It became like a small competition between us: who could be the
first to find a piece we knew where to put. And as it turned out I
was quite good at this. Several hours must have passed without us
noticing it, when I felt Jason was staring at me intensely. I
looked up and met his eyes. For the first time since I became a
spirit I felt warm inside.

“
What?” I
asked.

“
Look at you.”

“
What about
me?”

“
You are sitting down
here. On the floor. With me.”

I was speechless. My hand wasn’t stuck any
longer and I hadn’t even noticed. I realized I was sitting on the
floor next to Jason putting the pieces on the cardboard. I had been
so caught up in this puzzle, I had forgotten everything around me.
Including the fact that I had to go back.

“
Wow,” I
mumbled.

“
I know.”

“
Your mom was really right. This
is the perfect distraction.”

Jason smiled. Then there was a sound outside
the bathroom. Someone was coming up the stairs. Jason froze.
Suddenly I saw a strange fear in his eyes. He got up on his feet
and shut the door, then he locked it. He looked at me with
panic.

“
It’s my step-dad. He woke
up. You’d better go now!” He kind of yelled and whispered at the
same time.

“
Okay,” I said and approached
the mirror. I heard the door handle turn, then heavy
knocking.

“
Jason! Are you in there, you
little rat?”

“
Go!” Jason whispered and
signaled that I needed to hurry.

“
Who is in there with you? You
better not have someone in the house without my
knowledge.”

“
I don’t,” I heard Jason say,
almost crying. “I was just talking to myself … in the
mirror.”

The hammering on the door got worse and all
of a sudden I didn’t feel like leaving Jason here with that
man.

“
Jason! Open this door
immediately or I swear I will make you regret it,” his step-dad
yelled.

Jason shivered. He looked even more
frightened than when he saw me for the first time. His whole body
trembled while the hammering intensified.

I looked at him and felt an ache in my
heart. Then I floated toward him and took his hand. I squeezed it
as hard as I could until I knew he felt it.

“
I will be back one day to build
the rest of the puzzle, I promise,” I said. As I did Jason’s
step-dad started kicking the door and now it cracked
open.

“
Jason!” I heard him roar
before I went through the mirror.

B
ack in the cellar again, I found Abhik
sitting asleep on the floor. He had been the only one to wait for
me.

I stood for a long time just breathing
heavily. I stared into the empty mirror as if I expected to see
what was happening in that bathroom after I left. But there was
nothing to see. I closed my eyes and thought about Jason. I really
wished that I could have helped him in some way.

Chapter 10

During the next couple of weeks
I thought a lot about Jason. I felt horrible for not knowing how
things ended with his step-dad
and if he was all right or not. Several
times I thought about going down to the cellar again alone to go
through the mirror. But I didn’t even know if the mirror would
bring me back to the same place. And I really was afraid to get
caught if I tried again.

I tried my best to keep my distance from
Portia and her pack. Since they left me that night I didn’t care
much for them. Instead I was hanging out with Mick in the kitchen
during most of my free time while my mind was thinking of Jason and
that angry step-dad. Jason had been so nice to me and I had a
horrible feeling that he was in trouble.

I hadn’t told Mick about my night visit in
the human house. One day we were sitting in the kitchen and he
asked, “What’s on your mind lately? You have been so
distant.”

I shook my head. “It’s
nothing.”

He didn’t believe me. “I think it is
something. It certainly doesn’t look like nothing to
me.”

I stared at him. “Is it possible for us to
be friends with humans?” I asked.

He nodded. “Well in theory, yes, but it is
highly unlikely. I don’t think it has ever happened before. Plus
you need to remember that they can’t know all that we know. So you
would have to keep quiet about a lot of things.”

“
If they are in trouble,
can we help them?”

“
Sure we do that all the time.
You know, we watch over our loved ones. Sometimes we even try to
help them make the right decisions.”

“
But can we help people who are
not our family?”

He nodded again. “Yeah, sure…”
Then he stopped and looked at me. “We can, but
you
can’t. You are still a student,
remember?”

“
Yeah, I remember,” I sighed.

“
Have you been messing
with humans?”

I was a terrible liar even when I had been
alive so I just didn’t answer him. Instead I used an old trick: to
avoid answering a question, you divert the conversation by asking
another question.

“
So when do we get to help
the humans? How long do we have to be at this school?”

“
About three years. You have a
lot of things to learn. But you won’t graduate if your teachers and
Salathiel don’t think you are ready for what comes next. You don’t
fail at this school; you just get to take the classes again. … You
didn’t answer my question. Have you been outside the Academy’s
premises?”

“
No.”

I felt like I blushed. It wasn’t all a
lie; I mean we sort of stayed at the school. We just left through a
mirror, but we didn’t exactly leave the Academy, so I didn’t feel
like I lied. Not so much, that is.

He looked at me suspiciously. “Good.
Because you will get in really serious trouble if you
do.”

I nodded. I knew that. “So what does come
next?”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
You said the teachers and
Salathiel have to decide if a student is ready for what comes next.
But what is it exactly?”

“
I can’t tell you that.
You will see it for yourself soon enough,” he said with a small
smile.

As time
went by the more I worried
about Jason. What if his step-dad had done something horrible to
him after I left? That purple bruise on his head, could his
step-dad have given it to him? Was that why he didn’t want to talk
about it?

In class I didn’t listen anymore and when
Abhik or Mick talked to me I answered in short sentences, not
really thinking about what I was saying. I was really worried. I
hated the fact that Jason could be in trouble because of
me.

Then one night I had enough. I had been
awake several nights in a row and, remembering what Mick said about
not really needing sleep, I got out of bed and found my way down to
the cellar again.