Exit Point (2 page)

The only person who looks at me is Wade. “It’s no joke, Logan.” He’s halfway across the church and his voice is soft and quiet, but I hear him like he’s whispering in my ear. “It’s real.”

“I’m not dead. I’m still me. I still have a body and everything.”

“You are still you, but you don’t have a body. What you’re seeing is a thought form.” He points to a tall gold urn up by the minister. “Your body is in there. You were cremated.”

Thunk thunk, thunk thunk
. My heart pounds in my chest. Dread mushrooms in my stomach. Sweat beads on my forehead. “But everybody knows death is the end. That there’s nothing left but matter.”

“Death is only the beginning, Logan. Hannah knows that. Lots of people do.”

Head rush.

My brain feels like a nuclear explosion waiting to happen. I run to Wade. I grab him by the shoulders, press my fingers into the scaly snakeskin of his tattoos. “If I’m dead, how come I can feel my heart beating? How can I touch you like this? Hear everybody talking? Smell those stupid lilies up there?”

“It’s the way it works at first,” Wade says. “It’ll change when you move on.”

“I don’t want to move on. I don’t want to
be dead.” What I want is to wake up in my own bed and have all this be a dream.

“It’s too late, Logan. You’ve made your choice.”

“I didn’t choose. It was an accident.”

“There’s no such thing as accidents. You chose to die because you didn’t want to face your future.”

When I was a kid learning to swim, I almost drowned. It’s like that now. The same terror, the same helplessness, the same feeling that everything is out of my control.

I hear crying.

And wailing.

It is loud and painful. Frightening.

It is me.

The robed ones come back. They feed me blue. I resist but Wade says, “It’ll help.”

Soon, a fuzzy calm drops over me. It veils things, like a thin curtain I can see through but not sharply. I hear the service, watch people hug my parents, see them walk down the steps and out of the church, where they kick the leaves and breathe the cold fall air and get on with their lives.

They can go home.

The thought of home takes me there.

We are in the living room and it is filled with people and food. Like a party, only nobody’s smiling. My parents sit on the couch. They are surrounded. Grandpop. Amy. Hannah. The talking in the room is like a low rumble. It’s there, yet there’s something more. Something that scares me.

“I know what people are thinking,” I tell Wade. “What they are feeling.”

His frizzy brown hair flies out from his face as he nods. “Your awareness is growing.”

I don’t like it because I have to listen. Mom wonders what she did wrong, how she failed me. Dad feels guilty that we argued, that he insisted I stay with the swimming program. Amy is confused and scared. Grandpop feels like a disappointed old man.

Everyone hurts.

And that’s what gets me.

Their pain is so big and so strong that the room cannot keep it in. It seeps out the cracks of the house, down the sidewalk, along the
road, into the air. It is a living, breathing thing and it twists my guts in half.

I start to cry. I am too upset to be embarrassed. “I have to let them know that I’m okay.”

“You can’t do that,” Wade says.

“I have to. I need to say good-bye.”

“It’s not about saying good-bye, Logan. It’s about the choices you made. The lives you changed. And where you go from here.”

Chapter Three

Wade takes me to a park.

The sky still has that eerie glow; the warm air smells strange, like oranges. And there are flowers all over the place, in colors I have never seen. It’s all too weird. But I’m calm. We sit on the grass. There is a weeping willow tree behind us and a big lake in front of us. It reminds me of a place I used to swim in as a kid.

“Is this heaven?” I ask.

“Not exactly. This is more like a way station.” Wade gestures to the massive round dome beyond the tree. “That’s where they put the colors inside you. To heal your energy field.” Then he points across the lake. “But that’s where you really want to be.”

Where I want to be is home. But I still follow the direction of his finger.

A crystal skyline gleams in the hazy distance. There are other buildings too, huge structures in shapes almost impossible to believe. All reflecting rainbow prisms of light.

“That’s heaven?” I ask.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Heaven was not all floaty and soft like you might think. It was as real as a full keg on Friday night. Only, so far, not as much fun.

“Who are you?”

“Your guide,” Wade says. “I’ve been with you from the beginning. You have some decisions to make. I’m here to help you.”

“I don’t want to make decisions. I want to be alive.”

“You are alive,” he says. “In a different way and in a different place.”

I think to myself, This is not the place I want to be.

“You’ll get used to it,” Wade promises. “Trust me, after a while death will be more real to you than life ever was.”

I can’t hide a thing from Wade. He knows what I’m thinking.

“Of course I do.” He nods. “I know every thought you’ve ever had. I know everything about you, Logan. What you did in your life, what you should have done, what you didn’t do.”

Anger bubbles up from somewhere deep inside. “I’m only sixteen. I didn’t have enough time to do anything important.”

“You’d be surprised at what some people accomplish in sixteen years.”

I don’t want to hear about other people. I only care about me. And getting back to my family. “If you’re my guide,” I ask, “why didn’t you stop me from getting in that damned car. Why didn’t you keep me
alive?
”

“I tried. We discussed that particular temptation at length.” He watches me calmly. “You knew your father would push you to stay with the competitive swimming. Your father saw your refusal as another sign of laziness. But it wasn’t. You also knew the argument might get out of hand. And you promised me—you promised yourself—that if it did, you would stay and work something out with your dad. Instead, you took your frustrations out behind the wheel of his car. I warned you not to race on Houser Way.”

My anger reaches a rolling boil. I am furious at him, furious at myself for being in this unbelievable situation, and I’m scared. I don’t want to be dead. “You’re lying. You didn’t warn me about anything.”

“I did. You just don’t remember. But you will. In time, you’ll remember lots of things.” He points to the water. “But for now, watch this.”

The water shimmers flat, into a silver screen. Pictures of my life play out in front of me. Not the things I did, but the things I could have done. I see myself graduating
from high school; I feel my parents’ joy. I see Hannah unexpectedly pregnant; I know there is a problem with our baby. I see Amy surrounded by trouble; I know I am supposed to help her.

“Those were things you wrote into your contract before you were born,” Wade tells me when the pictures fade. “Things you agreed to do. Now you won’t be there to do them. You have altered a mess of probable futures, Logan. Not only have you ended your own life, but you’ve changed the lives of everyone around you.”

I know my parents still hurt. Their pain is inside me, beating where my heart used to be. Suddenly, I am desperate to be alive. I ache with the want of it. I want to go home to Dad’s stupid high standards and Mom’s “crock-pot surprise” suppers and Amy’s constant blabbering. Home to Hannah. “Let me go back! Give me another chance.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

The accident plays out in slow motion in my mind. I am there again. Laughing with Tom. Waving to Hannah. Getting in the car.
Booting the engine. Peeling off in a squeal of rubber. I hear the crash. Feel the heat. Taste blood bubbling in the back of my throat.

It happened. I really am dead. There is no going back. “But I went home for the funeral,” I whisper.

“You can hang around the living all you want,” Wade says. “All you have to do is think of a person or a place and you are there.”

“So I can say good-bye to my folks? Let them know I’m okay?”

Wade hesitates. “You can try, but it takes skill to communicate with the living,” he finally says. “And the living have to be willing to see the signs.” He shrugs; his snake tattoos ripple up and down his arms. “You can’t do much on earth when you’re dead. And hanging around doing nothing gets boring fast.”

Hanging around doing nothing has always been my number one pick. Now I could do it for the rest of my eternal life.

So why wasn’t I smiling?

“You need to move on, Logan. It’s harder—
you’ll have to take the rap for choosing exit point two—but for once you won’t be taking the easy way out.”

Easy is good. Rap-taking is bad. “Where would I move on to?” I ask warily.

“That depends on how much good you did when you were alive and where you deserve to go.”

I feel the fires of hell burning already. I wasn’t a bad person. I just wasn’t particularly good, if you know what I mean. “I need to let my parents know I’m okay,” I say. “I’m going back.”

“I don’t recommend it,” Wade advises. “I’d move on if I were you.”

That’s when I notice tiny lights—pinprick blobs—off in the distance. They bounce in the air over the lake, and they swirl in groups by the crystal buildings. Instinctively, I know the blobs are people.

Or they were.

The thought is not comforting.

One of the blobs breaks free and floats toward me. The wind picks up. There is a flicker of golden light. The blob grows bigger,
more defined. Then Gran stands in front of us, wearing a cherry red dress and a hat the size of a small car.

“Just a minute, Wade. Fill Logan in on the rest of it.” She tosses her head, and the purple hat practically topples her over.

“Fill me in on the rest of what?”

But Gran and Wade don’t pay attention to me. The two of them stare at each other—a six foot four tattooed Snakeman and a five foot nothing scowling Gran. They are talking without words—I know it—but I can’t figure out what they are saying.

Then Gran turns to me. I am struck again by how young she looks. How much thinner she is.

“Just another perk to being dead. You can eat all the Krispy Kremes you want.” Gran winks, then turns serious. “Here’s how it is, Logan. When you move on, you go across that lake to face the Council. Once you do that, there’s no going back. You cut your ties to earth. You cannot be around the living again without permission.”

“Then why are you back?” I ask.

“You and I have a history together,” Gran says. “And the Council thought it would be easier if you had a familiar face around to help you make your decision.”

“Moving on isn’t such a bad thing,” Wade interrupts. “Seeing the Council is a great honor.”

Gran looks at him, rolls her eyes. “A great honor?” She snorts. “You haven’t gone before the Council in fifteen hundred years. How would you remember? Those guys are tougher than a general with a prickle in his butt.” She turns back to me. “They do your life review. And it’s a killer. Every single thought you had, every single thing you did, you go through it all over again. They watch. You watch. If you did good, you feel good. If you did bad, you feel waaaayyy bad. At the end of it all, they want the good to outweigh the bad. They want to know you did the best you could with what you had.” Gran quirks her eyebrow at me. “You up for that, Logan?”

It sounds like something Dad put me through on a fairly regular basis. The “you
could do more with your life if you tried” lecture. Come to think of it, it sounds like something Gran used to tell me when she was alive too.

I frown. “I don’t get it,” I say. “Wade says moving on is the better choice. Staying behind is the easy way out. You hate it when I take the easy route.”

“Who said anything about taking the easy route?” Gran’s hat slides; she reaches up, straightens it. “You want to ace the Council, you go back to earth and do something to make those guys sit up and take notice.”

“Arlene,” Wade warns, “that’s enough.”

But Gran pays no attention to him. Her beady brown eyes bore into mine. “You go back and make your life count! You make sure that rat bastard doesn’t get to Amy and then you—”

“What rat bastard? What are you talking about?” I ask.

“Arlene, no!” Wade’s voice drowns mine out. “You’re not supposed to interfere like that.”

There is a shuffle of wind, a muffle of
words. “He’s my grandson. I’ll interfere however I like.” Then Gran folds in on herself and is gone.

I turn to Wade. “What did she mean? What rat bastard?”

But Wade is silent.

I have no choice now. If there is someone after Amy, I have to go back.

Except, getting there might be tough. There isn’t an airport—or even an Amtrak station—in sight.

Chapter Four

I float near the ceiling in Amy’s class at school.

The kids are writing; their heads are bent over their books. It’s amazingly quiet for a class of grade fours.

Getting here was amazing too. All I had to do was think “Amy” and then I heard the sucking noise—the same one that took Gran away—and I popped into place. I don’t know where Wade is. I don’t care.

All I care about is Amy.

And finding whoever Gran was talking about.

Considering the way Gran exaggerates the failings of the male species, I figure the rat bastard is probably some nine-year-old with an attitude. I study the heads of the boys. Which one, I wonder, is bullying Amy?

More to the point, what am I going to do about it?

For a minute, I am surprised and disappointed to find Amy in school. I just died. That ought to be good for at least a week off. But as I look at the orange and brown Thanksgiving decorations on the wall—the turkeys and the horns of plenty—my eyes are drawn to the calendar beside the door.

November 28.

I have been dead a month.

Shock makes me fall from the ceiling. I land in a sprawl on the floor beside Amy’s desk. Sitting up, I see the slight pucker of concentration between her eyes and I smell the baby powder scent of her soap.