The Everafter (5 page)

But part of me knows that all these things I’m worried about—falling out of my dress, Gabe seeing me throw up, getting laughed at for the way I kiss—these are mostly excuses so I can avoid admitting what the biggest problem is. Change. I hate it. I’m used to my life just like it is. If I’m the girl who just
dreams
about kissing Gabe,
then I know exactly who I am.

Sandra begins to walk away. “Wait! Where are you going?” I ask. We always walk to class together.

She gives me an “oh,
please
” look. “You know exactly where I’m going,” she says. Then she turns and starts walking again.

She’s right. I do know where she’s going. She’ll catch up with Gabe and tell him not to give up, that he should ask me out again.

Trying to stop her will be useless. I’m both terrified and relieved by the realization.

I close my locker, noticing that my pen is still on the ground. I reach for—

age 7

“Kitty, no!” I shout, just as her little ginger paws land in my carefully sorted piles of beads. Purple, pink, and turquoise beads scatter across the tabletop before pattering onto the floor.

At first, our new kitty is startled by the noise. She jumps backward on the table, bumping into a bowl of fruit. But as the beads continue bouncing across the floor, her ears prick up and fascination gleams in her eyes.

She pounces.

More beads roll across the table and plunge to the floor, followed by the soft plunk of a three-pound
kitten chasing them.

“No, no!” I shout again, frantically trying to gather the beads back together. I’m only halfway through the necklace I’m making and if I lose these beads, I won’t have enough.

The new kitty is batting at the beads, chasing them around the kitchen. Several roll under the refrigerator. More travel under the stove.

“Stop it, kitty,” I moan.

Mom puts her arm around my shoulder. “It’s all right, Madison,” she tells me. “We’ll get them out somehow.”

“But what if I don’t have enough to finish my necklace?”

Kristen and Dad are now intentionally kicking the beads around the floor, laughing as the cat chases them.

“This is all part of having this cat you’ve been asking for for months now.”

It’s true. I’ve been asking for a cat for a long time. And I was so happy at lunchtime. Tiny, furry, blue-eyed…my dreams came true when Mom walked through the door with her.

But now…
now
I’m thinking this might be a bad idea. Sure, “hard work” and “responsibility” were mentioned. But no one thought to tell me a kitten would ruin my necklace.

Kristen picks up the kitty, who starts to purr immediately. I’m jealous. She hasn’t purred for me yet. “Let me have her,” I say.

“In a minute,” Kristen says.

“Help me get your beads,” Mom says before I can wrestle the cat from Kristen.

Mom grabs a hanger from the closet next to the kitchen and starts sweeping it below the stove. A rainbow of beads emerges, and Mom moves on to sweep the area under the refrigerator.

“I hope I’ve got them all,” Mom says, but I’m not really paying attention to her anymore. Kristen is setting the kitty in my arms.

And the kitty is purring. For me. She likes me. Her little, soft padded paws bat at my cheek. She begins to play with my hair.

“Look at that,” Mom says in amazement.

The kitty snuggles her head between my neck and shoulder, settling in for a little rest.

“She looks cozy there, doesn’t she?” Dad says.

“Can we name her that?” I ask. I want her to be cozy with me forever.

“Sure,” Mom agrees. “That can be her everyday name.”

“Everyday name?” Kristen asks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, according to T. S. Eliot—”

“Ugh,” Kristen groans. Mom loves poetry, but Kristen can’t stand it when Mom starts talking about her favorite poets.

Mom ignores Kristen. “According to T. S. Eliot, a cat needs three names. One’s an everyday name, like Cozy. But then he says a cat needs a more dignified name. Something that allows it to keep its tail straight up and proud. Something so unique, no other cat in the world will have it. Cozycorium is a name I think Eliot would approve of.”

The cat’s purring vibrates against my chest. It almost feels like I’m purring, too. “But we can still call her Cozy for short, right?” I say.

“Right,” Mom says.

“Wait,” Dad says. “You mentioned three names. What’s the third name?”

“Oh, well, Eliot says a cat will have a secret name that only it knows. It’s a name that we’ll never figure out. But whenever we see that she’s deep in thought, she’ll be thinking about her secret name.”

“No,” I say. “She’s not allowed.”

“Not allowed to what?” Dad asks.

“Have secrets from us. She can’t have a third name.”

Kristen laughs at me. “You can’t stop her,” she tells me. “Cats pretty much do what they want.”

“I can too stop her,” I insist. “I’m going to take her upstairs and show her my room now.” I’m already halfway to the stairs.

“Madison,” Mom calls after me, “what about all these be—”

I
T SEEMS TO BE
a pinecone. It has edges like one, and its round shape tapers toward the top the way pinecones do.

But I can’t figure out how to make this thing work. The other items that have taken me places have been easy. I’ve tried imagining what it was like to hold them. To hand them to someone, to drop them, to put them on.

Something always works.

But not with this pinecone.

Maybe it’s the Universe’s idea of a joke.
Let’s put this object with her that she can’t quite figure out how to use,
it’s thinking.
See how long it takes her to go crazy.

Uh-huh. Not long. A person who’s dead and conscious
and revisiting her life at every opportunity must already be crazy.

Still…it’s almost as big a mystery as this whole how-did-I-even-die-anyway thing. How many different things can you do with a pinecone?

Maybe that’s not even what it is.

age 17

Ohmygod, if I don’t find that assignment
right
now, my English grade is going down the toilet!

I scurry frantically, pulling things out of my book bag for the third time this morning. I look everywhere.
Every
where.

I glance at the clock…. Twenty minutes until Gabriel gets here to pick me up for school. I worked so hard on that paper, and now I can’t find it. I did it last night at Gabe’s house and emailed it to myself. I’ll have to reprint it.

I switch on the computer quickly, and while I am waiting
for everything to boot up, I scramble to the bathroom for my toothbrush.

When I return, I log into my email account and open the message I sent from Gabe’s house last night.

Ohmygod. Unbelievable. There’s no attachment. How could I have sent an email to myself with the sole purpose of attaching that paper—then have forgotten to do it?

I grab my cell phone to call Gabe.

No answer.

My eyes smart as they fill with tears. Can I remember any of that paper? I’ll have to try to rewrite it in fifteen minutes. I flip open my English textbook. There are the two poems by Emily Dickinson that I’m supposed to hand in an analysis of—first hour:

Reading these two poems this morning causes me to shiver in a way that I never have before, and I’ve read them, well, probably a hundred times. Perhaps I’m anticipating my own exit from this world into the next when my parents see my English grade—minus this one-hundred-point assignment.

No time to think about it now. Must write down whatever I can remember about my original paper.

My fingers fly over the keyboard, rattling away in a manic rhythm. Memories of words and phrases skitter through my mind. I wrestle them into sentences: “It is ironic that Emily Dickinson inquired of the journalist Higginson
whether her poetry was ‘alive’ when the subject of so much of her poetry was death…. Her obsession with exploring the nature of individuality in the face of death demonstrates her belief in the power of the individual to transcend the boundaries of life itself…. Her poetic narrators face down a certain knowledge and understanding of their demise as they grapple, beyond the barrier of death itself, with a diminishing awareness of life….”

What was that line about the “Tragedy of the Flesh” that I’d written? Something about how she believed something atomic lived beyond that tragedy? Wait…no, I closed the paper with that line, didn’t I?

Ten minutes left….

Hold on. I wrote something about how she isolated herself in life, her reclusiveness being a form of dress rehearsal for death itself, and its “partings” of hell…. How did I put that?

Words continue to patter their way onto the screen. Organization? What’s that? No time to get these thoughts to build on one another.

Five minutes left….

A sudden sense of déjà vu strikes me. It’s like I’ve been through this moment in my life before, but…

Must just be the weirdness of trying to write about death.

Twice.

And about a poem with the line “My Life closed twice before its close”—I mean, who wouldn’t be freaked out about that?

I ignore the sensation and go back to writing: “Dickinson’s ‘letter to the World / that never wrote to her’ is a collection of poems that explore the depths of human emotion and its enduring ability to extend beyond the boundaries of any one life and into the experiences of humanity. Her body of work is the atom she left behind after ‘this brief Tragedy of the Flesh.’ That atom causes within readers a nuclear chain reaction of human connection.”

Print…print…print. It’s not printing fast enough.

Gabriel honks the horn at me. I swipe the papers out of the printer tray and then carefully open my folder. I
can’t
lose this paper again. I will place it right here in the pocket where I
always
keep assignments that are due for…

I freeze. Then shiver.

There it is. The original paper.

Right. There. In. Front. Of. Me. Exactly. Where. It. Belongs.

It’s staring at me with the all-seeing eye of Emily Dickinson.

How is this possible?

Gabriel honks again.

I’ll take both papers and compare them in the car. I shiver once more as I pull the old paper from the folder—

I shouldn’t have done it. And I know it the second I return to
Is
.

It seemed like such a small thing, letting myself find that original paper. Vanity, I know. The first version was so much better than the second. And, yeah, I wanted the better grade on it, but even more than that, I wanted my AP English teacher, Mrs. Bevery, to know how brilliant I was. I needed to hand in that first paper. I thought.

But now things are changing. A lot. More than they did when I messed with the whole handbag thing. That time it felt like the key in my song of life jumped up a half note. Now it seems like a whole different song is playing. Everything about space and time seems…different. And scariest of all…I’m forgetting who and what I was in the first version of life, the me who never found the original version of that Emily Dickinson paper. I’m afraid of losing her…
that
me.

It’s like dying all over again. I’m going to the funeral of someone who I both hated and loved. And it’s scary because I’m not sure if I’ll be as happy with the me I just created as I was with the old one.

age 7

The music swirls around us. Sandra and I are both wearing the “spinningest” dresses we could find. We twirl around on the dance floor watching them spreading out in a circle around our hips.

Life couldn’t be better. We’re at the Daddy-Daughter Dance. There are colored lights all over the community-center gym. Our dads are both dressed up the way they usually are when they leave for work. But, right now, our dads belong just to us.

Daddy is holding both of my hands as we sway back and
forth to the music. Every once in a while, he winks at Sandra’s dad and they both spin us around again.

Sandra and I giggle.

Next comes the “Hokey Pokey.” I love this song. Daddy is so silly when he does the “turn yourself around” part. I’m laughing so hard, I have a sharp pain in my side. Sandra isn’t laughing hard enough, so her dad tickles her.

For the next song, we change partners, and Daddy dances with Sandra. I dance with Sandra’s father. Even though I like him, I notice he isn’t as tall as my dad is. And he isn’t as handsome, either.

Someday, I want to fall in love with a man like my daddy. Someone who makes me smile and giggle, someone who twirls me around, someone who knows how to have fun doing the Hokey Pokey.

When the end of the evening comes, I don’t want to leave. I want to keep dancing, keep playing with Sandra. Tonight we’re pretending to be sisters, and I don’t want to ever stop.

But Daddy reminds me it’s time to go, and he helps me put on my coat. I look in the pocket for my ticket. When we got here, I put it in my coat. I know I will always keep it. It’s special. But…

The ticket isn’t there.

I look again…still not there.

I start to cry. Daddy gets down next to me to ask what’s
wrong. I tell him and tell him that my ticket is gone, but he keeps saying, “What? I can’t understand you.” I try telling him louder, but he still doesn’t understand.

Sandra finally translates for me. “You lost your ticket?” he asks. When I nod, he pulls me into his arms and lets me sit on his thigh as he tries to dry my tears.

“We’ll look,” he promises. “Calm down so we can look.”

Daddy, Sandra, her father, and I all look around the room…under tables, on the dance floor, on the chairs. The DJs are packing up all their musical equipment, and the janitors are starting to turn out the lights. The gym feels so lonely. All the magic is gone. Why couldn’t it stay?

Daddy tells me we have to go now, even if we haven’t found the ticket.

I cry harder. Daddy tries to comfort me by telling me that we can make a new ticket when we get home; that it’ll be just as good as the real one, maybe even better. But he doesn’t understand. I don’t want to leave my ticket in this lonely place, all by itself.

Daddy promises me ice cream on the way home. But that idea doesn’t make me feel any better. Mr. Simpson and Sandra finally leave. We look around the room one more time…no luck.

Daddy finally pulls me, still crying, from the room.

Back here in
Is,
I notice that the ticket is drab. It does not sparkle in pink and white the way I remember it. Instead, it just glows with a boring sameness.

Part of me wants to go back and allow my seven-year-old self to find it.

But I won’t. No matter how hard she cries.

When I was alive, I thought I was always losing everything. But I wasn’t. There are so few objects here in
Is
that can take me back to my life, I can’t part with the ones I do have.

Lost, this piece of paper is my ticket back to the Daddy-Daughter Dance.

And it has to stay lost to keep me the person the night of the Daddy-Daughter Dance made me….

Emily Dickinson referred to life as a “Tragedy of the Flesh.” Losing that ticket was a tragedy to the seven-year-old me, but that tragedy shaped the soul “I have elected.” Letting myself find that Dickinson English paper has already changed that soul some, but now I’m electing to feed and care for the one I have. I like it.

I swear Emily Dickinson’s poetry makes sense to me in a way it never could have when I was alive.