by Nan Higgins
“Sweetheart,” Dad said softly, “you won’t be able to go to Los Angeles.”
“Of course I will. I’m twenty-two; you can’t keep me here. I don’t care what you think I’m able to do with ghosts. I have my life planned out, and that plan doesn’t include ghost school.”
“Aria, this isn’t the case of a father telling his grown daughter what to do. This is an interpreter telling another interpreter that you must stay here and complete your training. There are consequences, not only for you but for me if you don’t stay, and they are severe.”
“What kind of consequences?”
“I can’t tell you. Not yet.”
Tears rolled down my cheeks before I even registered them in my eyes. “I don’t understand. How did this even happen?”
He sighed. “Normally, future interpreters begin to see the dead at a fairly young age. It can happen as early as sixteen but almost always surfaces by the time someone is nineteen. If someone hasn’t shown any signs of a quickening by the time they’re twenty, it is almost certain that they didn’t inherit the ability to communicate with ghosts. It happens, but it’s rare. When you spent so much time here and never saw or spoke to one, your mother and I thought you were a reg—a regular, non-interpreter—like she is.”
“So what happened?” I used the sleeve of my jacket to wipe tears away. I was beginning to wish I’d run away from the funeral home when I had the chance.
“In extremely rare cases, an interpreter comes into their quickening after the age of twenty. If it doesn’t happen by the time someone turns twenty-two, they never receive any translating abilities.”
“But I was twenty-two when I saw the ghost for the first time.”
My dad stood and rested his hand on my shoulder.
“Not quite,” he said. “You were born at 9:08 p.m. You saw Mr. Pfeiffer around eight o’clock.”
“One hour.” One hour had made the difference in living the life I had planned since I had cognitive thoughts and living a life devoted to death. The disbelief that had been a constant since last night gave way to horrible belief that my life was ruined. The storm in my stomach overwhelmed me, and I hopped off the desk, rushed past my father, and threw up in the trash can.
Chapter Seven
I texted Macy that night after my parents were in bed, telling her I needed her to come over. I sat in the living room, watching for her car. When she arrived, we shuffled down to the basement.
When we were little, we used to pretend the basement was our apartment. The finished section had a family room, small guest bedroom, and bathroom, and it was the site of our most epic slumber parties. Most of them, my parents knew about, but some they didn’t. We started using the space after our first sleepover, when our incessant giggling kept my mom awake until nearly three in the morning. When my parents were asleep in their second-floor bedroom, and Macy and I were in the basement, they couldn’t hear us at all. It had been a blessing to them when we were little and convenient for us when we were older.
I noticed the bulge in the long front pocket of her hoodie. “What’s that?”
“Emergency sustenance.” She grinned and pulled out two forty-ounce cans of beer. Ignoring the way my stomach still twisted, I took one and opened it, downing several gulps. “Jesus, take it easy,” Macy said.
“You won’t be saying that once you hear about my day.” I drained about half my forty, burped, and it echoed against the walls. Funny how even finished basements were more echoey than rooms in the rest of the house.
“Okay, so tell me.” Macy sipped her own beer.
Earlier, I’d had slight pause about whether to tell her about AfterCorps and the news my dad dropped. He didn’t explicitly say not to talk to her about it, but he did discuss the secrecy surrounding the organization. In the end, I didn’t really care what he thought about my sharing it with Macy, and I needed someone sane and outside of this situation to talk to. I started at the beginning with my mom’s non-coffee making, damp-haired stares, and brought her the welcome packet my dad gave me after dropping the bomb that I would be trading in my previously scheduled life for this new, subpar existence.
Macy opened the folder and took out the top sheet of paper, reading it out loud. “Welcome to your exciting new career at AfterCorps!” She pronounced the second part of the word like “corpse,” and when I told her it was pronounced “core,” she shrugged and said, “My way makes more sense.” I couldn’t disagree.
“You will learn how to liaise between the dead and living and accomplish the goals most important to your clients, as well as complete the correct paperwork and documentation necessary to assist in making their final transfer. You’ll get hands-on experience navigating the emotional needs of the newly deceased and gain solid defense techniques against unsavory customers.” Macy arched an eyebrow. “God. This reads like a college catalogue.”
“Yeah. I’ll be attending the Worst Nightmare University.”
Macy set the paper down. “So no LA.”
I shook my head. “Instead of spending my summer in Los Angeles getting my music career started, I’ll be in the basement at the funeral home learning Ghost Paperwork in Triplicate 101.” I’d felt numb since my dad unloaded the news, after the initial crying spree and vomiting episode. I’d only heard about half of what he said after that, lost in visions of singing onstage in front of thousands of fans, the story I’d told myself every night before I fell asleep now becoming no more than a fairy tale.
“What happens if you say no at the end of your training?” Macy asked.
“What do you mean?”
Macy rolled her eyes. “Whenever someone realizes they have special gifts in a story, there comes a moment when they have to decide whether to be the superhero or whether they’re going to go back to being whoever they were before they realized they were special. They always choose superhero on TV because it makes for better entertainment, but what if you decided to just be Aria Jasper, really awesome singer?”
I took a long pull on my beer. “I have no idea.” I hadn’t thought of that. My father had been so absolute in his revelations that it hadn’t occurred to me to think about taking a couple years to do my training, pacify my dad, and go back to the plan I had for my life. I felt a spark of hope, albeit a small one, that all wasn’t lost.
“You should probably find out.”
Chapter Eight
A week after I graduated from NYU, when I should have been packing my suitcase in preparation for my move across the country, I got in my Honda Civic and drove to Jasper Funeral Home.
“I’ll be there later,” my dad had said when I was leaving. He’d handed me a brown lunch bag. I’d looked inside and saw a bologna sandwich, a mandarin orange, and a pickle. “I’m doing the best I can, kid,” he’d said when I rolled my eyes.
“I can make my own lunch.”
I’d talked to my parents about getting a job so I could move into my own place. If I wasn’t going to start my dream career, I at least wanted to have a space of my own.
“Why don’t we talk about it after you have a few months of training under your belt?” Dad had said. “It’s going to be fairly intense, and you may not have time to get a job that would give you enough hours to make rent.”
I was starting to get the uneasy feeling that my dad was trying to stunt me somehow. Between not wanting me to move out to making me lunches in brown paper bags, it seemed as if he wanted me to be a kid again. I had no idea why or what it meant and got nothing but skilled sidestepping whenever I confronted him about it.
I’d barely seen my mom since graduation. When I did see her, she was always at the kitchen table, her hair usually damp, as if she needed to wash something away before venturing out of her room. My dad and I took turns making her toast or slicing grapefruits and sliding them in front of her to nibble on. She spoke in hushed monotones, tears trickling from her eyes like a cracked glass filled with water, leaking so slightly that you almost didn’t notice until you picked it up
and found your palm damp.
When I’d asked my dad what was happening to her, he’d talked about how badly my mom wanted me to follow in her footsteps and be a singer and how disappointed she was that those dreams had been replaced. I didn’t buy it. Sure, my mom had been a singer in her younger days, and she was proud of me, but I had never felt like she needed me to continue on the trail she blazed. Besides, she gave up singing professionally when she married my dad and became a mortician. It made no sense that she’d be devastated at the prospect of a daughter who was a death worker. I didn’t push the issue, not yet.
I was exhausted from being scared and worried all the time, and my training hadn’t even started yet. My dad was almost certainly lying to me, my mom was severely depressed with no sign of any improvement, and my lifelong goals had been indefinitely shelved. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, I was now peering around every corner, startled at every noise, convinced a ghost was going to attack. My father assured me it wasn’t going to happen, but he was being so mysterious about everything, I didn’t feel I could trust him. That hurt too, probably more than anything else. I’d never felt like I couldn’t trust my parents to have my back or support me, and I’d lost that.
I went inside the funeral home and down to the basement. Sally stood when she saw me arriving, but before I could get to her, I heard a voice say, “Hello again, dear.” I turned and saw Clara sitting in one of the chairs, a magazine in her hands.
“Hello, Ms. Braverman,” I said.
“Clara.”
“Clara.” I calculated how long it had been since I met her. Almost three weeks. “I’m surprised to see you still here.”
“Oh, you know,” she said, waving her hand. “A delay with my paperwork is all. In fact, I’m hoping to get everything resolved sometime today, and then I’ll be on my way.”
The sound of glass on glass distracted me, and Sally slid the window to the side and waved me toward her.
“I guess I need to be going,” I said. “Nice to see you again, Clara.”
“Lovely to see you, dear.”
Sally stood when I got to her desk. “You’re late,” she said, not unkindly.
“It’s nine o’clock. I’m on time.”
“You need to be at your desk promptly at nine. Your classmate has been here for nearly half an hour. She was on time.”
“My classmate?” This was the first I was hearing about anyone else training with me. Since most people had their quickening so much younger, I’d get private lessons. If I started with other newly empowered interpreters, I’d be surrounded by much smaller kids.
“Oh God, it’s not some fifteen-year-old, is it?” I asked. “Please tell me I’m not going to be doing this terrible training and also babysitting at the same time.”
Sally stiffened. “She’s not fifteen. And this isn’t terrible. There is no more honorable work than what you’ll be learning to do, young lady.”
“Sorry,” I said, trying to mean it.
Sally frowned and reached down beneath her desk to buzz me in. “Go on back.”
“Thank you.”
My classmate was definitely not fifteen. She was sitting in the desk nearest the door when I walked in and had short shaggy hair. It was light brown, as opposed to my raven-colored waves. She wore baggy jeans, bright blue Converse, and a T-shirt with a band I’d never heard of on the front. She turned and gave me a crooked smile. She was gorgeous.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m Sloane.”
“Aria. Hi.”
“So,” she said after I’d been standing in the doorway staring for a few seconds, “you wanna come in?” She waved at the empty desks. “There are plenty of choices.”
“Oh yeah.” I felt a blush rise to my cheeks. “Thanks.” I chose the desk to her left and sat.
“Aria Jasper, right?”
“Right.” The heat on my cheeks spread to my neck when I heard my name on her lips. “How did you know?”
“You’re the reason I get to finally start my training.” More crooked smiling from her and blushing from me. Then her words registered, and I frowned.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Sloane pulled a battered workbook out of a backpack at her feet. “This has been the extent of my training for the last year,” she said. I took the workbook and looked through it, noting that the pages had furious notes scribbled into every available space. “By the time I had my quickening, I was too old to start traditional interpreter classes. My mom gave me this book, and between that and the little hands-on work she’s let me try, I thought I’d be stuck as a clerk forever. Now I have a chance to be a special.” I must have looked as lost as I felt because her eyes widened. “You don’t understand a word of this, do you?”
“Maybe a handful of the words. That’s about it.”
“You’re telling me the daughter of the top leader in the organization doesn’t know the first thing about AfterCorps?”
I was embarrassed and wanted to direct her attention away from me. “How long have you known about it?”
“When have I not known about it?” she said and shrugged. “I’ve been planning to be an interpreter since I could walk. I was so scared when I turned eighteen, and my quickening hadn’t happened yet. And when I turned twenty and still nothing, I almost gave up.”
“So when did it happen?”
“About three months before I turned twenty-two.”
I thought about seeing the frantic stranger talking to my dad at the bar at Mitchell’s and my dad trying to communicate while also attempting to appear as if he wasn’t talking to himself. “Quickening” sounded like a dramatic event, and I’d been wondering if it was as mundane an experience for others as it had been for me.
“What was it like? Your quickening?” I asked.
She opened her mouth to answer when a voice boomed in the doorway beside us. “Sorry I’m late.” It was Nick.
Normally, he wore business suits in gray or black for the funeral home and sweats or basketball shorts if he and my dad were hanging out. Today, he had on fitted jeans and an untucked checkered button-down shirt beneath a sweater vest. It was a drastically different look for him, and it was weird.
“Hey Nick,” I said.
He walked to the front of the room and set his messenger bag on the desk. “Hey, girl,” he said, his standard greeting for me. To Sloane, he said, “Sorry, we haven’t met. I’m Nick Beckett, and you are?”
“Sloane Dennison.” She stood and shook his hand. She seemed starstruck and held on a little too long; her eyes and mouth were wide. I wondered what kind of rock star Nick was to have my new crush looking at him like that.
“Great,” he said. “Sloane, Aria, I’ll be administering your lessons for the foreseeable future. Welcome to Ghost School.” He went to the blackboard and wrote the word “Quickening” in lumpy uneven letters. “Who can tell me what a quickening is?”
“The thing that ruined my life,” I said.
He tipped his head to the side. “It changed your life, to be sure. Time will tell if your life will be ruined, and if it is, it’ll be done by your attitude and not your gifts.”
Ouch.
“Sloane,” Nick said, pointing with the piece of chalk. “What’s a quickening?”
“It’s the moment at which someone first comes into their interpreter powers,” she answered. “It happens through the first communication with a prior, either visually or audibly, and in some cases, both, although it’s rare to experience both in a quickening.”
“Good.”
“Wait, what’s a prior?” I asked.
“It’s an AfterCorps-specific term for a ghost. We are living, so we’re currents. They are priors.”
“Okay,” I said. “And…you said it’s rare to be able to both see and hear a ghost during your quickening?”
“It occurs in slightly less than ten percent of quickenings,” he said. “Did you guys experience visual or audible?”
“Both,” Sloane and I said in
unison.
“Maybe it’s not so rare,” she said with a laugh.
“Trust me, it’s rare.” Nick eyed us thoughtfully. “It’s about as common as left handedness.”
“I’m left-handed,” I said.
“Oh my God, me too!” Indeed, she was holding her pen in her left hand just like I was.
“We’re cosmically linked,” I said, blushing before the words were completely out of my mouth.
“Obviously,” she said with a grin, and I felt my toes twinkling with happiness inside my shoes.
I heard the staccato sound of chalk on blackboard and looked up to see Nick write the words “In-class assignment.”
“Today is the first day of your training, and like any first day, introductions are key. I want the two of you to write about your quickenings using every detail you can remember. Then tell a little bit about yourselves. You can finish with telling some things you know about AfterCorps already and what you hope to learn while I’m working with you. This will help guide my lessons. There are some things I’ll be teaching you regardless, per AfterCorps guidelines, but since there are only two of you, and you’re older, things will be a little different than if you’d started in a class of half a dozen sixteen-year-olds.
“For one thing, since you are older, we’ll need to do an accelerated version of your studies. You’ll start getting hands-on experience a lot sooner. Finally, I’ll have the liberty to custom design a part of your coursework in accordance with your strengths and interests.”
He moved behind his desk, pulled a notebook out of his messenger bag, and sat. “I’ll be writing too. I’ll make copies at the end for all of us to take home, and each of us will have two other assignments to read this evening as homework.”