by Nan Higgins
I glanced at Sloane, who was already scribbling, a small smile on her face. I shook my head at how happy she was to be starting ghost lessons and opened my notebook to begin my own work.
Chapter Nine
I got home that afternoon, a little giddy from sitting next to Sloane all day. She was definitely the bright spot in all of this. Sloane and orange juice.
I loved orange juice with a passion, but I rarely got to drink it. Citrus was rough on the vocal cords, especially near a performance, and since I always had a performance just around the corner, I could’ve counted on one hand the number of times I’d gotten to drink orange juice before my quickening.
Since I’d come into my abilities, I started keeping a gallon of OJ in the fridge at all times. I went to the kitchen, poured a giant glass, and sat at the table. There was a growing stack of mail since Mom had always been the one to handle bills and correspondence. I took a gulp of juice and looked through the envelopes. When I came across one addressed to me from MoodWave Media, I set my glass down with a thunk, and a bit of the thick liquid sloshed onto my hand. I stared at the envelope for a while. It could have been seconds or hours. Finally, I opened it and began to read.
Dear Aria Jasper:
We are sorry to hear you have decided against pursuing your music career. Any agreements regarding your future at MoodWave Media, whether verbal or in writing, have now been terminated.
Best of luck in all your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Angela Osborn
I trembled as I read the letter five times, then ten. My father had been vague when I talked to him about training for a few years and leaving the option open to go back into music once I fulfilled my duties to AfterCorps. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might not be a music career to go back to when I was done.
I had laid my AfterCorps homework on the table too and noticed a large drop of orange juice on the paper. When I wiped it away, it made a long streak across Nick’s words about his quickening. I stared at that streak while I finished my juice, then got up and put my glass in the sink and threw the Moodwave letter in the trash. That small act shattered me. I stared into the trash can and cried, my whole body shaking with the impact of this latest crushing blow. How could this be happening? I’d always known what I wanted in my life, and I’d worked and sacrificed so much for it. Not a single day went by that I didn’t put everything I had into pursuing music. How could it all be gone?
I walked upstairs, past my parents’ closed bedroom door—my mother was no doubt in bed—and went into my bedroom. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I could see the door to my parents’ bedroom, and glared at it. My life was falling apart, and instead of offering support or comfort, my mom was hiding. I wanted to hide too, but I couldn’t, and I was so angry and lonely. The only people who could really help me with what I was going through were both closing themselves off from me in their own ways, and I didn’t know why.
I closed my door and walked to the music stand in the corner. Sheet music for the last piece I’d been practicing, “I’m Not That Girl” from Wicked, sat open, a light film of dust on the pages. I hadn’t practiced since I found out that nothing I’d planned for my life was going to happen anymore.
I sat at my small electric keyboard and turned it on. I stumbled through the piano intro for the song—I’d always been a better singer than pianist, and I’d gotten rusty these last few weeks—and began to sing. I got nearly to the end before I broke again into deep, lung-crushing tears. Never had I felt so hopeless, so far removed from my own life.
Not bothering to turn off my keyboard, I crawled onto my bed and wrapped a corner of my cheerful teal and orange plaid comforter over me. The name was a misnomer, as I didn’t feel even a little comforted. By the time the tears had stopped rolling down my cheeks, I had fallen asleep.
* * *
I woke in the middle of the night, hungry and shivering. I changed into pajamas and my black terry cloth robe and went downstairs to the kitchen. A light was on, and to my surprise, I found my mom sitting at the table. She was bent over my homework, reading.
“Mom?” She jumped. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s all right.” She looked back at the papers and stood, coming around the table to give me a hug. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Sure.” I was surprised. She hadn’t cooked a meal since my birthday disaster, but I was too hungry to rock the boat by asking why she suddenly wanted to make food for me.
She went to the fridge and rummaged around. “Hmm,” she said, her voice muffled by the contents, “there’s not much to choose from.” She pulled her head out and held some eggs, cheese, onions, and mushrooms. “An omelet okay?”
“Sounds great.” The bottom had officially fallen out of my stomach.
I watched her pull out a skillet and busy herself making omelets. “I’ll go to the store tomorrow and get us restocked,” she said. “Any requests?”
“I’m almost out of orange juice.”
She paused, her spatula in midair. Then she flipped the eggs and gave a quick nod. “I’ll get you some more.”
Soon, she set a plate with an enormous omelet in front of me and sat across from me, using her fork to cut a bite.
“Thanks, Mom.” I took a bite, and a strand of gooey cheese hung out of my mouth and rested on my chin. I tucked it between my lips and swallowed. “This is so good.”
“I’m glad you like it.” She smiled around her food and set her fork down. “Aria, I’m sorry. I know that I’ve…that I took this news very hard, and I haven’t been here for you.”
“It’s okay.”
She shook her head forcefully. “It’s not okay. I’m your mother. I’ve never let you go through anything alone, and I shouldn’t have let you go through this without me.”
I cut a few pieces of egg and pushed them around on my plate while I thought about what to say. “Why are you so upset about this?”
She faltered, and her gaze slipped from my eyes to her plate.
“This was your future, Aria. Your destiny. I thought, after you turned eighteen, that we were safe, and you could pursue music and have a normal life. And when we made it to your twenty-second birthday, I woke up feeling like every weight I’d carried that you’d have to be a…an interpreter, was gone. You were free. I’d been carrying that email from Angela Osborn around in my pocket until your birthday, just to be on the safe side.”
“So it’s just about my singing?”
“It’s about your life. I thought your life was going to be your own.” She gave a shaky sigh. “But you belong to AfterCorps now.”
“Belong to them?” That sounded bad. I knew so little about what was happening to me, and I wondered if I was being kept in the dark to keep me from realizing the enormity of what, exactly, I was losing in all of this. I had lost my dreams of being a musician, but I hadn’t stopped to consider that maybe that was the least of it.
“Aria.”
I turned and saw my dad in the doorway. I hadn’t heard him come downstairs. His pajamas were rumpled, and his hair messy, but his eyes were clear. “I think it’s time you went to bed. It’s late, and you have class in the morning.”
I thought about telling him I was twenty-two and could decide for myself when I went to bed, but something in his eyes stopped me.
I picked up my plate, scarfing down a few more bites as I walked to the sink. On the way out of the kitchen, I grabbed my homework and took a last look at my parents, who seemed to have entered into a staring contest, before going upstairs to my room.
I left my door open and lingered for a moment to see if I could hear what my parents were saying, but it was no use. I could hear the faint sound of their hushed voices every so often but couldn’t make out any words. Eventually, I gave up and sat at my desk with the homework sheet in front of me.
Staring without really seeing it, I thought about my parents. Throughout my life, I could remember a handful of argumen
ts, none of which had ever seemed that intense, nor had they ever lasted very long. Certainly there had never been a long stretch of time in which there was palpable tension, as there was now. Of all the things that made me worried about what I was getting into with AfterCorps, their strained relationship combined with my mom’s absence the last few weeks were the things that made me most frightened, even more than the possibility that ghosts might be lurking anywhere, at any time.
I scrubbed my eyes and tried to shake off the feeling that things were going from bad to worse in my house. My homework didn’t seem like it would take long, but I needed to finish it and get some sleep.
I set Nick’s paper aside and pulled out Sloane’s sheet. She had covered the entire front and half the back in tiny print, leaving me to wonder how my own essay, which barely took up three-fourths of a page with my handwriting, would compare when Nick had them side by side.
To be fair, Sloane had grown up learning about AfterCorps and her potential paranormal powers. She’d had years to ask questions and form opinions about what to expect when she made it to her training. She’d obviously been dreaming her whole life about being a special, whatever that was. Two out of the three questions we’d been asked for this assignment had referred to what we already knew and what we wanted to study, and it wasn’t my fault that my answers to those were nothing and nothing.
I read her paper and discovered a few interesting things. She’d been working at her mom’s flower shop when she had her quickening. They were delivering flowers to a funeral home when a young guy asked Sloane if she had a lighter, and her mom pulled her aside and told her the guy was a ghost. Sloane’s mom told the ghost they didn’t smoke and directed him into the funeral home for assistance. They’d finished their delivery and then Sloane’s mom took her out for a beer to celebrate.
I also learned that Sloane felt she fell low on the AfterCorps hierarchy, but she was determined to work hard and prove she was an elite interpreter. Her ultimate goal was to join the ranks of a sector called CDU, of which Nick was a top officer. That explained the stars in her eyes when she met him.
Nick had encouraged us to make notes on each other’s papers, so I grabbed my pen, skimmed her paper again, and jotted these thoughts down:
What is the CDU?
What are the levels of the AfterCorps hierarchy?
How do we even know when a quickening happens?
Sloane and I knew because we were with our interpreter parents, and they noticed us noticing ghosts. Maybe we’d been seeing ghosts before and didn’t even know they were dead.
Why would a ghost need a lighter?
I set Sloane’s paper aside and picked up Nick’s. His handwriting was jagged but orderly, like a set of knives arranged across the page. His quickening story was a little vague, saying that he and his mom were out shopping at City Center, the mall that used to be in downtown Columbus before it went out of business. A woman came over to Nick when he was trying on school clothes and asked if she could help him find anything, and his mom took the woman to a corner of the fitting room and began whispering to her. Later, his mom explained that the woman was an LG, and that she had directed her back to her SW.
He also referenced being a leader of the CDU and made a point of saying he was the first in his family to have a high ranking AfterCorps job, as his relatives had all been clerks.
I got out my pen for more notes.
Is LG a lost ghost? If so, how exactly does a ghost get lost?
What is an SW?
How did Nick go about breaking through barriers to reach such an elevated status?
I yawned and pulled out my phone to check the time. I was shocked to find it was almost 2:00 a.m. and realized my earlier nap must have been a lot longer than I thought.
Macy had texted me around six to ask how my first day went, then again at nine to ask if I was okay. My thumbs flicked as I typed a quick response.
Day one was okay. It wasn’t summer in Los Angeles, but what can you do? I met a total cutie pie, I’ll give you details tomorrow, xo.
I went to bed thinking about Sloane’s crooked smile and tried to shut out thoughts of how strained my parents were in the kitchen.
Chapter Ten
Sally waved and smiled when she reached down to buzz me in the next morning. I went through the glass doors and turned right, heading toward my classroom.
“Aria?” Sally poked her head out of her cubby.
“Yeah?”
She looked a little sheepish. “I wondered, could you sign this for me?”
“Sure, is it some paperwork for training?”
“Uh, no.” She pulled out a program from when I performed as the featured soloist with the Columbus Symphony last year. “I was so far up in the balcony that by the time I got through the line to where you’d been greeting people and signing programs, you were already gone.”
I took the pen and signed the program. My heart twisted as I looked at my name on the thick, luxuriously buttery paper, above the songs I performed. I should have appreciated those moments onstage more. I performed so often that it always seemed as if there would be an infinite number of instances where I stood in center stage, a spotlight on me and a crowd before me. If I’d known how limited those times were, I would have spent more seconds smiling into the audience before I started to sing, held the last note of every song a little longer, and bowed more deeply. The disbelief I’d felt since finding out about AfterCorps was beginning to subside, and what replaced it was anger at the injustice that my life no longer belonged to me.
“I don’t think that signature’s going to be worth anything now,” I told Sally, and my voice wobbled.
She smiled. “It’s worth something to me.”
I tried to return her smile, gave her a quick nod, and went toward my classroom.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Sloane said when I entered the room.
“Good morning…moonbeam,” I replied, and she laughed.
She was wearing a different graphic T-shirt, presumably with another band, although they weren’t familiar to me at all. Their name seemed apropos for our current situation.
“Jonesing for Death, huh?”
“Yeah. You know them?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, you have to listen!” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and I saw that they had earbuds plugged into them. As she started scrolling through her phone, she handed them to me. “Put these in your ears.”
“Why can’t you just play it out loud?”
“It’s not the same experience.”
I shrugged and put the earbuds in. Soon, a mellow guitar riff flowed into my ears, and a man with a gruff and sultry voice started singing about an alien who fell in love with a girl from Earth.
I could bring you all the stars,
Jupiter, Venus, or Mars,
I need you always with me,
We can rule the galaxy.
I started laughing. “You’ve got to be kidding with this!”
“Why would I be kidding?” Sloane didn’t laugh, but she was grinning.
“Those are some sappy lyrics, my friend.”
“Oh. I get it.” She took the phone and earbuds back from me, her eyes never leaving my face.
“Get what?”
“You’ve never been in love.”
My mouth closed with a pop. I didn’t know how to respond to her; she definitely wasn’t wrong. Fortunately, Nick chose that moment to enter the classroom.
He clapped a single time. “Okay, guys. How did you do with your assignments? Let me see them.”
We handed them over and waited while he took a moment to read. I glanced at Sloane, who was doodling in her notebook. A lock of hair fell across her eye, and she blew it off her face and back into the shaggy mop on top of her head. I wondered if she had any idea how cute she was, then remembered her slightly cocky grin from a few moments ago. Oh yeah, she knew.
“Aria,” Nick said, “you forgot part of your assignment.”
He turned my paper to show it to me. “You only answered my first question. I still need at least an overview of what you know about AfterCorps and what areas in the organization you’re interested in exploring.”
“But, Nick, I don’t know anything. My father didn’t tell you?”
“What do you mean, you don’t know anything?”
“I mean, I didn’t know AfterCorps was even a thing until after I saw my first ghost on my birthday. I never knew my dad was anything other than a normal funeral director or that ghosts were a real thing until then.”
Nick’s mouth dropped open. “You’re joking.”
“I’m really not.”
His mouth popped closed, his eyes narrowed, and he dropped his head into his hands, muttering, “Really, Nathan?” Finally, he lifted his head. “All this time, your father told me not to talk about AfterCorps because he didn’t want to upset you, and in reality, you don’t know the first thing about who you are or where you come from.”
“Upset me?” I had never been more confused.
His lips flattened into a thin line. “I don’t feel comfortable going forward with training until I speak to your father about this.” He reached into his messenger bag and pulled out two thin, ancient-looking textbooks. “Here. You guys can start looking at these. I was going to assign the first two chapters for you to read tonight; go ahead and do that. AfterCorps training is suspended until further notice.”
“Suspended?” Sloane asked. “How long do you think it’s going to be?”
“Until I can get all of this cleared up.” He walked out, leaving Sloane and me to gape at each other.
“Wow,” I said, mostly just to break the silence.
I thought for a moment that Sloane wasn’t going to respond, she paused for so long, staring. “You really didn’t know anything about AfterCorps until now? Or even anything about priors?”