by Nan Higgins
“No, I didn’t.” She continued to stare until I began to feel uncomfortable. “I guess I don’t understand what the big deal is.”
“The big deal is, most people who have interpreter parents grow up hearing about it from when they learn how to listen. I’ve been taught about the responsibilities, powers, and traditions that come with being an interpreter since I was potty-trained.”
I thought about that. “But you said that not everyone with interpreter parents has a quickening, right? So what if you’d learned all that, and you turned out to be a reg?”
“Then I still would’ve known about my family’s history, my heritage. I would have known the truth about who my mom is and what she does, not just the superficial version of her.” I think she saw that part hurt me a little, the thought that I didn’t really know my dad, so she switched gears. “Besides, being an interpreter comes with some pretty nonstandard business hours. How did your dad explain that?”
“My dad is a funeral director. Nonstandard hours come with the territory.” Although, now that she’d brought it up, I wondered how often my dad was gone from home on mortuary business and how often it had been AfterCorps business.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Sloane said.
I looked at the textbook. It had a faded pale blue cover with the words Cognitive Interpretation: Book One.
“I guess Talking to Ghosts for Dummies was already taken,” I said, but before Sloane had the chance to respond, I saw the words at the bottom of the cover and gasped. “Written by Myron Jasper!”
“Your great-great-grandfather literally wrote the book on modern interpretation at AfterCorps,” Sloane said.
Every time I thought I knew the extent to which my parents had hidden reality from me, I got hit with a new piece of information that proved me wrong. What I’d learned in the last few minutes made my chest feel hollow. Not only had my parents kept me in the dark, but apparently, that was completely the opposite of what most interpreters did. To top that off, one of my relatives had written the handbook on working with ghosts. The worst part about these revelations was that they just created more questions in my mind, like exactly how powerful was my family in AfterCorps, and why hadn’t I been brought up being educated like other interpreters’ kids?
Since the night of my birthday, I’d felt as if a hole had been burned into my chest. With every new blow, that hole was getting bigger and bigger, something that would eventually turn me inside out and swallow me up if things kept going the way they had been. I put my hand to my heart to reassure myself with its steady, rhythmic beating, and willed myself to stop wondering how much worse this mess would get before it got better.
Chapter Eleven
Since ghost classes were canceled, Sloane and I packed our stuff, got out of the basement, and stepped out into a bright sunny day.
“What are you gonna do now?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll go home.”
She fiddled with her keys. “Do you want to maybe study together or something?”
I’d thought her eyes were pale blue, but now that we were out of the fluorescent-lit basement, they were actually sort of gray, like the sky in the middle of winter, reflecting the snow. “Study?”
“Look, I’ve been waiting my whole life to start my training. We’ve barely begun, and now we’re stopped. I’m ready to get going. We have our textbooks, right? So maybe we can work together. Besides, I might be able to help you.”
“Help me how?”
“Your family hasn’t exactly shared a lot with you. They’ve blanked you out on AfterCorps, and I can help you fill in the blanks. That way, maybe by the time training starts up again, you’ll be a little more prepared and a little less shell-shocked.”
“It’s that obvious, huh?” She smiled. “Sure, okay. Let’s study.”
“Rock on,” she said. “Your house or mine?”
“Hmm. How are the snacks at your house?”
“My house is ruled by Queen Betty Crocker and Princess Little Debbie,” she said with a perfectly straight face.
“You know, when she becomes queen, you’ll have to start calling her Debra,” I said.
“See, I have a lot to learn from you too,” Sloane said, the right side of her lips bending upward. “My house, then?”
“I’ll follow you there.”
* * *
Her house was a cute pale yellow bungalow just north of the Ohio State University campus on a sleepy street. She opened the front door and walked in, holding it open for me. It was cozy on the inside, with lots of cushy furniture in the living room.
“Snacks first, then study?” she asked.
“Definitely.”
I followed her to a sunny kitchen where she opened a cupboard door, and I burst out laughing at all the Little Debbie cakes.
“But where’s Queen Crocker?” I asked.
“If we feel like baking later, you’ll get to see her.” She tossed me a packaged cupcake. “You want something to drink? Water or pop?”
“Water is cool,” I said. She grabbed two bottled waters and sat at the table. I sat across from her and opened my cupcake.
“Are your parents at work?” I asked.
“My mom is. My folks are divorced.” She took a sip of water. “He travels a lot for work, so I only see him a few times a month.”
“You’re close to both of them?”
She nodded slowly. “In different ways, yeah. My mom is a total hippie, always talking about openness and communication, always encouraging me to be my highest self. My dad is all about business and success. He’s really into teaching me about being responsible and working hard. They’re good people, really different people. They split when I was very young. I can’t remember them together, and I can’t really picture them together, either.”
“I couldn’t ever picture my parents apart,” I said and frowned. That had always been true, but after the last few weeks, I felt unsure about it for the first time. Uneasiness had become the constant undercurrent in the sea of feelings that had flooded me in the last month, and it flashed up at this new realization.
“So,” she said, “wanna get started?” She picked up her backpack and pulled out the textbook, her notebook, and to my surprise, the assignments we turned in to Nick. I hadn’t even seen her take them.
“Sure.”
“First, why don’t I take a look at the questions you had so we can spend this afternoon starting to get you up to speed? Then tonight, we can each read the first two chapters. If school isn’t back in session tomorrow, we can at least meet up and talk about them.” She leaned over the slightly wrinkled pages and began to read. I looked around the kitchen and saw a picture on the fridge. I walked over and took it out from under the magnet. It was Sloane at maybe six or seven, and there was a blond boy a few years older with her.
“Who’s this?” I asked when she’d finished.
“That’s my brother, Derek.”
“Where’s he now?”
“He goes to Tulane for grad school; he’s staying in New Orleans this summer for an internship.”
I arched my eyebrow. “He’s not…”
“An interpreter? Nope. He’s not sad about it, either. He never wanted the gift, and he didn’t get it. We both got what we wanted.”
“Must be nice.”
Her eyes darkened for a moment, but she didn’t respond, instead picking up a page. “I’m going to answer the questions you asked on my paper in reverse order. Why would a ghost need a lighter? He wouldn’t, but sometimes, they get confused. Some ghosts understand that they are dead, and some have a harder time with it. It seems weird, but most of the time, priors are really clearheaded when they first die. The longer they have to stay in this world before the transfer, the more difficult it gets for them. They lose grip on reality, lose the ability to make sense of where they are, why they’re here, and what is happening around them. That’s part of why interpreters are so important. The quicker we can get th
em transferred, the more likely it is that they’ll relocate without having issues.”
The thought of ghosts getting confused and losing their grip on reality sounded absolutely terrifying. I rubbed my arms to try to rid them of the goose bumps that had prickled to the surface.
“Okay,” I said. “Is it okay if I take some notes?”
“Sure.”
I got my notebook out and scribbled away. “Got it. What next?”
“In question three, you ask how we know when a quickening happens, and your theory was headed in the right direction. The quickening occurs only when you are with the person from whom you inherited interpreting abilities.”
I looked up. “Really?”
“Yep. It’s nature’s way of helping us, if you think about it. Let’s say someone’s interpreter parent dies. The kid turns sixteen, and they start seeing ghosts who need help, and they don’t know what to do, and they’re just plain scared shitless, like the kid in The Sixth Sense. It would be pretty messed up, right?”
“It would be horrible.”
“Exactly. So if the ability to communicate with priors dies with the parent, the kid isn’t left to fend for themselves. Our own biology keeps us safe from having to figure it out on our own.”
I could feel my blush, and for the first time since I’d met her, it wasn’t because she was adorable. Biology hadn’t kept me from being blindsided by all of this or from trying to have to muddle my way through it with very little help from my parents. I was so damn mad at them.
On top of being a musician, I’d also been a straight A student my entire life. Macy used to say it was like I was programmed to overachieve because I couldn’t not be hyper-focused and hyper-prepared for everything. I couldn’t believe my mom and dad had let me walk into something so major without any idea how to handle it.
“Sorry,” she said. “I should have said that a different way.”
“Don’t be sorry. You’re doing me a favor. At this point, I’ve learned more from you than I have from anyone.”
She reached across the table and squeezed my hand, and then I was blushing for the same old reason again.
“Now,” she said, picking the paper up. “In question two, you asked about the levels in the AfterCorps hierarchy. This is a little more complicated because there are two facets to it. There’s the surface job situation, of course.”
“The what?”
She shook her head. “You really are clueless.”
I scowled. “That’s not my fault, remember?”
“You’re right,” she said, and I forgave her when I saw that crooked smile. “I’m sorry. Surface jobs are the ones everyone connected to AfterCorps has to have. They are the careers that allow us to have something to say when a reg asks what we do, and they are also the jobs that give us access to priors.”
I thought about that. My parents were morticians. Sloane’s mom was a florist. Nick’s mother had run the printing shop that supplied the funeral home with the programs, bulletins, and signature books. “Who else?”
“Well, let’s see. Hair and makeup artists, casket salespeople, caterers, clergy, musicians…I’m guessing that’ll be your surface profession.”
“What?”
“Well, you sing, right? Almost every funeral has music, lots of it live. I’d imagine it would be easy for you to get hired to perform at the services.”
I rested my head in my hands. Oh no. When I decided I wanted to move away from my classical, operatic voice training and focus more on pop music, my mom was really understanding. Opera was her love, but she didn’t mind that I had a different one. “Just be careful,” she’d warned, looking as if she was trying to keep the laughter out of her voice before she delivered the punchline. “You don’t want to end up a wedding singer.”
It had only been funny because it wasn’t going to happen. She knew I’d die before that. But here I was, about to become a death singer, something far, far worse. I felt weak and light-headed. My heart pounded, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut to fight tears away. That hole in my chest seemed to expand farther, and I felt dangerously close to losing myself to something I couldn’t see but was there all the same.
Finally, I lifted my face to see Sloane watching with concern.
“Go on,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Those are the surface jobs.”
“Right.” She nodded. “Among those positions, everyone is mostly equal, except for funeral directors. They take a lead role in both surface and interior professions.”
“Why?”
“The funeral home is the centralized office where priors get their needs served. It’s where they are assigned agents to help them finalize earthly issues, fill out paperwork, make preparations for their transfer, and it’s also where the judicial system is housed. Funeral directors manage and maintain all sectors of AfterCorps for their region, so they are the leaders in both the surface and interior roles.”
“You had me until the judicial system.”
Sloane got out a blank piece of paper. “Let’s take a look at the interior hierarchy; that’ll help things make more sense for you.”
“Okay.” I felt pinpricks rise to goose bumps—the good kind, this time—when she started making the diagram, her arm grazing mine with each stroke of her pen.
“Here at the bottom are the clerks. They process paperwork and help priors fill it out as needed. Next are data organizers and analysts. Organizers gather information from people’s lives and put together a report of all their big moments. Analysts determine what issues need to be worked out in this world before the dead can move on to the next.”
“How do they get the data?”
Sloane shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s one of the things we’re supposed to learn in training. Next up are the field agents. They work with both the priors and the currents to iron out those earthly affairs. They also advocate for priors when need be. They’re kind of a social worker-attorney combo.”
“But why would a ghost need an attorney?” The more she explained, the more confused I felt.
“Let me keep going, and you’ll see.” I had to admire her patience. She didn’t seem even a little annoyed at all my interruptions. “Next up are the bounty hunters and the judges.”
My eyes widened, but I kept my mouth shut.
“When misconduct occurs in life, people don’t always get justice, and they almost never get justice that satisfies the leaders of the Cosworld.”
“Cosworld is…”
“The afterlife, yeah. Cosmic world. So justice is distributed here so that priors can make their final transfer with a clean slate.”
“Leaders of the cosmic world? So like…Zeus and Hades?”
“Nah, they’re not gods, at least not the way you’re thinking. They’re more like heads of state. It’s a bureaucratic system there, the same way it is here. Granted, there’s a lot even our higher-ups don’t know about what goes on over there. We learn enough to inform our procedures on this side, but there are plenty of details over there that are classified.”
My mind swirled as I tried to absorb all of this. None of it was what I had pictured when I thought about the afterlife. Granted, I hadn’t spent a ton of time thinking about it, but when I had, it had been visions of walking toward a bright light and stepping into a gauzy, magical place in the sky where dead spirits flew around and looked benevolently down on their loved ones on earth. Going from one bureaucratic world to another hadn’t been in any of my imaginings, and it didn’t sound that great.
“It’s not what I expected when I learned about it either,” Sloane said. I must have looked as shocked and confused as I felt. “We’ll learn a lot more about it when classes start up again. If they start up again.”
“Who created the hierarchy?”
“Well, ah, Myron Jasper did. Before AfterCorps, interpreters over the world had their own ways of assisting priors. There wasn’t a large organization like this, but they did tend to gathe
r in pockets and work in small groups. Part of what made Myron so great was that he spent years researching and conversing with interpreters from everywhere and took the best parts of what they did to form AfterCorps.”
It amazed me the way her eyes glistened and hands gestured excitedly when she discussed AfterCorps’s inception and history. I couldn’t imagine getting so worked up over ghosts. Maybe if I’d learned all this back in middle school when I went through my ghost phase, but not now. I’d grown out of ghosts, or so I’d thought.
“Okay. So I guess the only thing left is the funeral directors, right? What are they called, managers?”
“Directors. Their title is basically the same in both areas. And there’s one step between directors and the one we just discussed, which also brings us to your first question.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “What is the CDU?”
“The CDU is the Criminally Demonic Unit.”
Chapter Twelve
Footsteps approaching from the living room stopped me from exploding in questions.
“Hey, Mom,” Sloane said to the plump, dark-haired woman who entered the kitchen.
“Hey, babe.” She turned to me. “Who’s this?”
“Aria Jasper.” I stood to shake her hand, and I saw something flicker across her eyes so quickly I couldn’t tell what it was. Recognition at my last name? Caution? Fear? I couldn’t even begin to guess why she’d be afraid that I was in her kitchen.
“Aria,” she said and shook my hand. She smiled, and her eyes were warm, and whatever had been there before was replaced by cheerful friendliness. “I’m Sandy, nice to meet you. You kids aren’t playing hooky, are you?”
“Training got canceled today,” Sloane said, “so we thought we’d study together so we don’t lose momentum.”
“That’s a sound idea. Why was training canceled?”
Sloane must have seen the pink in my cheeks. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
“All right,” Sandy said after a thoughtful glance in my direction. “Aria, are you staying for dinner? I’m making meatball subs, Sloane’s favorite.”