by Jamie Ayres
My roommate yawned luxuriously, and I was thankful for the sound of something real. I threw my pillow at him.
“Wake up, Sunshine!” His real name was Brad, a seventeen-year-old like me. He died in a car crash, so cliché.
He reciprocated my gesture, and a pillow fight ensued. “I was having a really good dream, Conner.”
Truth: all good things must come to an end.
“Sorry, but breakfast waits for no man.”
The Underworld would be unbearable if I didn’t have some friends here, but one thing I had always been good at was making people love me. I just sucked at loving them back. Loving someone required faith, something I obviously never had; otherwise, I wouldn’t be in this predicament right now. But I did have faith in Olga. Her friendship was like a good rock ballad, something I used to sing myself to sleep with to keep the nightmares away.
Brad and I headed outside. I never imagined the Underworld while I walked among the living, but even if I did, it wouldn’t have come close to this. Juvie kinda felt like I’d been shipped to a boarding school for rednecks. You might be a redneck if … your parents send you to a boarding school where you live in tents. Yep, there were a bunch of tents for us to stay in. When I had first arrived and met Brad, I observed, “Man, this place is intense.”
Hahaha! In tents=intense. Well anyway, he laughed and that pretty much sealed the deal on our bromance.
Everybody had a roommate in Juvie, an accountability partner as Leo stated. Leo was our angel headmaster, in charge of the two thousand teens housed in Camp Fusion. Juvie was divided into many camps with one angel in charge of each, I guessed to better manage things. And if you thought two thousand teens were a lot to handle for one angel, then you hadn’t met Leo. Besides, there was a lot less opportunity for sinning here, so two thousand thirteen to nineteen year olds camping together wasn’t such a big deal. But we were still fully human, with um, human desires. Leo said the same commandments we should’ve followed on Earth applied here.
There wasn’t much else Leo explained to us though, only we weren’t fit for Heaven or Hell so we were in a holding cell of sorts. We forever remained the age we died at, we were assigned chores, and we still attended school. Although there wasn’t much separation of church and state here. In fact, most of our studies focused around religion.
Brad and I made our way past the community bathrooms to our left, the red barn with real live animals in it to the right, and headed down the path lined with fields of wild flowers. The actual school sat on a pristine lake that was always the perfect temperature for swimming despite the absence of the sun to warm it. Old oaks and manicured hedges lined the sidewalk leading up to the school’s front entrance. Just inside to the left of the foyer was the cafeteria.
I opened the glass door and called, “Honey, I’m home,” like I owned the place, because that was how I rolled. The first time I had stepped into Camp Fusion High, my arms and legs felt like Jell-O, terrified at the uncertainty of what exactly went down in a place like this. But that had been over a year ago. Plenty of time had passed to regain my title as Most Popular. Oh sure, I had gone through all the phases before acclimating myself to this new environment. OMG shock, disbelief, bargaining, guilt, acceptance. I still hadn’t made it around to hope yet. Hope would be seeing Olga again, and that was never going to happen. I’d heard of heartbreak, but I never knew your heart could literally break into a tiny million pieces, repeatedly with each remembrance that the one thing you lived for was gone forever.
Damn, this sucked. I just couldn’t believe I had never told her. You know that lame question, “If you only had one day to live, what would you do?” Teachers used to ask us that as an icebreaker on the first day of school. I’d always come up with some bullshit answer. Now I knew exactly what I would do: tell Olga I was in love with her. Hell, I’d probably drop down on my knees if she walked through the cafeteria doors right now and ask her to marry me. Forget about there being no marriages in Juvie.
I wondered if she had a man now, if she survived. She had to survive though, right? I should’ve had on a lifejacket. I remembered bits and pieces of that day. Maybe my submission to all things reckless had angered God and that was why I died. Olga had tried to save me, and I remembered that, too. She probably thought she failed, but then again, if I would’ve died a few years later, I wouldn’t have been a teenager anymore and would’ve been sent straight to Hell so in a twisted way, she ‘saved’ me. I still wasn’t very comfortable with this God stuff, but Brad told me that was okay. He’d been here longer than me, by about a year. He said if we could just trust we were all here for a moment and that was real and something had to cause all that—then that made a great first step.
I had a while to figure it out, I supposed. I sought out God in my studies. We didn’t have teachers here; class was more like homeschooling ourselves. There were plenty of books. Olga would’ve been happy to know that. I was pretty sure her idea of Heaven included an unlimited supply of real books and coffee.
So, I tried to figure out the God stuff. I mean, yeah, He was real, obviously. But Leo told me my job now was to get to know Him, and I had no idea how to do that. I mean, the Dude didn’t even visit! I just wished I would’ve had my, “Luke, I am your Father,” moment a little sooner in life. Then, if Olga was in Heaven, I would’ve been with her now. Pretty much before I died, the only religion I knew had been Star Wars. I didn’t claim to be an expert on much, but nobody could deny my status as a Jedi Master when it came to all things created by George Lucas.
I figured if Darth Vader could overthrow the emperor at the last second and still be saved, then maybe that was what Juvie was all about. God wasn’t through with us yet. We all had a little bit of Luke and Vader in us; we just had to choose which one we were going to listen to the most.
Brad took a seat at the picnic table and poured himself a bowl of cereal. “What’s eating your brain? You’ve been quiet since we stepped in here.”
“Star Wars,” I answered through a mouthful of chocolate chip pancakes. Piles of food mysteriously appeared on the tables at mealtimes, but then they also magically disappeared after an hour, so you had to be quick.
“Dude, that horse is dead. Time to put the stick down.”
The orange juice I sipped squirted out of my nose a little as I let loose a laugh. “Look around my friend. Reality has absolutely no place in my world.”
I got sidetracked by the sight of Julia eyeballing me from across the table with those big baby blues of hers. She had the look of a girl who knew she was exceptionally beautiful and knew that you knew it, too.
“What?” I mumbled.
“You have bed head.”
Julia reached over and smoothed down my hair. We’d been going steady for four weeks now, my new record. Our courting was proof we weren’t trying to create a Utopian Society here by any means. So far, our relationship had been filled with happiness and disappointment, confusion and clarity, and all the other things, good and bad, that made dating interesting.
She leaned away from me, shaking her brown hair with thick blonde streaks in it as she plopped back down on the bench. Her yellow sundress gave her an angelic glow, but this one was no angel.
“You sleep well, handsome?” Waggling eyebrows seemed to suggest to everyone else at the table that we fooled around last night before our midnight curfew.
“Sure,” I agreed, but my tone conveyed otherwise. Last night was the first time we advanced past kissing and rounded second base, so I should’ve had sweet dreams and all that. I didn’t know why, but I felt so guilty afterwards. Okay, so I lived in the Underworld and was much more aware of sinning or whatever. But that wasn’t really what bothered me. It felt like I cheated on Olga, which sounded crazy since I was never gonna be with her.
“Aw, what’s wrong?” Julia asked in her annoying, puppy dog voice.
“I dunno,” I answered, bringing my best analysis of the situation I was in to the table.
Julia sho
t me a dirty look, but Brad intervened and started telling her about the weird dream he had last night. We all had weird dreams here, and we told them in detail, almost like ghost stories around a campfire.
I got so lost in deep thought about my Olga dreams that my brain had to travel a few dimensions back to present when the food disappeared and Julia called my name.
She stood behind me now, wrapping me in a hug. It didn’t even come close to emitting the warmth Olga’s arms had once held for me, but it was the best substitute I could find here.
Stretching my arms above my head like a cat, I stood and faced her. “You’re hot,” I said ruefully.
She laughed. She had a nice laugh.
“How do you view our relationship?” she asked.
The weight of our four-week courtship settled upon me at last. Here was Julia. In an otherwise miserable existence, she’d brought a little light to my life of late. But she wasn’t Olga. She was a frivolous indulgence on my part. Did I hope my attraction would bloom into something more like love at some point? Sure, but I wasn’t holding my breath.
“I’m crushing on you, girl. You know this.”
My answer possessed a nugget of truth, but her eyes flashed for a second and I was pretty sure I pissed her off. Clearly, she viewed me as more already.
“It’s just that, like, it feels like there’s this invisible wall between us. Can we talk about the accident?”
“No,” I deadpanned.
“Conner, please. You’ve never opened up to me about it, and I think it would help us grow closer. I told you my death story.”
She talked about dying a lot. She was an artist and into painting all these watercolors depicting her drug overdose. In truth, I’d experience never-ending shame if I died from swallowing too many pills. What a stupid way to die.
“What’s there to dissect? I took my annual first spring sail on Lake Michigan with my best friend. Lightning struck me. I wasn’t wearing a life jacket, and the voltage and hypothermia formed a deadly combo, inducing cardiac arrest.”
Truth: just the thought of that day made my throat close up. I knew now how wide, high, and deep this galaxy was, but this conversation had a way of making me feel claustrophobic.
Julia eyeballed me again, probably trying to gauge my mood to see if she could push me, but all I gave her in return was a glassy stare.
“Why does it take so much effort to even make cracks in you? Why do you act this way? We’re here to heal. You can’t do that by bottling everything up.”
I felt my body bending away from her without actually moving. “Ugh, Julia. I don’t know. Maybe I can’t let myself move on because I don’t know what happened to Olga. Did she die too? Is she in Heaven? Did she survive the accident? Is she happy if I’m gone? Because honestly, even though I’m constantly surrounded by people here, I feel alone for the first time and I know why that is—because my best friend isn’t here with me. I didn’t even freakin’ realize how much she gave my life meaning until I got here and didn’t have her by my side. And that’s what keeps me up at night, all the dreams about her. But there’s also not a damn thing I can do about it, is there? Because nobody likes to give us real answers around here.”
There was a gleam in her eyes, like she understood. “Thank you. I just wanted you to acknowledge the elephant in the room. You’ve put Olga on this pedestal, and I’m never gonna live up to your hero. I’m tired of competing with her. You can’t date a ghost, but you can date me.”
I couldn’t help myself. My Achilles’ heel was I couldn’t stand to have anyone angry with me, so I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “You’re right. And I want to date you, okay?”
On her tiptoes, she pressed her forehead into mine and we saw eye to eye, literally and figuratively. I’d gotten that good at lying, to look someone in the eye and still bear false testimony. Our lips touched briefly and as we hugged, I promised myself I’d truly focus on Julia. I’d focused all my thoughts on Olga, and it was time to get them back, because she wasn’t coming back.
“Oh, looks like we have an audience, honey.”
I twisted to get a look at what she saw behind me.
“Olga?” I whispered. I dropped my hands and faced her fully. “Olga?” I repeated, this time at a regular volume but voice cracking. Then I shouted, “Olga!” and ran to her. It turned out my first impulse wasn’t to drop down to my knees and propose. Instead, it was to touch her. I wanted to make sure she was real. Lifting her off the ground, I swung her around and around again.
Truth: God, if this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up.
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I’d like to thank:
First and foremost, Jesus, my Savior, for his boundless love, amazing grace, and perfect timing. My whole family for yourzany sense of humor and forcing me to not take myself too seriously. Dan the Man, the offer you made me fifteen years ago to marry you is still & always will be the best offer I ever accepted. It’s because of you that I can’t seem to stop myself from constantly reading and writing love stories.Kaylee, for harnessing your formidable intelligence and passion into making me a better person. I know we’re just a pit stop on your path to world domination. Ashley, for your random insights that make me laugh and your extra hugs that warm me from the inside.Where my heart is, you three will always be.
My A*W*E*S*O*M*E friends for their enduring prayers and much-needed support, including: my Sisterhood of the Traveling Journal (what God brought together nothing can separate! Our friendship is so special because it’s centered around our love for Jesus and it’s the reason we’ve been together as long as my marriage—I love you all so dearly), all my blogging buddies (who I cannot possibly all name, but you know who you are, and especially The Bookshelf Muse blog for being such a wonderful resource with their dazzling know-how ),my SWFRW group (an extra heartfelt thanks to Marisa Cleveland, who read so many versions of this story she got whiplash, and for Jaime Rush for being a “bad writer” but good friend when she basically told me to rewrite my whole story after reading my three page synopsis, and for the gracious Nicole Resciniti for all her sound advice and for 1,432 hits on my little ole blog in one day), my Vineyard peeps (of whom there is no EGR cases except for Pastor Jamie Stilson—thank you for showing me the power of ugly), my Caloosa Family(who inspires me to be the best version of myself every day), my GNO crew (special shout out to AmyCarver for inviting me to the first MOOK’s club and getting me reading again—saved me “the trip” of dropping kid #2 off at the fire station at the time), my Homie for cheering me on and chasing shiny objects with me (Ooooh Squirrel!), Blake for inspiring this novel in its beginning stages (so glad you kicked cancer’s butt and I hope you complete all the items on your life list someday), my new extended family who I will never dump, the Heidi’s (when the zombie apocalypse arrives, I promise to share ammo and Bennett’s coffee and donuts with you), and John Breedlove.
There is a quote by Emerson that states, “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn from him.” To name every person I’ve learned from during my thirty-three years would prove an impossible task, but please know that your spirit lives in the voices in my head and in this book—so a special thanks to you, too.
Several people at Curiosity Quills came together in a rather short amount of time to make 18 Things possible. It started with Sharon Bayliss, who hosted the contest that led Krystal Wade to my novel. Publishing a book was one of those dreams I only dreamed about, and you, Krystal, turned them into reality. Thank you for keeping insane working hours and always answering every little email in record time. I’m convinced you figured out how to clone yourself, or you really are Super Woman. You are for sure the BEE this side of the galaxy!
And muchos gracias to everyone at Curiosity Quills. Our FB chats are something I look forward to each day, mostly for your rollicking and sinister humor!
My parents—Julie Myers and Jeff Reynolds—my steadfast fans. I hope you celebrate my successes as if they were your own, because none of it would be possible without you.Dad, I’m sure you will hand-sell my books to half the population of the United States at truck stops and Mom, your clients will no doubt roll their eyes after you ask them for the third time if they knew your daughter has a book published. Also, to my sisters, Dawn and Misty, for the pictures and putting up with me and offering support because you love imaginary worlds and fiction as much as I do. And for the real Olga Worontzoff (GG), some day I hope to be just like you, a youthful ninety-five-year-old doing the Kalinka at The Fiddlin’ Pig.
Sincere appreciation also goes to the wonderful community of Grand Haven, for providing me with the setting that served as so much inspiration for this book. If any of my readers have never visited this town during the summer, add it to your bucket list!
Finally, my deepest thanks to all my teachers throughout the years. You introduced me to books and together, made me believe in a world where I could go anywhere and be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. And the person I most wanted to be like was you. And to all my past, present, and future students: you can go anywhere and be anything you want to be, and you will. Also, you are alllllllllll my favorites and thank you to every single young adult (or wannabe YA) out there who read this book.
Describe the way Olga feels like an outsider at school and at home at the beginning of the book.
Describe the events that led Olga to swallow a bottle of pain pills. If you were a character in the story, what would you say to Olga to stop her?
The author uses humor and exaggeration to create characters and events larger than life. Find a paragraph in which this technique is displayed and share it with your group.