by Penni Jones
“How much time to we have left? We were asleep for part of it, right?”
I remember the necklace and put my right hand on my neck. I breathe a sigh of relief when my fingers make contact. I look down quickly, so I don’t wreck the car. Even a fender bender could be a disaster.
“Nineteen hours.”
“Okay,” he says.
I step on the gas. The feeling of the powerful car under my control is decadent after not having even a body to control for so long.
Luke fiddles with the radio and it seems like we’re on a leisurely, fun car ride. My shoulder catches for no reason and I remember that this body is nearing its final destination.
“Juniper-fucking-Haskell,” I say.
Luke looks up from the radio and says, “To tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed.”
“You were? Try having arthritis and saggy skin.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” His perfectly manscaped eyebrows jump and he says, “Oh, shit. Do we have any money?”
“I don’t know.” In my rush, I hadn’t thought to look. Apparently, he hadn’t, either. But I did bring my purse. Or, Juniper’s purse. I grab it from where I have it wedged between the seat and the door and thrust to toward Luke. “See if there’s anything in here.”
Luke unzips the designer leather bag and pulls out small lotion bottle. “Estrogen cream?”
“Stay on task, please.” Is estrogen cream in my future if I come back as a female? No wonder Doris chose to be a male.
He pulls out a teal snakeskin wallet and opens it. “Two hundreds and a fifty.” He rifles around a bit and says, “ID, American Express, and Mastercard.”
“Do you have ID?” I ask.
Luke puts the wallet back in the purse and reaches into his pants pockets. “I don’t have anything.”
“Hopefully we can rely on our celebrity. I’m guessing you’re a celebrity because you’re here, but you weren’t famous when I was alive.”
He smiles at me and his eyes drop to my chest.
“Really?”
“I thought it would make you feel better about your body.”
“Gross.”
“If it helps, I jerked off to you once or twice when I was in junior high. But I pretty much jerked off to every woman who wasn’t a relative. And maybe a couple of older cousins.”
“Thanks,” I say. The train station is within my sights.
“I don’t know how to make this up to you. I know you didn’t have to do it,” Luke says.
This might be the biggest mistake I’ve made since I offed myself.
* * *
Luke
The irony has not escaped me. Naomi promised I could touch her tits when we were back in bodies. Without that promise, I would have gone ahead and ended it all at my parents’ house when the Shadow was stalking me, and she would be the new Doris without incident.
But that promise resuscitated me. And now she has skin bags that hang dangerously close to her belly button.
The train ride is more than four hours. We’ll have around fourteen hours left when we arrive in New York. Hopefully I’m famous enough to have easy access to Dylan Pine. Judging from the way the woman at the ticket counter smiled at me and gave me a ticket without asking for ID or money, I’m thinking it will work out. I don’t know why I’m famous, but I guess it doesn’t matter.
I take a seat on the train, expecting Naomi to sit beside me. She selects the seat behind me instead.
“What’s up?” I turn around and ask.
“I’m tired, okay?” She leans her head against the window and closes her eyes.
“Is this seat taken?” It’s a girl. A beautiful girl who never would have spoken to me when I was alive.
I shake my head because words aren’t making their way to my mouth.
She smiles and says, “Thanks.” She sits next to me, and a cloud of perfume travels through my sinuses.
I work up my nerve to give her a good look. She has long blonde hair and sun-kissed skin. She’s wearing a tight sundress.
“I’m Bree.” She holds out her hand and I shake it. It’s warm and soft.
“I’m Luke.”
Bree narrows her eyes and me and says, “You look just like Andy Sullivan.”
“Oh, yeah. I am. Just kidding.” I smile and hope she doesn’t think I’m a big weirdo.
“I don’t blame you for having an alternate identity. Things must be crazy for you right now.”
“Yeah. A little.” I wish I knew what the fuck she is talking about.
“I heard you were in Connecticut, but I didn’t believe it. My friend Shawna told me and she’s so full of shit, you know? She’s literally going to die when I tell her that I sat with you on the train.” She stuffs a piece of gum in her mouth and starts smacking. She pulls a phone from her purse and leans into me. It’s not like the phone I have. She pulls it open and says, “Smile!”
I smile and she snaps a photograph.
“Your phone takes pictures?”
“Yeah, duh!” She giggles and slaps her hand on my thigh. She pokes at the phone for a few seconds and says, “There we go! Undisputable truth. Shawna is going to D-I-E die!”
I turn around to see if Naomi is watching. Her eyes are still closed. Bree turns around to see what I’m looking at.
“Oh my God! Is that Juniper Haskell? She looks like shit.” Bree gasps and turns the phone toward Naomi.
“No. Don’t.” I push Bree’s phone away.
Bree frowns and says, “Okay.” She lowers the phone to her lap. “So, you’re going into the city?”
“Yeah. You?”
She nods and tells me her plans in detail. About the friend she’s staying with, the restaurant where they’re having dinner, the party they’re attending. She barely takes long enough breaks to breathe. I nod where it seems appropriate, but it’s really hard to pay attention.
At some point after the first hour she says, “I can’t wait to tell my friends that you’ll be at the party!”
“What?”
“You just said you’d meet me there.” She narrows her eyes and sticks out her bottom lip.
“I don’t know if I can make it. I’m sorry.”
Naomi leans forward and says, “He has big plans with me. Don’t you, stud?”
Bree looks from me to Juniper and back again. She has finally stopped talking.
Chapter 30
Naomi
Luke and the girl in the tiny dress flirted all the way from Connecticut to New York. Three hours and forty-seven minutes. I tried to sleep through the trip, but I couldn’t get comfortable in Juniper’s bag of bones.
The giggling, the dumb questions, the obnoxious perfume, the fluttering eyelashes. It brought me to a startling realization: Doris was right.
Men are a distraction for me. They always have been. I let Luke bring me here even though I was set up to have a decent thing going. I know he didn’t actually bring me here. I came on my own volition. But I could’ve minded my own business. It wouldn’t have been fair to Luke, perhaps. But hadn’t I helped him out enough?
The girl’s name is Bree. Dumb fucking name.
As we get off the train, she keeps one hand on Luke’s back and looks to me repeatedly.
“Are you guys going to be together on the next season of House of Has-Beens?” she asks.
I answer her question with an icy glare.
Luke says, “We can’t tell you that.” He smiles at her with Andy’s smile. Charming, fake, rehearsed.
“I don’t know why they would call you has-been anyway,” she says to Luke. “I mean, that sex tape just came out like what, two months ago?”
“Uh yeah, that sounds about right.” Luke’s skin turns bright red, and I don’t bother to choke back my laughter.
“So, you’ll call me later, right?” she asks Luke.
“Sure.” Luke regards her for a second before putting his arm around her shoulder and kissing her on the cheek.
“Oh my God, oh my God! I’m
never washing my face again. This has been the best day of my life!” Bree sort of jumps up and down, but more like bends at the knees a couple of times. Her heels are too high for jumping.
“Come on now, Andy dear. We have to get you to the VD clinic before it closes,” I say.
Bree’s expression deflates momentarily and then she shrugs. “Well, if you end up on antibiotics, we can go for coffee instead of cocktails. No biggie.”
She squeezes his arm and then walks away.
“Really, Naomi? VD clinic?”
“You don’t have time to fuck her anyway. Let me at least enjoy myself a little,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to have sex with her. I was just being nice. She thinks I’m some famous guy and it really made her day.”
“So, all of that carrying on was for her benefit? Aren’t you a prince?”
“Don’t do this. Okay? Let’s just find Doris.” A pained expression crosses his handsome face. Time to move on.
“Dylan has an apartment in Brooklyn. I don’t have the apartment number, but I have the address of the building.”
“How did you do that?”
“I checked the Internet this morning before breakfast. It’s freaking unbelievable.”
“There’s a cab,” Luke says.
He opens the door for me, and I slide in. The cab driver doesn’t seem to recognize either one of us. After spending a few hours with Andy’s biggest fan, I’m relieved.
I find the apartment building address on the slip of paper in Juniper’s purse and tell the cab driver where to go.
“When I died everybody was on this social media site called Myspace. Now everyone is on Facebook. And everyone puts all of their information on there. I looked up Dylan and found a ton of photographs. I know the block where he lives and the theater where he’s currently in a play.”
“I wonder if Doris knows the lines,” Luke says.
“No idea.”
“How will this work? We can’t make Doris do anything.”
“I think we have to kill her,” I say quietly.
“No, I think she has to kill herself. Right?”
I digest his words for a second. He’s right. And there’s no way we can do that.
* * *
Luke
“What if we trick her into killing herself? Like we put an overdose of sleeping pills in a drink for her?” That’s all I can come up with. There’s no way Doris is going to go voluntarily.
“I think that would technically be murder. I don’t think we can fool the afterlife,” Naomi says.
“Okay, what if we convince her to play a game of Russian roulette? We have nothing to lose.”
“I don’t think she’ll fall for that.”
“What are we supposed to do?” I ask. Naomi is really smart. She should be able to figure this out.
“If she doesn’t know she’ll be heading to Oblivion, maybe we can reason with her.” Naomi looks around and sighs. “But I’m sure she knows. That’s why she ran away when Tony and Edgar showed up.”
“Maybe we can appeal to her sense of ethics,” I say. Even though I know there’s no way in hell that would work.
“Maybe murder will work. I mean she’ll still be dead. Even though suicide souls go to a different area it’s all the afterlife, right?” Naomi squints at me like she’s trying to work it all out.
“I don’t know what other choice we have,” I say. The taxi driver is looking at us in the rearview mirror. He definitely speaks English. “We’re writing a screenplay. Right now, we’re trying to fix a plot problem.” I’m proud of myself for coming up with that. Maybe Andy’s brain works a little faster than mine did back on earth. Naomi must be proud, too because she looks at me and smiles.
For a second she looks like Naomi and not Juniper.
“We’ll figure it out. We have to.”
If I had been Andy to start with, I never would’ve killed myself. The ironies of the afterlife are endless.
Chapter 31
Naomi
I always hoped to end up in New York City when I was alive. I didn’t have a plan to make it happen, but I wanted to be a part of the excitement in the big city. But something always held me back. Lack of confidence, I guess. I didn’t know if I could make it there on my own, and I didn’t want to crawl back to Arkansas as a failure. And one time I was almost ready to do it, and then I met Jamie. Or was it when I met Greg?
It doesn’t matter. Either way I wasted my potential.
But I’m in New York now, old and in a smelly cab. No time for fun, just time to deal with Doris. We have less than seventeen hours left. It’s strange to rely on living time again.
The driver stops and I hand him cash from Juniper’s wallet. I over-tip in hopes that he won’t call the cops and report our murder talk. Getting arrested would really derail our plan.
When we step out of the cab my nose is assaulted by the heavy smell of car exhaust. It’s preferable to the driver’s cologne, which somehow smelled both sweet and spicy.
Luke stands next to me with his mouth wide open. His eyes are huge, and his head is darting around like he can’t decide where to look.
“I’m guessing you’ve never been to a big city before.”
Luke shakes his head gently from side to side without closing his mouth. His mouth must be filling with germs and car exhaust.
“I think we need to go this way,” I say and grab his hand, pausing a second to enjoy skin-to-skin contact. I guide Luke down the block so he can continue to look around like a dorky tourist.
There is a doorman standing in front of the apartment building. I’ve only seen doormen on TV. He’s a novelty, but also an obstacle. I remind myself that we are semi-celebrities as we walk up to the man.
“I’m not positive this is the building, but we have to be close. Tell him that you and Dylan are friends. Maybe he’ll recognize you.” I push Luke gently forward, and he snaps out of his awe.
The doorman looks at each of us individually and then at us together. His eyebrows scrunch together as he tries to make sense of our partnership.
“Excuse me, sir. I’m looking for Dylan Pine. He’s a good friend of mine but I don’t remember if he lives in this building or the one next door,” Luke as Andy says. He carries a comforting charm that has no doubt gotten Andy laid many times.
“Oh yeah? If you’re such good friends then how come you don’t know where he lives, chief?” He has a heavy New York accent. It’s magnificent.
I should have moved here straight after high school and never looked back. I’m already getting used to the exhaust stench.
“Well, we’re new friends. We’re working on a movie together and he told me to come by. He told me where it was, but I had a couple beers. I’m sure you know how it is.” Andy smiles and gently taps the doorman on the shoulder.
“What are you doing with this piece of garbage?” The doorman asks me.
“This young man is a friend of mine. I know it might seem odd. But no weirder than Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson.” I lean forward just a little, forgetting that I don’t have large breasts anymore.
“Hate to disappoint you, but Dylan Pine don’t live in this building.” He tilts his head toward Luke and says to me, “You might want to be more careful about the company you keep.”
My stomach lurches with anger, but I remember that none of this is real. I’m not Juniper and Luke is not Andy. I have no reason to be offended or angry.
“Yeah, well fuck you too, pal.” Luke’s jaw drops again as soon as the words escape his mouth. His face turns bright red right before the doorman slaps him. Luke stumbles back a couple of feet, knocking into tall man in a bright blue tracksuit before he rights himself.
“Hey! That was unnecessary,” I say. “What’s your problem?”
“You can’t really mean that, lady. This man,” he points at Luke and continues, “I read about this piece of trash in the papers. He got that actress Rochelle what’s-her-name pregnant and now he won’t even r
eturn her calls. He abandoned that poor young lady. She was of the Mickey Mouse kids, for Christ’s sake.”
“I what?” Luke asks.
The doorman clenches his teeth and squares his shoulders.
I wrap my hand around Luke’s forearm and pull him away before he can get a real beating. I’m pretty sure Andy’s muscles are just for show.
We get to the corner and Luke stops walking.
“Wait. Please.” He pulls the phone from his pocket and taps at the screen. “We have to get into this thing.”
“Not now, Luke.” I take the phone from his hand and put it in my purse. “It’s not your baby. It’s Andy’s baby.”
Luke nods and says, “Okay.” But something in his eyes tells me he doesn’t get it.
* * *
Luke
“Do you think Andy abandoned a pregnant teenage girl?”
“He just said ‘young lady,’ nothing about her being a teenager. And you did not abandon Daisy when she was pregnant. You killed yourself. You didn’t even know. This has nothing to do with you,” Naomi says. She’s walking faster than her body looks like she should be able to.
“Daisy was pregnant?”
Naomi stops and turns around. “You don’t remember.”
Her eyes are Juniper’s, but they still carry Naomi’s sadness.
“What did I forget?” It feels like a memory is just out of reach. When did it disappear?
“It’s better if you don’t remember now. Trust me, please,” she says. She grabs my hand again and I jerk it away.
“I have a kid, don’t I? And I don’t remember.” I ball my fists at my sides and stomp one foot. I probably look like an idiot. “The afterlife is such bullshit!”
“And that’s why we’re trying to get out of this situation. Let’s take care of Doris and get back to Suicide Soul Station. Then we can move on from the bullshit afterlife.”
I follow Naomi down the block. I should be thinking about how we can get Doris to come back with us but all I can think about is what I will lose next. Daisy will be gone soon. Then my parents. My childhood home. All my friends. No telling how many are already gone.