Best Friends Through Eternity

by Sylvia McNicoll

  “You’re not dreaming,” she says. There’s a hint of melody in the tones she uses as she talks. Singsong, little-kid-speak. But, at seven, people said we were both already such old souls.

  “I must be dreaming.” I pinch myself a couple of times. “You moved away seven years ago.” When I don’t wake up, I squint at her suspiciously. “I never got to say good-bye.” The strange tug of warmth toward this little girl becomes something that sparks and crackles inside of me.

  Her smile turns sad. “That’s because I died that summer.”

  “No!” It’s like a fist punches into my stomach. I double over and can’t breathe for a moment. But then random memories fly together, making sudden clear sense. My parents never told me much when Kim supposedly moved away. They never suggested e-mailing or writing to her, certainly not visiting. What Kim says has to be true. When I can breathe again, the crackles snap white and hot. “Why did my parents lie?”

  “Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny—do adults ever tell the truth to kids?” Kim’s childish singsong voice contrasts with her sad, old-soul thoughts.

  My voice lifts a pitch, and I sound more like the little kid now. “How did you die?”

  She shrugs her shoulders. “I was sick in the hospital awhile.”

  This all feels so weird, like a nightmare that spits ugly true things into your sleep. “Why can’t I wake up? This is scaring me.”

  “You are awake, silly. It’s just that you’re mostly dead now.”

  My mouth drops, every thought evaporating through it.

  Kim frowns as she watches my face. “You need to get used to all this.” Then she brightens again. “I know. Wanna help me dig to China?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, just drops down on her knees and begins scooping sand from her hole again. “Maybe we can find our real parents.”

  Despite all logic, the “real parents” we used to hope to find were kings and queens who would be ecstatic to be reunited again. We always dug at holes like that together.

  Just like me, Kim is a Chinese orphan adopted by a Canadian family. Her parents and mine discovered each other at a Red Thread meeting, a kind of meet and greet for adopted Chinese kids and their parents. When they saw how well we got along, they began planning playdates and other outings so we could be together. This way we would feel less alone in our new home. The playdates turned into sleepovers and the outings into holidays, until we were inseparable. Her parents became my uncle Jack and my auntie Bev.

  Until that summer.

  “I can’t stay, Kim. I have to get home. Mom will be worried.”

  Kim looks up at me, tilting her head in a question. “I thought you missed me.”

  “Seven years ago, sure.” I couldn’t eat or sleep at the time. My parents bought me a hamster to keep me company till I made a new friend, but I never liked it. Just used it for scientific experiments—timing its treadwheel jaunts, weighing it, putting it through mazes.

  “Your mom will get used to you leaving, too. My parents did.”

  “Stop this. I don’t believe you!” I snap.

  She pats the sand next to her. “Sit a minute. I’ll show you.”

  When I’m down beside her, she points to the hole in the sand. It fills with water, just like they always do. She swirls her hand in the liquid mud, and suddenly it becomes a snowy darkness that fills my sight line. I hear a train blasting its horn, wheels grinding and screeching along tracks. I can make out its form, see the green-and-white logo. Bright orange sparks flash through the darkness.

  A person walks in front of that train and I holler, “Get out of the way!”

  The person wears my winter jacket and hat. She turns for a moment, and then her body flies to the side. Hard to tell if she’s been hit or if she’s jumped.

  “That was you.” Kim’s voice returns as the picture swirls back into muddy water.

  “And I died?”

  “Not quite. Just your brain. You’re hooked up to a machine. Want to see?” She speaks so matter-of-factly, she sounds creepy.

  “Listen to you! Don’t you have any feelings?”

  Kim tilts her head again, looking confused. No wonder. It’s what people always say to me, and I never understand why they’re annoyed, either. You’re supposed to feel sad when bad things happen, but you’re not supposed to be a baby and cry about it. When my hamster died, I felt oddly guilty but announced it with a smile on my face, a nervous habit, and Mom freaked. Kim smiles that same way, too.

  She seems so much like me. Maybe that’s why we were such inseparable friends.

  “Look.” She points to the muddy water, and it swirls again. This time I can see into a hospital room. I can hear a machine sish, long in, and then sish, long out. A white sheet covers most of the body lying on that bed, but I can make out my head, all bandaged. My eyes are shut and swollen. One half of my face is purple and red.

  It’s my worst nightmare.

  My mother sits beside me holding my hand. Her silver-thread hair is tied back loosely. Her thin pointy face looks pale against her shaggy, dark eyebrows. No one ever says “Like mother, like daughter” about us. “Paige, listen to me. You have to wake up. The doctor says you can’t hear me, but I know different. Squeeze my hand if you can.”

  I squeeze my hand hard as I watch, but of course that body doesn’t do anything.

  “Wink hard, then, if you can’t move your hand.” My mother’s voice sounds strong, nothing crybaby about her. But the skin around her eyes and mouth wrinkles into winces.

  “Mom, I’m not in there anymore,” I whisper. I reach out to touch her shoulder, and it feels as though I transported myself close beside her. Still, my hand passes through her.

  “She can’t hear you.” Kim’s voice comes from somewhere up above the hospital room.

  I frown. Kim is right, of course, but I want to do something for Mom: kiss her cheek—I didn’t do that a lot when I was alive—brush her loose strand of hair back, heck, throw her purse to the floor. Some gesture so she knows there is something bigger to my life than that shell of me sishing on that bed in front of her. “What’s going to happen to me?” I turn toward Kim’s voice and the image of the hospital room disappears. My consciousness comes back to the beach. “Am I going to lie in that bed forever or will the rest of me die, too?”

  “Not unless your mom lets go. She needs to let them disconnect the respirator.”

  “And she won’t?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “What about my dad?”

  “She won’t listen to him. He’s too broken up to fight with her.”

  I shake my head. “I’ll be stuck there forever.”

  “Then we’ll play on the sand for a long, long time.”

  Anger boils up inside me till I want to claw at myself to release it. “I should have waited for Jasmine. None of this would have happened,” I shout at the sky, which stays annoyingly perfect, bright blue, no clouds now.

  “Maybe not,” Kim says. She doesn’t sound convinced.

  “Definitely not! I never walk on the track! I should have stood up to those girls. They couldn’t do anything worse to me than that train.”

  “You were mad at Jazz,” Kim says.

  “No, I wasn’t!”

  “Okay,” Kim answers softly. She raises an eyebrow at me. One of the same almost nonexistent ones I grow over my eyes.

  She’s right, though. How could Jazz just dump me? And if I admit it to myself, it’s worse than that. I felt so jealous of her. How could Jazz catch Cameron instead of me?

  Kim pats at a sand wall, not looking up.

  “I was afraid,” I explain. “A coward. I hate those jock girls.”

  Kim starts shaping a pile of sand into a tower, ignoring me.

  I stand up and kick at her castle. “I hate that I didn’t help her. Hate,” kick, “hate,” kick, “hate” myself is what I don’t say.

  She gazes up at me, her eyes shining with tears.

  I stop and kneel on the sand. “I’m sorry. I�
�ll help you fix it.”

  “It’s not the castle.” She sniffs and wipes at her eyes. “You’re just so angry. All the time.”

  “No, I’m not,” I say flatly as I heap some mud from the hole into a pile. Inhaling deeply, I smell the fishy salt air. “Mostly, I force myself not to feel anything at all.”

  Overhead, a couple of seagulls shriek at each other. Awk, awk, awk! The waves shh, shh against the beach, and a fuzzy clump of bright green seaweed drifts in.

  I stare at it. “Mom made kelp salad to keep us healthy.”

  “Food can’t save you from a train. But all that healthy stuff will keep you alive in that bed.”

  “Great! That shell of me on the bed will shrivel up like old snakeskin.” I rub hard at my eyes with the heels of my hands. When white spots float in front of me, I open them again. “I don’t want to die yet! But I can’t be that snakeskin, either. Living, somewhat breathing. Kimmee?” I wait till she turns and looks me in the eye. “Isn’t there some way I can go back and fix this?”

  “Press ‘Edit, Undo’?” she asks.

  I smile and nod. “Like we did when we made the comic strips on the computer?”

  “Maybe,” she says brightly. “I don’t think you can stop from dying if that’s your destiny, but I know some people have gone back a few days and changed some bits. I’d have to ask the older dead people.”

  “Could you? Tell them I need to help Jasmine. Then I’ll be fine with all this.”

  She nods, stands up and walks into the water, fading with each step that she takes. When the waves lap at her shoulders, she totally disappears.

  I collapse back on the sand and, just for something to do as I wait, dig at the hole Kim started. I’m dying in that hospital bed because I was a coward. If I can change even one half of that sentence, I will be happier. With the muck I scrape up, I form and shape a tower. At the top I make a turret, and by the time Kim’s molecules form again over the ocean, I stick a seagull feather in the top.

  Kim grins as she walks toward me.

  “Good news?” I ask.

  She nods, then points. “Nice flag.” She kneels down beside me. “They like that you want to stand by your friend. So you get to go back. But only for seven days.”

  “Should be enough time to end things better.”

  “There’s a couple of hitches.” Kim seems to grow older in the way she speaks. More in command. “You can’t let on, in any way, what will occur in the future. You can only use your knowledge from before the past week to make any changes.”

  I squint at her. “I don’t really get that.”

  “You can’t tell people you’re going to die.”

  “Well, duh. Simple enough.”

  “Okay, but you can’t yell at your mom for lying about me. ’Cause you don’t know about me dying unless you dig up the information yourself.”

  “Right. I’ll get on that one.”

  “You can be nicer to people, only not so nice that they think something’s up.”

  “Nicer to people? All I want is to defend Jazz, not start some pay-it-forward campaign.”

  “Yes, but you can’t tell Jazz that those girls are going to beat her up until you see it on that Facebook page.”

  “But they’ve always been like that. It’s predictable.”

  She shrugs. “True. This is pretty tricky, which is why the elders hate letting people return. But if you do it wrong, you’ll be back here even earlier.”

  “So the worst that could happen is … nothing,” I suggest.

  “Oh no. You could do real damage. You could bring others with you. Do you want to try or not?”

  “What do I have to do? Close my eyes, click my heels, say a magic word?”

  “No, just look down in the hole.” She swirls the mud.

  RETAKE:

  The Previous Monday Morning

  Hovering above, I watch myself opening my locker just as I did a week ago, first lunch break, pretending to concentrate on my locker combination. Suddenly, the way it often happens in a dream, I find myself inside that person actually spinning the dial around.

  Down the hall, Vanessa argues loudly with Cameron, the same as she did the last time. No one pays that much attention. This is a drama that plays routinely. Sometimes Cameron yells, sometimes Vanessa cries. Usually, they break up. For a day or two at most.

  “You were eyeballing that skirt. Don’t lie!” Vanessa’s eyes squint at him.

  “Give it up, Van. You look at guys all the time,” Cameron speaks in his reasonable voice. He stands squarely in front of her, his arms open wide, his palms spread out.

  “Not … like … you.” She jabs a pointed finger into his chest with each word. “You give them the come-on.”

  “Like you don’t.” He’s right, of course. They’re both major players.

  “Did you get that one’s phone number?” she accuses.

  He doesn’t answer quickly enough, and Vanessa hauls back and swings at him. Crack! Like the sound of a whip.

  Whoa! The noise still makes me jump.

  All the kids in the hall freeze. No walking back and forth, no shuffling books. Everyone just stops to have a good stare at what comes next. Cameron’s face turns soup red, but he doesn’t lift a hand. This is different from their regular breakup routine. They always like to be front and center stage, but Vanessa never uses violence.

  “Go ahead and call her, then. We’re through.” Vanessa flings her hair back over her shoulder and marches away.

  Cameron stays frozen a few extra moments, shocked like everyone else around him. Then he wakes up. “Fine, I will,” he answers loud enough for the spectators to hear. By that time Vanessa has already turned the corner.

  Whose number does he have? I wondered last time. I even took my own cell out just in case. He may have asked someone for my number. Then I dashed to the cafeteria, ready to gossip with Jasmine about the lucky girl.

  This time I walk with a sense of dread. I push through the double doors, the spicy smell of pizza hitting me as I slip into line and grab a tray. First break is crazy early to eat, yet we’re all programmed to feel hungry then. I slide the tray along.

  “How can you look at salad at ten in the morning?” Max says when I stop at the window with the bowls of spring mix behind it. He shakes his head in mock disgust. “Fresh and local in February, right?” There’s an amused twist to his broad lips. On his tray sits a hamburger with orangey cheese drooling over the patty and bottom bun.

  Last Monday I just rolled my eyes at him. But this time I figure nutrition and anticarcinogens don’t need to be my main focus. Hamburger is the type of meat Mom most rails against—ground-up germs, she calls it. This is just a small payback to her for lying about Kim moving away. Besides, I want to taste meat at least once in my life. “You’re right, Max. A mound of ground cow topped with saturated fat would be much better at this hour.” I order one from the cafeteria lady.

  “No fries?” she asks, a ladle of some in her hand already. “Comes with.” She always looks disappointed when kids shake their head.

  “What the heck. Sure, fries,” I tell her.

  She nods her hair-netted head in approval and beams as she dumps them beside my burger. She hands me the platter and I set it on my tray, sliding it along to the cashier. After I pay, I turn and look for a seat.

  Max sits by himself at the nerd table. I put my tray there, too, waiting for Jazz.

  That’s when she runs in and almost knocks me over. “You’ll never guess who I’m going to lunch with.”

  “Me,” I suggest weakly. “Like always.”

  “Cameron!” She squeals and does a little shimmy. “Can you believe it?”

  “Shhh!” I look around for Vanessa and her followers, something I didn’t do last time.

  Jazz ignores my warning. Instead, she throws her arms around me and forces me to shimmy with her. Her giddiness catches me up and I grin, too. “Great. Good for you.”

  “Do me a favor, Paige.” She stops her
shimmy. “Wait for me after school. Go help Mrs. Falkner till I come back.”

  “You’re going with him after school, too?”

  She nods, flashing a smile. “I’ll tell you all about it later. You just need to walk home with me. My parents aren’t from this century. You know that.”

  “Jazz, this isn’t a good idea. Vanessa’s really steamed at Cameron. Could you maybe wait till the body cools?” I watch her smile fade.

  “What are you talking about? You know he’ll just find someone else.”

  I frown. She’s right. I can’t argue further without telling her the future. Like she’d believe me, anyway.

  “You know I’d do it for you,” she says.

  Of course, she won’t have to. I will die first. In any case, my parents would let me hang out with Cameron. But unlike me, Jazz would willingly stand up for me, lie for me, protect me. I do get her point.

  “Have fun,” I finally tell her, and she gives me another hug.

  “You’re my best friend forever and ever,” she tells me and leaves.

  “I’ll try to be,” I answer under my breath.

  “I don’t know what you girls see in that guy,” Max says, hamburger grease shining on his chin.

  Last time that grease grossed me out. I looked away and ignored him the rest of lunch. This time I’m not going to let petty things force me into being more alone. Instead, I lean in and dab it away with my napkin. “Cameron’s good-looking, what do you think?”

  “So’s Vanessa, but what about personality? They’re like rattlesnakes.”

  “True.” I shrug my shoulders. “But there’s a certain excitement to a rattlesnake—the buzz, the anticipation.” I close my eyes, inhale the meaty scent of my burger and bite in. Dense with texture and flavor, mmm. The juice runs down my chin now. How did my mother get so turned off by this?

  “Nobody likes a nice guy,” Max complains.

  “Who’s a nice guy? You?” I look directly at Max now. He has a broad nose and wide lips and wears his bangs squared across the top of his round face, not a looker for sure.

  “Hey, I’m also funny, considerate.…”

  “And short. Don’t forget short.” I sample the fries in between bites of burger. They’re solid wedges of crispy potato.