Layoverland

by Gabby Noone

  My heart pounds as I watch the start of his stupid decision that ended both of our lives. The desire to laugh at him is completely absorbed by my rage.

  Caleb takes out the fancy bottle of whiskey, then brings it back to the kitchen and pours a shot into a juice glass. He looks at it for another second, then fills it halfway. Based on the amount of hemming and hawing and staring at the glass, I wonder if this was his first alcoholic drink ever. Finally he brings it to his lips and swallows it in several long gulps. When he’s finished, he gasps and clutches the countertop for strength. He picks up his phone again.

  I walk over to where he’s paused at the counter and look over his shoulder.

  What time? he texts back to Laura.

  8!!! she responds immediately.

  See ya then

  He never actually answers her question of whether or not he got into Harvard.

  Past Caleb puts his phone down again and pours another ridiculous shot of whiskey. Present Caleb cringes and I want to also, but I don’t because I know that’s not the professional thing to do with Sadie so close to me.

  “It’s stupid, right? That this was the worst thing to ever happen to me,” Caleb scoffs, his face full of shame. “But I just freaked out.”

  I know how this ends, of course.

  I die all because some brat is pissed off that he didn’t get into his precious Ivy League university, so he decides to get drunk and go finally make a move on a girl he was too much of a baby to actually talk to sober.

  Pathetic.

  But if Laura goes to his school, then why was he driving all the way over in my town, at least a half hour outside of theirs?

  Caleb picks up the second glass of whiskey and brings it to his lips, but before he can take a drink, he drops it, alcohol spilling across the granite. He clutches the countertop, gags, and hurls his body over to the fancy porcelain farmhouse sink where he vomits all over it, brown liquid and chunks of barely digested cookie dough flying everywhere. This time I can’t conceal my cringe. I look over at Sadie. Her face is calm, bored even.

  Past Caleb leans against the sink for a moment, then drinks cold water straight from the faucet. Finally he drags his body back to his bed and the memory fades out as he drifts off to sleep.

  I’m . . . confused.

  “What happened next?” I ask. “That’s not how you died, right?”

  “No,” Caleb says. “Even though it looks like it, one pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a shot of whiskey did not kill me.”

  A memory appears again. Now Past Caleb wakes to the noise of his phone ringing, but he fumbles around and can’t find it. The ringing stops, and finally he unearths the phone from under his pillow.

  Missed Call, Laura (1)

  Laura: U cummin or what?

  Laura: *coming sorry smh

  Dad: Your cousin Sarah got her Harvard acceptance! Have you heard anything today?

  Missed Call, Mom (3)

  Mom: Caleb please call me. Abuela slipped and fell at the holiday party and had to be rushed to the ER.

  Missed Call, Mom (1)

  Caleb looks at the time. It’s now 8:46 p.m.

  “Shit,” he mumbles to himself. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  He shuffles out to the garage, pausing to put on his slides, not even grabbing a jacket even though it’s the middle of December, and dials a number on his phone.

  “Mom? Mom, I’m so, so sorry!” he says. “I got caught up with some homework and lost track of time. I’ll be right over. Which hospital?”

  He hops into his silver SUV and zooms out of the garage, down the driveway, and nearly hits his mailbox.

  Present Caleb looks like he’s about to claw his own face off.

  “So you weren’t . . . drunk?” I ask coolly.

  He only drank a shot. And he threw up most of it. And then he fell asleep for a solid couple of hours. I’m not exactly sure how blood-alcohol stuff works, but I can guess the answer.

  “No,” he says quietly. “I was never drunk.”

  I was wrong about him.

  Caleb didn’t kill me because he was being an idiot drunk driver.

  He’s not the villain I thought he was.

  But still he killed me, right? He’s the reason I’m here. I mean, maybe he wasn’t drunk, but why was he was driving on the wrong side of the road?

  As if my head is the one conjuring memories, suddenly we’re all in the back seat of Caleb’s car as he’s driving down the road where the accident happened. It flickers in and out.

  “Caleb?” Sadie pipes up. “We need you to focus.”

  “I don’t know,” Caleb mumbles, clutching the car door. “I can’t seem to remember exactly how—”

  But before I realize what I’m even doing, I reach out and turn off the machine.

  29

  “Bea!” I hear Caleb call out to me once I’m way past the golf cart and nearly halfway back to the airport entrance.

  I’m panting hard, the adrenaline of desperately needing to flee wearing off. Finally I force my body to stop and lean over with my hands on my knees. I’ve always prided myself on my steadfast refusal to participate in gym class, but in this moment I’m wishing I died just slightly more in shape. I don’t feel any of the runner’s high I felt the other night. I feel like I’m going to barf.

  Caleb jogs up to me like it’s nothing and puts his hand on the small of my back.

  “You all right?”

  I look up at him. His hair blows just slightly in the wind and his eyes are basically boring into my soul. It’s too late to tell him the truth about who I am. If he finds out my secret, will he ever forgive me for holding him back from moving on?

  I don’t know how I should act toward him anymore, so I turn to my default mode for any situation in which my feelings confuse me: being a bitch.

  “Yeah. I’m fine,” I say as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, even though I’m still panting and sweat is dripping down my face. Wet, splotchy marks are beginning to form under my arms thanks to my grossly non-breathable polyester dress.

  “That was horrible, what you had to watch back there. Sorry you had to see that. Definitely not my best. Definitely, like, my worst. Ever.”

  “It’s whatever. A lot of people make bad decisions in their memories. I mean, not getting into Harvard? You really suffered. It’s too bad that you only had one defining goal in life.”

  I stand up straight and tuck my hair behind my ears.

  “You know,” I continue, “maybe if you devoted all the time you spent studying for the SAT on cultivating an actual personality, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Caleb looks like I’ve gagged him with a handful of sour candy.

  “You’re just another soul in my queue, Caleb. One of five thousand strangers I’m stuck dealing with.”

  “But I thought we were—”

  “What? You thought we were friends?” I say mockingly as I cross my arms.

  “Yes! I opened up to you. I showed you things I’ve never told anyone about before!”

  “Yeah, because it’s my job to get you to open up to me,” I scoff. “I don’t know what you expected.”

  He twists his mouth and looks like he’s going to cry. But before a single tear can fall down his face, he sprints away, faster than I could ever manage to keep up with.

  “What’s going on?” Sadie calls, speeding up to me in the golf cart.

  “I just needed some fresh air.”

  “In the middle of our session? Bea, do you not understand how important this is to me? This is the only thing holding me back. I’m so close, Bea. I’m so close to moving on.”

  Her eyes begin to water and she looks up and around the tarmac.

  “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she continues, then pauses. “When I was getting ready to board that plane, it wa
s like I was so close, I could taste it. My house in Heaven. I could taste my house. It tasted like shrimp cocktails and piña coladas. Every room has a different pastel-colored wall-to-wall carpet. And a Jacuzzi. Did I already mention that? And columns on the outside. And, oh my god, I even have my own phone line directly to my room.”

  I want to brush off this fantasy as stupid, but I get it. I miss my sister most of all, but I miss my phone too. And Internet access. And I miss changing clothes and putting on a fresh face of makeup every day. And I miss my mortality. I miss a lot of things.

  I miss being normal.

  I miss not constantly feeling the weight of the truth on my shoulders.

  “That sounds really nice, Sadie,” I admit, my voice catching in my throat.

  “I really believe it will all be there waiting for me, Bea. I really do. But to finally get there, I just need you to push this one boy through. Just one boy! He’s basically nobody.”

  “Yep,” I say, gritting my teeth. “Basically nobody.”

  30

  “Ughhhhhhhh,” I groan aloud when I return to my room and flop horizontally across my bed. I think I’m all alone, and then I hear the sound of the bathroom sink running. Jenna emerges in my peripheral.

  “Rough day?” she asks.

  “I’ve messed everything up,” I say into the bedspread.

  I feel Jenna sit down next to me and rub my back gently. The mattress slumps far too low to the ground under the weight of approximately one and a half teenage girls.

  “I’m sure you didn’t mess everything up,” Jenna coos.

  “No, like, I really, really did.”

  “What happened?

  I turn my head so only my right cheek is pressed against the bed.

  “You know how I said Caleb and I have a history together? It wasn’t just because he tried to bribe me that first day I met him. I knew him before. Sort of.”

  “I’m not really following,” Jenna admits gently.

  “Caleb is the person who crashed into my car,” I say quickly. “He’s the reason I died.”

  Her eyes widen. “No! How do you know?”

  I tell her about the passports. How I wanted to punish him. How getting assigned to him was the perfect revenge.

  “But now that I’ve seen things from his point of view, I don’t know if he deserves to suffer. Which is crazy because I usually think that when someone kills another person with their car, they deserve to suffer! Right? Right?”

  By the time I’m done talking, I realize I’m half screaming, half hyperventilating. Jenna brings her sweat suit sleeve to her mouth and lightly rubs it against her top lip in contemplation.

  “He doesn’t deserve to suffer if it was an honest mistake,” she says. “I mean, not more than the suffering he’s probably already going through knowing that he’s killed someone. If he’s not a sociopath, then he’s probably beating himself up inside over it. And he’s probably not a sociopath, because he wasn’t sent to Hell.”

  I roll over and sit up to face Jenna.

  How is she suddenly so logical?

  “The thing is, I don’t think he even knows he killed a person. So he definitely doesn’t know that I’m the person he killed. He was too hurt himself to find out what happened, which makes me think that that must be what’s holding him back from moving on. But when we go through his memories, I always find a way to stop him before he can think about the crash itself. I . . . I have to figure out a way to get him to move on to Heaven without exposing the truth I’ve been withholding from him.”

  But why is there part of me that doesn’t want that to happen? It’s the part of me that just likes . . . being near him.

  “No,” Jenna says firmly. “You have to come clean. It would be unfair of you to keep Caleb here for any longer.”

  “But I—”

  She puts her hand up for me to stop speaking.

  “You can’t play God, Bea. It’s not your choice whether or not he’s able to move on to Heaven. That’s up to Caleb to figure out. To take that away from him is the worst thing you can do to someone.”

  “Is it really?” I press. “Is it worse than murder?”

  Jenna looks at me impatiently.

  “You know I’m trying to make the best of being here, Bea, but I’d do anything to move on and know how my family is doing. If someone tried to sabotage that for me, I don’t even know what I would do. You have to tell him that you know.”

  “But that means I have to admit I was wrong,” I say, weeping. “I hate admitting that I’m wrong.”

  “So? You need to get over it and be the bigger person.”

  “I hate that phrase, Jenna. I feel like I’ve never heard anyone say it outside of reality TV.”

  “Okay, okay! Maybe it’s not being ‘the bigger person.’ Maybe it’s just doing the decent thing.”

  I turn over on the bed again and make another loud whining noise. Jenna yanks me up by my shoulders.

  “You need to go find him and tell him the truth,” she says, staring into my eyes. “Now. Or, in a few minutes, when you’re done blowing snot bubbles.”

  I know she’s right. And that just makes me cry even more.

  FINDING CALEB IS harder than I thought it would be.

  I don’t know his room number, so I pace up and down all the terminals, poking my head in every store and every waiting area. I even linger in the food court, sitting near the Home Cooking counter, watching people pile their plates with whatever mess du jour is on the menu, anxiously hoping that he’ll be one of them. But dinner comes and goes and he never appears.

  In a last-ditch effort, I loop around the terminals once more. It’s quiet, save for the sound of someone vacuuming in the distance. I pause in front of the only place I hadn’t stopped to look: the bar with the neon IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK ANYWHERE! sign. I go inside.

  There’s something kind of nice about it. Red light bulbs give off a warm glow on the multicolored bottles lining the bar. A bossa nova version of “Hey, Soul Sister” plays from the speakers, which is definitely the most tolerable of all the cover styles. Even the shiny orange booths and stools look inviting. If I were on Earth, or the mortal realm or wherever I’m not right now, I could imagine hip, annoying adults in their twenties hanging out here.

  I’ve never actually been inside a bar, at least one that’s not just a fixture inside of a chain restaurant. I wonder if the bartender will ask to check my passport, and, if they do, will they count my age from the day of my birth to the day that I died? Or at some point, will I be technically twenty-one here and allowed to drink? Is there even a drinking age here?

  I look around for Caleb, but the place is nearly empty. There’s a booth of old ladies laughing together. A few men sitting alone. Defeated, I take a seat at the bar.

  “What can I get for you?” a middle-aged woman with an updo and a Southern accent asks me from behind the counter.

  My brain blanks. I try to think of a cocktail. Any cocktail.

  “Martini. Dry, please,” I say, feeling like I’m doing an impression of a movie character instead of acting like I order this all the time.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t serve alcohol here,” the bartender explains.

  “But you’re a bar!”

  “It’s airport policy that no alcohol is served on the premises.”

  “To anyone?”

  “Anyone,” she says, shaking her head emphatically.

  “So what can you serve me?”

  “Well, I can pour some ice water in a martini glass and throw an olive in it for you.”

  I squint at her.

  “It’s actually quite a popular drink around here,” she insists.

  “I’ll just have a Shirley Temple,” I say.

  While I sit and watch her prepare the drink, I feel a tap on my shoulder.

 
“Caleb,” I gasp, turning to see him standing behind me. He looks sweaty, but under the reddish lights, he kind of . . . glistens. “Have you been running?” I ask, stupidly.

  “Yeah. I had to clear my head, think some things over. But then I was running because I was looking all over for you.”

  “For me?”

  “I need to apologize to you, Bea.”

  “To me?”

  The bartender slides me my Shirley Temple.

  “Anything for the handsome gentleman?” she asks, turning to Caleb.

  “No, thank you,” he says, even though he’s panting and clearly thirsty.

  “You sure?” the bartender presses.

  “That’s okay.”

  “All right.” The bartender shrugs, then leans up against the bar, staring at us.

  I give her a look.

  “What?” she says defensively. “There’s nothing else going on. Thought I might watch y’all’s lovers’ quarrel.”

  “This is not—” I begin to say to her.

  “I’ll have the most complicated drink on the menu,” Caleb interrupts, turning to her with a smile.

  The woman walks away with a grunt.

  “Look, Bea,” he continues. “I realize why you were so cold to me earlier, but not in your usual way. I could tell you were upset.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “What do you mean my usual way?”

  “Maybe ‘cold’ is the wrong way to put it. You’re honest. You call things like you see them and don’t put up with any bullshit. I . . . admire that about you. Looking at all my memories, I wish I’d been more like that.”

  He pauses and takes a deep breath.

  “Watching the final hours of my life today was rough. I’m sorry you had to see me like that. I could tell it upset you.”

  “You don’t have to apolo—”

  “No, Bea. I do. Look, I want to make it up to you. I was thinking we should go back to the hangar. I want to show you something.”

  This has to be a cruel joke, right? He probably remembered the accident. He figured out my plan. Now he wants me to watch myself die as punishment.

  But I know it’s not.