by Gabby Noone
“Oh, come on! You have to at least see the bright side in all of this.”
“Jenna, there is no bright side!” I snap, pushing myself off the bed and walking across the room. “We’re dead,” I say, gesturing between us. “I’m stuck here. For probably decades. Caleb just gets to move on, while I’m going to become a bitter old woman in the body of a teenage girl. If that’s not Hell, then I don’t know what is.”
“But it’s not too late for you to change things,” Jenna says.
“Yes, it is. I can’t go back and undo the things that I’ve done.”
“At least you got to do things!” Jenna snaps back, throwing the glitter across her bed. “Even if you regret them, so what? You still had experiences. Hell, you even got to have this sordid airport romance. It’s not fair!”
“What are you talking about?” I mumble.
“Do you know what happens to girls like me? Girls who have a terminal illness?” she says, quietly this time. “Nothing, okay? Absolutely nothing. My life was all hospitals and homeschool and living my life vicariously through people in books and movies. Do you know how many crappy cancer girl narratives there are out there? They are literally all about finding love right before death. There are none about how deeply boring and uneventful dying young can be. It’s so frustrating!”
I stare at the floor and take in this truth.
“And yeah, now I’m dead. That also sucks, but you know what? At least here, I’m not sick anymore. My body is frozen and the cancer can’t spread, so I can actually try to make a life for myself for the time being. I can move on from who I was. Isn’t that the whole point of this place? Forgiveness?”
She gestures around at the pile of glitter and the ugly bedspread as if they’ve taken on some profound meaning.
“I suggest you make a life for yourself too. Instead of obsessing over what an awful person you are, or were, because, frankly, Bea, it’s not a cute look for you. I know you’re not as cool and tough as you act like you are. I’ve known that since I met you. You know how I know?”
“How?” I ask, arching an eyebrow.
“Because no one who has mascara tears permanently stuck to their face is actually heartless.”
I look up and stare at Jenna for a long moment, then I smirk at her.
“What?” she asks, breathless from her rant.
“It’s just . . . you’re finally letting yourself be mad about something! You’re not curbing your emotions to make other people comfortable. You’re laying it all out there. This is good, Jenna. I’m proud of you.”
She threads her eyebrows together in contemplation, then a look of realization washes over her face.
“Yeah. I guess you’re right. I am finally letting myself be mad about something!” Jenna says, smiling back. “But stop deflecting, Bea. We need to return to the matter at hand. Do you have feelings for Caleb or not?”
“Since when was that the matter at hand?”
“Since I said it was.”
“He hates me now and—”
“I didn’t ask if he hates you,” she interrupts. “I asked if you have feelings for him.”
I ignore her question and lie back down on my bed.
“Fine, I’ll stop trying to squeeze an answer out of you,” Jenna says.
“I don’t really know how I feel,” I say finally. “I don’t really know anything anymore.”
“All right, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching too many romcoms, it’s that if you love someone, you should always tell them before it’s too late.”
“That doesn’t apply to real life.”
“Well, this isn’t real life, Bea. We’re dead!”
FINDING CALEB IS easy this time. I spot him from afar, waiting in the departures terminal in one of the long rows of plastic seats. His knees are curled up in his chair and he’s wrapped his arms around them. When he sees me walking toward him, he quickly unwraps them, sits up, and crosses his arms. I can’t read the expression on his face. It’s totally neutral.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey,” Caleb replies, the word sounding heavy.
We stare at each other uncomfortably.
“Are you busy right now?” I ask.
He looks around at all the potential passengers waiting half asleep in their chairs as if they might need him. They obviously don’t.
“Can you come with me out to the hangar?” I ask. “There’s something, well, lots of things, I want to show you.”
He scrunches up his face and looks away from me.
“I think we’ve made enough trouble for each other already,” he says. “It’s probably better, for the both of us, if I just stay put.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Yes.”
“But do you wish it weren’t true?” I press.
He nods once.
“Then just get over yourself and come with me,” I say, reaching out my hand.
Reluctantly, he takes it.
38
“I made you show me the worst moment of your life,” I say, settling myself into my helmet for what feels like the millionth time today. “So I thought it would only be fair if I show you mine.”
So I take him through the final day of my life.
He doesn’t ask questions. The whole time, Caleb’s face is completely captivated by what he sees, but I can’t tell if that’s a good thing. Maybe my memories, like a trashy reality show, are so bad that you can’t look away.
The corners of his lips turn up just slightly at the sight of me burrowed into the bottom bunk, refusing to get up for school. He laughs when I throw my food on Dominic. His eyes go wide when I talk back to the principal. They go even wider when I talk back to Taylor Fields. He cringes as I argue with Emmy in the bathroom. When we get to the part where I’m in my car, arguing with Siri, his face is in his hands.
I stop and turn off the machine before I can remember the crash itself. I think watching it once was enough.
“Do you have any questions?” I ask. “They don’t have to be of the superficial variety.”
He sits quietly for a minute.
“I don’t get it,” he says at last. “Why didn’t you tell me? If I were you, I wouldn’t have been able to even look me in the eye.”
“What was I supposed to do? Say ‘Hi. I’m Bea. I think you might’ve killed me with your car’?”
“Well, okay . . . I didn’t mean like that. . . .”
“What would you have done?” I blurt out. “If the roles were reversed. If you knew I killed you but I didn’t know it.”
He thinks it over and sighs.
“I probably would have tried to avoid you at all costs and pretend it never happened, while quietly stewing in my own anger the whole time.”
“See?” I shrug. “Being passive-aggressive isn’t really my thing. Pure aggression is. Or was. But you made me rethink everything. You made me understand that people can screw up but I can still care about them.”
Caleb flashes his eyes at me.
“You care about me?” he asks.
“I’m sorry,” I say, avoiding his question. “I was just in too deep. I knew things would change between us if I revealed that I knew what happened and had been keeping it from you on purpose. And I think part of me was actually scared of you finding out the truth because that meant you’d have to apologize and move on to Heaven.”
“What would be wrong with that?”
“Because then that would leave me here. Without you.”
Saying it aloud, I realize that this is the first time I’m actually being completely honest with myself.
“You don’t have to be sorry, though,” Caleb says, standing up and walking over to where I sit. “Yeah, you lied to me, but, at the end of the day, I’m the reason you’re here, even if it was an accident
. I just feel like I can’t say it enough. . . . I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to say it anymore.”
“Why? Am I being annoying?”
“No, Caleb. Because I forgive you.”
He stares at me, taken aback.
“Cool,” he says.
“Cool?” I ask, squinting.
“Sorry. I probably shouldn’t say something so casual. I’m new to situations like this.”
“You mean situations like apologizing to someone you accidentally murdered and then having them forgive you for it?”
“Uh. Yes.”
“Me too.”
We both stare at the floor.
“You said something this morning that I’ve been thinking about. A lot,” I say.
“What?”
“You said I made you fall in love with me. Is that true?”
Caleb looks at me, then back at the floor, then back at me again.
“Yes,” he says, swallowing.
“Well, I thought I should tell you, you made me fall in love with you too.”
Somehow, saying those words feels natural. Good, even. We lean in toward each other and kiss, slowly.
I’m shocked how it feels even nicer than when we kissed before. I’m shocked that kissing someone you love actually lives up to the hype. I’m shocked that in this land of extreme mediocrity, we are managing to feel something extraordinary.
“DO YOU THINK we would’ve ever met in real life?” I ask.
Caleb and I are lying on the concrete floor of the hangar, peacefully staring up at the ceiling as if the crisscrossed steel beams were constellations.
“Sure,” he says, twirling my hair with his finger.
“How do you think we would’ve met?”
I turn on my side, propping my head on my elbow to face him.
“Hmm,” Caleb contemplates. “Maybe road conditions were just slightly different and we both survived the accident, but you sued the hell out of me because you broke your, I don’t know, arm.”
“What?”
“Hear me out,” he says, sitting up. “We meet in court. You don’t even have a lawyer because you’re so good at arguing your own case. You win. I owe you millions of dollars. Fast-forward a few months later. Life is lonely in your new mansion. You think, You know, honestly, that boy I took to court? He was pretty cute. Maybe I should ask if he wants to come over sometime.”
“Realistically, I would probably just win thousands of dollars and I’d have a McMansion. I’d be nouveau riche and probably have bad taste in houses.”
“Out of that whole thing, that’s the part you have a problem with? But also . . . good point.”
Caleb stares at me for a moment.
“All right,” he says finally. “How about this? We meet in college, like normal people.”
“That wouldn’t happen,” I say. “I don’t have the grades to get into Harvard.”
“Well, as you saw, apparently neither did I.”
“I don’t even know if I had the grades to get into a college, period,” I protest. “So then where do we meet?”
“Penn State,” he says. “I settled. You finally got your act together and embraced the fact that you’re really smart—”
“Wow, thank you so much.”
“And actually started doing your homework to bring your grades up and applied.”
“Hm.”
“But the thing is, we both hate it,” Caleb continues. “College is the worst. All the football games and those stupid frat parties. Just everyone behaving like absolute sheeple.”
“Sheeple?” I giggle.
“Yes, sheep peop—”
“I know what sheeple are. You just said I’m really smart. Of course I know what sheeple are.”
Caleb tilts his head back in frustration, but he keeps going.
“So it’s freshman fall and we both happen to be at one of those stupid parties and you go outside to get some air because your roommate has abandoned you . . .”
“To talk to some guy whose face and personality closely resemble a package of bacon,” I add. “This hypothetical roommate has horrible taste in guys.”
“Exactly,” Caleb says. “It’s all a bit much. Then I come outside because I’m feeling the same way. And I make some stupid comment that I instantly regret like, ‘Glad it’s not raining, huh?’ And you just stare at me like, ‘Who is this idiot?’ and I go, ‘Name’s Caleb. I think we live on the same floor?’ Even though we probably don’t, but I just want to make some kind of excuse.”
“Then I just nod vaguely at you and say, ‘I’m Beatrice,’” I interject. “There’s an awkward silence, but then you actually say something extremely thoughtful and observational, and I turn and look at you like, ‘Who is this idiot?’”
Caleb gives me a sad smile.
“You really didn’t want to go to college?”
“Well, no,” I say. “But now, after that beautiful fan fiction we’ve just written, I think I do.”
“Did you really have no hopes and dreams in life?” he asks with a sidelong glance.
“It was my sister’s thing to have hopes and dreams. My thing was always being convinced that, like, sea levels would rise too high or a nuclear bomb would hit before I could achieve anything.”
Caleb shakes his head.
“I mean, but I was proven right! Although, I guess your Range Rover was slightly less powerful than a nuclear bomb.”
“Jesus, Bea!”
“Too soon?”
We look at each other and smile.
I want it to be real.
I want to wake up from this dream we’re in and have our fantasy of a completely run-of-the-mill encounter come true. But before we can continue the fantasy, we’re interrupted by the crackling noise of the PA system.
“Attention, guests,” a voice blares. “The next departing flight is now boarding. All ticketed passengers should make their way to the departures terminal immediately.”
39
“I’m not leaving,” Caleb says, sitting up. “I’ll stay here with you until you’ve helped enough people move on. Until we can travel to Heaven together.”
The expression on his face is dead serious.
“It’s going to be years before I’ll be allowed to leave this place, Caleb.”
“I don’t care. As long as I’m with you, it doesn’t matter where I am.”
“But we’re talking about this dump versus Heaven.”
“What’s the point of Heaven if you’re not there?”
I can feel the ghost of the old me cringe at how much Caleb’s words sound like they’re the lyrics to some generic boy band hit. But the new me has gone soft. She feels her heart break at the sound of them.
“You have to move on, Caleb,” I say, putting both of my hands on his cheeks. “You have to see how your family is doing. You don’t deserve to be here a moment longer. You made an honest mistake. You apologized for it. You’re a good person. I hurt people on purpose, and I need to stay behind until I’ve made up for everything I’ve done.”
A tear trickles down his cheek. I wipe it away with the pad of my thumb.
“Remember when you tried to mansplain the concept of ‘liminal spaces’ to me the first time we met?” I ask.
The corner of his mouth turns up in a smile.
“It’s like you said then,” I continue. “This place isn’t made for people to stay a long time. It was built to be left behind.”
He swallows hard.
“But I don’t want to leave you. What if nothing I feel there compares to the way I feel now? What if Heaven really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Then what? What if eternity is really underwhelming?”
“Maybe it will be,” I say. “But there’s only one way for you to find out.”
&
nbsp; “Do you think we’re even allowed to kiss in Heaven?” Caleb asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Hopefully, yes.”
“Maybe we won’t even want to kiss. Maybe in Heaven you don’t even feel human attraction anymore. Maybe the only thing you can be attracted to is, like, some abstract ball of light. Maybe you are some abstract ball of light. What if you lose your entire physical being? You don’t even have lips—”
I put my finger to his mouth to make him stop talking.
“Then we should probably kiss now, while we still have lips,” I suggest.
And so we do. I don’t need to explain the mechanics of kissing again, but know that this kiss is happy and sad at the same time.
There are things I feel and do now that I never thought I would before.
Running out of ways to describe a kiss is one of them. Even knowing what a kiss feels like is another.
I pull back from the kiss, knowing that if we don’t stop now, there’s a low chance we ever will, and Caleb will certainly miss his plane. He keeps his eyes closed for a second longer than I do.
“C’mon,” I say, pulling him by the hand. “It’s time for you to get out of here.”
OUTSIDE THE HANGAR, it’s dark, but the overhead lights are blinding. They spotlight a plane boarding across the tarmac. I guard my eyes with my hand and squint into the distance. I can see people walking up the temporary flight of stairs leading to the plane. Some of them are even cheering and whooping like they’re about to board a roller coaster, thrilled to be moving on.
Most of me is happy for them, but a tiny part of me wishes they would just shut up. I guess old habits die hard.
I focus harder and realize that the person leading all the cheering is Sadie. I lift a hand to wave at her, catching her eye right before she boards.
She pauses on the stairs and winks at me.
“I won’t forget you, Bea,” Caleb says, taking both of my hands into his. “We’ll be together again one day. I know it.”
“That’s if I don’t find another airport boyfriend to keep me company,” I joke.
Caleb rolls his eyes and smiles.
“I won’t forget you either,” I say, serious. “I’ll see you around, Caleb.”