DEADGIRL. From wherever I left off!

1. Some parts of this are super painful. Like. Super. DON'T JUDGE MEEEEEEEE
2. I think I'm going to rework the party scene and move it somewhere else. Or... I don't know. I need to think of wtf the point of that scene was. (There IS a point! ...I think)
3. I didn't proof read OR spell check this. I also didn't bother to edit in the italics for blogspot. Have... fun?
4. Last time, Juniper and Mariano had just escaped a demon library where some famous literary quotes attacked them...

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The librarian appeared in the glass door on the oppsoite side of the room, as quickly and unexpectantly as dry lightning. He face was blank and her frail, creaking arms pushed against the bar. Mariano was at my side immediately.

“Yes, I think we should leave.”

In my rush outside and down the steps, I tripped over the decorative corpse’s foot and ended up on my hands and knees on the sidewalk. Jagged little pieces of the crumbling sidewalk cut into my palms. Except that the sidewalk was perfectly in tact, and what I had assumed was gravel from disrepair was gravel at all.

Mariano held out a hand to me. I stared up at him, aghast. I grabbed a handful of the white pieces covering the sidewalk.

“These are teeth,” I said, dropping a couple into his outstretched hand.

As soon as the words left my mouth, he was off the sidewalk and in the middle of the asphalt street, rubbing his hands on his pants as if I’d contaminated them.

“What kind of a sick place is this?” he moaned. I stood up and stepped off the sidewalk as well. “What happened to your evil clowns and undead pirates?”

He kept mumbling about the teeth and the liver-eating hawk and the library’s security system as he pried open a manhole and tossed the metal disc aside. I watched him curiously and began to ask what exactly was so fascinating down there, but the jerk had the nerve to push me into the dark little hole.

I belly flopped face down into some sort of liquid and assumed I’d ended up back in that sewer, but it smelled oddly of grapes. My whole front tingled from the impact, and a body spashed down beside me. I sloshed around and found a smooth surface with my feet and stood up. I found myself next to Mariano in a foutain filled with some sort of bright purple grape beverage.

The fountain was a glass basin the size of a small swimming pool, set in the middle of what I could only liken to a ballroom. The spouts of grape soda from the middle of the fountain caught the light from a wall made entirely of glass, and the ceiling several stories above us boasted an ornate crystal chandelier. From the top of a curving marble staircase, a man was yelling things at us.

“Why are you here?” he screamed, tugging at his thick black beard. “I had the skylights replaced! They said this would stop happening!”

“Hello!” Mariano waved merrily. I started to climb out of the fountain, dripping purple onto the tiled floor, but he stayed where he was, as if he didn’t mind sticky purple liquid seeping into his shoes. “I think the gate is somewhere in the air, not your ceiling!” He grinned at the man, who started down the stairs, wrining his hands as he went.

“I’m hosting a party in a bit,” he said. “And you’ve ruined the refreshment.”

I was staring down at my legs. The “refreshment” formed into little dew drops and rolled right off my jeans and shoes, as if I was waterproof. Mariano launched into a speech about something vaguely related to parties.

“I hope you plan on cleaning this mess up,” the bearded man said in a high pitch, interrupting Mariano, and I looked up guiltily from my puddle of purple.

“Do you have some um… papel towels?” I asked. Mariano lifted on leg out of the foutain and let the liquid drip back down into to, balancing himself easily on one leg. He stepped out with his now dry leg and let the other one drip clean over the fountain, effectively keeping the marble tiles spotless. Curse him.

“I don’t keep any of that rubbish,” The bearded man said, bustling over to me. “Go check check the linen closet, down that hall, second door on the left.” And he pushed me toward an open doorway. I obediently scampered over to it, listening to him round on Mariano with demands about getting that “blasted metal hole” removed.

The linen closet had a shelf stuffed with the fanciest towels I had ever seen. I hadn’t realize realized towels could be fancy before– but there they were, soft and monogramed and whiter than a dentist’s smile. I picked the one I thought looked the least elegant and brought it back to the ridiculous-sized room, where the bearded man was gesturing madly at the fountain to Mariano.

“What are you doing?” The man yelled when he saw me, and I exchanged a look with Mariano, who looked just as baffled as I was. “We don’t use the good linens on floors! Here, let’s get you a mop while your friend drains and refills the fountain.”

Next thing I knew, the man was dragging me out another door and down another hallway, which was decorated with a large mural of people lounging about in the nude. He halted before a door, withdrew a mop from behind it and shoved it into my free hand, as I was still clutching the towel.

“Um,” I said politely.

“Good gracious,” he said, blinking at me. “What happened to your head?”

“Oh, uh, I’m new,” I said, and he nodded. I was as amazed at the nonchalance of his acceptance of the hole in my head as I was that he’d taken so long to notice it. The man started tugging at his beard again. I belated realized I no longer had Minerva in my hands– the pipe must be in the fountain still. I’d have to ask Mariano to fish it out for me.

“They’ll be here any minute, would you mind waiting?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking he meant for me to wait while he left and did something prepatory in relation to his guests. Instead, I was was dragged into a kitchen large enough to keep a very large restaurant full of starving tigers happy. The counters were lined with trays of hor d’oeuvres. The man offered a tray of carefully arranged bite-sized quisches to me.

“Make sure you sirculate the garden as well,” he said. I tossed the towel over my shoulder and awkwardly took the tray in one hand. My wrist immediately began to ache in complaint. The man took another tray and hurried back toward the ballroom. I followed him him at a much slower pace, careful not to spill the quisches.

Mariano sat on the edge of the fountain, which was now spewing orange soda. He had Minerva in one hand. The bearde man thurst the tray in his face and Mariano took it in confusion.

“What’s this for?” He asked, peering down at the little plates of what looked like toast slathered with an orange paste and artistically top with some type of greenery.

“For serving to guests, of course,” the man snapped. “Make sure you circle the gardens too. Here they come!”

A horn sounded, and I jumped in surprise, sending the quisches sliding dangerously to one side of the plate. The was followed by some very relaxed sounding piano notes, from some unknown source but that seemed to permeate the entirity of the room, and the doors at the top of the stairs flung open. Laughing people dressed in brightly colored suits and hoop skirts and veils and ruffles poured in, men polishing watches and women hiding their mouths behind feather fans. I gawked and wondered why these people were being served orange soda of all things. They spilled over the staircases and flooded the room, easily bunching together in groups of four or five and circling up like chatty teenagers.

“Perfect!” the bearded man cried. “They are in much better arrangement than last time.” He marched off in the crowd.

“Is this normal?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Mariano answered. “Then again, nothing here really is. Want to check the party out?”

We left the trays sitting on the floor next to the fountain and I leaned the mop against it and folded the towel on the side. I put it down, looked at it, looked at the way the orange soda was fizzing up and sending little droplets everywhere, looked at how the towel was still perfectly and pristinely white, and then picked up the towel again and redrapped it over my shoulder. Mariano smiling teasingly in that way that sort of made me want to punch him in the face, but he didn’t actually say anything except to offer Minerva back to me, so he escaped my wrath. We went wondering about the room. No one seemd to notice us and I stared unashamedly.

“Oh, Charlotte, you do always have the best anecdotes. Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves…”

All the women looked the same. Different colored and cut dresses, different complexions, different hairstyles, but there was soemthing about all the sharp angles of their faces and easy, painted smiles that carried from one to the next. The men were just as bad, all strong-jawed and clean-shaven and standing with an easy but refined posture. Their colorful costumes stuck out sharply against the white marble room, but they all seem to match it perfectly in manner and mood. None of them looked at us as we passed by.

I followed Mariano’s back as he weaved around the guests, looking them up and down as they passed. No one seemed to notice his scrutiny. One woman burst into clear, purposeful laughter, as if she wasn’t laughing so much as saying “Here, look, I have found this funny, let me show you.”

“Well isn’t that delightful! Oh, Charlotte, you do always have the best anecdotes. Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves…”

I stopped and stared. Mariano disappeared behind a group of gentlemen chatting about something which amused them enough to be animated, but not so animated as to seem course.

“Excuse me,” I said, timidly tapping the woman on the shoulder. “What did you say?” She didn’t make the slightest reaction.

“She had bought them in August, but she didn’t have well enough an excuse to wear them till October…” A woman with thick indigo skirts done up with lace of the same color was speaking and her carefully scupted curls bounced and she related her story through such a wide smile I could see all of her perfect teeth.

“Excuse me,” I tried again, louder. The woman in indigo kept going, and a man in an emerald suit made a humorous comment. Everyone tittered.

“Oh, Charlotte,” said the first woman again, “you do always have the best anecdotes. Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves.”

“She bought them in August…”

I backed away and then craned my head around for Mariano. He was nowhere to be seen. I took a few steps over toward the edge of the room, inching along on tip-toe and hoping to catch a glimpse of his curly hair among the flattened and combed heads of the other men.

“Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves…”

This time it was from another group, and a dark woman in an auburn dress with her hair pulled back in a complicated braid started on about buying gloves in August. I started walking faster. What was with this place?

I found the foggy glass doors outside, leading to the garden the bearded man had wanted me to make sure I circulated with the quische platter. The room suddenly seemed hot and muggy, so I pushed them open and wandered wide-eyed into the garden.

It was night here. The moon was full and bright and too close, like a romance movie or a painting, and the stars managed to arrange themselves into recognizable mosiacs– here a group of twinkling dots that formed the silhouette of a crab, there a bear, a woman. I would have spent more time gawking up at it, except that the garden was filled with enough flowers to match the guests inside, and little sparkling and glowing bubbles were drifting about in the air. Not soap bubbles, mind you– more like if you blew a bubble of chewing gum, but your gum was glittery and emitted a soft lavenderish light and bobbed along like a bouy. I suddenly had the need to know if they would pop like a soap bubble or collapse like a gum bubble if I thouched one, or maybe they were hard like marbles, or soft but firm like the bouncy balls you bought from machines for a quarter. I tried to grab one, but it just slipped through the gaps of my fingers. I tried again and again without much more results.

I stuck Minerva under my arm and cupped my hands together and went chasing after bubbles like that, dodging around overgrown plants on the tiny cobblestone paths of the garden. They still seemed to get through the crack in my fingers though, as if they somehow changed their form when my hand covered them, sifted through like smoke and then reappeared as a tiny glowing bubble before my mind could process what was happening.

Somehow as I was snatching at air, the towel slipped from my shoulder and landed on the ground, right on the edge of the path and half splayed across the muddy flower bed. I stared down at it in horror, having forgotten the bubbles. I picked up the towel and tried to brush it off, but the deed had been done– it was no longer white and would never been as white as it had once been. Frowning, I looked aound for a way I could get rid of it. I thought about hiding it in a rosebush, but can you imagine being a gardener and then finding a random towel in your rosebush? That would just be ridiculous.

Not that chasing floating glitter-bubbles wasn’t, I scolded myself and hurried back into the building. From the outside, it looked like a typical ivy-covered mansion– warm beige stones, three stories high and boasted complicated swoops in the red-tiled roof. Inside, the party was exactly as I had left it.

“Oh, Charlotte…”

I wondered who Charlotte really was.

Crossing the room and passing the fountain, I accidently bumped into a man in a gaudy scarlet suite, and he in turn elbowed the woman he was standing next quite hard, and she fumbled a bit on her heels but probably wouldn’t have fallen if not for the fact that no one had bothered to clean up the grape soda I’d dripped on the floor. She tumbled to the ground, and as I dropped Minerva and knelt down to help her, her conversation partner went on talking about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves.

“Are you alright?” I asked and offered her my hand. She tittered at something about Mrs. Dover and smiled chattily at the ceiling from where she was laying in a puddle of purple on her back. The conversation of her little group continued as normal.

I tried to pull her up by her arm, but she just slumped back down on the floor, smiling and giggling at the right places as her friends went on blabbering about silk gloves. I thought about trying to clean her up, but the towel wasn’t for grape soda, it was so clean and fancy and pure, but I had already ruined it, so… I pulled the towel off my shoulder and tried to clean up the area around her so her pretty dress wouldn’t be too stained with grape soda and not seeing anything else to do, I walked stiff-legged away, Minerva in one hand and the brown-and-purple soiled towel in the other.

I found Mariano again, hands in pockets and conversing with the bearded man, who looked quite cross and rather short and unextraordinary compared to the glamour of the strange, beautifully dressed people who flanked either side of him, smiles set as if they’d been paused in the middle of a clever anecdote about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves.

“It’s not so much that I think it’s wrong,” Mariano was saying, “so much as I think you’d have more fun with real people, you know? You can line all these guys up, and you can say they’re your friends and you can say that this is Charlotte, she’s twenty three and likes tennis and picnics, but you’re not really friends with them, are you?”

The man started yanking on his beard with such irritated force I thought he might pull it off all together. I came to stand at Mariano’s shoulder.

“I would bid you to know,” said the man, “that in life I had in fact maintain several friendships without personal acquaintance of the other, through an exchange of written correspondance, and they have been just as fulfilling– if not more– as any I might have experienced in flesh.”

“Well, yeah,” Mariano answered, “But you were actually talking to those people, in a manner of speaking. Exchanging ideas and jokes and what not. This people– you don’t know them. They’re not even real.”

The man huffed and twisted his beard in his hand. “People here are too wrapped up in themselves, or else they are too different from what I’d presume good company. I’d rather have friends who fit perfectly into what I see of the world. They cannot argue with me, or insult or betray me, and they are always the exact type of company I enjoy, polite and well-groomed, and I find their conversation agreeable.”

“Well, that’s the fun of friendship, isn’t it?” asked Mariano. “To be different people?”

The man snorted. “Different, yes, but not so much. I lived next to an Indian family for a number of years, and they were always cooking something or other, and the smell was so spicy it would burn your eyes as you walked by the house. Much better to stay with like-minded people who enjoy a decent meal, I think.”

“I like Indian food,” I said. The man turned his attention on me and stared as if I’d just remarked on the weather in the middle of a philosophical debate. “And I’d rather have burning eyes than listen to the same conversation over and over again. Surely you can find someone with more interesting stories to tell.”

“I would ask you of all people not to judge my social relations,” the man sneered, “as I have refrained from judging your discourtesy and generally coarse behavior. I am a well-respected man in these parts, and you should count yourself luckily to be privelege to my hospitality.”

Mariano letting out a barking laugh at that.

“Well respected by who? Your pretty imaginery friends?” He said with a mocking sort of smile.

The man turned back to Mariano, a dark glare painted across his face. “They may be synthetic people, but they are here and they are many, and they will support my opinions.”

I felt a dangerous sort of shift in the room, as the light chattering around us stopped and people turn to stare at us, faces frozen right in the middle of whatever they’d been saying. I unconsciously took a step closer to Mariano, who kept his hands in his pockets but seemed to tense and straighten his back. We stared at him for a few tense moments, being stared right back at by hundreds of unsentient eyes.

“Uh,” I said in attampt to break the awkward silence– was this how Mariano felt whenever he opened his mouth? “I, um. Here’s your towel back.”

I held it out to him, in all of its dirty and grape-scented glory. Mariano turned his head and tried to cover up his laughter with a very fake sounding sneeze. The beard man’s face twisted up as if I’d just offered him a very filthy looking toilet seat for breakfast.

“What sort of a joke is this?” He sneered and leaned back from the towel. The people at his sides didn’t make the normal shifts to perserve personal spaces as he backed into them.

“Well– I mean– you didn’t give me anything else to clean the floor up with, and you just left it.” I didn’t feel like I had to explain myself to him, but it was his towel and his ballroom fully of potentially malevalent synthetic people.

“Juniper,” Mariano murmured and took my elbow. He grip tightened on Minerva. “Let’s just go.”

As he led me back through the still ballroom and toward the doors into the garden, the bearded man called after us, “You are the worst waiters I have ever done business with!” As we ducked into the garden, the false people slowly began to reanimate.

“Oh, Charlotte, you do always have the best anecdotes…”

Mariano paused three steps into the garden, taking in the moonlight plants and glitter bubbles floating lazily around in the starlight. He reach for one, but it bounced off his finger tips a drifted away.

I sighed. “Don’t even bother,” I advised.

“Oh well,” he said. “Onward!”

He guided me through the garden and climbed over a back wall, a feat which, after wrapping the disgusting towel around the back of my neck like a scarf, I recreated with much less grace and much more stubbling. It’s not like I’d never cilmbed a fence before; I’d just never climbed a decaying stone wall covered in moss and waxy vines, only to find a brightly lit desert on the other side when I jumped off.

“Huh?” I said, quickly followed by, “What?”

I turned around, expecting to see the jardin wall, but all that was there was the remains of some sort of building. The walls on this side had crumbled to the height of my waist, but the otherside was tall enough to boast the outlines of windows, and a chimney towered above us. The bricks were a dull beige color, and the ones that weren’t scattered in broken patterns across the ground were regularly formed. The desert extended beyond it, flat and white and with a seafoam green horizon. I blinked, looked up to make sure that yes, yes the sky was green, then turned back to Mariano.

“I’m pretty sure it was night on this side too,” I said. “It was dark on the other side of the wall. I saw it.”

He squinted at me like he was trying to analyze my face, or maybe the sun was in his eyes.

“Interesting,” he said.

“What? What’s interesting?”

He shrugged. “When you’re not expecting a gate, you can pass through it. But when you are, you change it so that it fits with what you think should be right. But if you don’t automatically change the gate when you’re not expecting it, that can’t be what you really think, can it?”

I had no way to articulate any feelings I had on that (assuming I understood what he was trying to say, which I don’t think I really did).

“Do you know where we are now?” I asked.

“I think so,” he answered. “I asked that guy where we were, but he didn’t seem so geographically-inclined.”

“Is anyone?” I answered, eyeing the skeleton of the building which apparently contained a mansion and starlit garden. “Does the layout of this place make sense to anyone? Does the timing make sense to anyone?”

“We’re working on it,” Mariano answered vaguely, then led me off in a direction he seemed to pick at random.

As we trudged along, Mariano began to speak more and more animatedly on the usual topics that concerned him, namely anything that did not personally involve himself. The land remained flat, and after we passed out of sight of the old building (too quickly, Mariano observed, adding that “no one can ever seem to get the perspective right”), there was nothing to break the strange green horizon. The sun glinted off the white sand, and for the first time since death I felt uncomfortably warm. I drapped the towel over my head to keep the sun off my face.

“Do dead people get sun burned?” I asked, cutting Mariano off in the middle of a rant about bicycle lanes.

He seemed genuinely puzzled for a few moments, then said, “I don’t think so… I’ve never been.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Have you gotten any tanner?”

He laughed good naturedly. “No. I don’t think I’ve changed at all really. No one does, unless they want to.”

“Unless they want to?” I repeated.

“Well, yes, you’re just a reconstruction of what you think you are, you know? So you’re not going change unless you make a conscious decision.” Whatever facial expression I made in regards to that must have indicated I had no idea what he was talking about, so he attempted to furtehr explain. “When you die, your mind puts you back together according to whatever image you have of yourself.”

“Right,” I said, recalling his earlier explanation of my change of clothes. “And when you apply that to your surroundings– that’s called building, right?”

He bobbed his head from on side to other, as if my answer had merit but was also completely wrong. “Building is putting anything together according to your mind. Anything with some self-consciousness can put itself together– even some animals. But some people can control that consciously too– they’re the ones who make houses and landscapes. Most people eventually learn to at least consciously change themselves, even if just a bit. After all, you know enough about yourself to recreate yourself a few years ago, right?”

“I guess…” I said. “Does that mean there are no old people in the afterlife?”

“Not really.” He grinned. “And even if you can’t change yourself, you could always get a builder to, for a certain price.”

“And if I don’t,” I said. “I’ll just stay like this? Does that means I don’t need food or– or air or anything?”

His grin widened, his teeth as white as the sand. His hazel eyes seemed greener against the strange sky and were lit up like I had just said the greatest thing in the world. I took that as a “no, of course not! Isn’t being dead fun?”

“But wait,” I said, another thought ocurring to me. “Why am I waterproof?”

His grin turned to amused confusion as his eyebrows wrinkled together. “Are you now?” he asked. Very amused confusion, as his voice shook with restrained mirth.

“Well, yeah. Not even my clothes get wet– are you laughing at me?”

“I’m sorry,” he managed to get out behind snickers, his shoulders quivering. “It’s just–” More laughter. “You’re so serious about how everything should go and– and–” He was holding his sides now. “You messed up on yourself.”

He was completely overcome then, and we had to stop walking as he bent over himself, clutching his stomach and laughing loudly.

“It’s not funny,” I said dully. He recovered himself and looked me in the eyes.

“Sure it is,” he said and we continued walking. “You refuse to see gates, but you forgot absorbancy, and for some reason you have a dirty towel on your head. That’s hilarious.”

A dark shape appeared on the horizon. Mariano said something about it being a bus stop, then attempted to engage me in a conversation about interesting people on public transports. The only story I had to offer was about the woman who had driven the elementary school bus and had decided my brother Logan was named Joseph Patrick.

A few minutes later the vague shape began to take form. It was a huge bulk of something organically soft and mushy, festering in the bright sun. It was mostly dark gray, but as we approached, I began to make out patches of pink with something white squirming and twisting within them.

Mariano fell silent and took me to stand several yards away from it, turning his back to it uncomfortably. I gawked up at it.

It was a whale. A whale. It was rotting slowly in the heat– giant, snakelike maggots wormed and curled their way through its flesh. Around it, the sky green wavering in the heat, just like the sea, somewhere tropical and warm and beautiful. And here was a whale, beached and dying and defying the natural beauty of the world. It was art. Yet– no– that didn’t make sense, objectively.

I sighed theatrically. “I suppose I should just give up asking at this point,” I said. Mariano made a queasy noise in the back of his throat and took a few steps further away from the whale.

We stood there for a while, waiting for the mysterious bus Mariano had mentioned. He stayed silent and stared down at his feet. I watched the maggot-worms burrow in the whale flesh for a while, but maggot-worms can only be interesting for so long.

“I makes me sort of sad,” I said.

Mariano glanced up at me. “What does?”

“This place…” I gestured vaguely around us. “It’s so pretty, and someone spent a long time making it, thinking about it, but then they just left it.”

Mariano’s eyes flickered over to the whale, and managed to arranged his face into a smile with noticable difficulty. “You think a rotting whale is pretty?”

“Well, not that,” I said. “But this whole scene– the desert, I mean– it’s sort of peaceful. But it’s sad because it’s empty.”

“Aside from the whale.”

I let out a short, hallow laugh. “Yes, aside from the whale. Why would someone create this beautiful landscape and then just leave it alone?”

Mariano shrugged and firmly turned away from the whale once again. “They probably moved on to something new. Who knows how old this place is?”

“But it obviously meant something to them if they went to all this trouble and finished!” I answered. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering, but obviously Mariano wasn’t getting it. “And then it was abandonned…” It was made beautiful and then abandonned with a whale carcus in the middle. My mind reeled for a few moments with artistic sounding notions: rebellion, counterculture, negative space– something like that?

But in the end Mariano was probably right: they got bored and gave up. It was the most reasonable explanation, anyway. So I moved on to another thought:

“There are billions of dead people– why haven’t we seen anyone else here?”

Mariano offered what I was sure was calculated to be the most unhelpful answer: “Obviously the attraction of decaying desert-whales was lost on the general public.”

I looked back at the whale. It probably didn’t mean anything. I told myself I should stop trying to impose significance where there was none.

Low rumbles eached our ears. In a whirl of white sand, our ride appeared. Mariano was handing me in before it even came to a complete stop.

“This is a stage coach,” I observed as Mariano pushes me up the step.

“Yes,” he said, and we sat down across from two dark men wearing nothing but loin cloths.

“You said ‘bus.’”

“Coaches are buses, didn’t you know?”

The compartment was dim and so small our knees brushed the two men sitting across from us. Mariano made a few attempts at friendly conversation, but they didn’t seem very impressed with him. I pushed back the thin curtain– oxblood, to match the seats– and stuck my head out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the ebony horses pulling the conductorless carriage. They were the first animals I’d seen since dying.

I sat back down. The man across from me seemed nonplussed. “Are they built?” I asked Mariano. “The horses, I mean.”

“Yeah,” he said. “An actual horse would need a driver, you know?”

I spent the rest of the journey trying very hard not to bump my knees into anyone else. Mariano slumped against the side of the coach, angling his face so he could watch the scenery through the crack between the curtain and the window. I imagined the world changing like flipping through television channels: click! a desert; click! an ocean; click! the Himalayas. I wanted to look outside but decided it wasn’t worth the risk of possibly transporting us to the bottom of Lake Victoria or somesuch nonsense.

Eventually the coach stopped and we got off, though I didn’t understand how it knew we wanted to get off at this particular location. I forgot to ask when I saw our new surroundings.

It was a beach, as had been promised. There were all the usual furnishings of a beach: palm trees, exotic and bright flowers, sand. But the sand was black; sea shells of every color dotted it, all of the smooth and whole. The sea was a fiery orangey red, and instead of flow and ebb of the sea, it oozed and pooled and bubbled. On an island further out, a mountain slowly poured more of the lava-sea into the ocean. “Exotic” indeed.

Mariano fished the scrap of paper we’d stolen from the library out of his pocket. He studied it, then asked the air somewhere above his head, “Number twelve?”

A palm tree bent over, stretched out its fronds and grew itself into a small house with a wraparound pourch. The walls were the exact texture of the tree it had come from, as if someone has unrolled the bark from the trunk and wrapped the house like a birthday present. The roof was constructed from waxy green palm leaves.

A man leaned out the window and swore at us. He was young– probably in his midtwenties. His light hair was combed back and his face sported a more masculine version of my mother’s nose.

“And just who do you think you are?” he yelled, sneering.

“I’m Juniper Gard,” I said. “I think I’m your granddaughter.”

He stared, motionless for a few moments, then tripped over himself openning the door for us. He swore again and said, “You’re so young.”

He had us sit down around his dinner table and asked for my life story. I told him Mom had a degree in French but worked part-time in a bakery. I told him about my father and brothers. I told him how I died.

When I finished, he shook his head slowly. “Laurie must be crushed.” I stared down at my hands solemnly. Death had been an adventure so far, and I felt fine so far, but Mom had no way of knowing that. All she would know was that I’d died of head trauma or somesuch thing and that I’d never come home again. And, worst of all, the whole family wouldn’t be able to get together again for what was hopefully a long, long time.

And maybe Mom would think it would be never. And I couldn’t imagine how that must feel.

We were silent for a few moments after that statement, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Then Grandpa– Barry, I guessed I should call him, since he didn’t look much older than me– turned to Mariano.

“And what exactly are you doing here?”

Mariano brightened. “I’m Mariano,” he said, holding out his hand. Barry looked at it like he wasn’t quite sure what it was doing there. Still smiling, Mariano retracted it and kept going, “I’m just helping Juniper get adjusted. I can leave her here now, though, can’t I?”

Barry didn’t answer, but he narrowed his eyes suspiously. I sensed a lot of tension between them, but I wasn’t sure why. Nervously, I cleared my thought.

“But I’ll still be able to see you, right?” They both turned and stared at me in disbelief. Barry seemed slightly outraged. Perhaps he had some old fashion prejudice against young women squandering time with flippant males. “I–I mean,” I stuttered, “I don’t exactly have any friends here, and I’d be nice to know people my age.” I paused. “Unless you died a long time and are really fifty or something.”

Barry’s face settled into a small frown as I raised my eyebrows expectantly at Mariano.

“Not that long ago…” he said in a small voice. Then he abruptly sat up straight and waved at the wall behind me. “Hello! You must be Mrs. Palmer.”

I frowned and turned around. My maternal grandmother was still alive and well.

The woman leaning casually against the doorframe was gorgeous. She tall but delicate, with a slim figure and smooth face. Her auburn hair hung loosely around her waist, and she was sizing me up with honey brown eyes.

“Ah, Juniper…” Barry said, suddenly sounding nervous. “This is Serenity. She’s my, ah…”

“Death partner,” Serenity finished, arching an eyebrow at my grandfather. “Is this another relative, Barry?”

Barry started to open his mouth to answer, but I cut him off. “But you’re married,” I accused.

“I– not here I’m not,” Barry protested. He cursed again.

I scowled. “Grandma is still in love with you,” I said hotly. “She talks about you all the time, how handsome and gentle you are– how she misses you every day. She still wears her wedding ring, did you know that?” I stood up, digging my finger nails into my palms. Keep them still, I told myself. “It’s her prized posession because you gave it to her, and she vowed to love you forever, and she still does and you– you–”

During my speech Barry’s face moved from torn to hard, his mouth set in a grim line as he kept eye contact with me.

“Junie,” he said. “You don’t understand–”

“I think I do,” I snapped, then pushed roughly past Serenity and ran out of the house.

Seashells were crushed under my tennis shoes as I ran acroos the beach. I sat down at the shore, pulled my knees to my chest, and set about braiding my hair.

Not for the first time, I wished my hair was longer and thicker so I could do more with it. Braiding was theraputic: when I felt like I was losing control of my life, I needed to do something with my hands or else feel useless, and braiding hair was better than scratching up my skin. But my hair was naturally thin, and with a large portion of my head missing, it was even more so. I ran out of strands to braid quickly, and the urge to start ripping it out swelled within me. How could he do this? How could he be so disloyal to someone who loved him so much?

I took a deep breath and ordered my hands to disentangle themselves from my hair. I started rubbing my knees.

Juniper Marie Gard, I remember my mother saying to me, You are not a baby anymore. Stop being such a drama queen.

I stretched out my legs. The lava-sea lapped against my feet and ankles, feeling like bathwater. Since I was apparently water proof, I stood up and waded out to my waist.

Love doesn’t have to symmetrical, I reminded myself. No matter how much you dedicate yourself to someone, you can’t make them love you back. Barry probably had loved his wife in life, but now he was dead and things had changed. Finding a new love was normal. It was human.

I just…

Something sharp closed around my leg and pulled me under and started zipping me away. I screamed and my mouth filled with lava-water.

I didn’t need to breathe, and while my leg hurt and it wasn’t unbarable, so I wasn’t as panicked as I might have been under normal circumstances. I openned my eyes but all I saw was a wall of smoldering fire.

I probably should have expected something to attack me in an omninous sea of lava, like an angry sea turtle or a leviathon. I tried to kick whatever was holding onto me with my free leg, but when my foot made contact with something smooth but firm, the thing stopped swimming and started flailing me around. My back crashed against something rocky and I tried to pull my foot away, but the thing held on tight and I could feel my jeans and skin ripping.

I moaned in pain, but the sound was lost in the lava-water. I kicked some more at the thing and tried to catch a hold of the rocky bottom with my hands. The fear that maybe I’d be trapped like this forever and it was all because I was a silly drama queen who couldn’t deal with normal human occurrences poked at the back of my mind.

There current of the lava-water around me changed and the thing let go. A hand grabbed my forearm and pulled me up.

I started at Mariano, lava-water slowly dripping from my face. He was holding my pipe.

“You left this on the table,” he said. “I saw you go under, so I followed the splashing and ran after you… I guess I’m pretty lucky I didn’t accidently smack you with the pipe.”

He held out the pipe to me and I took it. “Minerva, I love you,” I said to it. Then a joked weakly, “And I guess I’m grateful to Mariano too, for saving me from and angry seaturtle.”

“An angry what?” Mariano asked, confused. We started back toward the shore. It was now pretty far away, but the lava-water appeared to be uniformly shallow. “You were attacked by a shark…”

“How uncreative,” I muttered. A shark, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? “Who in their right minds puts a shark in a sea of lava?”

Mariano shrugged. “It’s a sea of lava; what else are you going to put in it? Besides, it’s just a security system.” He explained I needed to be a resident or registered guest to go swimming. Security systems here were quite frightening, I thought, remembering the library.

I decided that if I ever got my own home here, I would have a lava moat with angry sea turtles. “And, like, gollums or something,” I explained to Mariano. He laughed.

“Feeling better, then?” He asked.

I stopped walking. We were almost to the shore and the lava-sea was only knee-deep. “I guess.” I sighed. “I just– I just wasn’t expecting that, and… I mean… I should have– it’s perfectly reasonable to find someone else when you’ve been separated for so long–”

“Juniper,” Mariano said quietly. “It’s okay to be upset.”

No, no it wasn’t, because it was reasonable, and I shouldn’t go villainizing family like that.

“I don’t think I can stay here,” I said. “Not right now. I need to get used to the idea.”

Mariano nodded. “I understand. But at least stay the night. Serenity invited us to dinner.”

I wasn’t aware there was enough of a coherent, linear system of time here to have dinner and guest spending the night. Mariano confirmed this as we meandered back to the house, having come on shore a good distance down the beach from it.

“Time is a man-made concept,” he said. “And it’s based on the rotation of the earth, so it stays consistent. Here? Not so much. People go about their business and dub particular moments ‘noon’ or ‘time to sleep’ at whim. How time runs relative to the living world is complicated and doesn’t really make much sense. It seems to be an average how much time everyone thinks has passed. Once a day took twelve years here, but 1996 passed in about forty minutes.” He paused. “We think.”

When, we got back to the house, Serenity made a big fuss about my leg. The bottom of my right pantleg was torn to pieces, and while I wasn’t actually bleeding, there were large pink indentations in my lower calf.

“Poor dear!” she said, and forced skirt and and mug of hot chocolate into my hands. I dutifully drank the chocolate, even though the weather was too warm for it, but politely declined the skirt.

“But your pants are ruined,” Serenity protested, refusing to take the skirt back from me. “I understand if you don’t like skirts, but I don’t think any of my pants will fit you…”

“No, no,” I reassured. “I’m really grateful for the offer, but my jeans are special to me.”

“Then take them with you,” she said. “You can get them repaired easily, but you’d just look silly walking around with them as-is.”

I didn’t know how to argue with that. I was trying really hard to stop being silly, so I changed into the skirt and my lucky jeans went into a canvas bag along with my towel and pipe.

The meal haphazardly designated as dinner was filled with awkward conversation. Serenity wanted to know about her partner’s living family, but as nice as she’d been to me, I felt uncomfortable talking about them with her and only gave vague answers to her queries. That strange tension between Mariano and Barry remained, and neither of them said much.

After dinner, Serenity showed me the spare bedroom and Barry very bluntly told Mariano, “You are under no circumstances sleeping under the same roof as my granddaughter.”

I thought this was hilariously old fashioned, but Mariano looked so forlorn as he marched out of the house I didn’t say anything.

After we’d all said goodnight, I climbed out my bedroom window and found Mariano sitting under a tree on the beach. At some point the sun had set and the seashells glistened in the moonlight.

“What’s up?” I asked and joined him.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay here?” he asked.

“Well, yeah,” I replied, blinking. “Serenity’s a sweetheart, but you saw how awkward we all were at dinner.”

“Where will you go?” he said.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re my peer advisor– advise me.”

He didn’t say anything for a few moments, just stared at the orange sea. “You can come with me,” he said finally. “Stay with the oragnization for a while. We could find you a job– what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said and leaned against the tree.

“Well, what did you want to do when you were alive?”

“Uh… finish high school?” I tried.

Mariano chuckled. “Haven’t given it much thought, have you?”

“No?” I suddenly felt silly and childish– I should have said something ambitious like defense attorney or pediatric cardiologist or professional figure skater. In truth I spent too much time imaging myself doing completely unrealistic things like DERP DERP DERP. My hands went to rub my knees, but I wasn’t wearing my lucky jeans anymore.

“We’ll figure something out,” he said. I picked up a shell and started fiddling with it, and he went back to staring at the lava-sea. Then he said, so softly I nearly missed, “I wanted to be a counselor.”

I put the shell down. “Like a shrink?” I asked.

“I wanted to work at a school,” he said. “But I guess that would be good too. I just wanted to help people.”

“Well, I think you’re doing a pretty good here,” I said brightly.

“Thanks,” he said, and he looked so sincerely thankful I didn’t know what to say.

The next morning, Barry pulled me aside while Serenity started on breakfast.

“I don’t like you hanging out with that boy,” he said.

“What’s wrong with Mariano?” I asked. “Don’t like your newly dead baby girl hanging with older boys?” I teasingly prodded him in the shoulder. He swore.

“I’m serious, Junie,” he said, not a hint of amusement in his voice. “I don’t want you to go with him. I don’t think he’s trustworthy.”

“Why?” I asked, baffled. “He’s my peer advisor. He saved me from a security shark yesterday. Is there something wrong with the organization he works for?”

“It’s the not ‘peer advisor’ part that’s the problem,” Barry said. He leaned toward me and said in a hushed whisper, “That boy is from the wrong sort.”

“The wrong sort?” I repeated. If there was nothing wrong with the peer advisor organization, then why shouldn’t I trust Mariano? He had been helpful, he’d gotten me here, he’d saved me.

“You know his… background,” Barry said. “I’ve met his type, and I don’t trust them.”

Had I been a wall, and had his words been a wrecking ball, I would have been completely destroyed. Really? That’s why he hated Mariano?

“What’s wrong with you?” I hissed. “Who cares where he or his family is from? He’s a person, and he deserves to be treated like one.”

I stomped away, back to the guest room. Barry called after me but I ignored him. I grabbed the canvas bag I’d left on the bed and swung it over my shoulder. I left, letting the door slam behind me.

“I know Grandma was really in love with you now,” I yelled at him as I stormed through the living room toward the front door. He was still in the corner, wringing his hands. Serenity watched me from the kitchen, startled. “I know because she never mentioned your sailor mouth or your stupid, unfounded prejudices.” I threw him the most furious glare I could muster. “Thanks for all your help, Serenity,” I said, and walked out onto the beach.

I approached the nearest palm tree and kicked it as hard as I could, holding in a scream. I had no words for the sheer outrage I felt toward my grandfather. I kicked the tree again and set about yanking at my hair. That stupid, ignorant, racist–

“Juniper?” Mariano caught my wrists, his face horrified. “What are you doing?”

“I– I–” I stuttered. I few strands of hair were caught between my fingers. Mariano slowly pulled my hands away from my head.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said calmly.

Cave Tree (deadgirl STRIKES AGAIN!)

My lucky jeans were lucky for a reason.

I’d had them since seventh grade. They were looser then and not nearly as faded. I took one of Logan’s belts to hold it up, and Logan and I took Matthew and Chris out to explore.

It was a game we used to play. We’d walk six blocks to a stretch of woods that once divided subdivisions and was soon replaced a gas station and an apartment complex. It wasn’t very big– there was no place in it you couldn’t hear the surrounding traffic. There the boys would run around like wild things, and I’d stand with my arms crossed and pretend to be an adult while imagining myself an elfin queen watching her subjects make mischief.

One day while the boys were off playing space ranger or something silly like that, I found the cave-tree. I was attracted to it because it was so much wider and taller than all the rest. It had gnarls all over the trunk and roots that slithered across the ground like lurking crocodiles. At the base was a hollow just large enough for a twelve-year-old girl to crawl into. So of course I got down on my hands and knees and stuck my head in.

It seemed the inside of the trunk was completely hollow with light peeping in from the gnarls higher up. I thought I could maybe stand up in it, so I did.

Standing in my cave-tree was charming for the first few moments. It was just barely wide enough that if I stood in the exact middle, not even my knobby elbows would touch the sides. A few rotting chunks of wood fell on me as I stood, but that was okay. It smelled of damp earth. I realized this must be exactly what standing in a coffin must be like. I crawled back out.

My brothers didn’t say anything, but my mother yelled at me for getting mud all over my knees from crawling around. She wanted me to be responsible.

The next time I wore those jeans in those woods was several months later. Chris was whining about something a five-year-old would whine about and we were trying very hard to ignore him.

Finally I said to him, “Let’s play hide and seek, okay? I’ll close my eyes and count to twenty and you three go and hide.”

I made a grand show of turning around and covering my eyes with both hands. I counted very slowly to ten, then peeked out through my fingers. Logan and Matthew were hiding very badly behind trees. Chris was nowhere in sight. I finished counting to twenty as quickly as I could.

“Where’s Chris?” I asked.

Matthew stepped out from behind his tree. “He hid over there somewhere.” He pointed. “He’ll probably find and spider and come back scared soon. But look…”

Matthew produced a baseball from his pocket. I found a stick and we took turns whacking at it until Logan managed to snap our makeshift bat. We wandered away then.

When the sun began to set, we realized we’d forgotten Chris.

I panicked, of course. I was the oldest, so I was in charge. Mom wanted me to be responsible. Logan and Matthew weren’t particularly concerned, and they helped me pick through the woods at a frustratingly slow pace. After we were sure we’d gone through the entire area once, they left complaining of hunger. I made them swear not to tell Mom or Dad Chris was missing.

I tried not to cry and wriggled my hand up the sleeves of my jacket, scratching at my arms in frustration. I hadn’t figured out the hair-braiding trick yet, and my hands needed something to do so I could stop feeling so useless. The sun set, leaving the sky a rosy purple color, but there was enough light pollution that I didn’t have too much trouble seeing. Then I remembered the cave-tree.

Surely that’s where Chris was hiding, I had thought. Surely. Where else could he hide? I found the tree and squatted down in front of the hollow. It was dark enough I couldn’t see inside to the coffin-hollow.

“Chris?” I called in a sing song voice. “I found you.”

No reply.

“Chris, this isn’t funny. Come out now. Don’t you want dinner?”

I decided to crawl in. But then– then Mom would know I’d be irresponsible, because it would be muddy and the knees of my jeans would be dirty. If I could keep them clean, and if I pulled Chris out, then Mom wouldn’t know and I could tell her I wanted to show Chris bats or that he was tired and wouldn’t move or one of so many excuses.

I brushed my jeans preemptively, to make sure they were as clean as I could make them. I stuck my arm in the coffin-hollow and waved it around. It was empty.

Maybe– I had a stupid idea. I thought maybe there were kidnappers, and they had taken my brother to work in a factory forever, and he would grow up crooked and sooty and I would never see him again. I got down on my knees and stuck my head in. But it was a stupid idea, and I knew it was stupid and impossible (how could a band of kidnappers hide in a tiny patch of woods?), but that didn’t stop me from crawling in and standing up and scratching my arms red with my stubby nails.

I stayed there in my cave-tree for a very long time. I started chewing up the insides of my cheeks along with the scratching, worrying about where Chris was and was he alright and would Mom say?

Eventually I crawled back out and desperately tried to rub the dirt off my knees. I could still find Chris somewhere else, and I could get my knees clean, and Mom would think I was responsible and I could never, ever forget Chris again. Maybe.

The stars were out, and I couldn’t see anymore even with the streetlights shining through the trees, so I stumbled my way back to the road. I could taste blood on my cheeks. I rubbed at me knees until the mud stains faded away.

I almost didn’t go inside when I reached home. But I reasoned to myself, using my logical-responsible-useful-self, that the best way to find Chris was to tell Mom. Mom would call the police or have some other clever idea that wasn’t standing in the middle of a coffin-cave-tree like a child.

When I let myself in, Chris was sitting in the living room, playing with his toy keyboard.

“Where were you?” I choked out, my voice cracking. I was on the verge of tears. My cheeks and arms stung.

Chris blinked up at me. “You never found me, so I came home.”

I gawked and wanted to hug him, but Mom poked her head out from the kitchen before I could move.

“Oh Juniper, you’re home,” she observed. “I was just about to send Logan after you. Come help me with dinner.”

As I sawed away at a baguette she gave me to slice, she said, “Can you believe Chris found his way home by himself? He said he ran away. You must have been worried.” She chuckled and began spooning rice onto plates. The knife slipped and I nearly cut myself.

She began to scold me as she ladled peas on top of the rice. “And you have dirt in your hair. It’s a mess.” I was grateful my sleeves covered my arms. As an after thought, she smiled and added, “At least you managed to keep you pants clean.”

And because of that, she would never know I had lost Chris.