Beyond (Afterlife book 1)

  So while Portia and Acacia started to move things around in the living room, giggling and snickering, I took Abhik with me outside.

  We found ourselves under the most incredible starry sky. The full moon shone at our feet. We flew out in the front yard, but then Abhik stopped. Slowly he placed his feet on the grass. He looked at me and I understood. He wanted to walk. So we did. For the first time since we learned how to fly, we walked on our legs. It felt weird after months of flying everywhere. It was a slow way to be moving around. But I could tell that Abhik enjoyed it. He couldn’t stop smiling. In the backyard sat an old swing set. Abhik took one look at it and then ran toward it like a small child.

  I ran after him and took the swing next to him. Since we were nearly weightless, it wasn’t quite the same as I remembered swinging in my childhood, but still Abhik seemed to enjoy it. Afterwards he tried the monkey bars and then the slide.

  “You know I didn’t get to do this much when I was human?” he said. “It was too much for me. I was so fragile and in too much pain.”

  “Well I am glad you get to do it now,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  We played like two small kids in the yard for hours, although it felt like minutes. When we got back inside, Portia and Mai had put their mark on the whole living room. Pictures were hanging upside down, chairs had been placed differently, and books were on the wrong shelves, one even on the top of the ceiling fan. Portia had a big vase between her hands and looked like she was going to break it.

  “Portia!” I said. “That’s enough!”

  She stuck out her tongue but put the vase down.

  Great, I thought. Nice and mature.

  “I wasn’t going to break it, just put it somewhere else. We were only having a little fun, that’s all,” she said. Don’t be such an old spinster.”

  Who uses that kind of words? I thought while laughing on the inside.

  “Well I don’t want to be involved in it. Let’s go,” I said to Abhik.

  But he didn’t come. He looked at me like a defying child.

  “I want to try this,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes as he started pushing pillows on the floor from the couch. He missed a few times when his hands just went through it, but I could see on his face that he was having fun.

  The drunken man on the couch didn’t seem to wake up, so I felt it was safe. They didn’t leave a big mess. It was mostly just small things like tying the man’s tie around his leg and taking his socks off and placing them on top of the TV. And when he woke the next morning he would think that he had been very drunk and had quite a party in the living room. Or at least his wife would, we figured, as we left the living room and floated up the stairs.

  Everyone was giggling—even Abhik—and I couldn’t help being a little amused myself.

  But that was only until we reached the bathroom door. As Portia opened it with that squeaking sound, we heard another door being opened as well.

  Chapter 9

  The face in the doorway immediately grew pale, eyes wide open with a scared look—the one spirits see a lot when they appear to humans. Spirits get used to it eventually, but at this point I had never seen it before. I had never had anyone afraid of me before and it sincerely scared the crap out of me. We all got so scared of the guy who was staring at us that we screamed and fell into each other trying to get to the bathroom mirror.

  “Hurry, let’s get out of here,” Portia yelled.

  She pushed herself ahead of the rest of us so she could get to the mirror first. Then she went through it. I was last in line as the boy closed the door to the bathroom with a shriek.

  “Hurry, hurry …” Abhik said while Mai slid right through.

  Then came Abhik and he had no problem either. He went through and now it was my turn. I put my right arm in front of me and pushed it through and as I did the bathroom door opened slightly. A baseball bat was the first thing I saw and then I panicked. Trying too hard to get through the mirror made it impossible. My hand was stuck. Not only was I trapped in a human house with a human, but I couldn’t move either.

  Great, I thought.

  “Who’s in there?” I heard the boy yell while swinging the baseball bat in the air. Who was he thinking he would scare off with that?

  Then with a sudden bang the door opened and he stood in the doorway with the baseball bat on his shoulder, ready to swing it. I felt the others trying to pull my hand on the other side, but I didn’t move an inch.

  It’s all in your mind, I thought. Come on, have you learned nothing?

  The boy stared at me from the doorway. His eyes were still wide open. Then he took a swing at me. The bat whistled through the air. Forgetting all about who I was, I covered my head and … the bat went straight through me.

  “Now what do you know?” I said quite impressed. I felt it go through me, but it didn’t hurt at all.

  The boy’s eyes became even wider and his mouth opened. He dropped the bat on the floor. He looked at me like he was paralyzed. His whole body shook and trembled. That was when I saw it. There was something about him. I was certain I had seen him somewhere before. Maybe I had known him before I died?

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  Of course he didn’t answer. He was still in too much of a shock. “You’re … You’re …” he stuttered.

  “I am a spirit, yes.” It sounded so weird in my own ears and I tried to imagine how it must have sounded in his.

  “But … But …”

  I tried to smile. “I’m kind of stuck, as you can see.”

  “This must be some dream or something,” he mumbled and tried to pinch his own arm.

  “Nope, I am real.”

  He kept staring at me. “Where … where did you come from?”

  I sighed. “Well it’s kind of a long story. See we come from this school … well … it is going to sound a little strange, but it is the truth. We go to a school of … spirits. See, I kind of … died some months ago and now I am … well … this.”

  The boy seemed less pale now and looked at me with suspicion.

  “You’re really dead?”

  I tried to smile again. Once he got the color back in his cheeks he was kind of cute-looking and about my age as well. I noticed he had a purple mark on his forehead, like he had been in a bad fight.

  “Well … if you put it like that, then yes. I am dead.”

  “So what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be with God in Heaven or something like that?”

  “Well I sort of am. We do have Angels at the school … but you see I need to go through this training at the Academy to learn stuff. … It’s kind of complicated.”

  “Have you seen God?”

  “Not yet. But I hope to one day.”

  “What is Heaven like?”

  “I have no idea, honestly … But the school is great. And being a spirit is really cool.”

  “Are you an Angel?”

  “No, that I am not. They are kind of special … I think, that is, see I don’t really know that much …”

  “But you are good, right? You are not like an evil spirit haunting houses and stuff, right?”

  “Well, no, not in theory… Not normally. But … you see… we kind of did something to your living room that wasn’t under the category of being nice, so … It’s really very complicated.”

  He looked at me even more suspiciously now.

  “You don’t seem to know much about anything, do you?”

  “Well I am new…”

  “Why don’t you just go back to where your friends went?”

  “Well, I’m kind of stuck in this gateway … and I can’t seem to go either back or forth. So …”

  I felt so incredibly embarrassed. It was like nothing I had ever gone through before. Seriously. It was worse than the time I realized I had walked around at school all day with toilet paper sticking out of my pants, or the time when I finally got the courage to approach this guy I had liked for a long time and I accidental
ly spit on him while I was talking.

  “So you are stuck here.” He said with a smile, like he found it incredibly funny, which of course I didn’t.

  “Yeah, that is kind of a problem …”

  “Why?”

  “We’re not supposed to show ourselves to humans before we graduate from the Academy. I’ll get in big trouble if they find out.”

  He looked at me. “Can’t spirits make themselves invisible?”

  I sighed. “Yes, they can.”

  “So why didn’t you just make yourself invisible when you saw me?”

  “Well … the thing is… we haven’t quite gotten to that part yet. That’s not until next semester.”

  The boy burst into laughter.

  “You’re funny,” he said.

  “Yeah well, I might be,” I said. There was a pause between us. Then I said, “Listen, I’m sorry about the mess downstairs in your living room.”

  He sighed. “Well, I guess my step-dad is sleeping down there on the couch anyway. He usually does when he’s drunk. So my mom will probably think he did it and clean it all up before he wakes up. I’m sure it will be fine,” he said.

  Another awkward silence followed.

  “How did you get that purple mark?” I asked and pointed at his forehead with my free hand.

  He felt the big purple bump. “Oh this?” he asked and seemed all of a sudden a little embarrassed, like he didn’t want to talk to me about it. “It is nothing. I just fell down the stairs.”

  “Oh, okay.” I thought it was a strange answer.

  “So what do we do now?” he asked.

  “I have to get out of this mess,” I said and looked at my arm. I still couldn’t move it either way.

  “Can I help?”

  “That’s kind of you, but I am afraid not. See, the problem is all in my mind. I have a hard time believing that I can actually go through things yet. Once I get it and stop overthinking it, I will no longer have this problem.”

  The boy’s face lit up.

  “Maybe I can help you,” he said.

  I looked at him quite surprised.

  “How?”

  “Well, my mother always says to me that I overthink everything. That I worry too much about things I shouldn’t. And when I do, she always tries to distract me with something else.”

  I had to admit that sounded like a good plan.

  “Okay,” I said. “Can you distract me then?”

  He smiled and put a hand through his sand-colored hair.

  “Sure. Give me a second,” he turned around and started walking but then stopped. He looked at me again.

  “By the way, my name is Jason,” he said.

  “I’m Meghan.”

  He was only gone for a few seconds but that was enough time for me to worry that someone else in the house would wake up and find me here. Also I had started wondering what my friends were doing on the other side of the mirror. They had gotten awfully quiet and since they had tried to pull my hand, they didn’t seem to have tried anything else. Knowing them, I guessed they had run and left me here.

  “I found the perfect distraction,” I heard Jason’s voice say. He had come back to the bathroom and was holding something in his hands. He showed me what it was.

  “You have got to be kidding!” I said. “A puzzle?”

  He smiled again. I was about to burst into laughter. I hadn’t made a puzzle since I was a kid. At first I thought he was trying to make me laugh, but little by little I realized that he was serious.

  “It is not any kind of puzzle; it has eight thousand pieces. Believe me, it will work,” he said and took off the top of the box. Then he tipped out the many pieces on the white bathroom tiles. Then he took a big piece of cardboard and placed it next to the pieces.

  “We’ll make it on the cardboard. I always do,” he said and looked up at me with anticipation in his brown eyes.

  “What? I can’t even reach them. I am stuck, remember?”

  “You can tell me which ones to pick and where to put them.”

  I sighed. This had to be by far the stupidest thing anyone had ever suggested to me. He turned the top of the box and showed me the picture. It was very beautiful—a woman and a man kissing in the window of her bedroom.

  “It’s Romeo and Juliet,” I said. “The eternal story of two who can never have each other.”

  Jason looked at the box. “I guess you’re right. My mom gave it to me. It’s good for me to have something to do, she says. So I won’t think too much.”

  “What do you worry about?”

  He gave me a curled smile.

  “Nothing … and everything, I guess.”

  I sighed. “Listen. This will take forever to make, and I really have to get back soon.”

  I didn’t want to break Jason’s heart, but a puzzle wasn’t really me and especially not now, when I was this stressed out and in kind of a panicky mode.

  He looked up at me while showing me a corner piece. “I found the first one,” he said and looked at the picture on the box. “It looks like this goes in the right upper corner.”

  He placed the piece on the cardboard. “There,” he said and smiled like he had finished the whole eight thousand pieces.

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Only seven thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine to go,” I said.

  He didn’t seem to mind my reluctance. He just kept going and soon some of Juliet’s face had grown out of the pieces. I kept pulling my arm but the more I did, the more it seemed to be stuck. I was really getting tired of this situation, but didn’t know what to do. So I stared at Jason who was eagerly building the puzzle on the floor in front of me. Now I saw him searching for a piece of Romeo’s hat. As his fingers went through the pile of pieces I saw the red hat with the green feather. Jason didn’t seem to have seen it and just kept looking.

  “There,” I said and pointed with my free hand. “His hat. It was right there on your right.”

  Jason searched and picked out the piece. Then he looked at me with a smile.

  “That’s the one I was missing. Thanks,” he said, placing Romeo’s hat and completing the head.

  I couldn’t help being fascinated by his passion for this puzzle and soon I was just as much into it as he was. I looked for the pieces and directed him to them and in the next couple of hours we made big progress. And I actually had fun. It became like a small competition between us: who could be the first to find a piece we knew where to put. And as it turned out I was quite good at this. Several hours must have passed without us noticing it, when I felt Jason was staring at me intensely. I looked up and met his eyes. For the first time since I became a spirit I felt warm inside.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Look at you.”

  “What about me?”

  “You are sitting down here. On the floor. With me.”

  I was speechless. My hand wasn’t stuck any longer and I hadn’t even noticed. I realized I was sitting on the floor next to Jason putting the pieces on the cardboard. I had been so caught up in this puzzle, I had forgotten everything around me. Including the fact that I had to go back.

  “Wow,” I mumbled.

  “I know.”

  “Your mom was really right. This is the perfect distraction.”

  Jason smiled. Then there was a sound outside the bathroom. Someone was coming up the stairs. Jason froze. Suddenly I saw a strange fear in his eyes. He got up on his feet and shut the door, then he locked it. He looked at me with panic.

  “It’s my step-dad. He woke up. You’d better go now!” He kind of yelled and whispered at the same time.

  “Okay,” I said and approached the mirror. I heard the door handle turn, then heavy knocking.

  “Jason! Are you in there, you little rat?”

  “Go!” Jason whispered and signaled that I needed to hurry.

  “Who is in there with you? You better not have someone in the house without my knowledge.”

  “I don’t,” I heard Jason say, almost cry
ing. “I was just talking to myself … in the mirror.”

  The hammering on the door got worse and all of a sudden I didn’t feel like leaving Jason here with that man.

  “Jason! Open this door immediately or I swear I will make you regret it,” his step-dad yelled.

  Jason shivered. He looked even more frightened than when he saw me for the first time. His whole body trembled while the hammering intensified.

  I looked at him and felt an ache in my heart. Then I floated toward him and took his hand. I squeezed it as hard as I could until I knew he felt it.

  “I will be back one day to build the rest of the puzzle, I promise,” I said. As I did Jason’s step-dad started kicking the door and now it cracked open.

  “Jason!” I heard him roar before I went through the mirror.

  Back in the cellar again, I found Abhik sitting asleep on the floor. He had been the only one to wait for me.

  I stood for a long time just breathing heavily. I stared into the empty mirror as if I expected to see what was happening in that bathroom after I left. But there was nothing to see. I closed my eyes and thought about Jason. I really wished that I could have helped him in some way.

  Chapter 10

  During the next couple of weeks I thought a lot about Jason. I felt horrible for not knowing how things ended with his step-dad and if he was all right or not. Several times I thought about going down to the cellar again alone to go through the mirror. But I didn’t even know if the mirror would bring me back to the same place. And I really was afraid to get caught if I tried again.

  I tried my best to keep my distance from Portia and her pack. Since they left me that night I didn’t care much for them. Instead I was hanging out with Mick in the kitchen during most of my free time while my mind was thinking of Jason and that angry step-dad. Jason had been so nice to me and I had a horrible feeling that he was in trouble.