I scrub my hands five times. When that doesn’t seem like enough, I get in the shower, spin the dials until I find a temperature that neither scalds nor freezes, and scrub everything else. I wash until it feels like my skin is swirling down the drain with the suds and the shampoo, and then I huddle in the corner of the tub, letting the water beat down on me, sobbing and shivering.
Every time I think the enormity of my predicament has finished hitting me, there’s something else, something like this, something I did every day without thinking about it the first time I was alive, something I would have waved off as ordinary and irrelevant immediately after I died. “If you go back to Earth, you’ll have to deal with all the disgusting things that come out of your body, with snot and shit and piss and bile. If you go back to Earth, you’ll have to deal with the worst parts of living, not just the best.”
It would have seemed like a perfectly reasonable bargain, once upon a time. But that was a lot of rides and a lot of roads ago, and now, nothing about this is anything other than terrible. Nothing about this is right, or fair, or endurable.
I shiver and sob until the hot water runs out and I’m stuck under the sleeting spray, chilling my skin, freezing me to the bone. That’s almost soothing. I’m so accustomed to being cold that being warm is almost unbearable. But living people get sick when they get too cold, and the thought of being sick—my head filled with snot, my lungs filled with cotton, throwing up every time I try to move—is enough to make me sit up and turn the water off.
The apartment is suddenly very quiet. Laura has managed to sleep through the whole thing. I struggle to my feet, slipping on the wet porcelain, all too aware of how easy it would be to slip and break my neck. How do people live knowing how easy it would be for them to die at any moment? How do they not just sit frozen by fear, letting their lives slip away one safe, swaddled second at a time?
There are towels on a rack next to the sink. I find one that isn’t already wet and wipe myself down, dead skin coming off with the water. I have never been this old. I don’t think I have ever been this scared. I am more afraid of living than I am of Bobby Cross. By the time I’m dry enough to pull my borrowed clothes back on I’m crying again, and I keep crying as I return to the couch, wrap myself in the afghan, and try to go to sleep.
Ways not to go to sleep quickly or easily: try to force it. Eventually, I succeed, and drop into a swirling hellscape of half-formed dream imagery, way too much of which centers on the bathroom experiences I’ve had since waking up in this unwanted body. The dead don’t dream. We don’t need to. The chemicals the human mind produces and occasionally needs to purge don’t occur in us, and so we’re able to keep going forever without so much as a nap. Sometimes we lose time because we get bored and let it go without reaching out for it, but that’s not the same thing.
I wake from a dream of Bobby Cross chasing me through an endless maze of broken doors and cracked concrete, sitting up with a gasp and opening my eyes on the bright light that streams in through the apartment windows. It makes me squint and shy away, raising a hand to block it out.
“Good,” says Laura. “You’re up. What the hell were you doing in the bathroom last night? You got water everywhere.”
“What?” I turn, still squinting. It’s so bright in here. Does Colorado get more sun than anywhere else? Someone should tell California. “I . . . um. I’m sorry. I had to . . . I had to take another shower.”
That’s not all I have to do. The pressure in my bladder makes it clear that I have to go again. My face falls.
“I didn’t even drink anything,” I wail. I’m whining and I know it and I don’t care. This isn’t fair. I have to drink at least a little to stay alive—I remember that from my high school biology classes, even if I’ve forgotten virtually everything else—and I’m resigned to visiting the bathroom multiple times before I return to blissful intangibility, but I shouldn’t have to do it when I haven’t done anything to earn it.
“Biology sucks,” says Laura. “Talk to me again when you hit menopause.”
My horror must show in my face, because she starts laughing, and keeps laughing as I dart into the bathroom and slam the door behind me.
Peeing isn’t so bad. I get everything handled as gracefully as I can, and stare into my own eyes as I wash my hands. This is me. This, right here, is me, Rose Marshall, sweet sixteen and never getting older. This is the face I’ve been looking at for decades, while my contemporaries have aged and grown into the adults they were always meant to be.
But this won’t be me for much longer. Not if time and the world of the living has its way. The changes may be small and gradual. It doesn’t matter. Whatever they are, I’ll be stuck with them forever, and I don’t want them. I just want to be me. I just want things to go back to the way they were, the way that they’re supposed to be.
Please.
Laura has cleared the bedding off the couch and is shoving clothes into a backpack when I emerge. She looks up, nods, and grabs a granola bar out of her pile of things to pack, lobbing it to me. I catch it automatically.
“I know you don’t want to, but you need to eat,” she says. “The TSA won’t be thrilled if you pass out in front of them.”
“The who?” I ask blankly.
Laura’s eyes widen briefly before she laughs. “Oh, man, I didn’t even think about that. You’ve never been on a plane, have you?”
“Planes were for rich people when I was alive,” I say uncomfortably. “There was no way we could ever have afforded it.”
“Welcome to the age of Southwest and JetBlue,” says Laura. “The airports have their own special police, the TSA, and we need them not to look at us twice. That’s why we’re going to buy you better clothes, and it’s why you’re going to eat that granola bar. There will be no fainting and attracting bad attention today. Not on my watch.”
“Okay,” I say meekly, and unwrap a corner of the granola bar, taking a hesitant bite. It tastes like chocolate and peanut butter and little pops of what I think might be puffed rice, all mixed up with oats and honey. It’s nice. I don’t say so, but I keep eating, and Laura looks satisfied.
“We’re picking up your ID in half an hour, and the Target is right around the corner from the drop point. Then we come back here, shower, and catch a cab to the airport. Our flight leaves at eight. We’ll be in Maine by midnight.”
How fast the human world has become while I wasn’t looking. They’ve taken distance and boiled it down to minutes, stripping away the magic of the journey in favor of the destination. I can’t blame them—time is so precious here, and Maine by midnight sounds like an impossibility beyond all measure. I nod, still silent, and take another bite of granola bar.
“Get your shoes,” says Laura. “Let’s go.”
* * *
The kid who sells us my ID—and there I go again; this “kid” is in his early twenties, and looks at me like I’m a baby, jailbait at best and a nuisance at worst—wears a baseball cap tugged down over his eyes and has a grayish tint to his skin, like he’s been running through coal dust. I wonder whether Laura realizes her “pizza delivery service” isn’t wholly operated by humans. I don’t ask her. It’s not my place, and more, it would be dangerous. I can’t afford to have him grab my new ID and run, not with the security Laura’s described at the airports. I need to be real. I need to exist in this world.
The ID says my name is Rose Moorhead. The picture shows a tired, wary sixteen-year-old girl with tangled blonde hair and the eyes of a feral cat, skittish, ready to bolt. It’s a surprisingly good likeness.
I’m still thinking about it when Laura hauls me through the automatic doors of the Target into a cavern that smells of popcorn and cleaning fluid and too many people making too many purchases. I can’t handle it. This is all too much, too real, and way too far removed from my truck stop and diner reality. The world has been changing the whole time I’ve been de
ad. I knew that—by the standards of my own kind, I’m virtually a modernist, keeping up with the latest trends and lingo—but I’ve managed to avoid considering what that means right up until this moment.
“These look to be about your size,” says Laura, thrusting a pair of jeans at me. “I’m going to grab a bunch of bras from the lingerie aisle while you try those on. Find something that’s comfortable and won’t fall down.”
“I don’t—”
“Go,” she says, and pushes me toward an arch labeled FITTING ROOMS. I step through.
The woman inside the small aisle on the other side looks up from the pile of shirts she was folding and offers me a patient, practiced smile. “How can I help you?” she asks.
“I’m supposed to try these on.” I hold up the jeans like a password, a skeleton key cast in denim and a price tag that makes my heart stutter in my chest. Laura says this is a cheap place to buy clothing. I can’t imagine what the expensive places must look like.
“Let me get you a room.”
Laura’s eye for sizes is good: the jeans fit me substantially better than the ones I got from the Barrowmans, hugging my legs and buttoning snugly around my waist. No need to worry about chafing with these jeans, or about them sliding down my hips when I have to run.
“Rose?”
“In here,” I call.
“Did the jeans fit?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Laura’s hand appears above the top of the door, holding an assortment of hangers, each with its own plain beige bra. “Try these on, figure out what size you need, and come out. Leave whatever you’re not going to take behind. You don’t need to try on the shirts, and the jeans will let us know what size underwear we need to buy for you.”
I’m not sure how the jeans are going to tell us anything, but I’m past arguing. I just want this to be over. “All right,” I say, and take the bras.
They’re softer than I remember bras being, and more restrictive at the same time, although that may just be an artifact of spending sixty years not worrying about gravity. The first two are way too small. The third is big enough for some really epic tissue paper action. The fourth fits, and I feel like I can breathe even with the straps tightened the way my mother always told me to. This is as good as it’s going to get.
Laura holds her hand out when I emerge from the stall, back in my borrowed clothes and clutching my selections to my chest. I hand them to her. She checks the tags and nods.
“Good,” she says. “Come on.”
When I was a kid, I had this doll. Not a Barbie—she’s after my time—but a rag doll sewn for me by some well-meaning lady at the church, who’d seen that my family didn’t have much money for things like toys. Mama made me a dozen dresses for that old doll, stitching them out of whatever odds and ends she had sitting around. I used to change my doll’s clothes three and four times a day, whenever I was feeling powerless, like I couldn’t control anything about the world around me. Shoot, maybe I couldn’t choose what I was going to eat or make the kids at school stop calling me names, but I could decide what my doll was going to look like. I could control her.
If I ever see my doll again—not likely, since I don’t think I loved her enough for her to leave a ghost, but who knows; maybe I wasn’t the last child to hold her hand, just the first and best forgotten—I’m going to get down on my knees and apologize. Laura drags me through the store like I’m her personal rag doll, and my only purpose here is to agree to the things she throws into the cart, or to let her measure them against me, holding them up to be sure that they’ll fit my current frame.
She buys me two bras, two pairs of jeans, a plastic package of underpants, a plastic package of socks, three T-shirts, and a hoodie. She buys me a toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush, and a box of menstrual pads. I don’t want to think about those. I don’t want to think about any of this. Having more than one bra implies that I’ll be here long enough to need more than one. Having . . . those other things . . . implies that they’ll be necessary.
I would rather die than rediscover the wonders of my period. Literally.
I slouch behind Laura, broken-spirited and homesick for the twilight, as we go through the checkout lane. The clerk who rings up our purchases laughs, saying to Laura, “They sure know how to sulk at that age,” in a conspiratorial tone. Laura laughs back. I hunch my shoulders, wishing I could sink into the floor.
At least I know we’re not remarkable. At least I know they’re not going to remember us. Women with sulky teenage children are a dime a dozen in this world, and while we might appear to be a cliché, at least it’s a harmless one.
“I have a backpack you can use,” says Laura, as we drive back to her apartment. “Change into something clean, and pack the rest. We’ve got about an hour before the car gets here.”
“Why aren’t you driving to the airport?”
“I don’t want to pay for parking, and I don’t trust Bobby not to track my car.” Laura risks a sidelong look at me. “I know you can find a car no matter where it goes, once you’ve been in it once. There have been plenty of reports of you doing exactly that. If Bobby can do the same, I’d rather he find my apartment, with us long gone, than figure out that we took a plane.”
“I don’t find cars, I find drivers,” I say. “But you’re right about Bobby. He finds cars.” She’s wrong about the airport. I can fly right now: I’m a living girl, with everything that entails. Bobby . . . can’t. Bobby is bound to the road, tires on asphalt, and while his demon car can break a lot of rules, even he can’t cross the country as fast as she says the plane is going to. Even if he could, he’d have no way of knowing where we were going. Being tied to the roads doesn’t mean getting the flight plans of every plane in the country at your fingertips.
I don’t say those things. Laura is invested. She’s trying to protect me by protecting herself. As long as she thinks both of those are possible—as long as she thinks we can get through this in one piece—she’s going to keep doing her best, trying her hardest, and focusing on the problem, rather than focusing on the fact that all of this is my fault. I did this to her.
Call it payback for a little attempted exorcism and move on. I’m not guilty. I’m not.
I refuse to be.
She parks behind her apartment and waves for me to follow her as she takes our purchases and heads for the door. After a quick, paranoid glance around, I do. It’s not like I have any other choice.
* * *
The airport is bigger and busier than I could ever have imagined. It’s like someone has taken the entry plaza at Lowryland and crammed it inside a single building, separating it into a hundred different lines. There are lines to check bags, to pick up tickets, to buy coffee. Mostly, though, there are the security lines, snaking through the concourse in great curves, as every person who wants to fly today subjects themselves to government inspection.
“In another ten years, they’ll probably want retinal scans at the boarding gate,” says Laura, as we wait for our turn under the microscope. “Be glad we’re doing this now.”
I am not glad. I don’t want to be here. Give me the familiar danger of four wheels on a blacktop, the road pulling and the car following its commands. Give me gas stations and hitchhikers and the ground, not this terrifying new world of flying machines and private armies. The TSA is everywhere, wearing blue uniforms and sour expressions.
I wonder what the ghosts are like. I wonder what I would see right now, if I could see the twilight. I wonder if any of them recognize me, if they’re pointing and whispering about this girl who looks just like Rose Marshall walking through their halls, draped in flesh and bone she didn’t borrow from anyone. I wonder if I’m scaring them.
“Hey.” Laura elbows me lightly in the side. “We’re up.”
A TSA agent beckons her forward. She gives me an encouraging nod and then she’s gone, leaving m
e to wait for my own wave, my own invitation. This feels like the judgment people say waits beyond death, only I’ve never been this afraid of any reaper or gather-grim. This is awful.
The man at the desk waves for me to approach. My feet seem rooted to the floor. He waves again, more impatiently this time. I’m holding up the line. The line, which matters more than I ever will, because it contains a thousand souls, and I only have the one.
Laura is already past the TSA, waiting in line for the scanner. I have to do this on my own. Swallowing hard, I step forward, holding out my ticket and ID.
The man takes them with barely a glance at my face, running the ID card under some sort of light that has to show it as a fake, simply has to. “Where are you heading?” he asks.
“Portland,” I say. “Maine, not Oregon.”
“Uh-huh. You traveling by yourself?”
“No,” I manage. “With my Aunt Laura.” It’s a lie, it’s a lie so big the sky should crack open and rain down hellfire on us both.
He doesn’t hear it. He scribbles something on my ticket—on my boarding pass—before handing it and my ID back. “Have a nice flight,” he says, and just like that, I’m dismissed from his awareness as he waves the next passenger forward, slicing off another segment of the line. I am through. I am accepted.
Laura smiles as I walk over to her. It’s a kind of smile I’ve never seen on her face before, maternal and patient and chilling. “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it, sweetie?” she asks.
It takes a beat for me to remember that she’s my beloved aunt in this strange new reality we’re crafting for ourselves, one where her sister, my mother, would trust her to cart me off across the country. “Not so bad,” I say bravely, and she laughs, and people smile all around us, at least the ones who’ve noticed us at all. Most of them are sunk deep into their own adventures, shutting out everything around them that doesn’t apply.