Jump When Ready (4 page)

Ghosts in the
Bathroom

After I finally accepted that the pastor would keep speaking
and that people would keep crying no matter what I did, I asked the others if
we could leave. I guess I must have learned whatever I’d been meant to from my
funeral, since a moment later we stood on a sunny sidewalk next to a tree-lined
street. No more towering fir trees touching the clouds, just the normal kind
like you’d usually see in a neighborhood, all of them full and vibrantly green.

I blinked against the sunlight. “Where are we?”

“Exactly where we were before, mate,” Simon said. “Weird,
huh?”

“Do you like it?” Naomi asked. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

I heard kids playing in the distance and the sound of
dogs barking in backyards. Cars rolled past on the next block, music blaring to
the afternoon. Was it my imagination or did I smell brownies baking?

“Sure, this seems nice,” I said. “Still not sure where we
are, though.”

“This is our neighborhood,” Jamie said. “The one we
agreed upon. It’s kind of a mix of different stuff, based on where we all last
lived.”

“We even snuck a bit of England in there,” Simon said
proudly. “The Victorian flats were my idea.”

At first, I wasn’t sure what Simon was talking about. The
side of the street we faced was lined with the kind of houses you’d find in the
suburbs pretty much anywhere. But when I turned around, I saw that the other
side showed a row of apartment buildings. Not the bland rectangles with windows
and balconies I usually thought about when I pictured apartments, but more
ornate, almost historic looking. I hadn’t noticed before, but now I saw that
there were also palm trees looming above the oaks and maples. I wondered what
had happened to the gray, drizzling sky and the forest we’d left when we’d gone
to my funeral.

Naomi somehow guessed what I was thinking. “Your place
isn’t really gone,” she said. “I mean, you can still go there if you want to.
It’s just not infested right now. No, that’s not it.” She turned to Jamie.
“What’s the word Martha uses?”

“Manifesting,” Jamie said. “It’s kind of what I was
getting at before. I know it seems weird, but you sort of created that around
yourself. Was it someplace you used to know?”

I had no idea what they were talking about with the whole
“manifesting” thing. Like I could somehow create my own personal rain forest.
Could I? Obviously, this whole deal was going to take some getting used to. I
shook my head. “Not exactly,” I said. “More like someplace I’d planned on
seeing. In the Northwest.”

Jamie nodded. “Sure, that’s cool too. Either way, since
it’s the place you came in with we decided to go with it for a while. Hope it
helped, but it was kind of getting us down.”

When he said that, I remembered that I’d slept for almost
a week. I was still trying to make sense of that, but it sounded like I’d
somehow left them surrounded in gloom the whole time. No wonder they were sick
of it.

I looked around again at the neighborhood. “Who lives in
all these houses?”

“Depends,” Jamie said. “There’s also an awesome skate
park down the street. We’ll have to break out the boards soon.”

An actual skate park? That did sound cool. In the past,
I’d only skated on the streets of my neighborhood and a few times in some
parking lots. For a second, I wondered about pads and helmets but then
remembered we couldn’t possibly get hurt. Or could we? I wasn’t really sure.

“Ready to see our house?” Naomi said. “It’s pretty
nifty.”

I looked from one side of the street to the other. “Sure,
which one is it?”

“That’s it, there,” Simon said, pointing toward one of
the Victorian apartment buildings behind me.

I turned to see a three-story building, painted in
different shades of blue, ranging from turquoise at the bottom to nearly purple
at the top, with white trim and green shutters. The place had a huge veranda
with hanging plants, dining tables and Adirondack chairs that looked pretty
comfy for lounging or maybe reading. Judging from the outside, definitely a
nice place to live.

“We call it Halfway House,” Naomi said. “I think you’ll
really like it.”

Halfway house? Confused, I looked at Jamie.

“Oh, that’s kind of a joke,” Jamie said. “Not that we
have substance issues or anything like that—we’re just sort of recovering from
whatever did or didn’t happen in our last life. Waiting and preparing, all
that. Nikki came up with the name, now that I think about it.”

“You may not have substance issues,” Nikki said over her
shoulder as she walked toward the house, “but you definitely have issues. Trust
me.”

As soon as we were inside Halfway House, it only took a
second to realize I’d never seen anything like it before. Not even close. For
example, living room? No way. Who uses a living room? Try inside pool, with
lounge chairs all around and “sunlight” shining down from above. This didn’t
seem possible, but there it was all the same. Next to the pool was a snack bar
window with a neon sign that said “Always Open.” I got only that far, then
stopped and stood there taking it in.

“Come on,” Jamie said. “There’s more.”

They walked toward the next room and I followed.

“This is the game room,” Jamie said. “Check it out.
Pretty sure we have it covered.”

Jamie wasn’t kidding—the place was fully loaded. Pool
tables, ping-pong, air hockey. Two bowling lanes, full-sized. Pinball machines,
Wii, PlayStation and Xbox. Not to mention a wall lined with arcade style video
games. For a moment, I wondered how I’d get the money to play those but
something told me it wouldn’t be a problem.

I shook my head and looked around again. “This is
amazing! Not possible, but amazing.”

“Oh, it’s possible,” Nikki said. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t
be here.” She seemed to be enjoying my confusion.

 “You need to see the dining room,” Naomi said. “There
wasn’t anything like it during my last life.”

I followed them into the next room to see a totally
deluxe mall food court, including everything imaginable and some things I’d
never imagined. Chinese, Mexican, burgers and pizza—all those, definitely. But
have you ever heard of Vegan Queen? Chocolate Hut? Neither had I, but there
they were.

“As you probably guessed,” Jamie said, “physical space is
basically meaningless here. This is a pretty big house, but obviously it’s way
bigger on the inside. Except when we don’t want it to be. It’s totally up to
us. Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but at the top of the
stairs there was just a carpeted hallway. Nothing unusual, pretty much what you
would have expected from outside.

“These are our rooms up here,” Jamie said.

“We all have views from the front windows, and back,”
Naomi said. “It’s really neat.”

Since all the bedroom doors lined the same wall, that
didn’t seem possible. But I knew it would be true.

“This is Nikki’s room, here,” Jamie said, as we passed
the first door. “Next to the stairs.”

“In case Jamie gets on my nerves and I have to flee,”
Nikki said.

Jamie cracked a smile. “This one is Naomi’s, then there’s
Simon’s. The next one is mine.” We took a few more steps before he pointed to a
door that stood partly open. From inside the room, I heard music playing. I
recognized the band, My Chemical Romance—one of my favorites. “That one is
yours,” Jamie said. “We think you’ll like it. Feel like maybe having some time
alone?”

 “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” I said. “Kind of
confused right now.”

“Totally understandable.”

The fact was, I also wanted to hang out a little longer.
I’d never met people like them before. Each of them were so different from each
other, but they didn’t seem worried about it. Not like anything I’d experienced
in middle school, definitely, where everyone had seemed so insanely desperate
to fit in. From what I’d heard, high school wasn’t all that different. Maybe
once you got to college, if you survived long enough to get there, you’d
finally be able to breathe. But these guys around me now didn’t seem to really
care and that’s what I liked about them. They seemed like cool people. Okay,
Curtis I couldn’t be sure about yet. Some anger issues there but at least he
was honest. At the same time, Jamie was right about me needing to recover a
little. I definitely needed some alone time to try sorting things out.

Just then, another door caught my eye at the end of the
hall. “Is that Curtis’s room?”

“No, he’s on the third floor,” Naomi said. “He kind of
likes his privacy.”

“Nice way of saying he’s a total creep,” Nikki said.
“There was no third floor before he came along.”

Okay, so the verdict definitely remained out on Curtis.

“That room belongs to Martha,” Jamie said. “You’ll meet
her soon, I’m sure.”

Even though this was the third time someone had mentioned
Martha, I guessed she was probably just a shy dead kid. I figured I’d meet her
sooner or later.

~~~

Once I closed the door, I checked out my room. It wasn’t
gigantic like the spaces downstairs but it was still pretty big. I noticed
right off that it had a desk holding a computer. You guessed it, an iMac, which
kind of creeped me out at first. But I checked to be sure. It went right to
Google, no scenes from my life popping up. For a minute, I got my hopes up but
it was all incoming, no outgoing. Social networking with the living was out of
the question. Come to think of it, my parents might have approved.

The thing is, they’d been at Bethany lately about this
guy she met through her Tumblr blog. In a way, I understood. What did anyone
know about Will other than he was a friend of one of Bethany’s online friends
and that he was also into poetry? The poetry part was weird enough, if you
asked me. But he was also twenty-four, getting ready for graduate school. Yeah,
my parents loved that part. At least he lived in a different state, which made
my parents feel a little better. The whole thing had been an ongoing issue but
now it seemed so small. If only we could go back to that being the big problem.
I felt pretty sure that right now my parents weren’t all that worried about
Bethany’s friendship with Will.

My room also had an HDTV, DVD player and an iPod with
docking station. There were cabinets for storing things (not that I’d brought
anything along) and shelves lined one wall loaded with all sorts of books,
including the manga and graphic novels I loved to read. A quick check of the
closet and dresser showed an array of jeans and T-shirts pretty much the same
as I had back home, not exactly my old clothes but close enough. As promised,
the room had windows at both the front and back, sunlight flowing from two
directions at the same time—kind of strange, but cool at the same time.

Still, it was beyond weird to think that this was where I
now lived. I’d drowned, met a bunch of kids in a tree, slept in a hammock that
had turned into a house which had disappeared again, then gone to my own
funeral. Now I basically had an apartment in a house the size of Texas with an
arcade, food court and inside pool.

I didn’t know what to do with any of it, so I grabbed a
D.
Gray-Man
from the bookshelf and went to stretch out on the bed. I read
about three pages and felt myself fading out again. I remembered what Jamie had
said before. Transitioning was huge, no doubt about it. I just couldn’t keep my
eyes open any longer.

~~~

Again, I didn’t really remember any other dreams. Just the
one about Bethany. This time she was sitting in a room I’d never seen before.
There was almost no light, just a little coming in through one small window. She
sat on a bed staring straight ahead, her eyes dull, her mouth hanging
half-open.

“Bethany,” I said. “I’m here with you. Where are we?”

Bethany didn’t move or look up. Her expression didn’t
change. It was like someone had taken her soul, leaving just this empty shell.

“Bethany, look at me! Can you hear me?”

I heard a noise and looked to see something starting to
cover the window. The room kept growing more dark, the light slipping away.
Soon, Bethany would be left in total darkness. I wasn’t even sure she’d know.

“Bethany, you need to get out of here!”

Then the last bit of light was covered and I couldn’t see
her anymore.

I sat up in bed, my heart hammering in my chest. Someone
was knocking on my door. I felt hot and wiped sweat from my forehead. Until that
moment, I didn’t even know if people “between lives” could sweat, but
apparently we did.

The knocking sounded again.

“Who is it?” I hoped it wasn’t time for another meeting
or funeral.

“My name’s Martha,” a woman said. “I wondered whether it
might be time to check in on you. I can come back later, if you’d prefer.”

I was still freaked by the dream and wasn’t sure I wanted
to meet anyone. At the same time, I was curious and couldn’t see any real
reason for putting her off. So I told her to come in.

The door creaked open and Martha stepped into the room.
She was probably in her late thirties, possibly early forties (I can never
guess at that sort of thing very well). She had long golden hair tied back in a
ponytail and wore faded jeans and a sweatshirt. Her eyes were the bluest I’d
ever seen.

Martha looked around my room. “This is nice. Do you like
it?”

“It’s cool,” I said, not sure if she’d had anything to do
with it. “But I’m still kind of getting used to things.” I got off the bed and
stood facing her.

Martha nodded. “Of course. And you can make changes as
you go. But we thought this might be a good start.”

“It is, definitely. I like it.” I hoped I hadn’t said
anything to hurt her feelings. It seemed like she really cared.

“Good. Did you have any bad dreams?”