10
The next day, I take my first Lovelesson, a sort of therapy session for the dead. Most humans wreck and waste their lives, this is unavoidably true. But so do we, with our second lives. But there is a place that can make us learn. It is a place to get help, and to help in return. And when I learned of its existence, I was hooked. To make us into better versions of our former selves, we are given Lovelessons. We are shown visions from our lives during which we failed to give love, and we must atone by going forth and fostering good in the lives of the ones who still have them – sort of like a make-it-right from the sky. Because second lives are about achieving perfection. Not with glossy hair or long, toned legs – we don’t have the bodies for that. (Or bodies, period.) We are interested in perfecting our souls. At the end of the day, after all, a soul is all we really have. So Lovelessons are the postmortems of our lives. An autopsy of all we were. A blueprint of all we can be.
I feel a roaring sound and close my eyes, and suddenly I am sitting in my sixth grade Home Economics class. It is exactly as I remember it: the industrial carpet smells like dust and chalk, and the walls are covered in weeks-old announcements. I can’t believe how seamlessly I fall back into this world, how natural it feels to be sitting in a room reeking of boredom and pencil shavings. I guess some places never leave you, no matter how long you’ve been gone.
I look over, and there I am. Shy, pulled into myself, hair covering my scar. Perpetually withdrawn. I want to slap myself, to scream everything I have learned up here before I have to leave, but it would be useless. My life has already happened, and I have already made all my mistakes. But, dear God, if I could tell this girl what I know now…
I sense that someone is in distress, and I look over and see Mary-Katherine Frisch. And I understand fully why I have been sent here. I failed this girl. I can feel it everywhere. This was a test that I did not pass, and now I have been sent back to observe and correct.
Brent Mallet, the class basketball star, is sitting behind her, and he is angry today. At the time of this vision I looked at his behavior and assumed he was simply cocky and popular, but now I see his home life: I see belts being raised into the air, screams, bruises hidden under long-sleeved shirts and arrogant smiles. And today Brent will unleash this misguided anger on the underlings of his class. It is something I both understand and abhor. How much better would the world be for humans if they stopped heaping their anger onto each other and found somewhere better to put it? Never was there a more dangerous combination than a small mind and a heart full of hatred.
He tapped Mary-Katherine on the shoulder. She looked back and groaned.
“Hey, Free Willy – I heard the school ran out of chicken fingers,” he whispered. “Did you break into the cafeteria again, sweetpea?”
She rolled her eyes in a way that was so forced, it makes me want to look away. “Oh, gosh. No, I didn’t. Mind your own beeswax.”
His smile grew. “I would, but you ate all of it. By the way, there’s a new shipment of chairs coming tomorrow, I hear you cleaned out the school’s supply by breaking them all?”
I looked over at myself. Old Me pretended I didn’t hear. New Me wanted to shield Mary-Katherine, to protect her from the wrath of this misguided boy. New Me was also less than vapor.
As Mary-Katherine wilted like a dead flower I think of all the times I was singled out for being different because of my medical conditions, all the suffering I was forced to endure under the hands of people who were confused and scared and lashing out. Every rude stare, every condescending dismissal, every time someone tried to be nice and just ended up singling me out even more and treating me like some injured puppy. And that is why I am here: to provide my skill set to someone in exchange for not helping Mary-Katherine.
Earth is a hard rock to live on, and all of us are damaged in different ways on the journey from the cradle to the grave. Many humans give themselves over to the fear and let the black parts of their souls take control. They become mean and bitter and they lash out with abandon. But do not hate these people – pity them. For the wicked are weak, as they have given up on trying to stay in touch with the good in themselves. All humans contain good and bad at the core of their souls – this is a natural duality. But only the strong can deny their wickedness, push down the fear, and choose to float through this world in clouds of kindness. The good are strong because they choose to do no wrong – admire them. Being evil is easy, loving can be hard. But love always wins, because it is in the hearts of the strong that it will always live on and prosper.
And this is humanity: billions of lost souls, damaged in a million different ways, stumbling about as they try to get to happy, either by locking their jagged edges into someone else and hoping their scars will fit into their own, or by soothing their wounds by sinking the knife into anyone else who will bear their burden. Will you insert the blade to dull your own pain, or will you choose to love?
On this day, my middle school self chose to ignore all this. I watched Mary-Katherine sit there, slumped against the back of her chair, her muscles tense. As Brent went on and on, she looked at me with pleading eyes, as I was the only one within earshot. And now I know why I have been shown this scene: I could’ve done so much. I understood her pain. I’d had the wrath of Brent himself directed at me.
Please, she was thinking. Please talk to me. Please get me out of this hell.
I saw my thoughts next.
…I just got made fun of for the scar, they called me Scarlet O’Hara again…I can’t have any more teasing, not after they called me Gone With the Wind last week…
I already had enough to deal with, so I cut my eyes. But there was so much I could’ve done. It would’ve been so easy to hug her after class. It would’ve been so easy to give her some of myself. I observed the hell she lived in, and I did nothing.
Up until then, Mary-Katherine had been trying to maintain her weight, but that night she ate an entire tub of sherbet she’d stolen from the garage refrigerator. She found that it comforted her, and she did the same thing the next night, with some corndogs thrown in. Down on Earth, she was now nearly three hundred pounds, and her organs were already declining in function. I could have saved her.
I never had a clue that her fate had something to do with me. She was already on her own path, but still, I could’ve done something. I could’ve helped her. And I didn’t. So much of her fate involved me, and yet I thought we were just strangers.
And the funniest thing was that she still attended my funeral. Fourth row, black pants, dark glasses. She was there. For me.
So today, I return the favor. I couldn’t do anything for her then, back when I was suffocating under my own humanity. But I can now.
Mary-Katherine is now a good-natured, generous adult. Her great love is music, and for five years she has slaved away as a local singer, performing in tiny cafes and forgotten little coffee shops. Her voice is soft and delicate and gorgeous, a spider web glistening with dew on a sunny morning, but most people ignore her. It does not occur to most humans in their narrow-mindedness that someone could be A. fat, and B. also be good at something. Some people in the crowds even crack jokes about her weight – jokes she pretends not to notice. But she does, and it is eating away at her inside. So I visit her at a gig one day. I can sense it – she’s about to give up. Nobody cares about her, nobody buys her albums, all they ever do is snigger and roll their eyes and call her a whale and a wide load and a pig. In all her years of singing, not one person has ever stopped and complimented her, recognized her, validated her. And she’s afraid it’s all been too much. She’s afraid she might be done. She’s afraid she might go silent.
None of this will happen if I have anything to do with it. I find a photographer on the street outside who happens to work with a viral blog that showcases humans at their most heartbreakingly sincere moments. Something funny tells him to stop. He walks inside the cafe, and another weird feeling – me – tells him to talk to the sturdily-built singer in the corner. He approaches her and tells her about his job, she lets her guard down and confesses her view that her whole life has been a waste, and he takes her photo and posts it along with her quote. The post quickly gains thousands of comments from sympathetic strangers, and her case goes viral within hours. The comments on her YouTube videos from new fans will break her open and make her weep for hours. “GORGEOUS!!!” Joanne Christenson from Tampa will write. “The voice of an angel!” Hilda Tremere from Norway will share. Mary-Katherine will appear on several local morning shows, and there will even be a write-up about her in a national newspaper. Her fame won’t last long, and the compliments will fade, but it won’t matter: the music will have found a home in her again. She will remember those few weeks of glory and love and kindness for the long haul. For the first time, the world will look at Mary-Katherine Frisch and see past the fat and the muumuus and the unhappiness. They will see her soul.
And from that day on, the music never stops.
I soar back home with a new sense of purpose in my soul. I will save lives now that I know the truth. And so I go Dreamskipping (more on that in a second). I want to insert some happiness into the world. Because maybe this is another goal of our second world: to right the wrongs of the first world. And not just our own wrongs, but humanity’s wrongs as a whole, too. Maybe they were just waiting for me to discover that on my own. I have let myself become so myopic: the world is about so much more than a dead girl and her alive love. And I have one last quest for the day. I must right this wrong. I must get over the heartbreak of my dream boy falling for someone else in front of my horrified eyes.
Monica Quintal is stressed. I can feel it in her dreams, which I intercept over suburban Dallas late in the night, filtering up into the wispy clouds like bubbles from a child’s wand. So I pause over the spider web of diamonds spread across the Texas hills and listen in to find out why.
I feel her story immediately. Her daughter Rita was always a quiet baby, and at first Monica chalked it off to a sweet personality. But when her doctors said Rita was failing to thrive, she started getting truly concerned. Currently Rita could not walk or eat or even speak. Tomorrow the school board was meeting to see if Rita would even be allowed to attend a public school, or if she’d have to be sent across town to a special center for what they called “invalids.” And Monica didn’t know how much longer she could do this. She just wanted to look into her daughter’s eyes and see that life burned within them. And all she saw was nothing. Having a disabled child was a sadness that a parent carried, too. They were both blue.
The sadness crushed her. Literally: she would wake up and feel the plight of her daughter descend on her, flopping onto her like an elephant had taken a seat on her bed. Rita was incapacitated, and it was an unavoidable misery. What would happen to her? Who would take care of her when Monica died? Who else was ever going to love her?
When her fiancé left, Monica walked on. When her parents died and left her to fend for herself, she walked on. When she lost her second job, she walked on. But lately Monica was tired of walking. Sometimes, when the lights went out, she feared the only thing tethering her to life was her daughter. Things were looking doubtful, and hope and money were running thin. Monica loved her daughter, but she was wondering when all this would pay off, why she gave away all of herself and seemed to get nothing in return. All everyone did was leave her. Rita was worth every sleepless night, every stare from strangers who don’t understand. But still, she was doing terribly, nothing seemed to help, and the world was perpetually stacked against them both.
I stop and think, accessing the memories of others to ride history. Monica has no idea, but I can see her Lovehall, and it is the grandest mansion anyone could ever hope for. Titans of business and heads of states will have nothing compared to her; billionaires will be paupers next to her. She deserves the world – she gave birth to a very flawed piece of herself and loved that human through thick and thin. Nobody has ever deserved more, actually. And when Rita dies at age sixteen, Monica will fall apart, but she will put herself back together and stand up again. She is a winner, even though she fears she is not. And she does not need to fret, because her daughter is headed to the good side. She is headed for freedom. And I want Monica to know it. I want her to know that her daughter knows of her sacrifice, and that all of this is not for nothing. I want to give her the comfort I never gave poor Mary-Katherine during my first life.
So I do what I can to make up for my middle school failure: I send Monica a vision of what she is waiting for. As she sleeps, her current dream stops, and suddenly she sees a scene of herself laughing next to her daughter – except it cannot be her daughter at all, because she is standing up. In her dream, Monica looks closer, and oh my God: it really is her. It is Rita, and she is standing up on a playground, laughing. And for the first time ever, she is aware of her surroundings, and there is a sense of understanding in her eyes. They are in heaven together, free at last, and Rita is walking and talking and doing all the things she never could on Earth, while she was constrained by her condition. This reunion will occur in thirty-eight years when Monica succumbs to a stroke, and I flash the date in Monica’s brain to let her know it.
Then, in the vision, Rita turns to her mother and does something she’d never been able to do while she was alive: she thanks her mommy.
Monica gasps and jolts awake with tears in her eyes. She looks over at her daughter’s door across the hall as her heart pounds, a new sense of strength dropping into her bones. Rita will be free one day. I show her another glimpse of the future, and Monica sees it all at once: Rita will stand on her own two feet, she will walk and talk and be able to voice all the thoughts in her brain. She will thank her mother for all she has done. She will live, even though she will be dead. She will finally find a full life in the afterlife, and Monica has never been more grateful and encouraged. She will never wake up and want to roll back under her covers again, now that she knows what awaits her daughter on the other side.
Because the world will have to throw a lot more than a disability and a worthless lover at Monica Quintal to break her. After all, she came from a long line of strong women – winners, fighters, warriors. Her grandmother was one of the first Latina nurses in Louisiana, and her mother overcame a marriage to a drunk and a severe case of diabetes to earn a law degree late in her life. Success runs in the Quintal blood, and even after Rita is lowered into the red Texas dirt, Monica will carry on. She will rise. She will win. And now she knows it.
I smile and float on. There is so much work to be done, now that I am dead. Now that I know better.
~
Just as I hit the grey area, though, something strange happens: I intercept a crying, disconsolate soul who has just been spit out of the Confluence. As a human, she was about my age, and very beautiful. She has a strange mark on her chest, like a hastily-healed scar, and I feel something pulling me towards her, linking us. Instantly, I know.
“He did it!” I call, and I soar to her. “The surgeon did it to you, too!”
She looks up at me as I embrace her, then sobs into my shoulder, frantic. “Oh my God,” she repeats over and over again. “Oh my God. I’m dead. I’m dead! He killed me!”
All the rage in the world explodes in my soul, a mushroom cloud in my spirit. “I know. I know. I’ll help you, I promise.”
“How?”
I wave my hands and conjure the most beautiful tropical beach in the galaxy. This seems to help her a bit. “Hey,” she says, “I was supposed to get married on a beach like this next month, in the Turks and Caicos. We’d even picked out the table settings. It’s pretty.”
“I know,” I say. “And it only gets prettier. But what happened? How did he kill you?”
The anger returns, fire surging into her eyes. “His mistress called him during surgery, and he took the call! I could hear him talking about going out for a steak dinner in the next room when one of my machines malfunctioned and I left my body. He killed me!”
I let her cry onto me again, sisters in death.
“I can’t believe this is happening!” she says, casting a glance down at the Earth, horror in her eyes. “I don’t want to be here. I wasn’t done yet! Everyone else here seems so content, but I want out! I would give anything to be back with my boyfriend and my mom for just one more minute…I didn’t even get to say goodbye to them, and-”
“Oh, sweetie,” I say as I pat her, “you just got forever with them. You just don’t understand how yet. And you need to know something else, too.”
I lean in and whisper to her, because I know what is coming for the surgeon. Her eyes grow wide as she listens. And soon she is not crying so hard anymore.