Afterworlds

She was my best friend, and I couldn’t say a word about the scariest and most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. I couldn’t tell her about knowing what came after death, or the ghost that haunted my mother, or those five little girls in Palo Alto. And worst of all, I couldn’t tell her about Yama.

Being with him had changed everything. There were energies inside me that I’d never felt before, a psychopomp shine on my skin and fire in my hands. I hadn’t slept in two days. The old man under my bedroom floor was right—I didn’t need to anymore.

I was becoming something else. Something powerful and dangerous.

“Do you hate me?” I asked.

Jamie shook her head. “I didn’t say you had to talk to me, just that you could. But maybe you need some other kind of help.”

“Like a shrink.” Suddenly I was annoyed. Mom had also suggested seeing someone, but it seemed different when a friend said it. “I’m okay, Jamie. In some ways, I’m better than okay. Better than I was.”

There was a glimmer of sadness in her face. “How are you better?”

“Well, some of what I can’t talk to you about, it’s not really bad. It’s more like, um, positive developments.”

Jamie leaned closer, her eyes interrogating mine. My fingers went unbidden to my lips. It felt as though Jamie could see Yama’s heat lingering there.

“Holy crap, Lizzie. You met someone.”

I should have denied it, but I was too surprised. We sat there staring at each other, every second of silence confirming what she’d said.

Jamie shook her head. “I thought you were being kind of perky.”

Something about the way she said “perky” made me giggle.

“Jamie . . . ,” I began, but had nowhere to go. I giggled again.

“Lizzie,” she said back at me. “Did this happen in New York? No, because you would have told me about that already. So you met someone in Dallas?”

A soft moan slipped out of my mouth, as if she were dragging the truth from me. But what I really felt was relief at finally telling someone, along with a happy panic as I tried to figure out what to say. “Yeah. I did.”

“That’s so romantic.” Her eyes were wide and glistening. “At the hospital?”

“No.”

“So, not another patient, and you’re being super cagey about it. You haven’t told Anna about this, have you?”

“Hell no.”

“Aha! So he’s older than you. Or are you being cagey because he’s not a he? Did you switch teams, Lizzie? You know I don’t care if you did.”

“I know, but he’s a he. And yeah, older.” It felt weird saying it that way. Yama might have been born a long time ago, but he hadn’t changed much since he’d left the real world. If Mindy was still eleven, surely Yama was my age. “Kind of older.”

“A hot young paramedic?”

“No,” I said, smiling. Jamie’s guesses would never get her to the truth, of course, but for some reason it felt good to have her trying. It felt normal. “He was just somebody who helped me. And we have . . . a connection.”

“That’s sweet, but ‘just somebody who helped you’? You suck at hinting.”

“Who says I’m hinting?”

She reached across the table and punched me. “I say you are! More hinting, now!”

“Okay,” I said. But what could I tell her that would even make sense? “He knows how to deal with tragedies.”

“Like a grief counselor?”

This was probably as close as she would ever get, so I nodded.

“Deep.” But then she frowned. “Isn’t that kind of unethical? Swooping in on someone who’s totally traumatized?”

“It’s not . . .” I groaned. “He’s not an actual grief counselor, Jamie.”

“You just said he was.”

“Not officially or anything.” This conversation was getting too specific, so I went for vague. “He’s just someone who gave me what I needed to survive all this. When nothing else made sense, he saved me. He’s why I’m not falling apart right now.”

She nodded slowly. “Okay, I like him so far. But he must be in Dallas, right? You know long-distance relationships mostly suck.”

“He’s here sometimes. He travels a lot. Um, for his job.”

“His job? Lizzie, what is he?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Soul guide? Psychopomp? Guardian of the dead?

“It’s a secret,” I spluttered. “His job is a secret.”

There was a long pause as Jamie considered this, while I contemplated the epic corner I had painted myself into. Maybe this was why I hadn’t called Jamie, because she always made me tell her more than I wanted to.

“Wait,” she said a moment later. “He’s some kind of spook, isn’t he?”

“Um, what?”

“It’s obvious.” Jamie started ticking off points on her fingers. “Secret job. Travels a lot. Was at terrorist attack. Good at dealing with tragedies. Age inappropriate.”

“Not that inappropriate. He looks really young.”

“You’re hooking up with a government agent!” she cried. “And how old he looks is what you’re focused on?”

I looked around, wondering if anyone in the diner had managed not to hear Jamie’s outburst. Nobody I recognized was there, but my mom’s friends came to Abby’s all the time. Plus, my face had been on the news a lot lately.

“We should stop talking about this now,” I whispered.

“Because you can neither confirm nor deny.” Jamie checked her phone. “Plus, we should get to school. I’ll pay.”

* * *

A little later we were in the car, watching the road slip past in silence.

This was what I got for opening up. I was stuck with a lie, and a ridiculous one. But if I denied that my secret boyfriend was some sort of secret agent, Jamie would just start asking questions again. And there wasn’t anything true I could tell her that would make as much sense.

For that matter, how much truth did I have to tell? What did I really know about Yama? I had only the vaguest notions about how old he was or where he was from. He’d never even had a chance to finish his story about becoming a psychopomp. Something about a donkey, was all I remembered.

I didn’t know the answers to any of the questions Jamie probably wanted to ask. But I had to say something.

“I know this all seems weird.”

“Yeah, it does.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Part of me wants to believe that you’re just straight-up crazy. Like, you invented a secret-agent boyfriend to make yourself feel safer.”

“Why would you want to believe that?”

“Because then no one’s taking advantage of you,” she said.

I stared at her, my breakfast twisting in my stomach. “He’s not like that.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way, Lizzie. Because in every action movie the girl hooks up with the guy who saves her, like that’s supposed to be normal. But in real life it’d be a pretty messed-up way to fall in love, because your emotions go all haywire when you’re getting shot at. Isn’t it called Stockholm syndrome or something?”

“Um, I think that’s when you fall in love with the terrorist, not the good guy.”

“Right. That would be worse. But you didn’t just hook up with somebody because you were scared, did you?” She pulled her eyes from the road to stare at me.

I shook my head. “It’s not like that at all. In fact, he kept saying it would be better if I forgot the whole attack, even if that meant forgetting him. But I couldn’t. We’re connected, since the first moment I saw him.”

Her eyes were on the road again. “By which you mean, he’s hot.”

“Yeah, he is.” For a moment, I didn’t know where to start, though my body was singing at the thought of describing him aloud. “Brown eyes. Brown skin, too. He’s tall, kind of wiry.” I could still feel the way his muscles moved beneath silk.

“Wiry? You mean he works out?”

“No. He’s more like someone who grew up on a farm.” As I said the words, it fell into place. There’d been lots of manual labor all those years ago.

“Wiry. Okay.”

Suddenly I wanted to tell Jamie everything, or at least everything that would make sense to her. “He’s got this twin sister who’s really important to him. It’s like they have a bond.”

“That’s weird, but cool.” Jamie sighed. “So you hooked up in Dallas? Like, while you were in the hospital?”

“No. It was here, two nights ago. That’s the first time we . . . the first time anything happened.”

“He was here in San Diego? Not stalking you, I hope.”

“No. He just happened to be here. And I’m the one who called him. Like I said, we have this connection. Just trust me on this.”

She turned to stare at me, and it was a long moment before her eyes went back to the road. “Okay. I trust you, Lizzie. And I’m glad someone was there for you. Just be careful.”

“I will be.” Of course, that was a lie. Being careful would mean taking Yama’s advice and forgetting all about the five little girls in Palo Alto. But I couldn’t do that. Mindy needed to know for sure that she was safe from the bad man. And I needed to know that everyone else was too.

I reached out and put my hand gently on Jamie’s, wanting to say something that wasn’t a half-truth. “I’m really glad we talked about this. It all seems more real to me now, just from saying it out loud to you.”

She gave me a smile, our hands parting as she turned the wheel to guide her car into the student parking lot. It was already swarming, groups of friends clumping together, excited to see each other again or mutually depressed about being back at school. It all looked so normal and of-this-world that it made my heart twist a little.

Like I didn’t belong here anymore.

It was strange. When I was in the gray world, I looked out of place, shiny and full of color. But this school parking lot felt foreign as well, too full of life for a psychopomp like me.

That word sucked. I’d started searching online for something better to call myself, but had found only the old standbys like “soul guide” and “grim reaper,” and lots of gods and goddesses with names like Oya, Xolotl, Pinga, and Muut, plus two from Chinese mythology called Ox-Head and Horse-Face.

For obvious reasons, I was still looking.

Jamie drove us carefully through the throng and pulled into an empty spot. The moment I stepped out of the car, people were eyeing me with furtive looks of recognition, a few of them pulling out their phones. But at least there were no TV cameras or reporters. The winter break had lasted just long enough for my survivor fame to recede.

But as Jamie and I headed for the school’s front entrance, I saw a black sedan parked in the street, a lone figure inside watching the students file past.

“Hang on a second,” I said to Jamie, and crossed the strip of lawn between parking lot and street.

The driver’s-side window hummed down as I approached.

“Hey, Special Agent.”

“Good to see you, Miss Scofield.” Elian Reyes was wearing his usual dark suit and sunglasses, and his tie was bright red today.

“It’s good to see you too. But, um . . .”

“To what do you owe the honor of this visit?” His smile gleamed for a moment in the morning sun. “Nothing serious. My agent in charge was concerned about your first day of school.”

“Anything I should know about?”

He gave a little shake of his head. “No new intelligence, Miss Scofield. Simply an abundance of caution.”