Charlotte was awakened from her daydream by a faint whistling sound. Kind of like a solo flute warming up in the band room. Looking around, Charlotte could not tell for the life of her where the sound originated. She put her finger in her ear, twirled it around, and hoped the noise would stop. It didn’t, so she tried her best to ignore it, turning her attention back to the forms. The top of the first page read “New Student.”
“Ah, so I guess this does mean that I got A.P. classes for next year!” She trumpeted proudly, hoping to impress the girl.
In her excitement, she started filling out the paperwork quickly, barely reading the questions.
As her slender fingers glided over the questions at a lightning pace, she became increasingly leery as she read them out loud:
“ ‘Full Name, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Sex…’ ”
“Sex?… Yes, please!” Charlotte said out loud, trying yet again to get the girl’s attention, but to no avail.
“ ‘Organ donor’?” Charlotte read, just a little less giddily. “Wow, they need to know everything.”
She continued to fill out the sheet as best she could, arriving at the end of the form and her patience at just about the same time. The last box read “C.O.D.”
“C.O.D.?” Charlotte said aloud, now totally exasperated. “Cash On Delivery? I shouldn’t have to pay for A.P. classes. This is public school.”
She left that space blank and returned the paperwork and the pen to the secretary, who handed back a tag with Charlotte’s name on it, attached to a very small elastic band.
“Here’s your ID,” the secretary snapped.
“Ah, thanks,” Charlotte replied, not quite sure why she needed a new ID, but way too intimidated to ask.
Charlotte pulled the tag out of the secretary’s cold, clenching grasp and put it on her wrist. Although it was super-tight, she kept it on and didn’t say a word.
The secretary stamped Charlotte’s papers as “received” and then approached a jumbo stainless steel filing cabinet.
“Okay. One more thing… I need you to confirm…” She paused, turned, and nonchalantly opened a large drawer. “… That this is YOU, and initial here.”
Charlotte was stunned. She could not believe what she was seeing. There it was. Her silent and graying corpse, still wearing her first-day-of-school outfit, lying still on the metal slab right before her very eyes. She wanted to faint, but she was paralyzed.
For the first time, she began to feel the cold in the room creep along her skin. She grabbed her wrist and pressed for her pulse. Nothing. She brought both palms to her chest to feel for her heart, which should have been pounding by now. But there was no beat. Freaked and shuddering, she moved closer to the cadaver and poked it gingerly in each limb, hoping for a reaction. Again, nothing. The final straw: an opened package of GUMMY BEARS protruding from her pocket with the culprit, the murderer, in a ziplock bag pinned to her chest. It wasn’t a trick. This WAS her!
“C.O.D… Cause Of Death,” the secretary instructed, pointing to the candy as she broke out in a grin.
Charlotte recoiled in an effort to distance herself from the corpse and tripped, hitting a huge industrial metal fan on the desk. It fell directly on her forearm, catching her hand in the blades.
Helpless, she watched as, one by one, her fingers were chopped off right at the middle knuckle by the twirling scythes. Her digits went flying off in every direction, spraying the room. She clenched her eyes shut and waited for the pain and the nauseating warmth of spurting blood to arrive. But it never came.
Confused, she mustered all her courage and opened both eyes ever so slowly and looked. Her hand, which should have been mangled, gnarled, and torn to pieces, was completely unscathed. She held it up and examined it over and over, mesmerized.
The girl in the waiting room approached just as Charlotte desperately tried to digest the reality of the surreal moment.
“Nothing can hurt you anymore,” the girl said matter-of-factly. “I’m Pam… and you’re, well, you’re…” Pam said as she bent down to help Charlotte up.
“No, please don’t say…” Charlotte begged.
“… Dead,” Pam whispered, directly into Charlotte’s ear.
Her words blew through Charlotte’s ear and into her mind like a blustery winter wind, and as they did, the haze of her own obliviousness began to clear. Looking around the room now, it was as if someone had hit the “rewind” button on her day. She saw everything from a different, almost third-person perspective, noting things that she hadn’t before.
It was all so obvious. The loudspeaker announcement, the cold basement, the “waiting” room. She looked around and started to notice things that she hadn’t before, like the unnatural blue tint of the secretary’s nails, the morgue-like filing cabinets in the back, the examination lights. And, of course, the gummy bear.
Charlotte screamed with such intensity that no sound came from her mouth. It was an otherworldly scream, one that can only be produced through sheer and utter terror.
“You’re dead,” echoed through her mind and rattled her soul as she ran out of the room and into the stairwell.
4
Why Me?
All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Destiny is the best defense mechanism.
It offers solace that there is order in the Universe and saves a lot of time and effort explaining the unexplainable—especially to yourself. Charlotte was gradually becoming less of a skeptic and more of a believer. It was definitely easier—and more importantly, it worked to her advantage. She believed because she had to.
Why me? Why me?” Charlotte repeated, not really expecting an answer, but hoping that the more times she uttered the question, the clearer her situation would become, and just maybe she could find the solution. That’s how she approached her Trig homework, by repeating the problem out loud to herself, and it always produced results. She prided herself on her self-reliance.
She recalled a fact that most people had heart attacks on Monday, the first day of the week. She died on the first day of school, when everything was on the brink of going her way. Why was this happening? Why did it happen after Fate paired her and Damen as lab partners? She needed answers.
Charlotte raced up the staircase, still screaming, burst through the unmarked door into the hallway, and screeched to a stop at the sight of Pam directly in front of her. She thought that if she ran fast enough, she could escape from the nightmare she was living, or not living, as the case might be.
“You can’t run from this…,” Pam said calmly as Charlotte, spooked beyond words, turned completely around and tried. Rounding the corner of the newly waxed hallway, she noticed there was no echo to her footsteps, no squeaking from the rubber on the bottoms of her shoes.
With each turn, BAM!—there was Pam. Charlotte grabbed her heart, but then remembered that there was nothing to clench. Her heart was not beating. Her chest felt like it was a hollow cavity encasing a cold, hard rock.
“You can’t run from this…,” Pam repeated as Charlotte scurried away.
Trying desperately to escape the wraith, and the reality closing in on her, Charlotte headed instinctively for the Physics classroom. What better place to find answers than the scene of the crime? As she entered, Charlotte noticed she’d stepped over something, but wasn’t quite sure what it was. She turned around and looked down to see a chalk outline of a body. Her body.
“An empty shell. That’s how they’ll remember me now,” she said despondently, considering that this generic, sexless, roughly drawn, gingerbread cookie–like figure was now to be her last, as well as lasting, impression on the Hawthorne student body.
It was the scene of the crime, all right. The crime against all that is unjust in society. The crime against humanity. The societal ranking system laid out right there on the ground for all to walk over.
Dying was horrible enough, but to die in such a pathetic and stupid way… c
hoking on a bear-shaped semisoft gelatinous candy was an indignity almost too much for Charlotte to bear. It would validate everything they’d always thought about her and confirm her worst fears about herself. She couldn’t even chew right.
What was left to do other than punish herself a little bit more? So she lay down on her back, arms and legs splayed, configuring herself exactly to the outline, in a gesture of surrender. A sort of morbid snow angel, if you will.
And for just a second, everything seemed just a little bit funny. Cruelly, ironically funny. The final and most appropriate in a series of embarrassing pranks ever to be played on her, and she was in on the joke. Mr. Widget was right. Fate had intervened in her day, her life, but not exactly as she had hoped. Not nearly.
“God must really have quite a sense of humor,” she thought, staring upward.
Then, speaking of “God,” something not so funny crossed her mind. She hadn’t seen or heard anything from the Big Guy, or Big Gal, as the case might be. Best to remain PC, she cautiously thought, as now, everything counted.
She’d spent a lifetime being judged. How bad could this be? The fleeting thought of her luck getting worse was more than enough motivation, however, to get her up from the classroom floor.
Charlotte straightened herself up, paused mournfully over the outline as one might at a grave, and walked slowly toward the door. Stepping back into the hallway, she could see Pam pointing ominously at something—kind of like one of those Ghosts of Christmas Whatever. It was her locker. Number Seven.
“Yeah, what a lucky number,” Charlotte said, dripping sarcasm.
The locker was shut tightly by caution tape. No evidence of tampering by the other kids, which was pretty insulting, actually. It meant that no one was even curious enough about her stuff—about her—to steal anything. She walked away, a strand of the caution tape stuck to her foot like a piece of wayward toilet paper.
“This is NOT happening,” Charlotte moaned, closing her eyes to wish it all away. As she opened them again, Pam reappeared, but Charlotte was a little less startled than before. “How long have I been… gone?” she asked tentatively.
“I don’t know exactly,” Pam answered matter-of-factly. “Time doesn’t really mean anything here.”
“You mean I could be… gone… for, like, a thousand years already?” Charlotte pondered.
“Probably not,” Pam said, and pointed silently again, this time toward a window. “Look.”
Charlotte looked out toward the parking lot in front of the school, where a group of classmates were gathering around a minibus as yet another announcement came over the loudspeaker.
“Attention, students! Any of you who would like to attend the Charlotte Usher Memorial, please report to the courtyard. The bus will be departing shortly.”
Charlotte could not believe what she was seeing. If it were still possible, a tear might have come to her eye. There was a small group of people waiting to board the bus for her memorial.
Could it be that dying had made her more popular than she ever imagined? Her mind started swimming wild with possibilities. What would they say about her at the memorial? Would anyone, dare she even hope, weep? Might there even be an outpouring of emotion in the community? Official Days of Mourning. She was filled with anticipation. This was suddenly really… exciting.
Charlotte was shaken from her reverie by an even more baffling development. There, in the middle of the throng, was Petula and the Wendys—crying! Charlotte could not believe it. Was this heaven after all? Maybe she was now the same as all those writers and artists who were ignored during their lifetimes but revered in the end. She had become perfect in death. Canonized, by even her greatest detractors. Maybe even Damen would miss her now.
These comforting thoughts lasted for about as long as it took Charlotte to puff out her flat chest in pride. It wasn’t collective grief that attracted Petula and the Wendys after all, but the cameras and notepads of the school press corps, and the promise of an early dismissal for the day. Charlotte braced herself and listened through the open window to the reporter’s questions… and Petula’s answers.
“I ate half a gummy bear for lunch just yesterday,” Petula said as she “sobbed,” studiously wiping at her eyeliner with the French-manicured tip on her index finger, all the while sneaking a peek at her makeup in Sam’s A/V video monitor. “It could have been me!”
“She’s a gummy bear survivor!” Wendy Anderson chirped to the reporters like a junior publicist as both Wendys held Petula, trying desperately to comfort her.
Leave it to Petula to jockey for face time by selfishly playing victim and sucking the air out of her memorial! And as much as Charlotte hated it, she admired it. Envied it, even. It was hard for Charlotte to sort out whether Petula just found it impossible to give up the limelight to anyone else or that she just couldn’t let a great opportunity to promote herself go by. The end result was the same either way, she guessed. It was all about Petula.
As the press opportunity ended, camera crews packed up their equipment, and Petula commanded the Wendys to TiVo the local cable access channel, Charlotte noticed the rest of the slackers swinging their arms through backpacks like parachutes, high-fiving each other, a sure sign the day was over. Yes, they cared. They cared about skipping school.
“Let’s see now,” Charlotte recounted, turning away from the window, “I’m dead AND forgotten.”
Pam watched her meltdown begin and said nothing. Charlotte was grieving for herself, which was normal, but was also becoming unusually unstable. At least Pam didn’t have to worry about Charlotte missing her family. Dead teens didn’t. They were way too self-involved.
Charlotte’s “Why me?” mantra now changed to “Why not me?” as glimpses of her geeky and loser-ish self began to re-emerge. There was no point repressing it any longer. Summer was over and everything, literally everything, was lost.
“Why couldn’t something bad have happened to Petula?” Charlotte ranted spitefully. “Maybe it will,” she hoped. “But, then,” she continued, catching herself mid-argument, “if something like this happened to someone like Petula, it would make national news, wouldn’t it? Gummy bears would be pulled off every shelf. There would be national hearings on gummy bear safety. CNN would declare gummy bears the new bird flu. There would be ‘team coverage’ on the gummy bear crisis. Not to mention the televised memorials every year. Damen would send red roses to her grave anonymously on a weekly basis for the rest of his life. Hawthorne High would be re-named in her honor. Church bells would toll commemorating the exact moment of her passing. Not for what she ever did in her life, but for who she was. She would be a hero.”
Charlotte continued to babble at Pam and complain self-pityingly.
“… And me?” Charlotte pondered. “I’m a chalk outline that people stepped on, not over. An inconvenience for the authorities. A lot of paperwork, not even worth a moment of silence.”
She felt cheated.
“Are you through?” Pam asked.
“Almost,” Charlotte said.
“Take your time,” Pam replied, the first notes of sympathy sounding in her voice.
But it was the other notes Charlotte was hearing that really got her attention. A faint whistling. The kind she’d heard in the office. This time there was no doubt about the source of the melancholy tones.
“What the heck is that noise coming out of your mouth?” Charlotte asked.
“Let me officially introduce myself,” she said, extending her hand to Charlotte. “I’m Piccolo Pam.”
“Piccolo?” Charlotte giggled.
“It’s my death name,” Pam answered.
“Death name?” Charlotte asked, realizing she didn’t have one and feeling excluded once again.
“Yeah, it’s like a nickname that some of us acquire, only it usually has to do with the way we died,” Pam said. “You don’t always get one right away. Don’t take it personally.”
How could she not? Charlotte thought what her “death
name” might be and was becoming increasingly dismayed at the potential for perpetual humiliation a stupid death name might hold.
“I’m Piccolo Pam because I tripped while showboating, allegedly, at the all-county band parade and swallowed my piccolo.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Charlotte said.
“Yeah, me too, but at least I went out doing something I loved and that I was really good at,” Piccolo Pam replied.
“Yeah…,” Charlotte said softly.
“And I died during my solo, so no one will ever forget it. That’s what matters,” Piccolo Pam added proudly.
“Yeah…,” Charlotte repeated blankly. She was clearly overwhelmed, trying desperately to make sense of everything.
Piccolo Pam smiled and put her arm around Charlotte. She squeezed her a few times, trying to cheer her up.
“It’s not all bad,” Pam joked. “Look at it this way, at least you don’t have to shave anymore!”
Charlotte still wasn’t sure if God had a sense of humor, but Pam sure did.
“Not that bad?” Charlotte said, bug-eyed with indignation. “I’m going to be known as a ‘choker’ for all eternity!”
As she grew more upset at the thought, Charlotte’s throat tightened and she coughed a few times, as if on cue.
“Don’t stress about the name thing,” Pam said, attempting to ease Charlotte’s insecurity. “Right now, you need to get oriented.”
Pam grabbed Charlotte’s hand and led her away.
5
Death for Dummies
A ghost is someone who hasn’t made it.
—Sylvia Browne
Time will tell all things.
The past was pretty much irrelevant now—a closed door—other than the fact that it had led her to the present. The present was terribly uncertain, a place of fear and doubt—restless. But the future existed to allay those fears, and to make both the past and the present bearable. The future was a place where all Charlotte’s hopes and dreams lived. And now she was all out of future.