“What kinda curve do they grade these kids on? A roller coaster?” Death griped as he slipped the report card back into the girl’s backpack like a ghost, and then slipped his gaunt, immaterial hand into another one nearby.
Death stood outside the girls’ bathroom that was itself flanked between two rows of lockers currently being utilized by the students milling around after the final bell.
He couldn’t figure out why Jennifer was taking so long to manifest, but as long as she wasn’t trying to escape, which was next to impossible, he could only wait until she was done with Meg.
However, it didn’t mean he couldn’t do something to kill the boredom, and being snarky was a good way to relieve him of that. With a ghostly hand through the indiscriminate book bag, he would pull out report cards or girls’ journals, completely invisible to the victims’ simple senses, and peruse them to his cynical heart’s desire. Another caught his fancy.
“Man, what’s with these kids’ grades? Is this a report card, or an eye chart?” he joked. He reached over and snatched another from a no-necked student with seemingly an over-abundance of brawn and, as Death surmised, a severe lack of brain.
“Heh! Well, this one was obviously hungry. It clearly says, ‘FEED’!”
And on it went.
The fact that Death decided to stand guard outside the bathroom, made Meg’s bathroom experience more uncomfortable than it needed to be, otherwise she wouldn’t have stayed in her stall nearly so long. Time, however, dictated her decision to vacate the premises.
Washing her hands in the now-empty bathroom, she wondered why she didn’t see Jennifer all day. She risked looking even more socially unacceptable by glancing and occasionally turning at otherwise innocent, ambient sounds, trying too hard to find and force a connection to the ghost of Jennifer, just to get the suspense over with.
“She’s turning me into a nervous wreck,” she said to herself while rinsing her hands. “Hearing things. Even got my friends looking at me strange. I can’t have that! They’re the only friends I have that’ll hang out with me without a retainer!”
“Gee, Meg. Do you always talk to yourself?”
Meg looked up at the sound, preparing to give another sad excuse as to why she was in the depths of her own soliloquy, when she saw in the mirror in front of her, the still youthful, still blissfully happy face of Jennifer.
“Hi!” Jennifer sang.
Meg turned around in a panic to address the girl directly, but only saw stalls across from her. Not turning further, she glanced right and left, both hoping and fearing to see her ghost in the room. It was still vacant despite the number of children outside it.
“Oh, come on, Meg,” said Jennifer by way of placating. “It’s just us girls. You can talk to me. Death will make sure nobody walks in on us. We have so much to catch up on.”
Meg took a breath and calmly turned to face the mirror again. Walking slowly to it, she said as evenly as her command over her fear allowed her to, “I guess we do. So, what have you been up to? Hell of a way to-”
She mentally kicked herself for the poor choice of phrase and tried again. “I mean, heck...heck of a way...I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say to a ghost.”
“‘Hi there’, is always a good start,” Jennifer offered brightly.
Meg fought her fear and looked into Jennifer’s face. She hadn’t changed a bit. Same short, red, regimental haircut, same beatific eyes that always seemed to see something beyond whatever happened to be in front of her, same dark blue jogging suit that was the standard dress of her cult. It was as if they had just met all over again. As if that sad moment in both their lives, afterwards, didn’t happen.
But it did, and the knowledge of that transmuted her fear into an ache of sympathy that made her want to open up to her again. Chuckling in her foolishness, Meg said with a nervous, lopsided smile, “Hi there.”
“Hi, Meg. I really missed you.”
“I missed you, too. I didn’t know you died that day until Death told me yesterday. What happened?”
Jennifer’s face, incredibly, began to sag in her memories of afterwards.
“We all drank a toast to your father. I remember that now, because he truly opened our eyes that day. We all wanted so much to be accepted and loved, that we forgot that our love came from our families, no matter how dysfunctional.”
“Yeah,” Meg said in wistful admiration of Peter, in one of the truly rare moments when she was proud to call him father. “He’s got that effect on people.”
“We suddenly saw that we didn’t need the cult any more,” Jennifer continued, trying to cheer up and sounding sadly perky. “And so we raised our cups of punch to the man and drank. I suddenly felt really weak and passed out, and the next thing I knew, I was in Limbo and was being told by an angel that we were there because our paperwork was missing, somehow, and chances are, we’d have to wait before being judged.”
“Yeah. Death told me about that,” Meg said. “Huh, you’d think Heaven could keep better records about that sort of thing.”
“They said that ever since Jethro Tull won the Grammy for Best Metal Band, the cosmic order’s been out of balance ever since. Anyway, suicides aren’t looked very favorably where I am, and if it can be proven that we willfully committed suicide, I’m afraid I’ll be going to...The Bad Place, Meg.”
The fear-lined face of Jennifer was counterbalanced by the worried countenance of Meg. She had no desire to see her friend fated to damnation, but at the same time, she couldn’t fathom what on earth could she possibly do to shield her from that.
“Well,” Meg started tentatively, uncertain as to how to help, and careful not to jump into anything too quickly. “What do you want me to do?”
If that sense of trepidation was evident in Meg’s face and voice, Jennifer hadn’t yet noticed. She was too busy lighting up the mirror she spoke through with a hopeful grin.
“We want you to defend us!” she chirped.
Meg’s brain felt like a record that skipped a logical groove. “Come again?”
“No, really, it’s easy! You just have to come to our trial as our defense attorney and put in a good word for us. William Kuntzler does it all the time,” Jennifer explained eagerly without batting an eye.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Jennifer, do you hear yourself? I can’t be an attorney. I don’t know the first thing about law. You need someone who knows you guys inside and out. I only knew you for a few days, and the cult, I hardly knew, so I can’t help you there.”
“But-”
“Plus, what if I don’t do a good enough job convincing whoever that you guys are innocent?
“But, I believe in you, Meg!
Meg brought her hands up to silence this obviously desperate foolishness. “Stop it, Jen! There’s no way I could live with myself if I wound up having a hand in slam dunking you into Hell if I screwed up.”
“I don’t think you’ll screw up, Meg. You’ve got to have more faith in yourself. We’ll be behind you all the way.” Jennifer implored, her confident perkiness dissolving to reveal the bare bones of her fear, though she tried to sound otherwise. “If your father could convince us of the error of joining the Heaven’s Helpers Youth Cult, then the daughter of Peter Griffin could do no less.”
Meg didn’t know what was more disturbing, Jennifer’s request, or the fact that the girl was actually looking up to her father.
A stray thought about time seized Meg and made her remember. She had places to go and things yet to do, but first, she had to tear those dangerous, rose-colored glasses from her friend’s begging eyes. “Yes, I could. Look, I don’t want you to be punished, but I don’t how to help you, either.”
Perhaps it was the honesty of Meg’s words, or maybe it was the undignified and unconvincing concealment of fear she heard coming from her own lips, but Jennifer finally fell into a shamed silence.
“I’m sorry, Meg,” Jennifer said, surrendering. Through the tones in her voice, Meg knew now what a doomed soul sounded like. “I guess I shouldn’t have listened to him when he said he knew you.”
“He who?”
“Death. I heard him talking about your family one day.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. He said that your family were a bunch of trouble-making, air-sucking meat-freaks, and then he said-”
“Never mind,” Meg said flatly.
“Anyway, he reminded me of the day you and I met. You were so nice to me. All the other kids teased the other Helpers and me, but you were different, Meg. That’s why I asked Death to get in touch with you while there was still time. You can do this.”
“No, I can’t, and after I’m finished here, I’m going to find Death and introduce him to a sledge hammer.” Meg broke off from her contemplation of smashing smart-alecky bones to look at Jennifer sadly. “I’m so sorry, Jennifer. I wish you could go to Heaven, but Death shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up. It’s his fault-”
Now it was Jennifer’s turn to raise a hand to silence Meg, after wiping an ethereal tear away. “No. No, it’s not,” she sobbed quietly. “I was...just desperate, I guess. It’s just bad breaks, that’s all. I was just...scared and being selfish, and I didn’t think about your feelings, Meg. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to burden you.”
Her last words were trailing like the end of a song as she began to fade from the mirror.
Despite her inability to help her, Meg didn’t want Jennifer to leave like that. She didn’t want to give up on her, but she couldn’t understand why it had to be Meg or no one.
“Wait! Isn’t there anybody who can help you on your side?” Meg asked aloud, bringing her hand up to stop Jennifer from leaving, and forgetting that Jennifer was in the mirror. Meg’s hand painfully deflected off its surface.
Jennifer went from sight without a sound, leaving Meg to look at her own stricken face, the guilt and helplessness etching lines into the youthful plumpness of her features, making her look, as much as feel, old before her time.
“So, how did it go in there?” asked Death. “Don’t worry, no one can hear you if I don’t want them to.” However, he still failed to notice that he didn’t actually shield her from notice.
“You know, you’re really sick to do that to her. She didn’t need you to get her hopes up like that,” Meg hissed at him as she stomped through the near-empty hallway towards the Principal’s Office, the few people around, hearing her and silently coming to their own conclusions concerning her sanity.
“What are you talking about?” asked Death, keeping up with her, but keeping enough distance to protect her from accidentally touching, and thus killing, her. “Do what to who?”
She stopped abruptly, too angry and ignorant of his power to care if he ran into her. Luckily, he stopped sooner. “Why did you tell Jennifer that I could defend her and her friends in some lawsuit? Do you get off doing things like that? God, you’re sick!”
“What are you talking about? The kid asked me to arrange a meet between you two,” he huffed in defense. “She said that she had something she wanted to work out and that she was sure you’d agree to it. How was I supposed to know she wanted to play Law and Order: The Home Game?”
“So you didn’t put her up to that?”
“No. Jeez, and I thought you were supposed to be one the smart ones around here.”
His words jarred her into shutting up and thinking, at last. A question begged to her. “Well...Well, then, why would she come up with something like that? What made her think I could do something like that?”
“I don’t know. What’d she say?”
“She said that she remembered how nice I was to her.”
“Guess she should have expected that, huh?”
Meg didn’t like the negativity that slinked coldly through that statement. “What are you talking about?”
Death leaned against the wall nearby and crossed his arms in contemplation. “Oh, nothing, nothing. Just interesting that she thought of you as a last hope and all, and you, y’know, slam the door in her face, that’s all. It’s nothing,” he said as nonchalantly as his disapproval could allow.
Meg wasn’t fooled, however. “Wait, you’re making me the bad guy here? Look, I don’t have time for this crap, especially from someone who admitted that he’s just a delivery boy for the afterlife. Do you care where souls go after pick-up, huh? I bet not, and no one comes to you with a guilt trip, because you don’t have to answer to them.”
“Hey, take it easy. All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t hurt to try, that’s all.”
Meg looked at Death as if he was completely and totally insane, as if he were her father. “Do you hear yourself? I’m not a lawyer. I have no experience being a lawyer. I wouldn’t know the first thing to do in a court case. I’m touched that she had faith in me, but-”
“You don’t have faith in yourself, is that it?”
Meg sighed in frustration. How and why was this hard to understand? “No. It’s a fool’s errand. What if I don’t get it right and she goes to Hell, huh? You think I want that on my conscience? I’ve got enough to worry about with the advice column coming up. Jeez, I gotta hurry up! Mom’s probably waiting for me in the office with the paperwork.” Meg then turn on her heel and marched at a quicker pace, Death, just behind her.
A group of kids milled around the periphery of the office in question, but Meg was still a good few yards away from them. Preparing to slalom a course through them, she said to Death, without stopping, “Look, Death, I have to live, too. I’ve been kicked in the ass so much in my life, that my last name might as well be Spaulding. This magazine job is just what I need to get me the respect that I deserve. That’s right, I said, deserve.”
“First off, it’s not a job.” Death pointed out pointedly. “It’s a glorified after-school assignment no self-respecting cool kid would be caught dead doing, and I should know.”
“Whatever! Their loss! This is mine!” Meg countered sharply, her diplomacy with the grim reaper wearing as thin as his robe. “I have to focus on how to present myself to my readers in the column. I have no intention of looking like a fool in front of people like Connie D’amico.”
It was then that Death took a sigh and just stopped walking.
Meg heard the exhalation and the ceasing of clacking footfalls and rhythmic taps from his scythe, and, not knowing why, herself, stopped to turn and face him curiously.
“What’s the matter? Why’d you stop?”
Death stood in the center of the hall, a dark, thin, lonely figure, seemingly unmoving and radiating a presence of melancholy that Meg could swear she felt.
“I got no right to brow-beat you, and you’re right, kid, I don’t answer to no shlub when I come down for a pick-up. If they got a problem, they better take it up with The Head Office, cos’ I’m way too busy and business is too damn good these days,” Death said soberly.
“And you were right about that Jennifer kid. She should’ve thought this out better. It ain’t your fault that she and the rest of those dopey cult members are in a jam. But, since you’re new at this advice column stuff, allow me to impart a little advice to you. The next time you’re truly ready to help somebody who comes to you, make sure it won’t be because of what you think Connie D'amico thinks of you...See ya around, kid.”
With a quiet hush of his tattered robe as he turned from her, he faded without fanfare.
Meg stared at the vacant space where a supernatural being once stood, feeling numb and awe-struck all at once. Again, she rebuffed the spirits, and felt an emptiness she couldn’t analyze, as they took their leave of her.
Her heart hardened in response to the emotion. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t understand. It was insanity to ask her to do something she had no confidence she could carry out. Failure, on a massive, personal scale, was the only true outcome. So why did regret begin to thread through her heart, upon reflection?
“Talking to yourself, Meg? Gee, if I’d known you’d crack under the pressure of doing that stupid column...I’d have made you do it sooner, myself!” Connie D’amico said from her small band of friends after they all walked up to Meg from behind.
Meg, guilty, late and nearly jumping out of her skin from the unexpected voice behind her, told Connie in weary warning, “Connie, I’m not in the mood for you right now. Just leave me alone.”
Connie simply leaned conspiratorially to her compatriots, sneering easily. “See what happens when you give a geek some power? It goes right to their beanie-wearing little head.”
She then turned back to Meg. “Don’t know if anybody told you yet, but that magazine thing is a joke without a punch line. Just like you.”
Chuckling to herself, Connie rejoined her friends, and as they began to beeline to the nearest exit, she added, “At least the losers in this school will have someone to whine to as an alternative to offing themselves, like that creepy girl in the track suit and her little cult buddies did last time.”
That was Jennifer’s epitaph, Meg finally saw. No flowers, no warm words, no love and remembrance of rich days of camaraderie and sisterhood. Just a name in a missed news report, a sad, hollow memory in the life of the students, colored and perpetuated by the shallow, heartless words of the schoolhouse bitch.
And possibly made into a lost, damned soul by Meg Griffin.
Connie’s coterie just reached the exit’s double doors, when a challenge halted them.
“Take that back, Connie.”
Connie turned to Meg, a look of sudden uncertainty sitting on her pristine face like a mask. Stunned, she asked, while walking back to Griffin, “W-What? What did you say to me, you little toad?”
Somewhere in the halls, Toad Girl looked around quizzically. She could have sworn she heard her name being called.
“I said take it back!” Meg repeated, standing her ground. Today, Meg was starting to feel that she could take on this clotheshorse in a fair fight, before suddenly turning it into an unfair one.
“Jennifer didn’t know what she was doing,” Meg said, riding high on the crest of righteous indignation and adrenaline. “She was just looking for someone to stand by her and be a friend to her.”
“So she went out and chose you?” Connie shot back. “Ha, no wonder she killed herself.”
Upon that, Meg’s center went cold and black, and she lunged at Connie with open hands, fingers questing for soft things to clutch and tear. Then her feet suddenly lost coordination and she stumbled forward.
Connie’s crew backed off as one, to avoid a collision, and other students nearby, who saw, stopped their chats and instinctively positioned themselves into a loose circle.
Meg noticed none of that. Apart from quickly regaining her balance and, more slowly, her composure, she noticed something else, something better.
At the moment she reached out for Connie, Connie, caught off-guard, screeched and curled into a defense crouch, arms criss-crossing in front of her face. Meg knew why.
She was reacting to the mauling she received from Meg’s father one day in school weeks after the town survived a severe flash flooding. In response to Connie’s abuse to Meg, Peter, hoping to prove his new appreciation for his daughter, promptly smashed Connie’s face through the glass door of a nearby fire extinguisher case a brutal eighteen times before Meg managed to pull him away. Following hard on the heels of that was Meg’s equally brutal assault on not just Connie, but also several of her cronies, after her three-month long stint in jail. The memory of the beating, and the subsequent kiss, was still fresh for both girls.
Meg, thankful that her near-tumble was not seen by Connie, and momentarily fascinated by her sudden fear of her, stood with imperious confidence at the wretched sight.
“You’ve got no respect for anybody. Not the living or the dead. You’re just fucking sad, Connie, and you make me sick. I almost feel sorry for you.”
Meg then gathered her things again and continued her walk to the Principal’s Office, though much more in control now and, she knew, looked on with at least a modicum of respect.
Connie D’amico, shaken by Meg’s condemnation of her, waited until she was of safe and sufficient distance before railing in a clearly rattled voice, “Hey...H-Hey! You don’t have to feel sorry for me! I’m not the one who’s going to be putting her foot in her mouth dealing with all of these mouth-breathers around here!”
A good number of the students that stood by during the near-fracas, took umbrage on the ‘mouth-breather’ jab, and turned angry eyes on her.
“What’re you all looking at?” Connie said with weak bravado.
Meg took a relieved breath as she closed her hand around the old doorknob of Principal Sheppard’s office. She opened the door and walked in.
The office interior was gone.
Meg stopped dead. Without wondering where she was, she instinctively turned around to leave, and saw no threshold or door behind her, just more of this new interior she was stranded in.
Meg noticed from the high ceilings and spacious entrances, that this place was built to a scale that was larger than the norm, or, at least, to what she was used to, and that felt strangely familiar to her because she felt noticeably small here.
‘Like I feel when I’m at Grandpa and Grandma‘s place sometimes,’ she thought as she was pinning down the feeling. Then it came to her. This place was a mansion.
Not like her wealthy grandparents’ home, she could tell now. Not nearly so grandiose and ostentatious, designed to beat visitors over the head with the knowledge that powerful, old money lived here. This place was sparse, functional, and of modern design. Clean, wide and well lit, yet emotionally cold, somehow, and orderly. It felt less like a home and more like a sanctuary...a church.
...A temple...
“Oh. My. God,” Meg said to herself, the shock of where she was finally slamming her into lucidity. All around her, unnoticed by her presence, and mingling in tiny groups from the entirety of their small throng, were kids. Kids in uniform blue jogging suits.
It was the strongest feeling of deja vu she had ever felt. As though she had stepped into her own memory of the event. Those same children with their carefree, mesmerized stares, the unfamiliarity she felt of their cloistered world, the short-lived innocence of the day.
She stood fearfully still, feeling like a soldier deep in enemy territory. Insecurity and a sense of wonder were battling to see which could motivate her next.
Remembering where she was now, she took a reluctant glance over at the fireplace further to the side of the dining room she was currently in.
There, hanging over the mantelpiece and flanked by two candelabras, in a picture frame so large, it dominated the attention of the room, was the image of an elderly man in a crisp, white robe that matched his snowy hair. Innocuous, it seemed, except for the eyes. Staring, penetrating, hypnotic, they were unnaturally colored with a jaundiced tint that drew one’s attention to those eyes directly. As expected.
Meg didn’t need any more confirmation. It was impossible, but she knew where she was. Heaven’s Helpers Youth Cult Headquarters. The last place on Earth she would ever see Jennifer alive.
A male cult member, wanting to reach a group nearby, promptly walked through Meg, catching her off-guard, her body distorting around and past the cultist’s as though she were water.
“Watch it, pal!” she said indignantly. “ Nobody get inside me until at least the second date!”
The cultist, and indeed, the whole crowd, hadn’t even stirred at her presence. Normally, she would have said that it was the story of her life, but this wasn’t normal obviously. Here, Meg was as a ghost, an observer.
Still feeling exposed, she forced herself to move, to quietly patrol her surroundings. She needed to find clues as to why she was brought here, so the lounge and foyer in the next room ahead seemed as good a place to start.
A hint of familiar red caught her eye by one of the temple’s bright, ornate windows. Craning her head around the sides of other heads in the way, Meg felt a stab of incredulity upon seeing herself, her ruddy toque caught in the afternoon light, standing and talking next to Jennifer.
It felt like watching a videotape of herself, except it was wholly immersive, if not interactive. Jennifer had spoken vaguely about what she called, “the trip”, while she continued to chat with Earlier Meg.
Jennifer then excused herself and headed towards the dining room. Meg remembered that as she saw where Jennifer had gone, noticing the cardboard box she carried to the dining room table. However, because Jennifer’s back was to Earlier Meg, she couldn’t see what it was she was doing by the punch bowl before she returned to her.
Meg easily followed her and reached the refreshment table just in time to regret it.
From the box marked, “Heaven’s Helpers Youth Cult”, Jennifer pleasantly fished around before producing an open bottle of cyanide, sprinkling it neatly into the punch, its deadly contents spreading out and mixing quickly. Meg gasped in shock. She couldn’t wrap her mind around the truth of it. Jennifer, innocent, misguided pawn of this misbegotten cult, was the facilitator of their mass death.
Meg’s stomach moved with a life of its own, and she had to fight to remember that the young cultist was obviously under orders to do what she did, while Jennifer sprinkled arsenic, and then powerful rat poison, into the mix.
Finally, when Meg didn’t think she could make the punch any more dangerous to consume, Jennifer finished her witch’s brew with a copy of Paul Reiser’s book, Couplehood. Meg was stunned speechless as the tome sank into the fruity, reactive concoction.
When Jennifer went back to the lounge, Meg watched her go, and then saw, hanging from the ceiling, a large sign proclaiming “time until transformation” with an LED clock counting down the minutes. Whatever “transformation” was, it would be soon, and Meg could bet the punch had everything to do with it.
She went back to the table and reached for the punch bowl. She was determined not to let this happen, if she could help it. As it was, she soon found, she couldn’t help it. Every time she would try to grab the rim of the bowl to lift it away and dump it, her hands would pass through the glass container as if she were swiping above it.
Nervously, Meg turned her gaze back to the lounge and, more crucially, to the foyer and the front door. Her father was going to arrive soon to bring her back to Stewie’s birthday party, and the talk he would have with her, however uplifting and moving, would become the harbinger of death in this house.
As the mass of worshipers brought the table out to the lounge and gathered with Earlier Meg, Current Meg heard the sound of another door opening as she reentered the lounge. A set of double doors leading from deeper in the mansion, swung out to reveal, to her discomfort, the cult leader.
Meg figured that she couldn’t be heard, and so she let loose a stream of hot words at the man who held so many doomed children in his thrall. His lofty, peaceful demeanor as he strolled to meet his happy flock, angered her deeply.
She could do nothing but watch history play itself out, from Jennifer introducing Meg’s earlier self to him, to the leader asking Meg if she had, “a mind that sought enlightenment and a heart that sought purity,” and when answered in the negative, whether she was, “a confused adolescent desperately seeking acceptance from an undifferentiated ego mass that demands conformity.”
Once she answered in the affirmative, and the leader offered her a suit of her own, Current Meg was close enough to hear the man command Jennifer in low tones, “Dispense the refreshments.”
“I can’t believe I almost joined him,” Meg mused worriedly, realization dawning on her of just how easily she almost came to dying alongside the others. Still, as she dreaded, Jennifer complied, going over to the table and pouring poisonous punch into disposable cups. Meg’s earlier self was given the first offering.
Meg reflexively swiped at the cup, terrified that her younger self would consume it. Her hand blurred right through Earlier Meg’s wrist.
“Oh, that’s right,” she remembered belatedly. “I’m still here. I didn’t drink it.”
The reason for her timely save walked into the lounge, as big as life. Concerned Peter waddled over to his daughter, who looked distraught, but was nowhere near as distraught as her older self, watching Jennifer pass out cup after deadly cup to every eager teen in the place.
Then the talk had finally come. Peter realizing what Lois had truly wanted and communicating it to a guilt-stricken Meg. A moment of forgiveness between father and daughter, and for the flock, a moment of loss and long-overdue clarity from the insidious brainwashing that ensnared them so long ago. And then...
“Here’s to family,” Peter cheered, as he raised a spare cup of punch in the air.
“No!” Meg screamed. It was primal and came from her guts in a surge. She knew he wasn’t to blame for any of what was about to happen, but she couldn’t stand still, she couldn’t surrender to the cruel, inevitable loss to come. She tore off, running to Peter to stop him, scare him, do something, anything, to hold back the next thing that was destined to happen.
The kids raised their glasses in turn, and as one, began to drink. It happened so quickly that if it were anything other than personal, Meg would have remarked that it was merciful.
But it was anything but merciful to her. All around her, in front of her, and in her peripheral view, boys and girls’ lives were snuffed out without fanfare, their lifeless bodies assaulting her ears with their flat thuds to the floor.
Yet, even that was not as heartbreaking as watching those eyes, Jennifer’s once happy, hopeful eyes, lose their focus, at last, as she collapsed near the table, a grieving friend rushing close to her side.
Meg wished hard that she could touch again, to hold Jennifer protectively in her arms, wished she could be heard again, to tell her that she was so sorry for everything that happened to her, wished Jennifer could live again, to brush Meg’s hair like she wanted to. All the things that were so denied them both, she wished could be, but all Meg could do was curl up in a heap beside a lost friend, and wail until she couldn’t breathe.
“Why do you care what happens to them?” Meg finally asked in a ragged, tortured voice into the floor when she managed to control her breathing enough. He didn’t need to show anymore of this, she knew.
“Because I hate pick-ups like this,” Death said quietly while he took a sad glance out of the lounge’s windows to the landscaping beyond. “Man, I wish things were better.”
Not getting a sufficient enough answer, Meg wearily straightened up on her knees, yet stayed protectively close to Jennifer’s body. “I thought you said you were like UPS,” she said tearfully.
Death stood off from Meg, not wanting to intrude on her grief. He had seen the ending of human life since Adam, seen it end in simple, and sometime fascinatingly macabre ways. He should have felt inured to it, detached from it and viewed it as a professional would, but he couldn’t now. Like he couldn’t then. Something jarred deep in him, pricking at his loose conscience like a spur, and it demanded resolution.
Maybe it was the wholesale waste of so much human potential. He sometimes felt that whenever he would visit the battlefield of some misbegotten war. Or perhaps it was just the naked fact that they all died so young. With his command of time travel, he would visit this place time and again to ponder those feelings, and, in the end, come away more laden with those feeling than when he arrived.
“Hey, just because I’m Death, doesn’t mean I don’t have a heart,” he explained, probably more for his benefit than hers. Then, as an aside, he quipped, “I know it’s around somewhere, but I do have one.”
“It shouldn’t have to happen to them,” Meg said, unconsciously stroking at Jennifer’s hair, her fingers passing through. She didn’t care. “What did it all come down to? Bad luck? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Could it have been that easy?”
“It’s just a raw deal, kid,” Death said. “It could have been just that easy, as you said. Everybody looking at what the right hand’s doin’, and then getting sucker punched by the left. I can’t explain it, and I don’t pretend to know. All I can say to you Meg is...I’m sorry.”
Maybe hearing Death actually apologize brought a little comfort back into Meg’s heavy heart. She gave herself a calming breath that came out as a sorrowful, shuddering sigh.
“You brought me here to see this. Why?”
“Because,” Death said simply. “You can do this. It never mattered if you knew what you were doing, just whether you’d do it anyway.”
Meg looked up at Death, red eyes no longer tearful, but giving off a clarity she hadn’t known before.
“If I did it...for a friend,” she realized, at last. “I didn’t know her long, but I can’t help thinking that she was my best friend. I guess that was easy, too.”
Ever since Death first met her and found out she had an appealing bit of a dark side when it came to her insecurities, he knew had found a caustic kin. Being an island of normality in a sea of familial dysfunction, it was simply an extension of an inner strength she had just dealing with life, a moxie that he could respect.
That was why he brought her here. Why she had to face the demons of her self-doubt. Because, as much as Jennifer believed in her, he secretly did also.
“Yeah, kid,” he agreed. “So, what do you say? You wanna give these guys a fair shake?”
Meg took a long look at her friend, sadness finally giving way to a smoldering determination to see justice done for her, for all of them, by any means necessary.
She stood and wiped her eyes clean, took a cleansing breath, and said, with a light heart and a proud smile, “What do I have to do?”
Death simply looked at her.
Death reached out and touched Meg.
Meg died.
